US man pays tax bill using five wheelbarrows of coins - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-38603615 <comment><USER2> I was about to repeat the old story that (in the US) pennies are not legal tender in amounts over 25 cents, but it turns out that since 1965, pennies are legal tender in any quantity. However, payees are not obliged to accept them; for instance, municipal bus lines can refuse to accept fare payments in pennies. [1][2]

[1] [http://www.snopes.com/business/money/pennies.asp](http://www.snopes.com/business/money/pennies.asp)

[2] [https://www.treasury.gov/resource- center/faqs/Currency/Pages...](https://www.treasury.gov/resource- center/faqs/Currency/Pages/legal-tender.aspx)

</comment><comment><USER3> This guy should have went down to the DMV to get his questions answered. He wasted more time going through all this mess.

 _Being self employed, I hardly have time to sleep, much less make a trip to my local DMV just to ask a "30 second question" so I tried to call my "local" DMV office by calling calling the only phone number listed on the internet for my local DMV. _

</comment><comment><USER4> When you make the government work for their share of your share... like a boss! ;)

</comment><comment><USER5> Has been done (tried) before: [http://archiver.rootsweb.ancestry.com/th/read/LITHUANIA/1999...](http://archiver.rootsweb.ancestry.com/th/read/LITHUANIA/1999-09/0936228834) , visual: [http://new2.fjcdn.com/comments/I+_7ffbead1aa9217ad05eb5487c4...](http://new2.fjcdn.com/comments/I+_7ffbead1aa9217ad05eb5487c4c8f75f.jpg)

</comment><comment><USER6> If you play stupid games you will win stupid prizes

</comment><comment><USER7> This seems to be a statement on the stupidity of still using pennies in 2017, more so than the point he was actually trying to make.

<comment><USER8> Whats wrong with using pennies?

<comment><USER9> They are worth less than they cost?

Imagine using coins worth $0.001 or $0.0001. You could use them, but why?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Take _that_ cashless society advocates!

Wait...

<comment><USER11> US man pays tax bill using five wheelbarrows of prepaid cards with pennies left on the balance.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Not legal tender in Australia. They could just refuse to accept it. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_tender](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_tender)

<comment><USER13> The US really ought to do away with pennies, and probably nickels as well. This stunt would be 10x less silly with dimes.

<comment><USER14> Canada did away with pennies: [http://www.mint.ca/store/mint/about-the- mint/phasing-out-the...](http://www.mint.ca/store/mint/about-the-mint/phasing- out-the-penny-6900002)

From Wikipedia:

 _Production of the penny ceased in May 2012, and the Royal Canadian Mint ceased the distribution of them as of February 4, 2013. However, like all discontinued currency in the Canadian monetary system, the coin remains legal tender. Once distribution of the coin ceased, though, vendors no longer were expected to return pennies as change for cash purchases, and were encouraged to round purchases to the nearest five cents. Non-cash transactions are still denominated to the cent._

<comment><USER13> Many countries in the eurozone price round to avoid the smallest coins as well: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euro_coins#Price_rounding](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euro_coins#Price_rounding)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Who has time for that?

</comment><comment><USER16> > Nick Stafford's coin payment required 11 people who were hired to break open > the paper rolls of the coins, taking four hours.

So you are telling me this 'Businessman' wasted 11 peeps x 4 hours x 10$ min wage = $440, to 'make a statement' to IRS and pay his $400 tax bill with pennies / coins?!

What kind of a businessman does that? What a waste of man power.

<comment><USER17> Surely he was also required to pay the extra costs for the transaction at the receiving end? I can't imagine the authority was somehow required to accept his coin payment, and not only accept but do it for free?

<comment><USER18> Yes, they were required to accept it. They are collecting taxes for the government (I'm not sure if the VA DMV is directly run by the government, or is a contractor doing business for the government, but it doesn't make a difference in this case), which means they have to accept legal US money, in any denomination, because of this section of US code, which he mentions on his website[0]:

As per section 31 U.S.C. 5103 of the "United States Coinage Act of 1965" Federal law specifically says: "United States coins and currency are legal tender for all debts, public charges, taxes, and dues."

Even charging an extra handling fee for dealing with all the coins is difficult to justify given the wording of the law. Luckily, carrying around 5 wheelbarrows of coins is also inconvenient for the person who's doing the protesting, so you really only see this sort of thing when someone is really aggravated and has lots of free time and money, it's not like we have a rash of DMV offices being crushed under a singularity's worth of pennies.

[0][http://www.craftvinyl.com/page165](http://www.craftvinyl.com/page165) (He actually got the BBC to link directly to his site, wow, he just made another million I bet!)

<comment><USER17> I can see how US law requires public entities to accept cash, but it's not clear whether they are allowed to charge transction fees for "expensive" transactions (othewise those transactions are subsidied by others)

Also: does the law imply that every public entity that you pay taxes to in the US must have a physical office somewhere that you can go pay with cash? Mind blown.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Librem Laptop RAM and Storage Bump, 32GB Max RAM - <AUTHOR> https://puri.sm/posts/librem-laptop-ram-and-storage-bump-32gb-max-ram/ <comment><USER2> Is it just me or do the hard drives on this thing seem weirdly expensive? The RAM is the same price as System76, but it's $999 for a 1TB NVMe drive vs $335.

Any idea for the reason on that? Otherwise it would be price comparable to a darter or galago pro.

<comment><USER3> might be a premium for drives with open-source controllers.

<comment><USER4> Huh, I didn't think about that. I know they do open boot loaders, but I just figured they'd leave the drive alone. Afaik, even Richard Stallman doesn't care about drive firmware, but I could be wrong there.

But that is a valid reason. I've thought about buying a Librem laptop, but the price always turned me away. I know part of this is scale issues, but it feels bad to pay 2x more for something with worse performance, and the hardware switches and open boot firmware don't seem like enough to justify it. But I guess they won't be able to drop prices until they get enough volume, so maybe that's the answer.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Can we please also have a track point with 3 buttons? Thank you!

<comment><USER6> Has anyone outside IBM/Lenovo ever managed to ship a TrackPoint that worked as well as the "real" ones? I love TrackPoints, but my experiences with them on non-IBM/Lenovo machines have been disappointing at best.

(Which is bizarre, since the first TrackPoint machines came out in the early '90s, so you'd think any patents IBM/Lenovo lean on for their great implementation would have expired long ago by now. Unless there's some patented discoveries they made after the first versions shipped.)

<comment><USER7> I've been thinking about making my own with load cells, but I guess looking up those patents and seeing how IBM/Lenovo did it is a good idea before I start.

It really doesn't seem hard though. It seems to me the trickiest part is getting the acceleration curves set correctly so that it feels nice to use. But that should be a matter of software/configuration, not hardware. High resolution readout from the load-cells seems essential, so that you can have precise readout of very low forces, giving the trackpoint a light and airy feeling without compromising precision.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I must be losing my mind, because Puri.sm is charging $1,599 for the following laptop:

\- Dual-core Intel Core i7 7500U

\- 250GB SATA (yikes)

\- 802.11n (not ac) wireless

\- 8GB of RAM

\- Intel HD Graphics 620

\- USB 2.0 ports

And for the "best" offering which is $3,997:

\- Dual-core Intel Core i7 7500U

\- 2TB nVME (not dual-SSD)

\- 802.11n (not ac) wireless

\- 32GB of RAM

\- Intel HD Graphics 620

\- USB 2.0 ports

This is a joke, right? 802.11n is completely unacceptable in 2019, as is charging $4k for a computer with Intel HD 620 on-board. What a joke.

<comment><USER4> Finding hardware with solid open source drivers (or writing them if they don't exist) and disabling Intel's backdoors is hard work, as is ensuring that everything works with an open bootloader. And they have to do quite a bit of this themselves since they need hardware switches to disable the camera and WiFi.

I'm guessing prices will come down if volume of sales goes up, but they're always going to lag the competition because they have to do more work than the competition (every new Intel line has differences in how to disable their backdoors).

I would totally buy one if they only charged a $300 or so premium _and_ if they had a TrackPoint and middle mouse button.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> 802.11n? It's 2019, for crying out loud, I can understand not having WiFi 6 yet, but this is way too retro...

I was looking at a ThinkPad X! Extreme yesterday. Better specs (8th gen Intel CPU, dual M.2 slots, GeForce 1050, 802.11ac of course) for less money. The System76 laptops also look more modern.

<comment><USER10> It's easily replaceable. They choose it because ath9k works without blobs. You should know what you are buying. Not the wifi card, the ram or the storage. Not even the cool-aid. You are buying a laptop that comes without bootguard enabled and can run coreboot. That's it in a nutshell. system76 is also a decent option since they have also started working on coreboot ([https://github.com/system76/coreboot/](https://github.com/system76/coreboot/)), and you can hack on it if it interests you. system76's products look more polished since they are clevos made for a wider audience.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> That processor is really old 6th gen and underpowered. I got a faster and newer _quad core_ 8550U in a Lenovo T480 with 9 hours of battery life in dual batteries. Plus, I have a 1 TiB Samsung 970 Pro. Sure, they do better on firmware tracing and privacy, but if it's not a competitive and good value, it's risking not being a survivable business model. The PC business is competitive and runs on slim margins, so if they shirk or shrug at keeping up, their business is going to die.

<comment><USER4> People that care deeply about privacy aren't nearly as price conscious as the average consumer. You just can't find many options that come out of the box with Intel backdoors disabled and completely open WiFi firmware.

I want a Librem, but I'm finding that the price premium is a little higher than such a small risk is worth to me. I hope they can bring prices down so people like me can justify it, but that probably won't happen for some time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I want one, and am willing to spend a bit more for the work they do, but not having a ethernet jack is a deal killer. I don't want to carry around an adapter.

</comment><comment><USER13> I'm really hoping they up the CPU (are newer AMD mobile CPUs any good?) and drop the SATA drive for another/a larger battery in the next rev. Only things making me hesitant!

I really do applaud their efforts though, I really dig the company and am even giving PureOS a spin (only complaint so far is their frankenbrowser vs. not just using Icecat). The price/performance just isn't where it should be.

</comment><comment><USER14> Could this be something that everyone who is dissapointed with recent hardware offerings be switching to?

Upgradability and fixability is there, though the price is a bit steep.

<comment><USER15> Price at least feels the same as a MacBook and I imagine the touchpad on this is horrendous in linux.

<comment><USER14> I don't understand why everyone keep saying touchpad works bad in linux. I have 2 laptops:

* Acer Chromebook 720 with pretty bad hardware touchpad, but it works with linux OK (I prefer using mouse)

* Thinkpad T420, good hardware, works with linux really well. Supports vertical and horizontal scrolling, some gestures (laptop is from 2011, I prefer using touchpad).

I suspect it's because Apple line of products don't have good linux synaptics support or something like that?

Here is a guide on how to set up touchpad on linux for most desktop environments, xorg along with some troubleshooting tips -- [https://wiki.debian.org/SynapticsTouchpad](https://wiki.debian.org/SynapticsTouchpad)

<comment><USER16> No, it's because Apple's touchpad hardware is superior, and the industry benchmark. I say this grudgingly.

I have given up on Apple's laptops for a host of reasons. The touchpad is the main thing I miss.

It's not a question of a driver update. The perfect precision of their touchpad hardware has not (yet) been matched.

<comment><USER17> It really isn't. I'm a GNU/Linux user, but I have access to a Macbook and, what's more, have the Magic Trackpad 2 right in front of me. It's just a regular touchpad hardware, comparable to one in my Lenovo laptop, but with "force touch" \- which if you don't care about silent clicking is just a gimmick that doesn't make much of a difference.

(if you do care about not making clicking noise without having to "tap", then well, it is somewhat exceptional - that's why I own it)

The "secret sauce" is simply in the application support for gestures. Even the driver isn't that exceptional (just well tuned), it's all toolkit and app support. On GNU/Linux you have several ways to support multitouch gestures, but all of them work as simple triggers - a completely different experience that what software on macOS usually provides.

<comment><USER16> Unless we come up with some objective criteria to compare touchpads, this may be a subjective judgement.

Nevertheless, there are a large volume of people who subjectively believe Apple's touchpads 'feel' better and more precise, beyond just multi touch gestures.

You could compare it to the handling of a car. There is some consensus luxury cars feel better to drive.

<comment><USER17> From what I gathered, it's actually another thing: there is a large volume of people using misconfigured or simply bad software with their perfectly fine hardware touchpads. Apple ones, that are actually well configured out-of-the- box, then "feel" better and more precise, and clueless people incorrectly blame their hardware for sub-par experience.

Been there, done that. I've blamed a touchpad of my work machine (which was actually a higher model of the same line as my personal laptop), but it turned out it used a different software driver (accidentally - I've swapped their SSDs and it turned out that the quality of their touchpads swapped as well :D). Also, both of these touchpads felt simply awful on Windows. After that I've spend some time figuring it out and it turns out that these days it's actually hard to get a crappy touchpad (unless you pay really crappy money for a whole machine). It's all in software.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Great news, now I know what my next laptop will be after 17 years of macbooks :P

<comment><USER19> Until they fix that weird off-centre trackpad, I'd continue suggesting people go Dell XPS, also the only PC laptop with a trackpad response even approaching that of a Macbook

<comment><USER20> I will not buy a laptop that doesn't have physical buttons on the touchpad. The reliability of knowing that my clicks are exact, saves me time and frustration. Sadly this is my only reason to not own a Purism.

But if you are considering the Dell XPS, I recommend you instead check out their Latitude 7xxx series. (On the website you find them under "For Work" instead of "For Home"). Like the Dell Latitude 7390 or 7490. Yay for real buttons. And pretty good in other areas as well, such as the keyboard quality, and ports.

It doesn't have touchpoint though. I just want a touchpad with real buttons. There aren't many options for that anymore. Another nice and relatively unknown option is the VAIO (no longer from Sony). [https://us.vaio.com](https://us.vaio.com)

I would LOVE to get a Purism if only it had the buttons.

<comment><USER17> Isn't it a clickpad (the whole touchpad being a big button)? I despise tapping, but I don't mind clickpads with softarea versus separate buttons.

<comment><USER20> Not sure. I hate the Lenovo style "the whole clickpad moves so much when you click that you're almost certain to miss" thing. But I also hate the soft "you have no idea if you just clicked or not, do you" thing too. So I really need my buttons and don't remember which variant the XPS has :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Can I please redesign your entire ecommerce experience? This laptop looks awesome and is actually price competitive but the discover and purchase experience is abysmal.

<comment><USER22> >discover and purchase experience is abysmal.

      0. Home page
      1. Select product: https://puri.sm/products/
      2. View prod descs, select product: https://puri.sm/products/librem-13/
      3. Scroll down, view prod desc, click shop now
      4. At product configuration page: https://shop.puri.sm/shop/librem-13/

Seems pretty normal to me... now normal isn't "great" but abysmal is a bit strong.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Serious question...

How did this submission make it to the #10 slot, after being posted 38 minutes ago, and with a handful of comments?

This is a very boring update about some product specs. I cannot see how it could be interesting enough on it's on to merit such a rapid response. It's not even remotely interesting on its own (it's essentially a boring advert).

I noticed the same happened with a Purism advert yesterday.

I'm a natural cynic, so perhaps I'm fooling myself into seeing what I want to see, but is this an example of shilling? Does HN have a history of promoting adverts masquerading as content (Reddit style)?

<comment><USER24> Your reaction is understandable, but there are many topics that HN readers are just personally really into. When those interests don't line up with our own we usually look for some explanation to bridge the gap. But shillage is not that bridge; it's just a quick and easy move to resolve the cognitive dissonance.

> _Please don 't impute astroturfing or shillage. That degrades discussion and > is usually mistaken. If you're worried about it, email us and we'll look at > the data._

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)</comment></comment>


The Future of Neuromorphic Computing - <AUTHOR> http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/a-computer-to-rival-the-brain <comment><USER2> The reason AI has been so successful recently is that the research community has assumed a ruthlessly empirical philosophy: no idea, no matter how beautiful or interesting, is considered truly useful until it bears measurable results on some dataset. The reason neuromorphic computing gets such skepticism from AI researchers is that so far it has resisted any attempts at this kind of empiricism. No neuromorphic implementation has shown state of the art results on any important problem.

If/When neuromorphic computers show groundbreaking results, the community will pivot quickly to using them. But expecting AI researchers to show deference to neuromorphic computing because it "mimics the brain" is to ignore the empirical philosophy that has led to AI's success.

<comment><USER3> To be fair, this whole Deep Learning renaissance was made possible and kicked off only after decades of research in multi layer neural nets (going back to the 80s) by Hinton, Lecun, etc. They stuck to their chosen method despite it not having great empirical results (the research community shunned NNs in the 90s for SVNs cause they worked better), because they believed it should and will work - and it did, eventually. So a similar argument for 'basic research' could be made for neuromorphic computing.

<comment><USER2> Yes, I totally agree. Yann LeCun, Geoff Hinton, Jurgen Schmidhuber and others did unpopular work for a long time. And they deserve tons of credit for their perseverance which paid off.

Similarly, I think it's great that there are AI researchers working on techniques which are currently out of favor. It's important to have diversity of viewpoint.

What irritates me about neuromorphic computing is that much of the work I see publicized (including the work in this article) isn't being presented as basic research on a risky hypothesis. Instead it's presented as the future of AI, despite the current lack of any demonstrated utility, and the almost complete disconnect between the AI researchers building the future of AI and the neuromorphic community.

The burden of proof is always on the researcher to show utility, and if the neuromorphic computing community can do that, I'll be super excited! Until then, I'll be waiting for something measurable and concrete, and rolling my eyes at brain analogies.

<comment><USER4> > Yes, I totally agree. Yann LeCun, Geoff Hinton, Jurgen Schmidhuber and > others did unpopular work for a long time.

...

> Until then, I'll be ... rolling my eyes at brain analogies.

Maybe you don't realize this, but these guys made more brain analogies than you can count over the same period to which you attribute their greatness. Meanwhile, they were attacked year after year by state-of-the-art land grabbers saying the same things you just did.

> isn't being presented as basic research on a risky hypothesis.

It is basic research, but it's not a risky hypothesis. Existing neuromorphic computers achieve 10^14 ops/s at 20 W. Thats 5 Tops/Watt. The best GPUs currently achieve less than 200 Gops/Watt. Where is the risk in saying that a man-made neuromorphic chip can achieve more per dollar than a GPU. There is no risk, and suggesting that this field is somehow has too much risk for advances to be celebrated is absolutely crazy.

<comment><USER5> Non-neuromorphic (analog) deep learning chip startup here. We're forecasting AT LEAST ~50 TOPS/watt for inference.

<comment><USER4> Sure - I guess it's productive for me to answer why this doesn't disagree with my comment. By the time you get the software to hook up that kind of low bit precision (READ: neuromorphic) compute performance with extreme communication- minimizing strategies (READ: neuromorphic), which will invariable require compute colocated, persistent storage (READ: neuromorphic) in any type of general AI application, you're not exactly making the argument that neuromorphic chips are a bad idea.

We literally have to start taking neuromorphic to mean some silly semantics like "exactly like the brain in every possible way" in order to disagree with it.

Edit: also, to ground this discussion, there are extremely concrete reason why current neural net architectures will NOT work with the above optimizations. That's the primary motivation for talking about "neuromorphic", or any other synonym you want to coin, as fundamentally different hardware. AI software ppl need to have a term for hardware of the future, which simply won't be capable of running AlexNet well at all, in the same way that a GPU can't run CPU code well. I think the term "neuromorphic" to describe this hardware is as productive as any.

<comment><USER6> Which existing neuromorphic computers achieve 10^14 ops/s at 20 W? If you compare them to GPUs, those "ops" better be FP32 or at least FP16.

Also, you forgot to tell us what is that "extremely concrete reason why current neural net architectures will NOT work with the above optimizations".

<comment><USER4> >Which existing neuromorphic computers achieve 10^14 ops/s at 20 W? If you compare them to GPUs, those "ops" better be FP32 or at least FP16.

The comparison is of 3 bit neuromorphic synaptic ops against FP8 pascal ops. That factor is important (as it means that the neuromorphic ops are less useful), but it turns out to be dwarfed by the answer to your second question:

> Also, you forgot to tell us what is that "extremely concrete reason why > current neural net architectures will NOT work with the above > optimizations".

this is rather difficult to justify in this margin. But the idea is that proposals such as those above (50 Tops) tend to be optimistic on the efficiency of the raw compute ops. But these proposals really don't have much to say about the costs of communication (e.g. reading from memory, transmitting along wires, storing in registers, using buses, etc.). It turns out that if you don't have good ways to reduce these costs directly (and there are some, such as changing out registers for SRAMs, but nothing like the 100x speedup from analog computing), you have to just change the ratio of ops / bit*mm of communication per second. There are lots of easy ways to do that (e.g. just spin your ops over and over on the same data), but the real question is how to get useful intelligence out of your compute when it is data starved. This is an open question, and (sadly), very few ppl are working on it, compared to say low-bit-precision neural nets. But I predict this sentiment will be changed over the next few years.

Edit for below: no one is suggesting 50 Top/w hardware running alex net software to my knowledge (though would love to hear what they are proposing to run at that efficiency) . Nvidia among others are squeezing efficiency for cv applications with current software, but this comes at the cost of generality (it's unlike the communication tradeoffs they're making on that chip will make sense for generic AI research), and further improvements will rely on broader software changes, esp revolving around reduced communication. There are a lot of interesting ways to reduce communication without sacrificing performance, such as using smaller matrix sizes, which would reverse the state of the art trends.

<comment><USER5> Our hardware can run AlexNet...

<comment><USER4> In an integrated system at 50 tops/watt? How are you going to even access memory at less than 20 fJ per op? Like, you're specifically trying to hide the catch here. If we were to take you at face value, we'd have to also believe that Nvidia is working on an energy optimized system that is 50x worse for no good reason.

For reference, reading 1 bit from a very small 1.5kbit sram, which is much cheaper than the register caches in a gpu, costs more than 25 fJ per bit you read.

<comment><USER5> So this is locked up in "secret sauce". But as a hint, the analog aspect can be exploited.

<comment><USER4> Look, it sounds like your implying compute colocated storage in the analog properties of your system (which is exactly what a synaptic weight is btw), on top of using extremely low bit precision. So explicitly calling your system totally non-neuromorphic is a little deceiving. But even then I find this idea that you're going to be running the AlexNet communication protocol to pass around information in your system to be a little strange. If you're doing anything like passing digitized inputs through a fixed analog convolution then you're not going to beat the SRAM limit, which means that instead you have in mind keeping the data analog at all times, passing it through an increasing length of analog pipelines. Even if you get this working, I'm quite skeptical that by the time you have a complete system, you'll have reduce communication costs by even half the reduction you achieve in computation costs on a log scale. It's of course possible that I'm wrong there (and my entire argument hinges on the hypothesis that computation costs will fall faster than communication - which is true for CMOS but may be less true for optical), but this is really the only projection on which we disagree. If I'm right, then regardless of whether you can hit 50 Tops (or any value) on AlexNet, you'd be foolish not to reoptimize the architecture to reduce communication/compute ratios anyway.

<comment><USER6> Oh, I see what you meant now. Yes, when processing large amount of data (e.g. HD video) on an analog chip, DRAM to SRAM data transfer can potentially be a significant fraction of the overall energy consumption. However, if this becomes a bottleneck, you can grab the analog input signal directly (e.g. current from CCD), and this will reduce the communication costs dramatically (I don't have the numbers, but I believe Carver Mead built something called "Silicon Retina" in the 80s, so you can look it up).

Power consumption is not the only reason to switch to analog. Density and speed are just as important for AI applications.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I never understand the odd advantage that brains are assumed to have over machines when comparing power consumption.

>... AlphaGo ... was able to beat a world-champion human player of Go, but only after it had trained ... running on approximately a million watts. (Its opponent's brain, by contrast, would have been about fifty thousand times more energy-thrifty, consuming twenty watts.)

A human brain has a severe limitation though. It can't consume more or less energy even if it I wanted to. AlphaGo could double, triple, etc its power consumption and expect to improve its performance.

The brain also took decades to train. Computers also have the advantage of being identical. You can't train any brain to be a master level Go player.

I just don't see brains as the high watermark of intelligence. They occupy a very specific niche in what I assume is a vast unbounded landscape of possible intelligences.

<comment><USER8> > The brain also took decades to train.

The brain of an insect doesn't take decades to train, and we're currently unable to match its capabilities, either.

> I just don't see brains as the high watermark of intelligence. They occupy a > very specific niche in what I assume is a vast unbounded landscape of > possible intelligences.

That is a hypothetical claim because we don't know what intelligence _is_. Surely, some algorithms are much better at some tasks than the human brain, but that has been the case since the advent of computing, and it does not make them intelligent.

Intelligence, or how we would currently define it colloquially and imprecisely, is an algorithm or a class of algorithms with some specific capabilities. Could those capabilities be taken further than the human brain? We certainly can't say that they cannot, but it's not obvious that they can, either. The only kind of intelligence we know, our own, comes with a host of disadvantages that may be features of the particular algorithm employed by the brain and/or to limitations of the hardware, but they could possibly be essential to intelligence itself. Who knows, maybe an intelligence with access to more powerful hardware would be more prone to incapacitating boredom and depression or other kinds of mental illness. This is just one hypothetical possibility, but given how limited our understanding of intelligence is, there are plenty of possible roadblocks ahead.

Even if a higher intelligence than humans' is possible, its hypothetical achievements are uncertain. Some of the greatest problems encountered by humans are not constrained by intelligence but by resources and observations, and others (e.g. politics) are limited by powers of persuasion (that also don't seem to be simply correlated with intelligence). For example, what's limiting theoretical physics isn't brains but access to experiments, and what's limiting certain optimization problems are computational limits, for which our own intelligence, at least, does not give good approximate solutions at all.

<comment><USER9> > The brain of an insect doesn't take decades to train, and we're currently > unable to match its capabilities, either.

It's not particularly useful to simulate insects. We can far surpass some of their capabilities, but the goal is not to make an insect-robot, just like we didn't care to make a mechanical horse.

<comment><USER10> Both of these are under active development

Robotic insects: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RoboBee](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RoboBee)

Robotic horses: [http://www.bostondynamics.com/robot_bigdog.html](http://www.bostondynamics.com/robot_bigdog.html)

<comment><USER9> Those are mostly interested in biomimetic movement rather than intelligence. They do have some applications, but i don't think they ve convinced the world that mimicking organisms is necessarily optimal.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> "Neuromorphic" = "Ornithopter of the mind"

Giving up on flapping wings was the first step to flight.

<comment><USER12> Indeed. Imagine that Wright Flyer never happened, but some time in 1940s, the progress in engines' specific thrust made a wing flapping machine able to take off. That's where we are with machine learning.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> It bugs me when people always talk about "neuromorphic computing" and explore crazy ideas that never work and look at them in awe, but when anyone brings up a somewhat novel architecture for deep learning (nets that are being used today, successfully...) people say "that'll never work".

For example, our startup uses analog computing to achieve accuracy roughly equivalent to digital circuits, yet we're told that we're crazy? Meanwhile people dreaming about memristors are showered with grants and money....

<comment><USER13> You're from Isocline, right ? Your GPS chip was really good.

But your SIMD chip will be much more impressive, right?

<comment><USER14> No, they are not from Isocline...

There are groups at UCSB and U-Tenn working on analog neural network technologies as well.

<comment><USER13> Could you please share a bit more about your chip and when it would be ready ?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> There's a lot of backlash and/or dismissiveness on HN every time someone brings up neuromorphic architectures, and I think it has a lot to do with the same defensiveness that people display when their political beliefs are challenged. _When_ neuromorphic architectures start bearing fruit, programmers will no longer be so in-demand for configuring the machines, as it will shift the balance of power towards hardware engineers and hard scientists.

<comment><USER9> Computational neuroscientists have been using simplified models like these for decades, and in principle the operation of these 'neuromorphic' neurons can already be simulated in large numbers in 'ordinary' computers. So, it's not clear at all what is to be gained. AFAIK, most of the neuroscience community considers Truenorth a marketing ploy.

I don't think programmers should wait for these chips before they panic. They should already panic now, because deep learning works.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> If these articles get into the math behind it, I think they will realize that, currently, the brain is just a metaphor for a style of computation.

The article does state this towards the end: "Given the utter lack of consensus on how the brain actually works, these designs are more or less cartoons of what neuroscientists think might be happening."

We don't really know how the brain does what it does.

</comment><comment><USER8> > the recent success of A.I.

I guess they mean the recent success mostly due to modern hardware of 1960s statistical clustering and classification algorithms that for PR and historical purposes some people call "AI", but are currently unknown to have any significant relationship with what we call intelligence.

When we achieve the capabilities of an insect we would be able to call our algorithms "AI" without getting red in the face, as we'd know there's a decent chance we're at least on the path to intelligence. Until then, let's just call them statistical learning. That wouldn't make them any less valuable, but would represent them much more realistically and fairly.

It's funny how how statistics was once considered the worst kind of lie, and now for some it's becoming synonymous with intelligence.

</comment><comment><USER17> In the movie Terminator 2, a futuristic robot with advanced AI was developed by reverse engineering a futuristic chip.

In reality, we do not need to reverse engineer a chip. We can just reverse engineer our own brains.

</comment><comment><USER9> I see nothing in these "neuromorphic" architectures than hogwash trying to bullshit governments into giving them money. There's no conceptual advancement offered by these computers that can't be simulated with matlab. Until the day when we actually learn how neurons work, these will just be extremely premature optimizations.

<comment><USER6> These designs are advances in the field of computer architecture. They look at how brain processes information for ideas to make hardware more efficient, for some applications (such as pattern matching). Did you expect something more?

<comment><USER9> They use very rudimentary sketches that have little to do with real neurons. ANNs have been mimicking these things in a slightly lower detail since the 60s. We can do better pattern matching with ANNs.

<comment><USER6> I think you might be confused about terminology.

Neuromorphic computing is running some known ANN model directly in hardware. Why do we want it? Because ANN models in software work well for pattern matching, and we want to speed it up/make it more efficient.

<comment><USER9> Nope, ANN's and deep learning are not used by these boards (Neurogrid, zeroth, truenorth).

<comment><USER6> [https://arxiv.org/abs/1603.08270](https://arxiv.org/abs/1603.08270)

They have been designed, and are being used either for more efficient pattern matching, or to speed up brain simulations (again, using known neuronal models).

You seem to expect something else from neuromorphic computing, why?

<comment><USER9> I stand with Yann Lecun's criticism on the article:

[https://m.facebook.com/yann.lecun/posts/10152184295832143](https://m.facebook.com/yann.lecun/posts/10152184295832143)

> [the truenorth team had] to shoehorn a convnet on a chip that really wasn't > designed for it. I mean, if the goal was to run a convnet at low power, they > should have built a chip for that. The performance (and the accuracy) would > be a lot better than this.

They used their 'neuromorphic' chip in an explicitly non-neuromorphic way, basically approximately mapping deep learning processes to their chip. There is very little neuromorphicity (brain-likeness) about it (plasticity rules out of their ass, for starters). And they still get less than state-of-the art performance in most tasks!

I expect 'neuromorphic' to be used when sound neuroscience is used in large scale implementations that allow us to actually simulate parts of the brain. Anything else, we call it what it is, ANNs.

<comment><USER6> Well, none of those chips are brain-like at all. For example, TrueNorth is fully digital, it uses separate compute/memory blocks, signal multiplexing, signal encoding, routing protocols, instruction set, etc, none of which is in any way related to what brain is doing. What makes you think it's "neuromorphic"?

Whether you like it or not, get used to people calling their hardware ANN implementations "neuromorphic".

<comment><USER9> Nope, neuromorphic means the hardware would simulate the neurobiology, not ANNs. More practically, they would never publish in Science if their title was "printing ANNs in hardware".

<comment><USER6> TrueNorth hardware, as I illustrated, does not resemble neurobiology at all. There are no brain-like components there, on any level. Moreover, it can run ANN algorithms just as easily as more "neuromorphic" algorithms.

Pointing to how they chose to name it for publication is not exactly a very convincing argument to support your view, is it? :)

<comment><USER9> My view is they 're useless. i don't get your point, sorry.

<comment><USER6> My point is architectures like TrueNorth are very impressive from the point of view of a computer engineer, and they are very efficient when running their intended applications (neural network algorithms). The fact that they are not "brain-like" does not make them any less impressive.

<comment><USER9> > very impressive from the point of view of a computer engineer

Maybe, i suppose as much as a bitcoin ASIC is.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Facebook chose not to act on militia complaints before Kenosha shooting - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2020/8/26/21403004/facebook-kenosha-militia-groups-shooting-blm-protest <comment><USER2> I used to think the good created by social media outweighed the bad. Now I firmly believe the opposite. I actually think I hate Facebook more than any other commercial operation, ever.

</comment><comment> core-questions There are an awful lot of people who believe that Rittenhouse shot in self- defence, fearing for his life, as a part of a militia trying to defend their community against burning and looting and rioting, which is not an unreasonable thing to want to do after months of this activity across the USA.

Expecting Facebook to have a role in policing this is just silly, it's armchair politics at its finest. Even if Facebook didn't exist, these people would have gotten together to defend their city. The solution here isn't to stop people from defending their city, it's to stop people from crossing state lines to terrorize communities for the actions of police officers, especially when there's a grey area as to the illegality of the policing action.

Media companies that pretend otherwise are throwing fuel on the fire by covering for the mob. Do they hope they'll be spared? The number of burnt businesses with BLM signs on the front in Kenosha should be a pretty good indication that you can't prostrate yourself before the mob and assume that it will result in your property being spared.

<comment><AUTHOR> > There are an awful lot of people who believe that Rittenhouse shot in self- > defence

Self defense after running into an unarmed crowd swinging around a rifle?

I'm not going to say he's guilty just yet, but the police charged him with first-degree intentional homicide.

I think it's fair to say the people who believe it was self defense have a lot of explaining to do given the facts as we know them.

<comment> core-questions > Self defense after running into an unarmed crowd swinging around a rifle?

I'm not a judge, I'm not a lawyer, I'm just telling you a lot of people are mad about this. Apparently a Molotov was thrown at him (have not seen this), and in the video I did see, he was on the ground about to have his face stomped in when he shot. There's an argument for self-defense there; it'll be up to a court to decide, but for now, it's not clear that these murder charges are going to hold up.

<comment><USER3> He isn't old enough to carry a firearm so by open carrying the weapon he already committed a felony.

By crossing from Illinois into Wisconsin with a firearm he was not legally allowed to carry he committed a felon.

Self defense is not likely a position which will apply here.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Looks like self defence to me, why would we think otherwise at this stage?

We have clear evidence he was fired at by protesters

[https://twitter.com/trbrtc/status/1298839097923063809](https://twitter.com/trbrtc/status/1298839097923063809)

So should have Facebook shut down the protesters page instead if this is the case?

<comment><AUTHOR> > We have clear evidence he was fired at by protesters

The link you provided doesn't seem to support that conclusion.

<comment><USER5> Other than videos of people with pistols running after the kid and shooting in the air?

I have no clue WTF is happening in US, and what is the source of constant escalation, but Im pretty sure Putin is laughing his ass off right now. This is classic old KGB destabilize and weaken procedure in action.

<comment><AUTHOR> What videos are you referring to?

<comment><USER4> The multiple linked videos above in the Twitter thread that the New York Times analysed of the timeline.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's not what those videos show, nor is it what the NYTimes said they show.

<comment><USER4> Sorry, but at this stage I assume you are a troll. But one last time in case you are not. From the thread, from the New York Times reporter -

"At 23:19, Rittenhouse is seen in this YouTube livestream. He's being chased into a parking lot. While he is being pursued, an unknown gunman fires the first shot into the air."

<comment><AUTHOR> You: " We have clear evidence he was fired at by protesters"

You're calling me a troll? Please.

The comma is important here. The person chasing is not the same person shooting. You and others keep conflating this and it appears to be intentional.

Whatever happened at that moment, this individual decided not only not to order assistance to the person he shot in the head, but to run into an unarmed crowd waving around a rifle.

<comment><USER4> You could have stated this on my first comment if you were being in good faith.

rasz then corrected what I said, early in this thread, which you and I are replying on.

This is quite bad faith on your behalf.

<comment><AUTHOR> Please do not continue to personally attack me. It violates the principals of this community.

I have not acted in bad faith, we simply appear have a disagreement about the English language.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Mosh - <AUTHOR> https://www.jefftk.com/p/mosh <comment><USER4> The article misses the other great feature of Mosh: It never get disconnected, regardless of the client's state (IP address change, or device sleep mode), and you will never loose terminal sessions.

When this is not so appealing to desktop users, it is a godsend feature for laptop/mobile users. Especially, if you are an iPad user you should try Blink shell app [1] with Mosh. This combination turns the iPad your favorite portable terminal machine.

[1] [https://blink.sh/](https://blink.sh/)

<comment><USER5> > The article misses the other great feature of Mosh: It never get > disconnected, regardless of the client's state (IP address change, or device > sleep mode), and you will never loose terminal sessions.

I almost switched to mosh in the past while searching for this kind of solution to short-living ssh connections.

But I've finally never made the jump, re-launching ssh/tmux being four keystrokes only (up+enter x2). Not justifying changing the whole paradigm. Plus you get the additional bonus with tmux to be able to recover the same remote terminal sessions when switching computers (leave stuff in place at work, go home, continue on the same stuff at home).

Edit: maybe it's the time for jumping ships!

<comment><USER6> Does the keepalive functionality in ssh help here? Like:

ssh -o ServerAliveInterval=5 -o ServerAliveCountMax=1 $HOST

<comment><USER7> There's one place where it doesn't (and can't) help at all: when your address is changing frequently.

Suppose I'm doing some remote debugging stuff on my way to work. I have one IP on my home Wi-Fi. As I walk to my bus stop, it switches to LTE. As my bus drives through the city, I periodically jump to different addresses. I grab a coffee on my walk to the office and end up on the coffee shop's Wi-Fi with their address. I leave and hop back to LTE, until I get to work and connect to its Wi-Fi.

With SSH, every one of those changes means reconnecting. With Mosh, it means that everything pauses for an instant and then resumes as if nothing ever happened.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> As someone who codes on a remote server the whole day, mosh is absolutely necessary and it is fantastic

Advantages:

\- you dont see any lag when you type, it is exactly as if you were on your local machine

\- when network disconnect, the terminal freeze and when network is up again, the terminal becomes interactive again preserving everything in between

\- connection is preserved as long as the terminal is open, so even after hibernation your session is preserved

Drawbacks:

\- you can't scroll , but if you use tmux then it is possible . I've tried using Eternal terminal, as it allows to scroll but it doesn't perform well at all on laggy connections

\- You can't detach and re attach mosh connections (same for ET)

\- I'm not sure it is possible to preserve middle-click copy/paste (at least I've not managed to make it work)

\- time to connect is a bit longer than normal ssh

<comment><USER9> Why do you code on a remote server?

<comment><USER10> Pretty common for physics experiments. My computer has neither direct access to the data being collected, nor the processing power to deal with it. Sure, I could code locally, push to a repo, and then test remotely, but the additional turnaround would be obnoxious. Far easier to open up a terminal and run emacs remotely.

<comment><USER11> I am a former Emacs user and now a VSCode user. VSCode has great 'remote SSH' capability - running a whole session locally on a codebase that is remote. Everything works seamlessly - find in files, code navigation etc.

<comment><USER12> That doesnt answer why. I have a table saw that works really well, doesn't mean I use it all day every day.

<comment><USER11> That's a good point that I didn't make clear, in my head it was implied from context.

Using VSCode in this way makes you much less dependent on good SSH. When using emacs in a terminal over SSH, your whole UI is being rendered over SSH and any latency or packet loss is going to affect UI feedback and rendering.

If you use VSCode Remote-SSH, you UI is rendered locally, so typing and editing work smoothly, and you don't really notice a bit of network latency on a request to "find in files" for instance.

Running your emacs locally and then using Tramp to edit remote files (as suggested elsewhere) gives you some of that benefit but is a much more limited development experience, and (in my experience) flakier.

<comment><USER12> why do you work remotely at all instead of just doing it all on your pc?

<comment><USER11> There are a number of situations where you don't want to compile or run code on the same machine that you develop on. Use of containers or VMs can mitigate a lot of them (differing environment or platform), but not all. I have 3 different causes at different times:

Developing a python framework for running system tests on hardware. This can only be run on the machine that is in the lab connected to the hardware. For various reasons related to the network latency of being at home, the easiest way to iterate on that is to checkout and develop on the machine itself.

Developing on Linux, from home. My work laptop is a (small) Windows machine. Normally it doesn't get heavy use - some presentations and email reading when I travel. Now I'm WfH it's my primary machine. By SSHing to my Linux desktop at work (for terminal and for VSCode), I get the development experience of Linux on my Windows machine (there are some other benefits to do with that machine being on the right network and close to the stuff it needs to talk to a lot).

Developing FPGA code. This requires a hugely powerful machine to compile on if you want a reasonable compile speed. The Hardware group have a few specialised machines for this that are shared, so that we can have laptops and get the benefit (also means you can leave a synthesis going overnight/over the weekend easily).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Eternal Terminal 'et' is like Mosh but functionally better. Doesn't break scrollback. Transparent to tmux control mode.

I switched from Mosh to et across 12ish servers around 6 months ago and am way happier for it.

[https://eternalterminal.dev/](https://eternalterminal.dev/)

Previous conversation:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21640200](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21640200)

<comment><USER14> Looking at Eternal Terminal, it doesn't have the same "local echo" feature that minimises the effect of latency in a cli environment.

Thats the trade-off. The "local echo" feature is what I use mosh for as I deal with system 8 to 10 timezones away. Doing this breaks scrollback.

I guess when mosh was first made, this was a problem with ssh shell sessions over EDGE or 3G as well, although network latency is less of a concern these days on 4G LTE or 5G mobile.

<comment><USER15> What about using GNU screen inside a mosh connection like that:

        mosh server -- screen -xRR -D

You then can use the scrollback buffer provided by screen with Ctrl-a, ESC and then the usual Up/Down and PgUp/PgDown buttons.

<comment><USER14> Yeah, I do something similar with tmux. You can even get mouse scrollback to work properly by setting the option in the conf file.

Here some medium article about this -

[https://medium.com/@toja/tip-using-mosh-with- scrollback-257a...](https://medium.com/@toja/tip-using-mosh-with- scrollback-257a54a848b3)

<comment><USER16> For some reason scrollback mouse integration works well till one disconnects and reconnects, and then suddenly it's broken.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Mosh is great, but it does not support port forwarding. For some people, including myself, this is a deal breaker. It has been an open issue/feature request since 2012[1] and even has a ~600 USD bounty on it[2].

[1] - [https://github.com/mobile- shell/mosh/issues/337](https://github.com/mobile-shell/mosh/issues/337)

[2] - [https://www.bountysource.com/issues/4471419-ssh-port- forward...](https://www.bountysource.com/issues/4471419-ssh-port-forwarding- doesn-t-work)

<comment><USER18> I would also love this feature, but I understand the argument that it's major feature-creep for this project - as I understand, with mosh as implemented it would be difficult to integrate. IIRC they would have to roll some kind of TCP over UDP? I'm not sure, it's been a while since I looked at it. I'm willing to accept a good tool missing features over a poorly maintained tool that at some point had all the features I care about.

And realistically $600 is a pittance compared to the long-term cost of maintaining a feature that has the potential to dramatically increase the size of the code base.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> If you're an Emacs user (like the author apparently is), I would recommend trying out TRAMP: [https://www.gnu.org/software/tramp/#Overview](https://www.gnu.org/software/tramp/#Overview)

Emacs will transparently handle SSH connections and let you edit remote files as if they are local. Just as importantly, if you run commands like M-x compile or M-! (aka M-x shell-command) while you're looking at a remote file, Emacs will "do the right thing" and run the process on the remote machine, rather than on your local machine.

This gives you the benefits that the author mentions about mosh - <USER2> will appear as you type without waiting on a server round-trip. Additionally, you also won't have to wait for a server round-trip to see your cursor jump to the minibuffer, which the author mentions as a pain point.

If you need to run things at the command-line, you can do so in a "shell" buffer via M-x shell (or M-x term if you need to run something curses-like).

The major downsides:

\- I/O operations (including opening and saving files) can be much slower than if you were running Emacs in a terminal, because the bytes need to be sent over SSH.

\- It's not always easy to keep track of which buffers are "remote" and which are "local", so sometimes you'll run a command and it will run a process on a different machine than you expected.

</comment><comment><USER20> Mosh is fantastic. And as an old-timer I am rather amused how some good ideas from a while back make its way into current hot tech again. After all, the IBM 3270 terminal was specifically designed to not transmit one character at a time. Thanks to this, a 1970s-era IBM 3033 mainframe fitted with only 16 MB of main memory was able to support up to 17,500 3270 terminals. (see [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_3270](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_3270))

<comment><USER21> Terminals in mosh are still fundamentally character mode, though. That's a fairly inescapable part of the POSIX general terminal interface. A better analogue for something where there's a block-mode send of form data is, ironically, a WWW browser and WWW pages with forms.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> The problem with mosh from my perspective has always been this sentence in the blurb:

> _This is accomplished using a new protocol called the State Synchronization > Protocol, for which Mosh is the first application._

This protocol has never been documented, making it "only" rather than "first", and once again putting the world in the position of one particular implementation's foibles being the only "specification".

</comment><comment><USER22> Last time I tried using things like this, it just ended becoming a VT layering monstrosity where you had like 3-4 terminal emulators all interfering with how you expect your keyboard and mouse interactions work. It's also why I gave up trying to use tmux.

It's easier for me to just pick one terminal emulator I like and spawn multiple windows of it, ssh about and deal with the woes of TCP than put up with VT layering like mosh requires.

</comment><comment><USER23> I am also a fan of mosh.

I really like that I can close my laptop and put it into standby, take it somewhere else with a different wifi network and just open it and get right back to work. From a user perspective it appears as if mosh was never disconnected.

<comment><USER24> You can use tmux for persistence like that, and I use mosh in combination with tmux just because it's so nice to get multiple windows and panes.

<comment><USER25> tmux solves a different problem - your session persists across disconnects, but you still have to reconnect and attach to the session manually.

mosh is for low bandwidth high latency but as a side effect it makes the reconnect step transparent most of the time.

(for the record i also use both mosh and tmux)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I've used mosh extensively over the last few years with very few issues. It composes well with tmux. The only barrier to me really advocating it is the lack of support for bastion hosts and working around firewalls.

<comment><USER27> I've used ZeroTier to solve most of that sort of network issues.

</comment></comment><comment> globular-toast I started using mosh a few weeks ago when I was working over ssh more. Even for working over LAN it was attractive because I'm really sensitive to typing latency. Don't be like the author and put off trying it, it's dead easy to install and try. No setup and no commitment to keep using it.

However, I quickly ran into a problem which is that it breaks a scrollback. This is the one big problem with mosh and will probably never be fixed. I tried to find other ways but eventually decided I couldn't live with it. Shame.

<comment><USER28> Terminal emulators (xterm, iterm2 etc) are emulating something like a VT220 which were called "glass terminals" to differentiate them from earlier terminals which were keyboards attached to printers. So there's still this underlying concept of an endless spool of paper, and that's what you see when you scroll back. A scroll is literally a long piece of paper.

Anyway that means if you cat some long file and then hit control-c, whatever was output before you aborted still has to be sent to your terminal emulator so it can write it to this paper (save it to the scrollback buffer). This sucks on a slow connection. mosh is running the emulator on the remote side of the connection and the client that you're interacting with locally just syncs periodically to whatever is currently being shown on the screen. So it doesn't have to send all of the output, which as you've seen, does break local scrollback. But it's a great solution for the problem it was designed to solve which is making terminals work over slow and/or unreliable network connections.

If you pair it with gnu screen or tmux, then they become the terminal emulator and maintain the scrollback buffer, so you can still scroll back and see all of the paper. You just can't do it with the slider on your local window because your local emulator doesn't have access to the full contents of the buffer. I turn off scrollbars in rxvt and just rely on screen to maintain the buffer and use command keys to go back when I need to.

<comment><USER29> Mosh could easily load the skipped-over lines in the background. It's not incompatible with the design. It just requires a developer to put in the effort.

<comment><USER28> Can it though? How can a program manipulate the scrollback buffer of the terminal that it's running in? Other than by printing more output. But once it's updated the current line, it can't go back and add more lines - <USER3> lines have already been printed on the scroll.

<comment><USER29> Even if it had no way to communicate the lines to the local terminal, it could still load them and handle the scrollback itself, locally. I think that's what the eventual plan is, too.

But it wouldn't be exceptionally difficult to figure out some way to stuff lines into the scroll buffer. Especially if you got a mosh-aware terminal.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> You need to install a server in the server for this to work. That is, if you are using SSH to log in to server farms as a "user" (as opposed to a server farm admin), then you cannot just "use mosh".

<comment><USER31> When I first found out about mosh, I imagined it would work seamlessly even with servers that don't have the mosh server installed by auto-installing itself.

If mosh could do this, I would `alias ssh=mosh` and use it all the time.

Otherwise I need to remember which servers have mosh installed, and for those that don't I need to ssh in, apt-get mosh, disconnect, and reconnect with mosh.

I'd imagine it could either just scp a binary over to the target system (in the case of insufficient privileges) or use the system package manager to install itself.

<comment><USER30> That's supposing that you can run mosh in the background while you are not logged in.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Mosh's non-support of scrollback was always a deal-breaker for me.

iTerm2's tmux integration is pretty nice, though.

Apparently there is iTerm2+tmux+mosh dark magic if one is into that kind of thing: [https://www.gaeblogx.com/2017/10/09/Remote-Shell-Session- Set...](https://www.gaeblogx.com/2017/10/09/Remote-Shell-Session-Setup/)

<comment><USER33> Well, tmux supports scrollback with `prefix [`, then `j` and `k` and `C^u` and `C^d` to move up and down, Enter to select and copy text. Not good enough?

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Mosh has been a godsend while working from home the last few weeks. Especially because despite my company and all its employees being in India, we host all our servers in the US to 'keep up appearances'.

</comment><comment><USER35> VS code remote works pretty well for this. Lag-free local editing of files, terminal is always there when you need it.

</comment><comment><USER36> If you use a combo of iTerm on Mac + Mosh + tmux, I highly recommend rebuilding mosh on client/server from this PR[1] which adds better support for copy & paste. Also, if you use mosh without tmux, you're missing out -- learn tmux.

[1] [https://github.com/mobile- shell/mosh/pull/1054](https://github.com/mobile-shell/mosh/pull/1054)

<comment><USER37> Mosh + tmux on an iPad Pro rocks. I can now select and copy/paste using finters or Apple Pencil.

<comment><USER36> Are you using Blink? When you copy/paste, does that only work within the SSH session or can you copy to the system pasteboard?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Is Mosh being maintained anymore? I remember giving it an install maybe a year ago and remembering it didn't have any updates in quite some time.

<comment><USER39> It looks like there has been active development, but they haven't cut a new release.

Reminds me of pyqtgraph, which gets commits most days last time I checked yet hasn't released since 2016.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> I use mosh in tandem with tmux.

About say 10% of my reconnects would fail with mosh, and the session would be orphaned. But combining with tmux, even if I lost the mosh session I could make a new one and reattach to tmux.

My use case was iPad/iPhone remote working. (Usually while visiting in-laws or on a plane) Very intermittent connectivity.

I used the open source blink terminal for iOS (which I bought because it's great). It can use mosh.

</comment><comment><USER41> I've been using Mosh for years and it's one of the first things I install on all servers I setup. I also install the client on my android phone via Termux and it's absolutely great on laggy and unreliable mobile connection. My only gripes are the lack of scrolling buffer (need to remember to use tmux) and the lack of support on iTerm's fancy tmux integration. Other than that it's an absolutely fantastic tool!

</comment><comment><USER42> Used mosh to access remote linux machines over a sub-GHz IPv6 mesh.

Since the mesh is UDP only, this provides a relatively normal shell experience for this type of situation.

Works well.

</comment><comment><USER43> I mostly use mosh from my mobile for connections to home. It handles session persistence nicely even while on the move.

It'd be great if I could use it now while working from home because my ssh sessions keep dying. Unfortunately the work firewall won't allow this. So tmux to preserve the sessions is the best I can do.

</comment><comment><USER44> Mosh is awesome! The biggest issue I ran into was it being UDP based - lots of places lock down UDP even over VPNs - and if your client dies there is no way to reconnect. However as long as the client is active it is pretty bulletproof. Hopefully http/3 will cause people to loosen up UDP rules a bit.

</comment><comment><USER45> tmux+mosh is a winning combination for working on remote servers.

If you spend any time using a terminal to remotely manage servers, it's worth using at least tmux (and mosh because it provides a better experience with imperfect connections).

</comment><comment><USER46> I used to live in SE Asia and was regularly SSH-ing into servers running in the US. The latency was awful. Mosh made everything far more pleasant. The only downside is that you have to install extra software server-side.

</comment><comment><USER47> I used it for a while - but was worried about security. Is it as hardened as ssh?

<comment><USER48> Mosh doesn't have to do the hard part.

The difficulty is key agreement and authentication, but both those happen in SSH itself. So by the time Mosh is invoked you're definitely an authorised user and you and the server share a secret, so Mosh is just moving encrypted packets.

It uses authenticated encryption, and I don't know much about the specific mode it apparently uses, OCB3, but in general there's just not that much to go wrong over and above all the work still happening in SSH.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> I'll just add that mosh is excellent. I started using it on a trip to the other side of the world. The ssh latency was terrible, and mosh saved the day.

</comment><comment><USER50> Mosh is awesome! I use it all the time to connect to servers over a slow and high latency satellite link. Highly recommend it for high latency connections.

</comment><comment><USER51> Mosh + Blink (iPadOS) is a great combination.

</comment><comment><USER52> Does anyone know how to get mosh to play well with emojis or Unicode strings?

</comment><comment><USER53> Big fan of mosh, I've used mosh + tmux + neovim for years</comment>


Scientists try 'cloud brightening' to protect Great Barrier Reef - <AUTHOR> https://phys.org/news/2020-04-scientists-cloud-brightening-great-barrier.html <comment><USER2> I remember a version of this being proposed some 15+ years ago. Glad someone is trying it. IIRC the estimated cost was not that high. It was not intended for local use.

Please don't use fossil fuel to run stuff like this.</comment>


Ask HN: Should founders be single or in a relationship? Why? Pros cons? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> (Almost) everyone that I respect the accomplishments of on Wikipedia seems to have spent most of their life married. And being married now for a little while, I would not go back. The people who say that you need to choose between them are probably men in their 20s who work too much (or, that has been my experience). When you start your career, you spend a lot of (wasted, output- wise) time learning instead of productive. People get more productive as time goes on, which allows you to earn more _and_ do more things outside of focusing on getting to be good enough at working. Eventually you can make a great living without too much painful learning and evenings and weekends grinding, so you can spend the rest of the time how you wish. Eventually, you can do the same with kids, parents, etc. depending on you and still somehow function. It takes a lifetime it seems to learn those things, but there does not seem to be much of a downside.</comment>


Facebook separating Workplace from the main site for security-minded customers - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnbc.com/2018/10/31/facebook-introduces-workplace-domain-to-calm-enterprise-security-fears.html <comment><AUTHOR> Original title: "Facebook is separating Workplace from the main Facebook site to appease business customers concerned about security" (35 characters too long).</comment>


I would like my $0.37 refund, please. - <AUTHOR> http://lucasmccoy.blogspot.com/2011/02/i-would-like-my-037-refund-please.html

<comment><USER2> > I'm sure to this lady her time is worth much more than $1.48 per hour

Sometimes, it's the principle. During my wife's last pregnancy, our insurance company would overcharge us by $20 for every single pre-natal checkup; we debated the merits of calling in (every time), sometimes spending up to an hour getting through the phone tree to the person who could correct the error, and we decided that even if we theoretically value our time at more than $20/hour, we'd rather not let our insurance company slowly squeeze money out of us that they weren't entitled to.

<comment><AUTHOR> >our insurance company would overcharge us by $20 for every single pre-natal checkup

I think I would do the same in your situation because it's multiple occurrences.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> People make decisions based on principle, and the information they have at the time. The shopper probably didn't anticipate that it would take 15 minutes to correct her purchase. She probably didn't have a good feel for what the price difference would be. She knew she was paying more than she _should_ , so she said something. I don't think I would act any differently.

<comment><AUTHOR> "A lot of times people have trouble translating percentages into real numbers. She had also been wronged by being charged 5% more than she should have.

However if she had thought this decision out in the terms that we just have, I doubt she still gets that refund."

Hindsight is always 20 20. Still once you here someone say they have to get a manager involved you know it's going to take at least a few minutes.

<comment><USER3> Sure, but by that time she had already committed to getting her money back. People don't constantly re-evaluate their decisions as new information comes in. They're not machines.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Sometimes it's easy to forget that we (people in their most active years making 3 dollar-digits per hour) live in a bubble. We would happily trade a few dollars so we don't have to wait. We would happily trade many dollars so we don't have to talk to you. Basically, our time converts to money and back to time almost without any effort or friction.

Did you know that there are other people that are actually enjoying their life? The fact that they are standing on their feet, talking to other people, smelling the residue buffing detergent on the crummy supermarket floor. Spending 15 minutes in line chatting with other human beings and getting paid for it ($0.37) is just another beautiful morning for the people that have a life.

To all HN readers: I hope one day we all know what this feels like :-)

Edit: What I'm trying to say here is that it is very presumptions and shallow to assume that the monetary gain was the only asset in the "worth-it?" equation.

</comment><comment><USER5> Don't underestimate the limitations of the fixed income, or the spare time of the elderly. The year I worked at Rite Aid was not the best of my life.

<comment><USER6> Coupon clipping is also a fairly common activity, particularly among stay-at- home moms, and it typically translates into an hourly wage of $6 ~ $8. (This is why coupons are so effective at price discrimination -- if $6 ~ $8 an hour is an insult to your intelligence, you will happily pay full price for your chocolate pudding snack.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> It also cost the store money to process. If no one holds the store accountable, then there is no incentive for them to be diligent about correct pricing. Sometimes people sacrifice their own time for the greater good. If the pricing problems continue though shoppers will become annoyed and shop elsewhere. This is why for the store it is better to have a smoother process for small price adjustments, it should not be necessary to wait 15 minutes for the store manager's approval on a 37 cent refund, nor should he even have to deal with it at all, that is a waste of his time and salary to be attending to something so minor.

This topic relates to software. As soon as we receive a request for a refund on software we approve it. This means it costs the minimum amount to process and annoys the customer the least. There is no point to fighting or arguing or wasting the customer's time.

Painless refunds is in complete opposition to the policies of many large software companies who have a "no refunds once opened" policy, which doesn't even make sense since they tend to have revocable registration numbers and machine locked licensing, so the no-refunds policy is nothing more than a giant rip off for customers.

</comment><comment><USER8> In related news, a man died unhappy and alone today. Before he died, and looking back, he remembered the time a girl had asked him to drive her home. After some extremely advanced math he had given her a cab fare and stayed at work

But fortunately he had fully optimized his earning potential.

<comment><USER9> And we'll never know if his judgment regarding the potential benefit in that situation was right.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I worked in a theme park and we had a discount coupon so the customer could buy 2 meals with a 50% discount for the second meal.

Only in August, after 2.5 busy months one customer complained and spent maybe half a day arguing with the cashier, then with his manager, then with food supervisor, and finally with guest relations people. He got his 1(!!!) cent back. It was an error in the POS system that manages all the cash registers. However, he also saved many pennies for future guests, also hopefully the park reviewed the POS logic for other items and thus could have fixed similar errors and saved even more money for the customers.

So sometimes someone's wasted day is a benefit for many other people.

</comment><comment><USER11> There's actually a TV show on "Extreme Couponing" [http://press.discovery.com/us/tlc/programs/extreme- couponing...](http://press.discovery.com/us/tlc/programs/extreme-couponing/)

Coupons are wonderful advertising as they can attract customers that may not otherwise even entertain purchasing a product or service, but have a processing cost on both the buyer and seller's end.

The point isn't the money, the point is keeping that customer in the future.

<comment><USER8> Coupons are a very effective way to maximize revenue on a product by segmenting your market.

"Rich" people would usually never consider coupon clipping, and so will pay full price.

By putting ever more complicated ways to save money ("save 5% by clipping this", "save 50% by clipping 10 weeks of these", "save 90% by clipping 10 of these, then sending off for the rebate") a seller can make sure that even the poorest can buy their product at the cost of inconvenience.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> To me, this seems like something most selfishly rational people will not pursue--because it's mainly an externality that you're paying for with your time. However, most people are pursuing these due to principle, and perhaps to protect their and others' interests in the future.

</comment><comment><USER13> I guess the opposite principle is the when people don't submit their rebates for big ticket items. On a per hour basis, they would be making a killing. By failing to do the rebate, that opportunity cost is painful.

</comment><comment><USER14> I think the author makes the mistaken assumption that everyone is cash-rich and time-poor. Plenty of people are the opposite, have plenty of time, but a limited income.

<comment><USER15> He also makes the mistaken assumption that she would have done something income-earning had she not got her refund. She could have simply gone home and watched TV earned nothing and she would be down 37 cents.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Monetary value of time probably isn't even on the top ten list of "reasons why humans do things". This isn't news. Not everything - in fact, not anything - can be reduced to money.

<comment><USER17> Well, hold on. It's certainly in the top 10 reasons of why I _spend_ money, probably not in the top 10 reasons of why I try to _save_ it though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Am I the only one here thinking: Why did she buy 12 candy bars?

<comment><USER18> Because they were on sale, obviously.

<comment><USER15> obviously :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> At least she didn't pay with a check!</comment>


It's Time to Change the Narrative About Clean Energy - <AUTHOR> https://unreasonable.is/change-narrative-clean-energy/amp/ <comment><USER4> The article discusses re-branding the clean energy industry so it is as American as the interstate highway system and the jobs that it provides are as valuable as those in the automotive or coal mining sectors but didn't go so far as to suggest what that branding could be.

A television ad campaign showing lots of blue and white collar workers at solar farms, wind farms, and hydro plants performing various maintenance, construction, and engineering activities might help more than the shots of wilderness and nature that seem to be designed to appeal to environmentalists more than the average joe. need a slogan and an audio signature (a la intel bong or netflix drum) and clean green power could become the engine powering America's future!

<comment><USER5> Very good point, the political power of coal seems to be as much about cultural concepts of masculinity as anything else. It already employs many fewer people than alternative technogies:

[https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-05-16/solar- bea...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-05-16/solar-beats-coal- on-u-s-jobs)

I also wonder whether the talk of coal being dirty and dangerous actually boosts its appeal to some voters. At the least solar and wind need to be seen as rugged. Maybe they should also play up scale, the latest offshore wind turbines, for instance, are absolutely massive.

<comment><USER6> > I also wonder whether the talk of coal being dirty and dangerous actually > boosts its appeal to some voters.

For example, see the attitudes around "Rollin' Coal". Practitioners cite "American freedom" and a stand against "rampant environmentalism" as reasons for coal rolling (aka "Prius repellent"). I'm not sure what argument one could make to change a coal roller's mind.

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

<comment><USER7> Someone who's gone to the trouble of modifying their vehicle in that manner may be beyond the point of reasonable discussion. On the other hand, that's likely to be a pretty small proportion of people, overall.

<comment><USER8> You could certainly appeal to their appreciation for reliability. Consider this, does an electric vehicle have ANY emissions reducing equipment at all that one must maintain?

The unreliability of the emissions gear is usually what comes up when I talk to diesel folks. Rolling coal is a fun extra for them.

Just musing now, but the diesel guys today seem to say a lot of the same things the gas guys said in the 80s with their EGRs and cats and vacuum lines galore under the hood destroying their reliability. Gas got variable timing and direct injection, and is no longer so fragile. Maybe there's some room left for innovation there, maybe not.

<comment><USER9> > Consider this, does an electric vehicle have ANY emissions reducing > equipment at all that one must maintain?

Yes, you need to keep it clean, drag affects all things equally, and dirty anything means more drag.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I would also like to see the environmental groups and the left in general stop branding coal as somehow immoral. How about instead trying to make coal compete on level ground: tax its carbon emissions, tax its particulate emissions, require real management for whatever waste it produces, and see if any investors or inventors want to keep it alive.

If the CO2 emissions could be adequately captured, the particulates scrubbed, and the fly ash turned into concrete [0], there may very well be a place for coal for hundreds of years.

[0] Fly ash appears to be a pretty good replacement for a large amount of Portland cement, and the latter also comes with quite a bit of CO2 emissions.

<comment><USER11> Unfortunately in the real world, with the best available technology, mining coal is dirty, the particulates can't be fully scrubbed, and coal ash is toxic.

<comment><USER12> There were some stories about a Chinese coal plant manager who made "clean coal" (claims of near 100% clean). Never saw anyone debunking it. I wish to know how true the claims are.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This guy is right on, it's time to stop calling clean energy "clean energy". That term makes it sound like the differentiating aspects of wind and solar as compared to coal, gas and oil, is that the new stuff has lower carbon output. That's true, but it's not the point anymore. Wind and solar are so efficient, and so cheap that there's no need to market them on their environmental impact, so dump clean energy. Here are some ideas I'm just throwing out there for new terms:

New Energy

Tech Energy

Cheap Energy

Durable Energy

Efficient Energy

<comment><USER14> "Renewable Energy" maybe?

<comment><USER15> Or even "free energy" if you want to go really eye-catching.

Or "independent/freedom energy" to highlight that building up renewables pushes independence from resources provided by foreign nations.

Along those lines, how about "secure energy" since energy independence is a national security issue as well.

<comment><USER16> > Or "independent/freedom energy" to highlight that building up renewables > pushes independence from resources provided by foreign nations.

This should be large part of the narrative. I vote "Energy Freedom."

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Environmentalists are the _only_ power bloc in politics that isn't in favour of cheap energy (their priority is obviously 'clean'). The irony of this is that if it happens that clean energy is the most economic alternative, then the small number of fanatics who want to make it a moral or political issue are going to be the biggest roadblock. They'll probably still be ignored as they have been for the last couple of decades though.

That being said, talking about the number of jobs might be politically savvy but isn't actually a big picture advantage - energy production is a bit special in my view and we don't want people working on that. We want people working on ways of taking energy and transforming it into something useful. The thinking here is a bit like observing the difference between being unemployed and starving vs. unemployed with a $10 million inheritance - <USER2> are good and bad ways to be unemployed. With cheap enough energy, anything is possible.

<comment><USER18> It seems to me that environmentalists want cheap energy, they just (rightly) consider the environmental damage of traditional energy to be part of its cost, and it's expensive enough that it's not actually "cheap energy."

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> "Clean energy could feel as all-American, cutting-edge, rugged, reliable, resilient, and tough as fracking."

Feel, schmeel. Clean energy must be -thought of- as _manifestly_ the only rational option ... one that is decades behind where it needs to be ... one that is an _urgent_ priority.

The future of all life on Earth is at stake. We waited too long, and now it's too late for PR, too late for 'gentle easing'.

</comment><comment><USER20> The rapid growth of jobs in renewable energy is a temporary excursion, mostly an artifact of current rapid expansion. At steady-state it will take fewer people to supply electricity from a renewable-heavy electricity system than a coal-heavy system. That's one reason that I am bullish on the long term price- competitiveness of renewable electricity but skeptical that there will be enough steady "green jobs" to offset jobs shed from legacy energy technologies.

For example, the old coal plant in Nucla, Colorado is going to close by the end of 2022.

[http://www.cortezjournal.com/article/20161001/News05/1610099...](http://www.cortezjournal.com/article/20161001/News05/161009993/0/FRONTPAGE/Coal- fired-plant%E2%80%99s-closing-sends-shockwaves-in-Nucla)

...

 _the local job options could be pretty limited in far-western Montrose County once two of its major employers close their doors, eliminating what are currently 55 jobs at the plant and 28 at the mine._

...

According to the EIA, the Nucla plant generated 416,150 MWh in 2015 for an average annual power of 47.5 megawatts: [http://www.eia.gov/electricity/data/browser/#/plant/527](http://www.eia.gov/electricity/data/browser/#/plant/527) That's an abysmal productivity per employee (or a fabulous job source, depending on your perspective): 0.86 real annualized megawatts per employee at the plant ; 0.57 megawatts per employee if you include the mining jobs.

(Since this article was published, the mine shut down. The coal plant still operates for a few more years. The MWh generated at the Nucla plant also declined sharply in 2016 and 2017.)

A well-sited utility scale solar farm like Desert Sunlight can produce an average annualized power of 147 megawatts with just 15 full time employees, for a ratio of 9.8 megawatts per plant employee.

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

[https://www.doi.gov/sites/doi.gov/files/migrated/news/pressr...](https://www.doi.gov/sites/doi.gov/files/migrated/news/pressreleases/upload/Desert- Sunlight-fact-sheet.pdf) ("Expected to create up to... 15 permanent jobs")

If you amortize the labor for construction over the lifetime of a solar farm, it takes up the lion's share of labor-years associated with a given facility. It's still lower per MWh than for legacy coal plants. It's also concentrated up-front. It looks like solar produces a lot of jobs if you measure while new American solar projects are booming and new American coal projects are nowhere to be seen.

I don't intend any of these observations as a defense of coal or an attack on renewable energy. I am thrilled whenever low-emissions sources displace dirty fossils. But I keep writing comments like this on energy-and-jobs stories because few writers have thought much about the _composition_ of the numbers. The gleeful articles about how many jobs we can create with renewable energy are at least missing some important caveats. The occasional conservative attack on how labor-inefficient renewables are, like [https://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2016/06/01/jobs- are...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2016/06/01/jobs-are-a-cost- not-a-benefit-yes-even-for-renewables), likewise misunderstand the long term labor implications of more renewables than fossils.

<comment><USER21> > 0.57 megawatts per employee if you include the mining jobs [...] a ratio of > 9.8 megawatts per plant employee [for renewable energy].

Another media take is that renewable energy will be costly for America (a specific perspective is that it's a Chinese conspiracy); this tidbit clearly shows that this perspective is false.

If America does not commit to renewable energy it will most certainly fall behind the rest of the world where energy would be significantly cheaper, if not "free" via taxation. As a generalization: local manufacturing won't be able to compete with international competition (because international competition would have lower energy costs), so there won't be anywhere else to get work. There won't be money to import fossils (due to a lack of manufacturing exports), so there won't be fossils to generate power. To make matters worse, these two outcomes are mutually-reinforcing.

We can't compete with China right now because of cheap Chinese labor, imagine how the manufacturing landscape would look with cheap Chinese energy thrown into the mix. Renewables save more blue collar jobs in the long run (but fewer energy jobs in the short-term).

In the long run, there is no way to save all the energy jobs. We need to start looking for other ways to tackle the coming energy labor market crash and, apart from UBI as a pretty flawed solution, I have nothing.

<comment><USER22> The main reason that renewable energy looks cheaper is that most countries chose, as a policy decision, to count the costs of dealing with its intermittent nature entirely against the non-renewables that have to fill in the gaps rather than the renewable generation. That's why Germany has wholesale electricity prices that regularly go negative thanks to green energy and some of the highest consumer electricity pricing on the planet - <USER3> renewables get the right to sell to the grid even when their power's not useful and the non-renewable have to pay for this, and then ultimately consumers have to pay when the non-renewables need to fill in for dips.

<comment><USER21> The comparison drawn is MW/employee which is not relative to anything: it's just how much power the plant is pushing, irrespective of whether its useful as that specific time. It's a fair oracle. I purposefully stated "long run" because none of this works until energy storage is also solved (which it mostly is) or developed (which it definitely is not).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> This is a social class issue, as much as it is a 'branding' issue. The social class that likes Subarus and Volvos, recycling, organic foods, and coffee with foam in it (aka us, the hacker news types) has chosen 'clean energy' as a sort of social purity test.

What he's saying does make sense; take it away from the bozos who brought us ... Facebook, 'Obamacare,' $4000 studio apartments next to a pile of human excrement in San Francisco, and the rest of the disgusting mess that is modern life, and it might be more popular with regular joes.

</comment><comment><USER24> I didn't get the point of anti-progress stance being perceived as American.

</comment><comment><USER25> I agree with a lot of what this guy says, but this bit rankled my nerves:

> In short, it doesn't feel American. […] American is can-do, right-now, yes > ma'am…

No dude, that is exactly the kind of polarizing attitude that you are accusing the folks on the other… "side of the fence" (or whatever you want to call that).

"American" is lots of things to lots of different people.

<comment><USER26> Sure, but you're missing the point: Marketing campaigns aim for the average sentiment, not the individual sentiment.

<comment><USER25> I didn't miss the point. I explicitly said I mostly agreed with him.</comment></comment></comment>


Critique my freelance site - <AUTHOR> http://gee.io/

<comment><USER2> dude, i noticed the little small github link on the top right. it needs to be more prominent. even better, if you actually linked to some of your best past projects, it would increase your hit rate by at least 5x. i guarantee it.</comment>