Google wants websites to adopt AMP as the default for building webpages - <AUTHOR> https://www.polemicdigital.com/google-amp-go-to-hell/ <comment><USER3> I don't like AMP at all and fully agree with all the lock-in concerns - but I didn't find this post particularly convincing.

This reads in places like a developer or publisher who has grown accustomated to stuffing his pages with gobs and gobs of javascript and questionable UI patterns and is now outraged at the prospect that someone wants to take that privilege away from him. I can't agree with that.

Examples:

> _The underlying message is clear: Google wants full equivalency between AMP > and canonical URL. Every element that is present on a website's regular > version should also be present on its AMP version: every navigation item, > every social media sharing button, every comment box, every image gallery._

So Google's suggestion is that, _if you 've already chosen to offer an AMP page_, that page shouldn't have intentionally worse usability than the original?

> _For years Google has been nudging webmasters to create better websites – > 'better' meaning 'easier for Google to understand'. Technologies like XML > sitemaps and schema.org structured data are strongly supported by Google > because they make the search engine's life easier.

Other initiatives like disavow files and rel=nofollow help Google keep its link graph clean and free from egregious spam. All the articles published on Google's developer website are intended to ensure the chaotic, messy web becomes more like a clean, easy-to-understand web. In other words, a Google- shaped web. This is a battle Google has been fighting for decades._

Sitemaps and structured data were the _non-proprietary_ attempts to structure the web. Those could have made the web more accessible for everyone, not just Google. They are something fundamentally different than AMP.

Yet, he condemns them too? Why?

He seems to argue that the chaos and messiness of the web infrastructure is itself a quality that should be defended. Why would that be the case?

<comment><USER4> > _This reads in places like a developer or publisher who has grown > accustomated to stuffing his pages with gobs and gobs of javascript and > questionable UI patterns and is now outraged at the prospect that someone > wants to take that privilege away from him. I can 't agree with that._

Well, it's not your job to agree with that or not though. He should be free to do as he pleases (so, the freedom to spew gobs of JS etc. should be unarguable) and you should be free to not visit his page.

<comment><USER5> Should they be free to spew gobs of JS?

The average person can't tell in advance — or, often, after the event — that this will happen, and when it does happen it is bad for them.

Aside from the security issues, the current status quo shortens battery life, wastes bandwidth (which is still precious and limited on mobile, even if not on landlines), and is generally done for the benefit of everyone except the user.

<comment><USER4> > _Should they be free to spew gobs of JS? The average person can't tell in > advance — or, often, after the event — that this will happen, and when it > does happen it is bad for them._

If they can tell in advance, they can tell it after, and punish the page by not visiting it.

If they can't tell it after the event, then it shouldn't matter.

<comment><USER3> > _If they can 't tell it after the event, then it shouldn't matter._

Ah yes, the famous strategy for solving all problems: Hiding them, because if no one notices them anymore, they are not problems anymore.

<comment><USER4> Isn't that the definition of empiricism and/or utilitarianism?

If something doesn't impact someone in a way that they can ever tell, it is not a problem to them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Google is also trying to get rid of URLs in Chrome, which dovetails with AMP certificate-signed content, [https://www.engadget.com/2018/09/05/google- change-interact-u...](https://www.engadget.com/2018/09/05/google-change- interact-urls-website-security/)

 _> So we want to move toward a place where web identity is understandable by everyone—they know who they're talking to when they're using a website and they can reason about whether they can trust them. But this will mean big changes in how and when Chrome displays URLs._

There's an IETF proposal for certificate-signed web content (Web Packages) which can be rendered offline. The browser address bar will no longer show the URL of the web server (e.g. Google AMP), it will show the authenticated origin of the Web Package.

2017 IETF proposal by Google: [https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-yasskin- webpackage-use-cas...](https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-yasskin-webpackage- use-cases-00)

Video of a Chrome demo at 2018 AMP event, which looks like the latest Chrome proposal for hiding URLs in favor of "web identity": [https://youtube.com/watch?&t=9m03s&v=pr5cIRruBsc](https://youtube.com/watch?&t=9m03s&v=pr5cIRruBsc)

There may be overlap in goals with W3C Web Publications, which is working to converge EPUB and Web: [https://w3c.github.io/wpub/](https://w3c.github.io/wpub/)

What happens if your "web identity" certificate expires or is revoked/blacklisted? Does your web identity certificate require a separate yearly fee from the domain name?

Edit: Comments from Chrome dev team manager, [https://twitter.com/__apf__/status/1037057121961967616](https://twitter.com/__apf__/status/1037057121961967616) & [https://twitter.com/__apf__/status/1037181065423515648](https://twitter.com/__apf__/status/1037181065423515648)

 _> URLs aren't usable, but people are forced to rely on them for so much -- browsing, security, sharing. Expect to see changes to how Chrome displays identity in the coming year._

<comment><USER7> This "hide the url from the user" is exactly what America Online did back in the day to try and keep everyone from leaving their garden. I remember being offended by it and trying to explain to people what that meant and that they should cancel their AOL accounts over it, with little success.

How did Google get this bad? Why are we letting the internet devolve back to the early 90s?

<comment><USER8> To be honest I think that's jumping to conclusions based on an article that's absolutely leaping to conclusions. It's highly unlikely Google's web crawling team conspired with AMP to force the web to convert to AMP

<comment><USER6> Are you replying to the correct comment? Was that claim made in this thread?

<comment><USER9> That claim was the basis of the entire article. Did you read it?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Yeah that's gonna be a no from me dog...

As a marketer I've been fortunate enough to avoid most of the AMP fallout because of the specific makeup of my clientele. However, my colleagues who have to deal with AMP want Google to kill it forever and never bring it back.

<comment><USER11> The fact that marketers hate it can only be taken as evidence that it's a good thing.

<comment><USER12> I know this is a bit cheeky, but HN sometimes has this comically simplistic view of other professions. It's as bad as the older C_Os who refer to all of dev and IT as "computer people." As someone who is both a developer and a marketer I can tell you both fields have depth and value, and neither is easy to do well.

Success often hinges on making something people want. Marketing done well is hugely helpful in determining both what people want and whether they perceive a product as a solution to their problems, and it can help guide product development with marketing analytics and other user data. I don't think I'd ever have been successful without a marketing background.

To take it back to the original point, I will never move to AMP. I spend a lot of time speeding up my pages through simplification, caching, and any other trick that makes sense (deferment, lazy loading, minification, combining, etc.) But there are a lot of reasons to not want your link to start with amp.google.com when someone shares my page.

* Any links to that URL rely on the good graces of the search engines to "count" for rankings and continue sending traffic. This is especially worrying if I decide to change standards. Will my rankings tank? Will the crawlers get totally confused and think I have a bunch of 404s? Both have been reported. These are not risks I'm willing to take with my sites that took so much work to build and promote.

* When someone shares my page I want my URL to be clear - not some google.com URL. That's both confusing for the user and bad for building a brand. Even if it was a cname to my own subdomain I'd feel better, e.g. amp.mysite.com

* Aside from the reason above, the lock-in is philosophically problematic. I intentionally use cross-platform apps on my phone because I don't want to be locked into an ecosystem. I don't foresee switching to Apple, but I didn't foresee switching to Android either. The point is that I could. This freedom is important to me.

* I don't trust that Google is committed to me and my content. Just look at the YouTubers getting screwed over by Google's lazy copyright policy. What makes you think they're going to suddenly staff up and/or care more on web content?

Anyway, as a writer, marketer, business owner, and web developer: fuck AMP.

<comment><USER13> > I don't trust that Google is committed to me and my content.

This * million. The only thing I can reliably trust google is that when I type a search query, results will be meaningful.

Regarding them keeping my data secure, not selling out to NSA, dropping support for things on a whim, kicking users out of their platform, I can't really trust them.

Google or anyone else.

It's just not their core business. They don't really make much money from AMP. It feels like some VP's pet project to get a big fat stock bonus.

If you run a serious business. Stay the hell away from AMP.

<comment><USER14> I honestly don't care about the NSA; nothing I am doing would even be remotely interesting to them. I am more concerned about my privacy being exploited by advertisers, banks, credit bureaus, political campaigns, and over-zealous local governments.

<comment><USER15> Do intelligence agencies exist to "keep us safe", or to advance the state's economic interests?

<comment><USER16> I guess one could think of that as a false dichotomy. I'm not sure you can necessarily cleanly separate these two things.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I understand that Google may want more and more control over the web, but we need a free and open Internet, for both business innovation and non-economic societal growth. It's a good thing we have other data giants like Facebook and Amazon to say no to Google when moments arise like this.

And I predict that future technologies will democratize the ability to 3D-print hardware to be used with open-source networking and web software to connect to each other in ways that don't depend on single web companies like Google in order for it to be cheap and nice to use.

Think about this: no consumers care whether Google succeeds or not - <USER2> just want the web services that they want. Google could easily fade away and be supplanted by another entity in ten years' time if something sufficiently innovative and disruptive arrives on the scene.

<comment><USER18> I'm not sure I completely agree - I think the internet is so laissez faire that it attracts centralized powers to fill the vacuum it creates. The future of the internet and what it looks like is probably going to depend heavily on the net neutrality legislation that is passed on the next decade.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> The idea of moving en masse to a technology that's controlled by a single company just doesn't sit right.

<comment><USER18> Can't companies host and control their own version of AMP?

<comment><USER20> They can, but don't get credit for it in Google's page rank. Which to me makes the whole complaint sound dishonest. They want to have their cake and eat it too.

<comment><USER21> >don't get credit for it in Google's page rank

How do you know that? There are very few people in the world who can claim that with evidence.

<comment><USER22> I haven't tested it but google shows a lighting bolt next to amp sites so maybe the custom amp websites dont get the bolt.

<comment><USER23> That should be easy to test, given that cloudflare hosts a top-level AMP cache. Just check if a cloudflare-cached website gets the bolt.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> AMP has horrible UX for mobile, I hate when I click on an AMP link because I am suddenly in some wierd web Twilight zone where the UX for my browser has changed for the worse.

It has been a net negative for usability in my book.

<comment><USER25> I always end up scrolling back on the url to change 'amp' to 'm'. Manually editing a URL on a mobile device, it just makes me sad.

<comment><USER26> On desktop I use an extension that redirects any AMP page (I don't come across them often, but people share links) to the canonical page. It would most likely be possible to install it in Firefox mobile too.

I also have all amp-related addresses blocked in my host file, which is probably less feasible on mobile.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> AMP is in two parts: the HTML/JS spec, and the Google implementation and cache.

Putting aside the Google bits, is there a case against building within the AMP HTML and JS spec? Or is the case against all down to Google's ownership of the project?

On my iPhone AMP is frustratingly buggy: rotation doesn't work properly, the URL bar doesn't disappear on scroll, Reader mode works inconsistently, etc. But these seem like issues with Google's cache and hosting, not the spec.

<comment><USER28> So, we spent ages getting to where everyone agreed on standards and they were correctly implemented.

Google are now making new standards which don't conform to the agreed standard, which restrict how you can build your site. If you don't do it, they'll destroy your traffic.

AMP is text book Embrace, Extend, Extinguish. No ad network but the Google ad network allowed.

We're sleep walking back into the same thing MS did 30 years ago, with Google this time. They really have just lived long enough to become the villain.

<comment><USER29> > AMP is text book Embrace, Extend, Extinguish. No ad network but the Google > ad network allowed.

Are you talking hypothetically? Because right now...

[https://www.ampproject.org/docs/ads/ads_vendors](https://www.ampproject.org/docs/ads/ads_vendors)

<comment><USER30> Somewhat ironically that link doesn't work on my mobile device...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Oh wow, these type of behaviors is why I'm starting to lean onto the idea of splitting these monopolists into their own companies. I wasn't sure why it made any sense in the other article today from The Verge: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17918264](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17918264)

But now...

<comment><USER32> I would much prefer a market based solution.

Searching news on Google is a bad experience. AMP has made it even worse.

There's room in search.

<comment><USER33> I still miss when Reader was still very popular.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> In my experience CloudFlare has too many false positives outside of US/EU networks. I often cannot access websites that are behind CluodFlare. It would be a really sad day if they became a gateway to 50% of web traffic.

<comment><USER35> I agree with your point (based on my travels), but it would be nice if you could elaborate on what the connection to AMP is. Same kind of market dominance with potential abuse?

<comment><USER36> I'm assuming that comment is in reference to Cloudflare also being in the AMP game, but acting as an AMP cache. In their words:

> _Until now, AMP-enabled links were only accessible through the likes of > Google, Twitter, Bing News, and Facebook. Cloudflare's Accelerated Mobile > Links democratizes the power of AMP for free across all Cloudflare plans._

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Look at this hilarious list of amp caches, showing what Google considers a decentralised standard [https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/blob/master/caches.jso...](https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/blob/master/caches.json)

<comment><USER3> Hey, it's more than one! /s

<comment><USER38> And quiet opposites as well. Baidu and Microsoft are major investors in Cloudflare. But this list has to grow, by a lot.

<comment><USER39> so like, double or..

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Ah yes, after web designers and developers took years upon years to bloat webpages to the point they're almost unusable unless you're on a privileged position: inaccessible to the blind, infuriatingly slow to those with slow connections and laden with so much JavaScript and CSS and images, they're impractical to those with a laptop or any battery-powered device... now they band together against the evils of Google.

Now, don't get me wrong, Google is thinking primarily for their own benefit here and this is one of those cases in which the end doesn't justify the means, but is a simpler web that much of a bad thing?

<comment><USER41> This morning when I was reading the thread about how Google wants to kill the URL, nobody was seeing the more sinister implications at all.

I couldn't pay a parking ticket I got a few days ago because I needed to download a half gigabye app to pay it, and my $250 phone from three years ago wasn't new enough. And they developed the app first, and there was no fallback to just HTML. My only choice was to go to the station and pay. What if I couldn't afford to travel to pay my ticket in person and couldn't afford a phone made in the last 18 months?

And yes, certificates will be politicized. If you displease them, they can have every device in the world block your server.

Of course, soon, Firefox will just be a re-branded Chromium, because of course Mozilla's brand is the only asset it has, as we all know that if Mozilla can't make Firefox keep up with the impossible standards that Google sets for us, then it is worthless. If Firefox can't implement the latest polyfills or DRM garbage that Google decided on, then it should be thrown out and we should just accept our new overlords.

Use any technology in a non-standard way, and it quickly becomes clear how bad things are. The rot is even more visible in developing countries.

This is hegemony. Not exaggerating.

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17911009](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17911009)

<comment><USER42> Google has changed and people should not use their services.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> I've never worked with AMP but reading about it I'm glad I haven't. For me personally, I think the biggest issue with AMP is "The project enables the creation of websites and ADS that are consistently fast ..." (taken from [https://www.ampproject.org/](https://www.ampproject.org/), capitalization by me). Yeah it's a google project, but really, do they honestly believe that internet is for ads? I might be living in a bubble, but I've never heard anyone speak fondly of ads. I worked for a media company for years which had ads on their news sites and no one liked them. They were more of a necessary evil needed to bring in some money, if we could have survived on subscriptions alone we would never have had ads on our sites. Also, I think the amount of ad blockers in use speak for itself.

</comment><comment><USER44> The time has already passed to put this giant down. For a business that lost it's capability of innovating at least 10 years ago, even having all of those great brains as their workforce and plentiful money, they try too hard pushing this kind of bullshit into the industry.

Stop trying to enforce unnatural and irrational changes just for gaining protagonism on something you DON'T DESERVE and shouldn't even mess about.

It's already annoying having to load your analytics present in almost every modern website, despise the fact that most of the world don't even know about the existence of this, neither agreed with(cannot choose to block something you don't even know about).

Are you thinking it's overreaction? wait for tomorrow. Keep underestimating what they are doing.

</comment><comment><USER45> The real issue: marketers _gave_ Google the power, influence, and leverage needed to push these sorts of things.

In a way I like AMP, as it restores the simplicity of the web, and I wish that would've happened without Google making it necessary (to rank well).

Here's hoping marketers learn to market outside of Google and Facebook, _and_ the web is made simple again.

<comment><USER46> Marketers use Google and Facebook only because of laziness...Microsoft or someone needs to make a tool that can manage bids etc across every ad network for free and that alone would break Google's foothold in marketing. I've seen PPC/etc teams drop Bing/Yahoo/Twitter/Snap etc entirely, not because the leads weren't there, but because it becomes increasingly hard to manage large budgets across multiple ad networks. And Google integrates so well with Analytics, which just owns the space. It's a monopoly. I don't care if people can "choose" a different search engine, marketers don't and can't without a huge switching cost.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> As a user I hate AMP. I find myself on a website I want to share and go to copy the link so I can share it, andd...surprise! It's NOT the canonical link, but a Google Amp link. I wanted to share the post to a desktop. So now I have to find my way out of this AMP hole just to share a website.

Personally I could care less about "speed improvements." If the site loads slow I'll juat skip it. Amp existing to help that happen less doesn't really affect me. I probably waste too much time surfing anyway; maybe I WANT to filter slow websites on my own (by ending my search/session).

<comment><USER48> > on a website I want to share and go to copy the link so I can share it, > andd...surprise!

Eh easy now, they will fix that for soon /s

[https://www.businessinsider.com/google-chrome-url- replacemen...](https://www.businessinsider.com/google-chrome-url- replacement-2018-9)

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> Reminds me of "embrace extend extinguish" except google skipped the "do as you're told part"

</comment><comment><USER50> I'm no fan of AMP, but:

The current choice for google when someone searches for a news story is between linking them to a page that is (a) in an ecosystem under google's control and (b) will load reasonably fast and get fairly straight to the article content, or (a') is completely up to the publisher and (b') may contain any number of redirects, external scripts, full-page ads, pop-ups and overlays, autoplaying sound+video etc.

If we had a system that offers (a') + (b), it would blow everything else out of the water. At the moment we just have to pick the least bad option. AMP is obviously aligned to google's business interests, but if you A/B tested the user experience of the AMP and non-AMP versions of many of the news sites out there on mobile, I think you'd see a preference for AMP because the publisher can do less of the stuff aligned with their own business interests.

EDIT: I realise that AMP can break many navigation features, but for the "click a link - read a single article - leave again" use case it beats getting interrupted by an "other articles you may enjoy, and by the way sign up to our newsletter!" pop-up halfway through.

<comment><USER51> AMP is the monopolistic dream of google, they want all the internet on their servers, and thats not only bad, also it is ilegal

<comment><USER50> Google already has a copy of most of the internet on their servers - they're quite open about this if at tech conferences (although they claim to respect robots.txt).

I completely agree with you that their monopoly dream is bad - their motto "don't be evil" is starting to sound as ironic as the word "democratic" in some countries' names - but many of the advertising and data-sharing practices on the "open" web are also bad (and sometimes illegal under the GDPR).

Choose your poison.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> Of course the Goog wants every web site on earth in their pocket. Now that they own more than half of the Internet, they're in a perfect position for <del>coercion</del> persuasion.

</comment><comment><USER53> Someone tell me about amp-iframe.

Do those restrictions[1] result in a browsing experience with

1\. significantly less resource usage/battery drain?

2\. less distraction?

3\. less of my user data flying off to who knows where?

[1] [https://www.ampproject.org/docs/reference/components/amp- ifr...](https://www.ampproject.org/docs/reference/components/amp-iframe)

</comment><comment><USER54> My 2 cents on AMP [https://pawelurbanek.com/amp-seo-rating- performance](https://pawelurbanek.com/amp-seo-rating-performance)

Long story short: you can achieve similar performance and UX without resorting to adopting a proprietary standard.

<comment><USER55> It's not about performance, it's about getting more points in google pagerank.

<comment><USER54> SEO rating, user experience and website performance are closely related.

<comment><USER56> True, but Google's going more aggressive and putting sites that use their AMP standards higher than those that don't - or in other words, they penalize good / fast websites to push AMP websites higher.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> I can't wait for AMP to die. Too many broken sites and translating urls away from google's attempt at taking over their hosting.

</comment><comment><USER58> "Google wants to kill the web" should be the title of this article.

</comment><comment><USER59> > The end result is an enormously diverse and anarchic free-for-all where > almost no two websites use the same code. It's extremely rare to find > websites that look good, have great functionality, and are fully W3C > compliant.

> All the articles published on Google's developer website are intended to > ensure the chaotic, messy web becomes more like a clean, easy-to-understand > web.

> AMP pages are fast to load (so fast to crawl), easy to understand (thanks to > mandatory structured data), and devoid of any unwanted clutter or mess (as > that breaks the standard).

> An AMPified web makes Google's life so much easier. They would no longer > struggle to crawl and index websites, they would require significantly less > effort to extract meaningful content from webpages, and would enable them to > rank the best possible pages in any given search result.

> The Google AMP Cache will serve AMP pages instead of a website's own hosting > environment, and also allow Google to perform their own optimisations to > further enhance user experience.

> No more rogue ad networks, no more malicious ads, all monetisation approved > and regulated by Google.

There are plenty of things to complain about with AMP. But, it also does address some very real problems. These are some admittedly cherry picked quotes - but, the article seems to make that point as well, even if it disagrees with Google's approach. What I'd love to hear about is a different approach to address these issues - and not something handwavy about how it could be done in a weekend. Actual code.

</comment><comment><USER60> I believe that Google has good intentions behind pushing AMP. They want websites to load faster. Everyone wants that. I especially hate those bloated news websites. But AMP is a wrong solution for the problem. If Google wants to make web pages faster, it can more heavily penalise slow and heavy pages in search.

I used to host my website using WordPress with a lot of plugins. It was incredibly slow and unreliable. Eventually I decided to replace it with my own custom solution developed from scratch. We had blog, forum and payments on the website. It took just a couple of months of evenings and weekend work to complete the project. I'm very happy with the result [1]. It works 10x to 100x faster and it's much more flexible. My point is that people shouldn't be afraid of replacing their existing bloated system with something new and better. I was afraid that it would be impossible to replicate WordPress and plugins functionality that I needed, or it would take too much time and effort, but I was wrong. I'm glad I made the move.

[1] [https://www.traccar.org/](https://www.traccar.org/)

<comment><USER59> > It took just a couple of months of evenings and weekend work to complete the > project.

That's kinda a lot of work. I'm not sure if you are saying that everyone should do the same - that doesn't sound realistic.

The site does load fast and look great, though!

<comment><USER60> Not everyone needs to integrate forum and payment system. A simple static website or a blog can be done in much less time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER61> I always thought this was pretty simple. Google wants surveillance of everybody. AMP is a way to advance that.

You can generally revise an AMP URL to make it normal.

<comment><USER62> You have to first understand what AMP is before you can revise the URL though. The vast majority of people do not know what AMP is, or that they interact with it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER63> The actual title of this article seems more appropriate: "Google AMP Can Go To Hell"

</comment><comment><USER64> I am bit surprised about this article. The momentum around AMP slowed down. AMP pages do not rank that well anymore as when they were introduced. Also within Google, there is no unanimity about the future of AMP. But maybe I got the signals wrong.

</comment><comment><USER65> I don't think Google is at wrong here for pushing its standard for its business. It is just doing what it's expected to do as a business.

The problem is people getting comfortable with Google and depend on Google too much. In the end, Google is in a position to force decisions on everyone.

If you are not happy with the way Google is doing things, stop using Google products and develop or use alternatives.

</comment><comment><USER66> The AMP thing continues to make me a little perturbed.

Because theoretically the damn thing should work - Google's QUIC protocol is often the only protocol my shitty internet can support. It's wonderful.

Shouldn't AMP be using QUIC, does it? If it does - then there is something seriously wrong with the cache/prefetch algorithm in the AMP CDN. Because sometimes cold pages refuse to load!

</comment><comment><USER67> [https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=9m03s&v=pr5cIRruBsc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=9m03s&v=pr5cIRruBsc)

This video is hilarious. Applause for a slight cosmetic change to a URL that basically amounts to a subdomain?

How do people at Google find such work fulfilling? If I was given such a meaningless project I'd be depressed. It seems that at a certain point such large companies run out of real work to do, and insist on making such changes that don't really matter anymore just to create work for people to do and present on stage.

This is going against everything that the web stands for. I assume the next logical step in this line of thinking is for Google to require developers to start making pull requests to Chrome when we want to change the style of the text on one of our pages?

It seems like what could have happened at Google is they are fed up with web sites draining the battery on their precious Android devices and want so desperately to beat Apple in the battery life game they are willing to neuter the web in order to do it.

This is exactly what happens when you hire an aggressive queen and don't have any checks and balances in your behemoth tech company that is becoming more and more accustomed to her dark soul.

<comment><USER68> > they are fed up with web sites draining the battery on their precious > Android devices and want so desperately to beat Apple in the battery life > game

That... does not make any sense. If anything, it will increase the relative lead of Apple in the battery life game.

It's about not having information being more and more stuck in Apple News / FB because those silos are more efficient than the web. If people use apps instead of the web, Google will earn less money.

</comment></comment><comment><USER69> Let's not pretend we're surprised.

</comment><comment><USER70> The solution to speedy web pages is for the browser makers to give the user fine-grained control over javascript. E.G. your page gets 100kB of js (which could be gzipped) and then no more js for you. Or we throttle your js performance after that. Or you have to pay the user $.001 for each 100kB after the first 100kB.

<comment><USER71> Not every web page is "just" a web page. It is perfectly legitimate to have 1-2MB of JS on a page if that page is a full game for example.

<comment><USER70> So let the user whitelist those. That's part of what "fine-grained" implies.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER72> I won't comment about the merits of AMP, just something that bugged me about the first paragraph. The author questions if a project is open source due to their authors and main contributors, which seems very odd. A license is a license is a license, don't confuse it with external issues.

</comment><comment><USER73> Have they fixed the content negotiation thing yet? I want to serve either valid HTML or AMP based on what the caller supports. Inventing a different URL for every possible presentation is a problem that HTTP already solved.

</comment><comment><USER74> The domain is called "polemic digital" and -- surprise -- offers a polemic view to cash in on amp hate. That it's doing so well over here is a nice example of polemic half truths doing well on social media.

<comment><USER75> Yes, really good social media would only discuss fact.

</comment></comment><comment><USER76> I actually like AMP because when I see the symbol I know the page will load almost instantly when I click on it. People that spend time on getting their page AMP-ready has less of the garbage click-bait stuff.

</comment><comment><USER77> Google simply wants to build a walled garden which it controls. The whole point of AMP was to speed up sites on slow networks. Increasingly, I am seeing AMP even on extremely fast networks. Why?

</comment><comment><USER78> If G wants this, then there must be government oversight. One person (as corporations are defined as a person) can not be the sole dispenser of information. That's too much power.

<comment><USER79> I suspect a large part of the reason G wants this is _because_ the government(s) want oversight. There has been a concerted effort in the last few years for governments to pressure web giants into creating centralised means of controlling what users see. Make absolutely no mistake: governments will _love_ this idea.

</comment></comment><comment><USER80> One thing I don't understand: why does _Bing_ push AMP in their news section? It's not a different instance either, it's the canonical AMP Project.

</comment><comment><USER81> It worked before. Google converted Netnews into Google Groups.

</comment><comment><USER82> Well, Google implementation of AMP is major reason why I mostly stopped using Google search. They seems to be blind or just don't care any more.

</comment><comment><USER83> amp.js? No thanks. A blessed subset of the HTML, CSS and media that is optimized for load times and memory footprint? Ok.

<comment><USER84> Orrr we could just demand that people build sites like this willingly and then we all don't have to let megabucks-Google become the arbiter of right and wrong?

<comment><USER83> Well, that just isn't happening and hasn't happened for years. So someone stepping up to define a standard focused on performance is a good thing in principle. You also need incentives for that standard to get adopted. Of course google shouldn't be the only player here, others should participate in this too.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER85> The best thing about AMP? It's the chain symbol on top of the screen that gives you the "real" page link.

</comment><comment><USER86> And I want ice water in hell. Looks like we're both going to be disappointed when we get there.

</comment><comment><USER87> I know that you are one of my main traffic provider big G but you can go to hell with AMP.

</comment><comment><USER88> Good.

In my experience, AMP pages are leaps and bounds better than the full-fat experience. There's far less tracking, far fewer ads, and less asynchronously loaded core content. All of these mean that the page loads much faster and is a generally better experience.

</comment><comment><USER89> How about going back to WAP, it was such a good idea at the time.

</comment><comment><USER90> You have to give it to Google, they ambitious: people use ad blockers, they want to change how every single website is made to be able to bypass ad blocker.

I think it's just genius.

</comment><comment><USER91> Do no evil GOOGLE

</comment><comment><USER92> tldr; In this case AMP != Apache + MySql + PHP

</comment><comment><USER93> AMP is a practice in anti-competitive moat building that net-neutrality enforcement would obviate.

<comment><USER94> Is it? I've never heard of net neutrality being applied to web standards - only carriers and usage pricing/prioritization.

To me, this sounds like antitrust, not net neutrality.

<comment><USER93> AMP exists, primarily, because content publishers cannot afford to have the points of presence that Google has (e.g. Google Global Cache, Google Data Centers). The residential ISP oligopoly makes it so that only big players (e.g. Netflix, Google) who can peer directly with the ISPs get sufficient bandwidth to compete at a reasonable price. Everyone else gets to pay the premium to the middlemen (e.g. Akamai, Level 3) or bend the knee to Google for their market access via AMP. Publishers also must be competitive on the biggest search engine in town and the enhanced page ranking of AMP articles probably forces the issue for most.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER95> I knew the headline was coming. Just waiting for the day they start charging for using AMP.

</comment><comment><USER96> There are many things Google wants, for the past decade most people have been going along with those demands. Perhaps it's time for us to tell Google what we want.

<comment><USER97> Not possible. Google has the web in a vice grip. Don't agree with their policies, drop in ranking, no one sees your disagreements.

<comment><USER75> This is only true for people who rely on google searches to drive traffic.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER98> what irks me is that there seems to be no plans to address the google.com issue. This really kills it for AMPs honestly.

I guess PWA + AMP = PWAMP is not really a thing?

edit: and of course pwamp.com is taken.

<comment><USER99> There you go [https://www.ampproject.org/docs/guides/pwa- amp](https://www.ampproject.org/docs/guides/pwa-amp)

</comment></comment><comment><USER100> for god shake... AMP can go to hell

</comment><comment><USER101> Next thing you know... Reddit won't allow linking out of its website.

All the content, even the advertisements will have to be built as Reddit posts.

</comment><comment><USER102> D-minus for AMP, and D-minus for Angular while I'm at it... the later one for obfuscating the web.

Edit: I posted 1 comment in the last 2 days on HN and now try to post a link and I get this error: "You're posting too fast. Please slow down. Thanks." please 1 upvote and I might be able to share an interesting story... LOL... the mods here would make a carnage if they were in a real power position. Thanks Dang...

?

<comment><USER103> We rate limit accounts when they post too many unsubstantive comments or get involved in flamewars. The fix is to give us reason to believe that you'll use HN as intended in the future. When people do that at firstname.lastname@example.com we're happy to remove the rate limit. But you have to mean it!</comment></comment>


How to purchase an iPhone app - <AUTHOR> http://www.futuretap.com/blog/how-to-purchase-an-iphone-app/

<comment><USER2> was also reported on TechCrunch: [http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/12/17/futuretap-taps- taptapta...](http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/12/17/futuretap-taps-taptaptaps- where-to-iphone-application/)</comment>


Formation of quadruple helix DNA tracked in live human cells for first time - <AUTHOR> https://medicalxpress.com/news/2020-07-formation-quadruple-helix-dna-tracked.html <comment><AUTHOR> >Single-molecule visualization of DNA G-quadruplex formation in live cells

[https://www.nature.com/articles/s41557-020-0506-4](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41557-020-0506-4)</comment>


Marshall McLuhan Playboy Interview from 1969 [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://web.cs.ucdavis.edu/~rogaway/classes/188/spring07/mcluhan.pdf <comment><USER2> Has been 30 years since I first read this... it's so hard to out think your "box"

"The present is always invisible because it's environmental and saturates the whole field of attention so overwhelmingly; thus everyone but the artist, the man of integral awareness, is alive in an earlier day. In the midst of the electronic age of software, of instant information movement, we still believe we're living in the mechanical age of hardware. At the height of the mechanical age, man turned back to earlier centuries in search of "pastoral" values. The Renaissance and the Middle Ages were completely oriented toward Rome; Rome was oriented toward Greece, and the Greeks were oriented toward the pre-Homeric primitives. We reverse the old educational dictum of learning by proceeding from the familiar to the unfamiliar by going from the unfamiliar to the familiar, which is nothing more or less than the numbing mechanism that takes place whenever new media drastically extend our senses"</comment>


Write and Manage Notes (in Markdown) from the Terminal - <AUTHOR> http://ianzapolsky.com/posts/my-last-final/

<comment><USER2>
        With two hours to go before my test,
        I got obsessed with the idea that
        there should be an easy way to write
        notes in Markdown and view them as
        compiled HTML instantly.

pandoc ??</comment>


Households without any cash savings are twice as likely to be wealthy as poor - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/03/are-the-suburbs-making-people-live-paycheck-to-paycheck/284586/ <comment><USER2> The analysis misses the crucial factor - access to credit.

A middle-class homeowner can easily borrow tens of thousands of dollars cheaply and easily via credit cards and overdrafts. With a good credit history, you don't need liquid savings to deal with a temporary cashflow problem; Low interest rates mean that it is economically rational to rely on credit in this way, rather than having capital under-utilised in instant access savings accounts.

Credit is vastly more expensive for the poor, especially the unbanked poor (who represent around 8% of the American population). Borrowing $1000 for a couple of months costs just a few dollars if you have a low-rate credit card, but hundreds if your only access to credit is through payday lending. Without the cushion of cheap credit, it is imperative to have a rainy-day fund.

The availability of peer support is also highly relevant; If you have affluent family and friends, then the consequences of cashflow problems are greatly diminished.

The author draws the conclusion that the middle-classes are financially insecure, but I think that the converse is true - they choose to spend to the limit of their income because they are highly financially secure and do not fear short-term cashflow problems.

<comment><USER3> Credit cards aren't necessarily the best example as they carry horrendous interest rates relative to just about everything else in today's market. That said, they can paper over a very short-term cash flow crunch easily without costing too much. And, as you say, there are often many other sources of credit such as family, HELOCs, etc.

That said:

>they choose to spend to the limit of their income

I'd argue that this is generally not a good idea unless "spend to the limit" includes a budget for savings.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Partly this is due to households who are financially well-situated having options for smoothing out transient cashflow issues which are superior to keeping large amounts of cash in non-productive accounts. Depending on your risk tolerance, if you're a millionaire, having $1k in checking might not be quite as insane as people writing personal finance advice for Americans with $30k annual incomes would make it out to be. (Most folks with $30k annual incomes don't have $100k available on plastic or the ability to have $30k wired from their brokerage to checking within an hour of asking for it.)

<comment><USER5> this may be a nit, but unless the $30k is in a cash-equivalent like money market wouldn't you have to wait 3 days for settlement of whatever was sold for that $30k?

<comment><USER4> It depends on a bunch of factors. For the type of folks I'm imagining, that won't be a problem for them. Think "margin." Not only do they not need to wait 3 days to receive the $30k they might never have to sell anything for it at all.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This article refers to two classes of people, the "middle class" and the "poor". It then goes on to categorize the middle class group as "wealthy".

It's as if words no longer have meaning. Wealthy means you can live off your wealth.

</comment><comment><USER7> I was sad that they didn't consider the fact that people save or don't save often as a function of their experience growing up. I remember finding vegetables that my wife's grandparents has canned in jars "for later" from the 60's in their basement. They were _savers_ , they had lived through the Great Depression.

Then there were people for whom their whole life the folks that gave them money, their parents or their employers, were always there for them to give them more when they needed it, they haven't saved _anything_. A lot of them got caught out when the Great Recession hit.

Are their children and people who lived through that more inclined to save again? Hard to say, but it seems like it isn't really relevant to compare the savings behavior of a 40 year old to that of a 20 year old. They had completely different life experiences. And when the 40 year old was 20 it was a different experience than the 20 year old is currently experiencing. As so much of our behavior is driven by our past experience, this sort of cross generational behavior comparison analysis totally falls flat for me.

</comment><comment><USER8> Article calls out an interesting point by Elizabeth Warren.[1] In this country, it's extremely difficult to access the best schools without expensive housing. That encourages families to overextend and puts them at risk of bankruptcy.

There was a recent This American Life episode that demonstrated the human impact of our absurd system, where hyperlocal property taxes set school quality. I thought it was a particularly strong episode.[2]

[1] The Two Income Trap, [http://www.amazon.com/The-Two-Income-Trap-Middle- Class-Paren...](http://www.amazon.com/The-Two-Income-Trap-Middle-Class- Parents/dp/0465090907) [2] This American Life #512, "House Rules" [http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio- archives/episode/512/h...](http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio- archives/episode/512/house-rules)

<comment><USER9> _There was a recent This American Life episode that demonstrated the human impact of our absurd system, where hyperlocal property taxes set school quality. I thought it was a particularly strong episode._

Oh yes. I remember my favorite bartender who after a divorce kept herself afloat working part-time retail and tending bar. There aren't many alternatives in nowhere rustbelt America. She rented an apartment that was in the only decent school district in town, all other schools were quite like juvie hall. About 75 % of her income must have gone to rent. When her youngest son had finished school she moved.

I cannot fault this decision, education is important, and when you are near minimum wage a support system is important. Moving to where the jobs are isn't the panacea it's made out to be on this website.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> This article is ass backwards. It implies that the upper middle classes are poor because they don't keep cash savings.

But what it actually suggests is that the middle classes are putting their money into property and investments - which is indeed a rational choice that will make their excess wealth work for them.

Not that I'm saying the middle classes aren't being squeezed - by the 1% stretching off into the distance. But this is just not that.

<comment><USER11> Sure, but in the case of job loss + foreclosure or short sale, all of that goes up in smoke. It's a big risk.

<comment><USER12> I wonder why one can't sell a house for about 95% of the market value in a month. I mean it sounds like a good deal: the property owner can sell the property quickly to pay off the mortgage, while keeping some of the savings for himself. The real estate investor will make 5% of the value of the house in a few months (minus expenses).

<comment><USER13> Transaction costs on housing hover around 5-6% generally, and that ignores holding costs. Housing isn't an 'economically perfect' marketplace.

<comment><USER12> Fair point. Transaction costs for the seller where I live apparently only include the estate agent commission, which can be 3% or even a fixed amount (e.g. 3k€).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Home ownership and kids were the thing for me. While studying I was netting 800€ a month in a 400€ rental apartment and never had worry about money, and had a decent buffer in the bank. Now working and having a 2 + 2 sized family, we net 5000€ month, and pay 1500€ a month for the house (loan + other costs), and and still we have to very carefully budget our every month, often running on fumes when a payday arrives.

(I have no regrets, this was more of an observation.)

</comment><comment><USER15> I read over the referenced Brookings paper and I can't make any sense of it. The paper doesn't really define what they mean by "wealthy" and "poor" (which is a red flag). It seems like they define "wealthy" as having a nonzero amount of illiquid assets, and "poor" as having a zero amount of illiquid assets. This is crazy - if you have one dollar in home equity, you are wealthy by this definition.

The paper's main conclusion is that 1/3 of people living hand-to-mouth [hand- to-mouth is the paper's term for having no liquid assets] are poor, and 2/3 of them are wealthy. But I couldn't find any data on what fraction of the population is "poor" and what fraction is "wealthy", which makes it impossible to interpret this result. Are "wealthy" people more or less likely to live hand-to-mouth than "poor" people? I couldn't figure that out from the paper.

The Atlantic article also seems to be totally wrong in interpreting the paper, saying the "wealthy" have at least $50,000 in illiquid assets. The paper, however, says "the [wealthy hand-to-mouth households] typically hold sizable amounts of illiquid wealth: for example, the median at age 40 is around $50,000." Confusing the minimum amount of wealth with the median amount of wealth is a huge, huge error that totally changes the meaning.

If anyone could figure out what this paper is really saying, I'd like to know (not sarcasm).

Link to paper: [http://www.brookings.edu/~/media/projects/bpea/spring%202014...](http://www.brookings.edu/~/media/projects/bpea/spring%202014/2014a_kaplan.pdf)

<comment><USER16> Warning: Cynical poster alert. Modern economics is inextricably entwined with politics. Look at the last line of the conclusion:

> _Second, we showed that the model that allows for W-HtM behavior implies > that to maximize the aggregate consumption response to scal stimulus > payments, the payments should feature more moderate phasing out with > household income._

During the economic shock of 2008, there was a fiscal response applied that was pretty much formulated in the wake of the depression: Give money to folks who are very poor (unemployment, welfare, foodstamps), who will then boost the economy a bit because they will not save/hoard the money or go tie up wealth in long-term assets.

The current paper is pointing out: "Hey, there are wealthy people living hand- to-mouth. If you give money (= "fiscal stimulus") to them, you will achieve a boost in the economy as well."

Who knows, maybe the conclusion is right. But god knows how you'd achieve any confidence that the conclusion wasn't a function of the authors' funding.

<comment><USER17> This is explains all the counter-intuitive formulations and statistical errors in the paper; thank you for highlighting it.

Really, though, this sort of thing happens _every_ _single_ _time_ an _Atlantic_ story is posted.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Misleading choice of words in the headline and text. A teacher making $60k a year is "wealthy" by The Atlantic's definition.

<comment><USER19> Well it depends if that teacher had inherited a property and some income producing assets from a parent or grand parent and have a pension from a former job (say 20 years in the army). They could be very well be wealthy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> > _Most poor hand-to-mouth people (the red line) are younger, peaking around > 22 years old_

Gee, I would be tempted to attribute this to many people graduating from college/university around the age of 22...

</comment><comment><USER21> The title for this article is "Are the Suburbs Making People Live Paycheck to Paycheck?".

However, the article isn't about suburbs at all. It is about the financial implications of home ownership. Home ownership maybe relegated to suburbs in NYC, but in a large number of cities that is not the case.

</comment><comment><USER22> Possibly the "wealthy" appear to be living hand to mouth intentionally. Inflation is a highly regressive tax on cash and savings that rewards hard/real assets.

Buying the most expensive house you can (barely) afford is a wealth building strategy. It's not without risk, but you have inflation on your side. Sitting on cash to save up for that down payment is an uphill fight against inflation.

As a parent of a 3.5 and 1 year old, I'm definitely a believer that our public schools are de facto private institutions. You pay your tuition one way or another for a premium product.

<comment><USER23> I'm not so sure there is such a thing as a premium product. Home schooling outcomes can beat public schools by a large margin (don't always, but can). There's so much room for improvement, I'm not sure I want to spend ANY extra money on a particular public school.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I have access to 12 months of 0% interest up to about $10-15K with a fee of about 3%, $300-500 total due to my credit score.

I think the access to Credit allows people to live paycheck to paycheck.

</comment><comment><USER25> No discussion of the proportion between poor and non-poor overall?

If you pick a household at random, you're 3x as likely to get a household with over $50,000 in net worth (their cutoff) as you are to get a household with less.

According to this article, if you pick a household with no cash savings at random, that drops to 2x.

Thus, households with over $50,000 in net worth are much more likely to have cash savings. In other words, _no shit_.

</comment><comment><USER26> Rich counties are also more indebted as percentage of GDP than poor countries. If you're well off people will lend to you and it makes sense for you to leverage. Classic correlation vs causation.

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

</comment><comment><USER22> Friendly reminder... Label your axis people! Especially if you're using them as evidence to prove your point. Though, due to the image quality, I'm wondering if these images were actually taken from the original study rather than produced by The Atlantic.

</comment><comment><USER27> The world "wealthy" in my opinion means you can live the rest of your life in comfort without working, if you choose. These people are not wealthy.

<comment><USER28> There is more than one definition of "wealth" and "poverty". You could be a senior Silicon Valley engineer making 200k a year and that would make you wealthy compared to some homeless person in Detroit, but you'd still be poor compared to a hedge fund manager in NYC making 500 million.

<comment><USER27> Well on a logarithmic scale, 200k is much closer to 500m than it is to 0.

<comment> guard-of-terra On a logarithmic scale you don't get close to 0 no matter how hard you try. It's infinitely far away isn't it?

<comment><USER29> 0.001 dollars is essentially 0, isn't it?</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Core ML: Integrate machine learning models into your app - <AUTHOR> https://developer.apple.com/documentation/coreml <comment><USER2> Apple's new iOS CoreML inference engine supports Keras models! Developers will be able to design and train model using Keras and then convert the architecture to run on the CoreML engine. I suppose you can run TensorFlow models too if you designed them w/ Keras.

<comment><USER3> Yeah, that is surprising given that keras is not a language, but a continuously changing python class. How bug complete is the conversion? What about some new features like attention? And what about the future changes in keras?

<comment><USER4> I think they mentioned in the Core ML lab that the conversion tool is being open sourced - which would help with these issues.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Cool that the file format is officially specified as a Protocol Buffer: [https://developer.apple.com/documentation/coreml/converting_...](https://developer.apple.com/documentation/coreml/converting_trained_models_to_core_ml) (bottom of page)

<comment><USER6> Is there a protobuf to capnproto converter?

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> When "Core ML" is no longer a mini language to reason about ML the PL semantics...

<comment><USER8> Yeah, it crossed my mind as well.

But nowadays every time I see ML on HN, it happens to mean ML = Machine Learning instead of ML = programming language.

<comment><USER9> It's also going to make the name ReasonML even more confusing, considering you can apply the word "Reason" to machine learning...

<comment><USER7> Someone in the ML programming language community should use the name DeepML to further sow the seeds of confusion.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> "BNNS does not do training, however. Its purpose is to provide very high performance inference on already trained neural networks." :(

[https://developer.apple.com/documentation/accelerate/bnns](https://developer.apple.com/documentation/accelerate/bnns)

<comment><USER2> yes, it's an inference engine that runs pre-built architectures. why would you want to train on the device?

<comment><USER10> Maybe not fully train but fine tune on the user data ( images, voice, surroundings, etc, etc)

<comment><USER2> oh, you're talking about updating parameters. Maybe sending that new data home and train a new model and then update parameters across all devices in fleet.

<comment><USER11> > Maybe sending that new data home

I'd assume Apple does not allow this.

<comment><USER12> Apple would allow this with privacy statements, it's practically the industry standard right now. Of course Facebook is doing this for instance.

However it could be a killer feature to have easy api's for doing personalization all on device.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> "Core ML is optimized for on-device performance, which minimizes memory footprint and power consumption."

This is major, if they have managed to achieve it reasonably. But before opening a Sekt, I want to see some benchmarks. :)

</comment><comment><USER14> Federighi says Core ML on iPhone is 6x faster than Google Pixel and Samsung Galaxy S8.

How they actually compare?

<comment><USER15> The probably ran the same tests on Android using Pixel and S8 and then on iPhone (which leveraged CoreML). I would like to see a more detailed analysis myself.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> using it means need to handle Android with another framework separately

<comment><USER17> Is there any cross-platform framework recommended?

<comment><USER18> check Caffe 2. I haven't tried that yet but looks promising.

<comment><USER17> ok, get it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Lots of options to explore, but no reinforcement learning yet.

Also, some converted Core ML Models ready to use here: developer.apple.com/machine-learning

<comment><USER20> Reinforcement Learning relates to the way you train your model. Most of the time, it ends up being a feed-forward neural net (possibly with some convolutional layers), and rarely an RNN, all of which are supported.

</comment></comment><comment> ajay-d The python package, coremltools, to convert the trained model is only for python 2.7??

<comment><USER21> Is python3 shipped on OS X by default? I'm not sure why they are still shipping 2.x -- anyone know if 3.x will be shipped in high sierra?

A bit disappointed that the model conversion tool only supports an older version of Keras as well (1.2.2). Keras 2.0 is pretty new but I hope they update the conversion tools for it quickly ...

I wonder if the conversion tool will be open source ... seems like they'd want to support the widest net of external models since they don't yet have a way to produce .coreml models directly. Or maybe the intent is to augment Keras/caffe/etc to support saving .coreml directly?

<comment><USER22> Both python 2 (/usr/bin/python) and python 3 (/usr/bin/python3) are shipped by default on Ubuntu.

Right now, coremltools is only available for Python 2.7 ([https://pypi.python.org/pypi/coremltools](https://pypi.python.org/pypi/coremltools)), which is annoying as the entire code base I've worked on for months at my current firm is in Python 3.6. Hopefully this is updated soon for Python 3 support.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Having a directory of trained models to download is an interesting concept. This will certainly accelerate the adoption of ML.

</comment><comment><USER24> Does it support caffe/TensorFlow/MXnet model inferencing?

</comment><comment><USER25> Why not caffe2? And why mention libsvm, are we in the 90s?

<comment><USER26> Because SVM is fast and more than good enough for most problems.

<comment><USER2> I think he's talking about libsvm, the c++ package

<comment><USER26> It's there because they want to include SVM.

So, same answer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Machine Learning needs a new acronym. ML is already taken! Get your own!

<comment><USER28> Which of these 109 entries is objectively the definitive one?

[http://www.acronymfinder.com/ML.html](http://www.acronymfinder.com/ML.html)

<comment><USER29> At this point, I would like to nominate Malt Liquor.</comment></comment></comment>


When forced to wait, wait - <AUTHOR> http://breckyunits.com/when_forced_to_wait_wait

<comment><USER2> Appreciated the irony of reading this article while waiting a few seconds for a build.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is actually the underlying concept behind my personal productivity technique. I'll write about my system (and the piece of software I wrote for it) in a couple weeks.

</comment><comment><USER4> Wasn't Drucker the one who tried to avoid everyone multi-tasking ?

I personally prefer to focus on one thing at a time</comment>


Ask HN: Styling comments in PR reviews - <AUTHOR> I get a lot of styling comments in my PR reviews (like gnats on a in a PR jungle :-p). This is in Typescipt. TBH I don't find working on them the best use of time a lot of times.
Is it common for one or two people on a team to receive a lot of styling comments? I am pretty sure this is a good mix of product focussed and pure software engineering focussed groups.
Drop a paragraph on what story or insight comes to your mind on the subject. <comment><USER2> Usually it's one of three things:

>Your style isn't up to spec

If you always smell crap, check the bottom of your shoes. I've found team style guides to be useless generally, but attempting to emulate team style by looking at existing code is a winning move. Coding is a team effort, and even if it's a little extra work, a little beautification can go a long way towards readability.

>Code reviewers want or are incentivized to help

Many code reviewers make a point not to leave a nontrivial review without commenting. Whether this is because they want to help, or because in many workplaces, the code review metric optimized for is "comments closed", some people will feel obligated. When there's no substance to dissect, style is often substituted

>Someone's giving you a hard time for irrational reasons

This is an interpersonal issue. You don't, in my opinion, need to worry how others will view you if this happens since most people can tell when somebody is just being a dick in a CR. If you're concerned about this, try to figure out why you two have beef by asking them and either resolve it, ignore/forgive it and move on (some hills aren't worth dying on), involve management or HR, or change roles

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes very valid points.

I am thinking of making flashcards with all the styling comments and really internalise them. Its like failing a driving license test everytime I create a pull request. haha...

Anyways, I was keen on knowing if this is a common problem (say like 10% of the population faces or its even scarcer).

I personally have never seen a project fail because the styling was a little off. I have seen projects succeed because they hit the customer early, and fail because they didn't do it a lot better than existing solutions. But then, to be honest, every project has its own flavours to success.

<comment><USER3> Forget notecards, what you need is a well configured linter. There's no reason to save style issues for code review when they can be caught with static analysis. Having encountered this team issue previously, linting made it a non-issue. Pre-commit hooks and CI are two options for enforcing code style.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Some people need to comment on something in order toi justify their existance. Subjective issues are the easiest.

I assume PR is not public relations?

<story> Long time ago I worked at this place where the CEO was known for needed to fel involved without actually being involved. My boss had me work on a demo that the CEO would use for potenial clients. In the middle of the demo it did some odd steps. Clearly a mistake, I had just failed to remove a part in the scripting. Well I showed this to my boss, with the odd part in, since I did not realize it was there. When it happened I commented that I obviously need to remove that part. He told me to leave it in, as it would give the CEO something to complain about, and feel like he had made a real contribution. When shown to the CEO he loved the presentation except for that one glitch. You could almost read his mind ("oh my what would these foolish developers do without me"). <story off>

Sadly I have seen this repeated many times.

<comment><AUTHOR> This is a really interesting story. Glad you shared it. I suppose, being a CEO, one is entitled to such privileges. :)

PR = pull request. Created so that your peers can review the code and catch any issues (architectural, logical or just styling). I think the value attributed to them should be 100x to 10x to 1x (or lesser than 1x).

But its not a commonly held belief. Many software engineers take pride on producing beautiful code. Its not about the product but also about wanting to be the best (say taking it from 99% to 99.9%). But it has its bad side - product can take a back seat to the new cool aid drink language on the block.

<comment><USER4> So back in the dark ages ... 20 years ago, company I worked for had what they called 'SoftWare Intensive Inspections'. Code we were writting delt with Telecomm and if a system failed then the telephone company lost money and when it failed real bad, 911 would not work and people could get hurt.

Part of the proces was that when you reviewed stuff, you could comment on: 1) does not work 2) not understandable 3) not maintainable 4) failed to meet standard - but these were usually related to #2 or #3 5) excessively slow or large - like could be written to be 10 times faster, just double the speed was a STFU

During the inspection the author was the note taker. Another would read the code and explain it as best they could. If they could not explain the code, then it failed #2 & #3. One person, usually team lead would arbitrate if the problem was really an issue.

This process seemed to work real well, and found a lot of bugs before the code was fielded. Of course someone would always argue the tabs verses spaces, and where do the curly braces go. This was usually met with STFU. The most common standard fail was the use of magic numbers. I had one jerk who actually did a #define TEN 10. Needless to say that failed.

In all of this STYLE was never a valid complaint.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Use Prettier and never look back.

<comment><AUTHOR> And tslint ... <\-- does not work so great on my vscode for some reason.

(mostly looking for interesting stories... out of the closet)</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Find me a graph of screen resolution to salary - <AUTHOR>

I'm curious if there's a relationship of screen resolutions to salaries. I have no idea how to get data for this. Ideas anyone? <comment><USER2> This reminds me of a funny ad in PC World many years ago. There are three images of desks with computer monitors on them.

The first is a 14" monitor with every inch filled with open windows - email, Excel spreadsheets, Word documents, web browser, and many more. The caption reads "entry level"

The second is a 19" monitor with two windows open: email and Excel. Most of the desktop wallpaper is visible behind these windows. The caption reads "middle management"

The third is a 24" monitor with one window open: Solitaire. The caption reads "CEO"</comment>


On Procrastination - <AUTHOR> http://www.newsweek.com/id/173335

<comment><USER2> Basically, the article says David Allen is right. Getting Things Done is a religion to many, but for me it was a collection of a bunch of little tips that really did help. For $9 its worth a read.

<comment><USER3> I've also read David Allen's book -- excellent stuff. So far I've found his method of using a Someday/Maybe list to be extremely freeing (though I must admit that the list is growing ridiculously long). I've pretty much got the "get everything out of your head" part down, now I need to work on the actual "getting things done" part. :)

If you use OS X, there is an excellent app built around the GTD methodology called OmniFocus (if you also have an iPhone, there's also an iPhone app that syncs with the desktop app). Both are very well worth the money.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> i actually thought about creating a proxy server that monitors access to sites and reduces access to say the top 25 sites, to times during lunchtime etc. i.e parental filters for grown ups.

where the idea falls down is, that for the target audience here, rather than do the work they were supposed to be doing, they would spend the time to get around the proxy server.. :/

</comment><comment><USER5> This company is obsessed with the topic of procrastination. They devoted a week to it on Slate.

</comment><comment><USER6> I wish that I can actually read all the stories in HN tomorrow instead of now.

<comment><USER7> <http://news.ycombinator.com/rss></comment></comment>


New great App builder - <AUTHOR>

You can try the beta @ www.yabb.me <comment><USER2> Interesting but too limited in it's feature set also no ability to set titles and other basic features in the demo, may just be the demo but this is evidently important. I think it's quite cool but having hundreds of apps which just have twitter feeds in them is not very useless. One idea would be to open some kind of marketplace so startups or services can offer their widgets.

So for example Dropbox could offer a feature which hooks into it. This could go further but an interesting start.</comment>


The SR-71 Spy Plane Was So Fast, It Outran Every Missile Fired at It - <AUTHOR> https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/sr-71-spy-plane-was-so-fast-it-outran-every-missile-fired-it-49202 <comment><USER3> I don't know much about aviation, but I know there's a plane that was faster than the SR-71: The X-15 [1].

I know because my great uncle died flying the X-15 on an experimental flight [2], so it's always been an interesting story for my family.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_X-15](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_X-15) [2] [https://theaviationgeekclub.com/the-story-of-mike-adams- the-...](https://theaviationgeekclub.com/the-story-of-mike-adams-the-only- pilot-to-lose-his-life-during-the-x-15-flight-test-program/)

<comment><USER4> I find it absolutely incredible that the piloted speed record set by this aircraft - set in October 1967 when William J. Knight flew Mach 6.7 - hasn't been broken in 50+ years.

<comment><USER5> Maybe because once you start going faster than that there isn't much point staying inside the atmosphere? If you want to count spacecraft that record has been shattered.

<comment><USER6> It is like the land speed record. As soon as you get over a couple hundred miles per hour you might as well fly.

So when you get to mach 6 you might as well be in space....

<comment><USER7> And when you get to about mach 33 you might as well leave orbit.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Is there any single piece of technology that's more retro-futuristic than the SR-71? It is undefinably iconic especially if you understand what happened behind the scenes. Lockheed's Skunk Works managed to not only look into the future, but they managed to make it manifest in the past.

The first one took flight over fifty years ago and we still talk about it as if they represent the promise of the future. As a culture and community, we rarely view Project Apollo in the same way. To me, in contrast to the Blackbird, our first step outside our cradle looks dated. The Saturn V is an ode to the sheer force of will required to send human beings to another heavenly body. It certainly looks the part. The Blackbirds, on the other hand, were precise, surgical instruments designed to cut borders and they look the part. Every element of the plane ends in that sharp-looking edge. There are no blunt surfaces on it. It's one complex curve wrapped around itself and stretched into that timeless shape.

And that's before you pull back on the curtain. I don't have online sources for this, but I have read books about the project that explained how every single part within the Blackbirds - from the engines to the paint - <USER2> brought into being for this project. They set out to do something so daring and so pioneering that they had to invent new alloys to do it. And then they had to build the machines to work that alloy: new machines - tape-based robots - to precisely carve it into shape, new procedures to put it together, and new philosophies to let it fly. These planes were designed to fly so fast that ordinary Titanium-based alloys would melt or weaken over time leading to rapid, unplanned disassembly. They didn't have more advanced ceramics which could do the job, so Kelly Johnson's team came up with a new alloy that was annealed - or re-tempered - in flight, so that it became stronger and stronger over time. Theoretically above some classified altitude the Blackbird can go much faster than Mach 3 and keep on going until the airframe melts away at some crazy high, theoretical speed no one has bothered to check.

They did all of that in a past where the most sophisticated engineering tool in common use was a slide rule and the first scientific pocket calculator was nearly a decade into the future.

Do you ever wonder when we'll build something so daring that it will finally eclipse this project? I do. Paraphrasing Thiel, "what happened to the future? We were promised Blackbirds and got the F-35 instead."

<comment><USER9> > Paraphrasing Thiel, "what happened to the future? We were promised > Blackbirds and got the F-35 instead."

It's kinda weird how the F-35 just looks somehow dated and like a slob compared to e.g. the older (and cooler looking) F-22. Though perhaps "cool looks" is maybe not the prime factor in fighter jet selection...

<comment><USER10> > Though perhaps "cool looks" is maybe not the prime factor in fighter jet > selection...

The urban legend about why the X-32 lost out to what become the F-35 is it having a stooopid looking mouth on it: [https://i.imgur.com/1GW21we.jpg](https://i.imgur.com/1GW21we.jpg)

<comment><USER11> The x-32 was just happy to be there. Like a big metal basking shark.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> There is an unbelievably good interview with Brian Shul, one of the only SR-71 pilots to take a bunch of pictures _of_ the plane[1]. He tells the story about when his commander asks him to fly right up to the soviet border to get their anti-air radars to light the blackbird up. He asked what he should do if they shot missiles at it and his commander said to just turn around and outrun it. He was quite skeptical of this and very amusingly describes this real life encounter. He's a really funny speaker.

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BZRP1q1PGUk&t=33m0s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BZRP1q1PGUk&t=33m0s)

UPDATE: Video with better sound thanks to [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19505767](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19505767) I found the specific story I was referring to at 33m

<comment><USER13> +∞. I watch this anytime I need motivation. This guy is the epitome of not letting anything get in his way. Such a good public speaker and amazing career! Cannot upvote that video enough.

Here's one with better sound: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BZRP1q1PGUk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BZRP1q1PGUk)

<comment><USER12> Thanks updated! (33m0s is the story I was referring to)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> A friend of mine served in the Air Force on the refueling planes that serviced the SR-71s. He said that it was hard for the refueling plane to go as fast as the SR-71's _slowest_ speed! So they did the refueling in a shallow dive, to give the refueling plane a boost.

</comment><comment><USER15> The SR-71 flight manual can also be found here [0].

I was surprised to find the plane can be flown solo [1], and with no pressure suit below 50,000 feet [2].

There is also a section on "Tactical Limits" describing scenarios where exceeding normal operating limits is advised to exit a hostile area [3]

0\. [https://www.sr-71.org/blackbird/manual/](https://www.sr-71.org/blackbird/manual/)

1\. [https://www.sr-71.org/blackbird/manual/5/5-23.php](https://www.sr-71.org/blackbird/manual/5/5-23.php)

2\. [https://www.sr-71.org/blackbird/manual/5/5-23.php](https://www.sr-71.org/blackbird/manual/5/5-23.php)

3\. [https://www.sr-71.org/blackbird/manual/3/3-135.php](https://www.sr-71.org/blackbird/manual/3/3-135.php)

<comment><USER16> Link [3] is hilarious in how banal it is- the same of the manual describes both how to defog your windows and how to GTFO if under hostile missile fire.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> There is a few really great stories about the SR-71 on the internet, many out of the book "Sled Driver". I would not (as it is customary on other parts of the internet) leave the full copy-pasta here, but I do recommend the "air speed check) story (to be found e.g. at [https://oppositelock.kinja.com/favorite- sr-71-story-10791270...](https://oppositelock.kinja.com/favorite- sr-71-story-1079127041) ) and the low fly-by (e.g. at [https://foxtrotalpha.jalopnik.com/the-sr-71-blackbirds- most-...](https://foxtrotalpha.jalopnik.com/the-sr-71-blackbirds-most- spectacular-flyover-was-also-1719654907)).

<comment><USER18> I re-read the "air speed check" story every time it's posted. It never gets old.

<comment><USER19> Same here!

I first came across the story here on HN, and every time someone mentions it I re-read it. It truly never gets old; only now I just got goosebumps. I think it's the people _bonding_ part that gets me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I think there is a lesson here that applies to more than just planes. Speed often can solve a problem in a simple way.

The enemy will fire missiles at us. What shall we do? (1) Invent missile-proof armor, (2) Build computer-guided anti-missile lasers, (3) Just fly really fast.

I guess all of those are hard to do. Making the SR-71 fly at Mach 3 wasn't easy. But to me it seems more elegant.

In the early 2000s, Google made a big deal about speed in web apps. I think it still does, but I don't hear about it anymore. And everybody knows that GMail is slower. But I appreciated it while it lasted.

<comment><USER21> This resonates with how I like to solve problems. Instead of thinking about how we can fix it or mitigate it, how can we make it impossible for a certain kind of problem to occur? Maybe it's just my procrastination speaking but I find it easier to just wipe out entire kinds of issues.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> To me the most interesting part of this article is that I missed there was a contract awarded for a Mach 6 SR-72, that may or may not already have a sighted test platform.

</comment><comment><USER23> I wish more SR-71 stories focused on the sensors and defensive systems. Although not a sexy as the aircraft, in some ways the SR-71 could be considered a "sensor truck." Post-mission processing and analysis of raw data was a huge part of the total SR-71 program. The system and sensor manufacturers were on the cutting edge of airborne reconnaissance and remote sensing. Good page on some of the sensors here: [http://www.sr71.us/sr_sensors_pg3.htm](http://www.sr71.us/sr_sensors_pg3.htm)

</comment><comment><USER24> My favorite story about the Blackbird is how it was designed with heat and expansion in mind.

On the ground to leaked fuel like a sieve[1][2], it was only once it reached operational speed that the joints & frame heated up and sealed it, (thus requiring a refueling shortly after take-off). [1] [https://www.sr-71.org/blackbird/sr-71/](https://www.sr-71.org/blackbird/sr-71/) [2] [http://physicsbuzz.physicscentral.com/2011/02/betrayed-by- he...](http://physicsbuzz.physicscentral.com/2011/02/betrayed-by-heat- sr-71-blackbird.html)

<comment><USER14> The ground crews, I'm told, hated this plane because it leaked toxic fuel everywhere while on the ground and was otherwise a pain to deal with.

These sorts of stories are what impress me about programs like this. No commercial product could ever be so expensive, so difficult, so wildly impractical. The military are practically the only ones who can do things like this, because the need is so great it justifies all the craziness. I work at NASA and we do crazy things like sending robots to Mars, but that seems tame compared to the insanity of something like the SR-71.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Y'all should really go to the National Museum of the US Air Force. You'll see almost all of the planes mentioned here there. And it's free. Nothing like seeing Blackbird in person as well as all the other planes. Plan on a full day at the place.

</comment><comment><USER26> One of the authors, David Cenciotti, also has a nice aviation (primarily military) weblog [1] and made some interesting speculation about that stealth Blackhawk [2].

1\. [https://theaviationist.com/](https://theaviationist.com/)

2\. [https://theaviationist.com/tag/stealth-black- hawk/](https://theaviationist.com/tag/stealth-black-hawk/)

</comment><comment><USER27> There's a Lockheed A-12 on the USS Intrepid that you can get very close to with a guided tour. One of the facts the tour guides tell you about it is the titanium for the planes, as well as that of the SR-71s, was mostly sourced from Russia via shell companies for all kinds of bullshit reasons. So, America flew spy planes over Russia that were made from materials mostly of Russian origin.

</comment><comment><USER28> I don't know the full veracity of this piece, but IIRC the Foxbat once acquired a lock on it: [https://theaviationist.com/2013/12/11/sr-71-vs- mig-31/](https://theaviationist.com/2013/12/11/sr-71-vs-mig-31/)

<comment><USER29> Plenty of things acquired a lock on it, including ground-based SAM sites. That's the easy part.

<comment><USER26> The USSR pilot claims:

 _"Had the spy plane violated Soviet airspace, a live missile launch would have been carried out. There was no practically chance the aircraft could avoid an R-33 missile."_

<comment><USER29> The pilot also claims the lock was from 120km, which is the maximum range of the R-33 at the time, so I'm a bit dubious of the idea without a practical demonstration.

I do suspect the "surround from all directions" approach detailed later would've worked, but that's why we moved off to stealth and satellites.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Here are some relevant and IMO very interesting videos for your viewing pleasure:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=reytu0y5efs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=reytu0y5efs)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-5nSKLyrM1s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-5nSKLyrM1s) (long talk by SR-71 pilot Maury Rosenberg mentioned in the first video)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CeBu6mRDaro](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CeBu6mRDaro) (an even longer talk by another SR-71 pilot Richard Graham)

</comment><comment><USER31> If you're into this kind of stuff the book Skunk Works by Ben R Rich is REALLY good! IMO it carries a lot of lessons into software development and startups also. Like they did random startup type things where for example the external starter motor for the planes engines was made from a couple Buick motors. They spent lavishly where they had to but were frugal and kept it simple where they could. Fun + interesting read.

</comment><comment><USER32> apparently "no Blackbird of any variety has ever flown over the landmass of Russia or China", according to former SR71 pilot Col. RH Graham.

so we don't really know if they have the capability, but after they downed the U2 in 1960, seems the US didn't want to find out empirically.

that said, you have to love this plane. it's a spaceship.

<comment><USER33> I recall reading a story of flying an SR71 through the cloud from a Chinese nuclear test. We wanted to know if it was a fusion weapon or not.

The Chinese sent up a fighter after it, and, well, it wasn't fast enough. It also had too low of a ceiling.

Can't cite a source (I read about this, what, four decades ago?) so I can't prove it happened.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> If you haven't heard the "SR-71 Speed Check" story, it's pretty amusing. As told by the pilot: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8AyHH9G9et0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8AyHH9G9et0)

</comment><comment><USER35> Remember the U2, the predecessor that _was_ shot down famously. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Gary_Powers](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Gary_Powers).

</comment><comment><USER36> A bit unrelated , but would someone please explain how come missiles fired from Stinger MANPADS are so fast?

<comment><USER37> They really aren't. They can only get up to ~750 m/s.

You want fast, take a look at the Sprint missiles. The damn things had 100g of acceleration and could hit 3400 m/s.

<comment><USER38> Did you say Sprint missiles?

[https://youtu.be/xZTjA44T6tY?t=93](https://youtu.be/xZTjA44T6tY?t=93)

<comment><USER37> I do actually follow him, but I hadn't seen that yet.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> On paper it would out run any missle with prior warning. But in reality in a dog fight at close range its unlikely it would be at top speed to do so quickly enough.

<comment><USER40> There is no such thing as "dogfight at close range" with an aircraft that travels at Mach 3+ when cruising into enemy territory.

Even the slightest turn at those speeds moves the airplane by 10s of miles.

Any attempt to intercept or shoot down planes that fast happens at great distances and is totally dependent on computers, radar, and missiles.

<comment><USER39> It wouldn't get much time to spy at that speed, it has to slow down at its destination and it's fuel limits won't allow great distances without speed changes. Top speed is different from real speed

<comment><USER29> You're badly misinformed on the SR-71.

> It wouldn't get much time to spy at that speed

That's why you take photos and do the spying part back on base. The SR-71's weapon was its sophisticated camera setup.

> it's fuel limits won't allow great distances without speed changes

When it set its speed record, it crossed from LA to DC on one tank of fuel. (It tanked up immediately after takeoff and immediately before landing, but the cross-country flying part didn't involve a tanker.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Opinion: SR-71 does not deserve its records.

There are many faster objects, including the X-15 and Shuttle. Both are faster than the Blackbird but do not count. Shuttle is a spacecraft but even during reentry, shuttle could not hit such speeds unaided by other aircraft that departed from it along the way (the boosters etx). Nor could the X-15 which was dropped from a larger carrier aircraft. Both could not get to their records speed unaided.

Neither could the SR-71/YF-12. They burnt so much fuel getting off the ground that, to preform a run to top speed and get home, they needed to refuel. So how is that fundamentally different than Shuttle or the X-15? For an aircraft to qualify as an aircraft it should be able to get up and down without help. Therefore it is the Mig-25/31 that deserves the praise of "fastest aircraft".

<comment><USER42> This is an urban legend. Landing it when it was almost empty was gentler on the landing gear, so they took off with relatively little fuel in case the mission was scrubbed.

They could have taken off and accelerated to record-breaking speeds if that's _all_ they wanted to do, but the typical mission profile was to fly to far away locations to conduct surveillance, so in-air refueling was always part of the mission profile.

<comment><USER41> That's not the information I've seen. From what I've read a fully-loaded takeoff and climb would burn so much fuel, far more than a typical profile, that it would still not have been able to break records set by the migs.

<comment><USER43> That sounds dubious to me. The SR-71 had some massive tanks and the idea that it couldn't accelerate to full speed on one tank seems unlikely. Even if you account for the burn in climbing to 50k feet ASL it seems like it has to be underselling the Blackbird quite a lot.</comment></comment></comment></comment>