Laravel 5 released - <AUTHOR> https://laravel-news.com/2015/02/laravel-5-released/ <comment><USER2> There's an article specifically about the release here:

[https://laravel-news.com/2015/02/laravel-5-released/](https://laravel- news.com/2015/02/laravel-5-released/)

It might be a better way to get an overview of this release as it links to various other articles about v5.

An article specifically on the changes:

[https://laravel-news.com/2015/01/laravel-5/](https://laravel- news.com/2015/01/laravel-5/)

<comment><USER3> Thanks. I always find the release notes far more informative than a commit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> After using Laravel 4 for an internal company tool I have a hard time recommending it (sadly, I was hopeful). I found the docs to be uneven in quality/scope, some key features (mostly around the ORM) missing and the 'feel' to be slightly off.

It's hard to quantify, but I have used CakePHP, Yii, Rails (0.9 through 4), Django and plenty of home-grown 'frameworks'. From all those the most cohesive and understandable to me was Rails followed by Yii (surprisingly).

Maybe it's the docs or structure, but Rails and Yii have a strong opinion and it seems their developers have both CS smarts and industry experience, which shows in the structure and code.

I'm sure in time Laravel will mature and improve. Currently it just feels like there's a lot more hype than it merits.

<comment><USER5> Maybe it's a matter of taste?

I have worked with Symfony2, Zend Framework, Yii, Kohana and Laravel and find Laravel the most intuitive to work with.

I like that you can start using it for very rapid prototyping and refactor into more complicated structures as the application grows.

<comment><USER6> Totally agree. I think that Symfony2 is a pain in the ass. Laravel lets you have something working really fast. Then you can improve the code later on.

<comment><USER7> Agreed, Symfony2 is great, but I see it being used more in an open source project capacity. Working on it at a company where time frames are key, rapid development is huge. Plus, laravel is far more intuitive and I can ramp up new team members much faster.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> If you're new to Laravel or want to learn more check out [http://Laracasts.com](http://Laracasts.com). Jeff Way does a great job. (Just a fan/current subscriber).

<comment><USER9> Jeffrey Way is the best. Back at Tuts+ I'd only watch his courses—no one else was as good of a teacher as him. Laracasts is even better.

<comment><USER10> His 30 days to learn jQuery was a critical growing tool for me - if you're at all interested in low-level front end JS, definitely check it out. Its free.

<comment><USER9> That's actually the first course I took by him. I took a few of his other HTML/CSS courses and I am doing PHP Fundamentals (to get into Laravel later) because of the "jQuery and PHP" parts of the 30 days course. All good stuff.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Laravel represents what modern PHP can do and be. Clean, organised, fully object-oriented. Kudos to what Taylor Otwell has created both from a marketing perspective and technical standpoint.

<comment><USER12> I was a little scared by the heavy use of static method calls in Laravel 4. L5 has made the statics easier to ignore if that is not your thing.

But after understanding the Facade pattern that is widely used by the framework, I've concluded that the use of the static method calls is not an antipattern at all.

<comment><USER13> It really is less of an antipattern in PHP than other languages. With every request being its own process you don't have to worry about singletons as much, and as long as it's easy to swap with mocks/fakes/whatever it's all good.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Having watched Laravel 5 throughout development, I'm personally unhappy with the fact that most of the nice features of Laravel have been removed.

For example, the default version of Laravel 4.x shipped with the "Whoops" PHP stack trace view, which is far superior to the L5-default Symfony stack trace view. Other features were removed too, including the HTML library. Blade tags were changed for no reason.

Overall, it feels like instead of adding requested features, Taylor decided to redesign the architecture for no reason.

<comment><USER15> FUD.

The "architecture" change is the bootstrap repository, which has a new folder structure. I know, scary stuff! Folders!

The "architecture" has some enhancements to middleware and fleshing out events/commands to a "command bus". Basically, you get more sugar on top of the (mostly) same architecture.

Whoops caused a lot of headaches behind the scenes, and did stupid things like convert ALL http error responses to 500, even on a 404 error (which showed up in Whoops, as HTTP errors are converted to exceptions within Symfony's HTTP stack).

Blade tags have one new tag, and the old ones still works.

This point might be the subjective one - HTML library. HTML libraries create an enormous amount of support for people's edge cases and generally are better pushed out as a third-party add on to suit your needs. The upgrade guide explains how you can add them back in if you want. [https://github.com/illuminate/html](https://github.com/illuminate/html)

<comment><USER13> That's a shitty explanation for dropping Whoops. The first time I remember the discussion of it being dropped got brought up was because of a bug in the framework relating to the assets, where Taylor didn't hesitate to blame Whoops and deleted comments on Github pointing out that the problem was actually in his own code.

It would've been super easy to add some code that sets the HTTP code for Whoops's response if that was the problem - but the fact is you should demand your framework users define their own 404 handlers.

The old Blade tags now escape all HTML, that hardly counts as working.

<comment><USER16> You can easily change the config to make the Blade tags work as they previously did. I'm unhappy about this change as well though. It's very reminiscent of some design decisions PHP has taken:

1\. Create feature X.

2\. Users don't understand feature X, and use it when they should be using feature Y (for safety.)

3\. Update the API so that feature X does what feature Y did, and create feature Z that now does what feature X did.

4\. Old users using feature X incorrectly are now protected, while users who correctly used feature X must now convert to feature Z.

<comment><USER17> Not being familiar with Laravell, having a look at[1], I see what you mean:

> In Laravel 4 Blade included the following two styles: {{ and {{{. > The > double curly bracket was a raw echo and the triple curly bracket escaped. > > > Now both the double and triple curly brackets escape the variable and a > new {!! $var !!} is for raw.

I'd argue that having unescaped output be shorter/easier than escaped output was probably a design error in earlier versions -- but I'm not sure I like the "fix"... If it was a green-field design, I must admit I like the "danger!"-feel that unescaped output has in L5 though.

[1] [https://laravel-news.com/2015/01/laravel-5/](https://laravel- news.com/2015/01/laravel-5/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I really like Laravel, it makes getting things started easier. I am glad I finally have a good way to manage my assets from within Laravel so that I don't have to deal with all of that myself every time. The only thing I find Laravel lacking is Web Socket support and every time I tried to implement something I would basically give up and switch to Node.js. Is there anything that can get web sockets working in Laravel?

</comment><comment><USER19> I love the `Architecture Foundations` section in documentation [1]. I wonder why more frameworks don't do this. It happens a lot that I have no idea where to put files when I start with some frameworks. I am still not sure how good it is but I am reading through it right now.

[1] [http://laravel.com/docs/master/providers](http://laravel.com/docs/master/providers)

</comment><comment><USER20> I tend to use Laravel when the client/project forces me to use PHP rather than Rails. It's not bad when coming from the Rails world.

I also have a bit of pride that it's made in Arkansas. Yes, we have computers and the internet here.

</comment><comment><USER21> Laracasts has a series of introductory screencasts on Laravel 5: [https://laracasts.com/series/laravel-5-fundamentals](https://laracasts.com/series/laravel-5-fundamentals)

</comment><comment><USER22> I'm a fan of Symfony but love that there are several advanced frameworks pushing the state of the art forward (Symfony, Laravel, ZF2).

</comment><comment><USER23> What are the main advantages of Laravel over say Cake or Symfony?

<comment><USER24> Having worked with Kohana, CodeIgniter and WP, Laravel is the reason I started writing PHP again. Also being a node developer, Laravel feels at home with Express(both influenced by Sinatra).

Artisan command line utility, Migrations for DB version control, Blade template engine and the neat directory structure are some of the things I like apart from the community ofcourse

<comment><USER19> What is the thing you don't like about Laravel community? (or is this what you say when other PHP devs are involved?)

<comment><USER25> I think that he actually likes the community. The wording might be quite confusing but I think that's what he meant.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> More info: [http://laravel.com](http://laravel.com)

</comment><comment><USER27> For those currently using Laravel, here are some upgrade guides due to the large changes from 4 -> 5

[http://laravel.com/docs/master/upgrade](http://laravel.com/docs/master/upgrade)

[http://mattstauffer.co/blog/upgrading-from-laravel-4-to- lara...](http://mattstauffer.co/blog/upgrading-from-laravel-4-to-laravel-5)

</comment><comment><USER28> Looks like some links are broken. For example [http://laravel.com/docs/authentication](http://laravel.com/docs/authentication) redirects to -> [http://laravel.com/docs/4.2/authentication](http://laravel.com/docs/4.2/authentication) which is 404.

<comment><USER29> It wouldn't be the first time. When Laravel 4 came out, they decided the best way to announce that would be to make all the old URLs for Laravel 3 documentation point to Laravel 4 pages, and then _take down the Laravel 3 documentation completely._

Yes. Completely. Not just "put it in a less prominent place" or "hide it six levels deep in the directory hierarchy" \-- it was _gone,_ overnight. Poof! Vanished.

I happened to be in the middle of a Laravel 3 project at the time, so the sudden removal of all documentation for the version I was working with was more than a little painful.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Deal-breakers for me with Laravel:

\- Blade templating language. I don't need yet another templating syntax to learn, especially one that isn't analogous to others I know and are common among other frameworks.

\- I really can't imagine going back to an active record based ORM. I've learned too many hard performance lessons from Doctrine1 and rails at this point.

\- Facade/proxy pattern based classes. I think as they are implemented in the actual framework, these are done correctly. However, I think the userland understanding of this pattern is often lacking and leads to a lot of glorified singletons that are some how touted as acceptable because they call them facade/proxy based.

In the giant lineup of frameworks, ranging from something as simple as SlimPHP or silex, all the way to enterprise targeted frameworks like Zend Framework 2, I just don't see why I'd ever pick Laravel as the go-to solution in any use case.

<comment><USER31> Those don't have to be deal-breakers.

\- You don't have to use Blade. Use Twig or Smarty or whatever you want

\- You don't have to use Eloquent. Use raw queries or Doctrine or whatever you want

\- You don't have to use Facades - use the IOC container to get whatever you want

Its so easy to plug-and-play with composer, and there are so many other features to laravel.

<comment><USER30> Yeah, at that point why use Laravel?

All the major frameworks are just as decoupled, but as soon as you start selecting off the "native" defaults for things like templating and ORM you lose integration features that have been built into other areas of the framework to support that specific library.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Ive been so excited about this! Though I kinda miss the call to action buttons that they had on the old site. Scrolled down the page looking for the quickstart button before I had a "duh" moment and clicked on documentation.

</comment><comment><USER33> Bad to see, Laravel still doesn't have an LTS version. Upgrading is a pain.

<comment><USER34> Might be a business opportunity, ala [https://railslts.com/](https://railslts.com/).

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Awesome news, been expecting this since a mysterious twit last week, Laravel is awesome, can't wait to check v5

thanks!

</comment><comment><USER36> i dont want to depend on a framework by one person.

</comment><comment><USER37> Can you really write beautiful code in PHP?

<comment><USER38> Sure. PHP, especially post 5.4 has matured a lot and offers as many niceties as your favorite blub language. It has its warts, but at this point, nothing worse than what Javascript has for example.

That said, while you can write beautiful code in PHP, IMHO, Laravel is not that.

It full of "string typing", over-applied and mis-applied Design Patterns, and poorly thought abstractions.

It just saddens me that Laravel is considered well designed and advanced codebase, or, worse, a standard of how PHP should be coded.

While it's not as bad as the Wordpress spaghetti, it is mostly Java EE (circa 2004) in PHP, sans the strong typing assurances (and, fortunately, sans the gobs of XML too).

On the other hand, Laravel works and has a strong community going for it, which, as in the case of Wordpress, makes all the difference in the world.

<comment><USER39> Can you give an example of a well designed PHP codebase?

Are any of the other frameworks (Symfony2, Zend, etc..) better?

<comment><USER40> When I tried SF2 I found it to be a terrible, Java-like, pile of abstractions. This might work for some people, but if you prefer thinking about business logic (as opposed to "where do I extend this IoC dependency container so that it can find my ControllerFactory), it's not for you. It left me bitter.

Yii is supposed to be nicer, I heard from colleagues, but I left PHP programming the moment I saw the opportunity so I can't vouch for that.

<comment><USER41> Extending the IoC container?? A ControllerFactory?? You never do anything like that in Symfony. The thing I appreciate most about Symfony2 is how it enforces good design patterns.

<comment><USER42> One might argue that the SOLID principles applied in Symphony and inherited by Laravel are in fact anti-patterns which only serve to add massive cognitive overhead. They've wrecked countless Java projects over the years and are now going to do PHP the same favor.

There's even less reason for a scripting language with a GIL to be saddled with this level of complexity, than there is for Java.

<comment><USER43> Much of the complexity in Symfony comes from its "dependency injection" component (a misnomer, really) and the inclusion of annotation magic in the standard framework distribution.

These days, I'd rather use the basic components (e.g. Symfony's HttpFoundation library) with something like league/container (formerly orno/di) and a simple routing library like nikic/FastRoute.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


More Than Half of US Covid Lockdown Closures Permanent: Yelp - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-07-22/more-than-half-of-u-s-business-closures-permanent-yelp-says <comment><USER2> I just learned that a restaurant chain that I really liked has decided to permanently close all of their locations. That really bummed me out. The restaurant scene is going to look a lot different after this pandemic is over.</comment>


If my startup fails, this is my cover letter for my next employer - <AUTHOR> http://killall.dashnine.org/2009/02/i-may-need-a-new-job-because-my-boss-is-a-jerk/ <comment><USER2> I think this joking, but remember this anyways:

No one gives a damn about "I, I, I, me, me, me..."

"I did xyz... and I want xyz... and for me, I want... and I do... and I'm..."

People want, "...for you, can be done... value to you... profit to you... minimal risk to you... incentive-based, so you only pay me as work is delivered..."

People are persuaded by appealing to their own interests. If you give an I/me centric story to persuade a savvy business person to do something, you're instantly getting written off 90%+ of the time. If you can show someone that you can do amazing things for them, they'll choose you and you profit.

<comment><USER3> Well, the whole conceit of the piece is that the guy is his own horrible boss, but could presumably be as effective working for someone else who appreciates his ethic. The whole thing could be a lot more direct if the goal was to persuade, but then the humor would be lost.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> You definitely have to read the entire article. I assumed it was some dailywtf-style rant until the last paragraph.

<comment><USER5> You do? I thought the punchline was clear by the middle of the second paragraph. I _wanted_ not to know, but eh.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I submitted this yesterday and pulled it after 20 minutes. This was written in jest to capture my feelings the day before I announced my product here.

<comment><USER6> I'm glad that it was in jest; you may convince someone that you'd work just as hard for them as you did for yourself. I doubt that is a situation most people would enjoy, especially as the first job after a folded startup.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is pretty funny because I am in a similar situation, and have been wondering how the hell I am going to explain the last two years of my life. Could anyone in HR really understand what it is like to start a company?

<comment><USER8> > Could anyone in HR really understand what it is like to start a company?

Odd that you would assume that anyone in HR is incapable of starting their own company.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> This was extremely fun to read. I love it. It helps people to understand that working for a startup probably won't bring you riches, but it will make you a better person.

</comment><comment><USER10> This is one of the best pieces of writing on entrepreneurship I have ever seen.

</comment><comment><USER11> Congratulations to raffi for launching. I enjoyed this piece, and it would serve its stated purpose very well I believe.

An impressive feat by an impressive individual, it seems. Wish you all the best!

</comment><comment><USER12> Is the author here referring to himself as _his_ boss in third-person? The last paragraph somewhat implicitly states it but isn't 100% clear. . .no one else I asked so I felt I obligated to ask it.

<comment><USER13> Yes, that's how I read it and most people here seem to operate under the same assumption.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Nice idea--but too long: who would read past the first winning sentences? Consider the potential employer may have dozens or hundreds of resumes to read.</comment>


Tesla: Capital Raise Now, or Bankruptcy in 4 Months - <AUTHOR> http://seekingalpha.com/article/4049370-tesla-capital-raise-now-bankruptcy-4-months <comment><USER2> This article is not exactly doing the math right. Yes, the total value of Tesla might become negative in 4 months, but it won't have run out of cash at that point.

If Tesla is anything like any other company, it can maintain an accounts payable balance. So that $1.6 billion, as long as money keeps flowing through Tesla, does not have to be paid back. It's simply the balance on it's credit card. It's paying it down every month, and adding new things onto it, just like every other company. This results in a running credit line that effectively stays open forever. Most of it, like your own credit card's first month balance, probably doesn't even have interest on it.

Long term debt is -surprise- long term. So it doesn't have to be paid back in the next two years (that's the usual definition).

[http://ir.tesla.com/secfiling.cfm?filingID=1564590-16-26820&...](http://ir.tesla.com/secfiling.cfm?filingID=1564590-16-26820&CIK=1318605#TSLA-10Q_20160930_HTM_CONSOLIDATED_STATEMENTS_CASH_FLOWS)

If you want to know when capital needs to be raised, this document has a cashflow section. It's not 100% enough to know how the cash-on-the-running- account situation is, but it's certainly a good starting point.

Cash and cash equivalents at end of period: $ 3,084,257 (in 1000)

TLDR is: Tesla has 3 billion in the bank, and is using in it's new fast investment rampup plan for the gigafactory about 250 million per quarter, but let's say that doubles, ok, then we have about 3 years. Given that in that time, some long term debt will become short term debt, let's say further analysis will probably shorten that, but even shortened it will be more than 2 years. So ... 2.5 years ?

Yes it's net worth if you add it all up is negative, just like every other company these days (the 2008 FED recovery plan has made sure that the holdouts didn't hold. They offer 1% or so long term debt to companies, companies took it and, effectively and predictably, paid it out to shareholders. Barring exceptions, every large company has negative value. At least Musk is spending it on infrastructure and research & development). If you're going to refuse to invest in net-negative-worth companies you're going to be missing out on a lot, and even the champions of that approach, like Warren Buffett, don't do it in practice (despite rhetoric to the contrary). Not that they have a real choice, of course, but still.

</comment><comment><USER3> Wish I could read the full article, but I'm not installing an app just to read that article. Moving on...

</comment><comment><USER4> This article is on Seeking Alpha. That is as much as you need to know.</comment>


Twitter talk bot - <AUTHOR> http://servletsuite.blogspot.com/2011/06/twitter-talk-bot.html

<comment><USER2> I won the hackathon at PayPal Innovate for one of these. You can see it live here: <http://twitter.com/#!/paypal_api_help>

There's a video here: [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1lVFns851r8&feature=playe...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1lVFns851r8&feature=player_embedded) if you're interested. Anyone have questions about developing these?</comment>


Ask HN: Who's hiring Data Scientists/Machine Learning Engineers? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> The quant trading shop I work for in Boston is:

Boston, MA (not remote) MDT Advisers - We're a small quant investing shop working with machine learning, financial analysis, and the hardest dataset in the world. We're mainly hiring for a general analyst position that's about 60% programming and 40% financial and statistical analysis -- <http://www.mdtadvisers.com/careers/qea.jsp> . The people, problems, and pay are good, and we aim for good work-life balance(e.g. no 60 hour weeks).

You can email me at firstname.lastname@example.com with any questions you have.

</comment><comment><USER3> NewsCred is looking for engineers in NYC.

We're looking for engineers interested in Information Retrieval, Solr, Lucene, Machine Learning, NLP etc.

We're also hosting the NYC Hadoop meetup tonight (Thursday) at our offices at General Assembly. Come by!

</comment><comment><USER4> I saw this via twitter this morning, not sure what clover is, but: <https://www.clover.com/jobs.html>

<comment><USER5> Thanks for posting this. We're building a very strong machine learning, data science, and algorithms team here at Clover. Come work with a Robocup champ and a rocket scientist in Mountain View! I'm particularly looking for people to design, build, and operate our data pipeline. Strong Hadoop experience a definite plus.

Email me at firstname.lastname@example.com if you're interested.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Color is - <http://twitter.com/#!/dpatil/status/53130035732824064>

</comment><comment><USER7> Intelligent app search startup is looking for one <http://iapps.in/jobs>

</comment><comment><USER8> In the UK: <http://www.coderstack.co.uk/data-mining-jobs></comment>


Show HN: Flat – Music notation software: Web-based and Real-time collaboration - <AUTHOR> https://flat.io <comment><USER4> Awesome jobs. It has been a long time, but in high school I was on nationally competive drumline and spent a lot of time with [Finale]([http://www.finalemusic.com/products/](http://www.finalemusic.com/products/)), [Sibelius]([http://www.sibelius.com/home/index_flash.html](http://www.sibelius.com/home/index_flash.html)), [Forte]([http://www.fortenotation.com/en/](http://www.fortenotation.com/en/)), and [Noteworthly]([https://noteworthycomposer.com](https://noteworthycomposer.com))

Great to see the evolution to web. Struggle a bit with triples, specifically quarter note. The editor always wants to insert sixteenth note triplets.

</comment><comment><USER5> Initial thoughts after playing one popular score[0] in FF dev 46.0a2 (3/2). I can only see four measures per screen, which is fine. However, by the time it scrolls to the next page it's already played 2.5-3 measures so really all I see is a constantly scrolling mass of notes, none of witch are the ones being played at the moment.

Playing another popular score[1] I get constant notifications of other people entering the score, which seems to slow down the animation a bit behind the audio. The slow scroll of the staves when the song moves to the next line also makes the animation a bit sluggish until it gets to the top and is smooth again (but starts scrolling about 1.5 measures later anyway).

It seems like a neat project but the playback usability leaves some to be desired.

[0] [https://flat.io/score/56cbc1e390851c1618bae44a](https://flat.io/score/56cbc1e390851c1618bae44a)

[1] [https://flat.io/score/56cf72ecebcadbb864b63c11-hello- adele](https://flat.io/score/56cf72ecebcadbb864b63c11-hello-adele)

<comment><USER6> Is there a reason to have a scroll at all?

When seeing the pagination, I imagined the app's author thinking it would make people right in their element. However, realistically, importing the annoyances of paper scores to the browser seems like a mistake. It makes more sense to have the score go infinitely towards the right, which they do on their non-default ?layout=track option.

As an aside, what about the legality of publishing copyrighted music that can be played without paying royalties?

<comment><USER7> We had and have so many debate over that topic. Actually, both ideas are true. As you I would prefer the track view, but many had claimed the "page view". One thing for sure, the scroll isn't convenient at all... We're working to address that and improve the overall experience :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> As an electronic musicial ([http://www.soundcloud.com/decklyn](http://www.soundcloud.com/decklyn)) I'll give you some feedback from years of hanging out in a DAW. I'll bring up my perspective on some points others have offered and a few other items primarily related to usability. Note that I've spent a lot of time in a piano roll rather than notation software so my experience is very colored but hopefully this is somewhat useful.

1) The need for instruction others have cited I think is a bit over-stated - <USER2> was able to get in and start writing immediately without any introduction.

2) Using social media for login eliminates the barrier to entry for me personally. I was fine signing in. Sure it might be fun to allow an ephemeral experience if people just want to check it out but I wouldn't put that at the top of your backlog.

3) Placing notes. IMO placing a notes should be a toggle not a draw function. I don't want to select a note and delete it - I want to double click it and have it disappear as you would in pencil mode in a daw. At the same time, I don't want to click a note and then click on the length of the note to change it - I want to drag the selected note's length.

3) If I want to change a notes length, I'm forced to change a group of notes existing at the same time. I'm assuming this is a limitation of the modelling - eg that for each fragment of time, a group of notes exist together. This inherently limits me from producing music. If I want to write a quarter note A and two eigth notes C and then D I have to draw a twice and then tie it - <USER3> is a lot of work IMO. Again maybe it's because I'm used to the piano roll in a daw and I haven't worked in notation software as much but I fell like it should behave somewhat similarly - that notes are more of a toggle.

Using ties doesn't seem intuitive - although it lets me span the length of a single note, maybe you could have a tool that treats notes like a grid and lets me click a noted and drag it in the grid - vertically for pitch and horizontally for length.

Just some ideas based on things that I found where a bit difficult for me to get done having a quick trip through.

It's cool though - thanks for making this. I'd consider laying ideas out here on the go.

<comment><USER9> As someone who has used both a DAW and musical notation software in the past, it must be mentioned that they are two completely different paradigms. This product is designed for writing musical notation. A DAW is designed for manipulating the arrangement of samples in a multitrack timeline.

<comment><USER10> That's a very narrow description of a DAW. OP was specifically talking about the piano roll - a feature that obviously differs from traditional notation but is still very much related since both aim to achieve the same goal.

A DAW surely isn't limited to sample-based arrangements. In that light your description of a DAW isn't wrong, but very much unrelated to the point OP was trying to make.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This is great and an idea I've toyed around with building. I think we'll eventually see web-based music composition and DAWs in the browser take off.

As someone who's become used to composing with guitar tablature (a la Guitar Pro) instead of musical notation, it'd be great to see this mode supported as well. The fact that this has MIDI export built in is another great feature and a requirement to prevent lock-in. Good job.

<comment><USER12> I doubt that. Audio software needs to run with as low a latency as possible... so you want to be really close to the metal.

<comment><USER11> I agree. High-end audio manipulation will remain native, but I think for a simplified use-case (composition, lower quality renders) the browser is a good sell.

That and the tooling is almost here with MIDI.js[1], Web Audio[2] and Web MIDI[3] as a working draft.

[1] [https://github.com/mudcube/MIDI.js/](https://github.com/mudcube/MIDI.js/)

[2] [https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/API/Web_Audio_A...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/API/Web_Audio_API)

[3] [https://webaudio.github.io/web-midi-api/](https://webaudio.github.io/web- midi-api/)

<comment><USER13> Hey! I'm head of audio and MIDI at Flat.

In fact, latency and audio quality (because of file sizes for sampling and because of available resources for synthesis) are two big limitations in a browser.

We have big expectations about the upcoming Audio Workers ( [https://github.com/WebAudio/web-audio- api/issues/113](https://github.com/WebAudio/web-audio-api/issues/113) ) to release advanced synthesizer.

Also, we want to enjoy the capabilities of the MIDI output features, in order to route MIDI signals to Virtual Instruments on the computer (through virtual MIDI ports)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> So, I managed to import one of my compositions here: [https://flat.io/score/56d88e7af9e84f623ce60fb0-sonata](https://flat.io/score/56d88e7af9e84f623ce60fb0-sonata) If anyone wants to test out collaborative editing, be my guest.

Some thoughts: the typography is rudimentary (lots of spacing issues and collisions), the number of notational features in lacking (can't seem to find how to add a turn or Italian tempo markings, for starters). Note entry is inconvenient (although I didn't try using MIDI), not so happy about the TOS as far as rights to your own work is concerned. I also had a number of failed attempts at xml importing, not sure what eventually led to a sucess. The interface is also pretty simple and intuitive to use, especially compared to native apps.

<comment><USER7> Hey, thanks for the thoughts.

Indeed there are still many notations lacking. We're doing our best to ship as fast as we can. Regarding the import, music notation softwares are not sticking to the standard and it's a real pain to be "compliant" with them... :( Yours finally worked due to a hot fix we did ;)

Regarding the ToS, we didn't think them this way but I completely understand that it can be a concern. Will update them within the upcoming days.

Best,

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> As someone who recently switched from academic music composition to a corporate job, this is really cool.

I've used Finale in its various versions for over 6 years now, and it's still widely considered in academia as the best notation software, not because of its ease-of-use but because of the depth to which one can add weird/special notation to the score.

In my experience, either composers are using Finale, or a combination of Sibelius and Adobe InDesign. This being said, most of the (albeit mostly American, or Americans in Europe) composers I have met/worked with often use notation software as the last step in the composition process.

The collaborative aspect of Flat.io is really nice, but until the depth of notation catches up to the desktop clients like Finale/Sibelius, I have a hard time seeing (at least) concert/academic composers make the switch.

Side note: is it possible to rebind the note values to different keys? I've gotten so used to Finale's 4=eighth, 5=quarter, command+(NUM) for duplets/triplets, etc.

</comment><comment><USER16> I'm a hobby pianist with occasional paid gigs. I'd love to use this to play along with scores. Here is my feedback purely from a playback perspective. I haven't tried entering / editing any scores yet.

Some issues:

\- Vertical page scrolling is not as intuitive. Could the pages be moved into place from the right? (horizontal scrolling).

\- Scrolling is not at all smooth and just far too slow throughout (regardless of the mode used).

\- No support for multiple systems per page. In other words, if the page could fit more measures, the next measures should be wrapped.

Feature requests:

\- Consider allowing a no scroll mode - just skip to the next page.

\- Also, allow configuring of page turns X beats ahead of the playback location. For example, I prefer folks to manually turn my pages 1-2 measures before the end of the page as I will have memorized the remaining measures.

\- Could you provide an option for the score to resize to use the maximum available vertical space?

\- Landscape page mode?

\- Hide entire instruments (therefore reducing the system height).

\- Support multiple systems per page (line wrapping of measures).

<comment><USER13> Thanks a lot for your feedback!

You can switch to a vertical mode with the button on the top right corner (||||). It should also mitigate the scrolling issue. Meanwhile we will do our best to increase performance on huge scores.

For your features requests:

-A no scroll mode will definitely come

-Yes, you're right, for now it's made for listening but not for playing we will soon add a "Performance" mode in order to smoothen the "page turns" and to do it automatically with the sound.

-That's a neat idea we will consider it

-It's already available in the display options (the second button on the top of the first page, on the right of the instruments button)

-In fact it's a good idea in order to have more space when working on a piece

-You can have multiple systems in a single page. I assume that you have many instruments. We try to keep instruments grouped, not to have instruments scattered through multiple pages when possible

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> This is a very impressive piece of work. It's addressing a similar problem to my friend Adrian's project www.soundslice.com - the complexity of hosting interactive sheet music online is enormous.

<comment><AUTHOR> Indeed, especially for the engraving / editor interactions / audio playback. We launched our beta in December 2015.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Looks tantalizing, but I couldn't find any demo videos, which would be crucial for understanding how it works.

<comment><USER13> Here are some demo GIFs about how to use the editor: [https://flat.io/support/editor](https://flat.io/support/editor)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> How is a user supposed to find out what this site really _does_ without putting in an email address and agreeing to terms of service?

So many sites do this:

> Cool Title!

> Sign up here.

> Some Web 2.0-looking boxes with a few words about how cool the thing is.

> Sign up here.

With no obvious way to something that isn't either a sign-up box or a few more meaningless words.

And then way down at the bottom in tiny font I see "Music Score Editor." Ah- ha! I think, and click. No... that just scrolls me back up to those meaningless words.

Next to that is "Guitar Tabs." Now that one DOES lead to an example. There is a real example! With no way of guiding me to this link, in tiny font at the bottom, and under the previous meaningless link.

And finally I realize that there's a link to the top, "Popular", which is not a helpful word and is, again, next to a meaningless link ("Education", which leads you to more words).

<comment><USER20> I think you might be a bit harsh.

First thing on the landing page, it says: "Write your music scores online" Create, collaborate and discover sheet music with your web browser

I found the "popular" link pretty quickly. Click that, and if you STILL unclear on the site, then no matter what they do, you're unlikely to be happy...

<comment><USER21> I agree. If "Write your music scores online" is not enough for you to understand the product, then you are probably not a target user.

Similarly, lots of ad tech and dev tools landing pages are unintelligible to people who probably don't want to use the product, but perfectly reasonable to those who might.

<comment><USER22> I can't see how you can make such a comment while being efficient. When you're looking for some software, you don't want "X that does Y". There are already solutions (maybe hacky ones) to do Y, so you want some X that will be good in your workflow. And this is not something you can decide with "Do Y. Awesomely." Honestly the current page is not so bad, but it is still a far-cry that the convincing thing: a demo, a quickstart tutorial, or a video.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Would love to try this, I mean, absolutely love! But there's no mention of cost anywhere, and the link to the TOS is dead. So I'm not signing up just yet.

<comment><AUTHOR> For now it's completely free for the individual accounts (education accounts have a small fee: [https://flat.io/edu/pricing](https://flat.io/edu/pricing)). The individual ToS are available here: [https://flat.io/legal/tos- individual](https://flat.io/legal/tos-individual)

<comment><USER23> Just found the TOS while browsing. The link under "sign up" (leading to [https://flat.io/legal](https://flat.io/legal)) was the one I referred to as broken.

        (...) you grant us a worldwide, non-exclusive,
        royalty-free and perpetual licence to use,
        copy, reproduce, distribute, adapt, re-format,
        modify,  publish,  translate,  licence,  sub-licence,
        and  exploit  the  User  Content anywhere and in any
        form for the purposes of providing our Service (...)

Yeah, I'm sticking to Lilypond, thanks.

<comment><AUTHOR> @gnud Thanks for the link, we will fix this shortly. This part of the ToS applies to the public & shared content that can be accessible by everyone on the internet ;-)

<comment><USER24> As written, it applies to the "music, sounds, text or information that you make available or create whilst using the Service" and gives Flat a "worldwide, nonexclusive, royalty-free and perpetual licence to use, copy, reproduce, distribute, adapt, reformat, modify, publish, translate, licence, sub-licence, and exploit the User Content anywhere and in any form." [1]

I can see why artists might be a little concerned about this.

[1] [https://flat.io/legal/individual-terms-of- service.pdf](https://flat.io/legal/individual-terms-of-service.pdf)

<comment><AUTHOR> We will update them in next few days / weeks to be more precise about private and non-shared content. This actually more apply to public content (e.g. you can see on "popular" pages).

<comment><USER24> Nice to hear, cool.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Professional classical guitar teacher here.

At this stage, it's too early for this to be useful in my personal teaching practice. You undoubtedly have a feature comparison matrix. Hats off for what you've already accomplished.

AND I can see almost immediate use for your app at the stage it is in, with a slightly different angle!

My solfege colleagues would kill for a simple way to integrate music notation and text. Or a quick and easy way to build rich solfege exercises.

I suspect that that may be much easier both to pull off and monetise than yet another (and for now rather feature poor) music notation app.

<comment><USER26> Hey, check out my product Soundslice (soundslice.com), which I think might interest you. We're not a notation editor -- we let you combine (existing!) notation with audio/video and share that with students. See soundslice.com/teachers and let me know your thoughts, if you're up for it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> GitHub for music sheet. The execution of this app is just so delightful. Next up: Forks and pull requests? :)

<comment><USER28> Just use lilypond in a github repo. I guess that is too complicated ;)

<comment><USER29> Github has special rendering for Markdown and CSV files. Would be _awesome_ if they did the same for Lilypond and/or MusicXML and made such files playable.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Wow! It's Etherpad for music scores. Very impressive and very useful to people like me who don't have the interest in purchasing or maintaining something like Sibelius but want to explore musical ideas with other people. Hope it's not too expensive when it exits beta!

<comment><USER13> Thanks a lot! We will always keep a free version and later (but soon) offer a premium plan.

<comment><USER30> I'd like some way to write music like a piano roll or a pad system, or just some alternative to Western classical notation, which I find hard to translate to sounds in my head.

<comment><USER13> We will probably release a piano roll view in order to simplify any MIDI input first, so stay tuned!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I'm curious what you're using for the backend.

<comment><AUTHOR> We use Node.js / Lua / Python, depending which services. For example for the engraving part we use some common code shared between the frontend/backend, same for the audio rendering.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Can someone remind me why i am supposed to need an internet connection to score a piece of music?

<comment><USER13> An offline version is about to be released, and if you ask why a web-based version, it can be very useful for Chromebooks for example.

<comment><USER33> But why would someone use this instead of Finale, Sibelius, or even MuseScore or Lilypond, all of which are very much better at score editing?

It's really not hard to email someone a Sibelius (etc) file for editing, or even to work together in a session over Skype/Facetime.

I suspect the number of Chromebook owners who can't live without an online music collaboration solution isn't huge.

<comment><USER7> Things is that Finale and Sibelius are expensive. They're not very intuitive and convenient for beginners. We do not expect to come as a pro software like them.

Finally we're only 1 year old they're more than 10. Give us some time ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Since there's no search available : [https://flat.io/sitemap- scores.xml](https://flat.io/sitemap-scores.xml)

</comment><comment><USER35> Is there a similar tool for guitar tablature (not guitar pro)? This is fantastic.

<comment><AUTHOR> You can actually have tablatures if you create a document with a guitar & check the box "Tabs" :-)

<comment><USER36> I was confused about this, too. I added an "electric bass" part to the auto- created "my first score" and didn't see a "tab" option. Browsed through the "support -> editor" page and didn't see anything about tab parts in there, either. I only saw the tab option when creating a new piece.

<comment><USER7> Indeed. The next instrument modal will be much more intuitive for that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> As a music beginner, this is what I am looking for. I thought a site where all hymns are gathered, shared, edited and played, with lyrics aligned.

</comment><comment><USER38> Nice work! I like it a lot!!

<comment><USER7> Thank you :D</comment></comment>


How a lawyer, mechanic, and engineer blew open an auto scandal - <AUTHOR> http://pando.com/2014/10/18/gms-hit-and-run-how-a-lawyer-mechanic-and-engineer-blew-the-lid-off-the-worst-auto-scandal-in-history/ <comment><USER3> This article illustrates the need for trial lawyers and keeping that route option open.

See how Texas shut down the medical lawsuits under the guide of malpractice reform where it didn't really work as advertised.

In an ideal world, the consumer protection agencies, etc would do their jobs. But they can't because of the revolving door syndrome, the industry lobbying, and so on.

So what are our alternatives to force companies to fix their product defects? People actually died due to their shoddy design/production and these companies tried to hide or cover up.

I wouldn't be surprised to see an increased effort to pass laws to remove the ability for us to sue companies in case something goes wrong. This on top of the media campaign to paint trial lawyers as the scum of earth. Some may but many are actually very good and very dedicated at what they do.

<comment><USER4> It's probably self-serving, but I think it's valuable to have people in society who have different incentive structures. Trial lawyers don't answer to share holders or analysts--they answer only to judges and juries composed of ordinary people off the street. Within an otherwise capitalistic market economy, having some of them around provides a valuable foil.

Tort reform in Texas worked out as designed--what you have to ask is: what was it designed to do? Take caps on jury damages: do you think that's targeted at frivolous litigation? Or is it targeted at limiting compensation in the most meritorious cases, ones where someone really fucked up and a jury saw fit to award a big number?

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I feel the root cause here is the culture of setting hard deadlines by management.

Getting a deadline moved even for logical reasons involves pushing against massive internal red tape. Missing a deadline invites greater punishment from management than compromising on quality. Naturally, quality loses out.

Happens all the time in our own industry, and sadly, this case shows that it happens even in safety critical industries.

All engineers, regardless of industry, should be trained in how to negotiate with management. All managers, regardless of industry, should be trained to respect opinions of subordinates.

<comment><USER6> That almost sounds like you're absolving the engineers (as though they can do no wrong). Changing a part, without also changing it's part-number, doesn't sound like a normal thing to do (and then forget about).

This is a complex issue and I do not agree with the (over-simplistic) reduction to 'management' and 'deadlines'.

<comment><USER5> Not absolving the engineers. The engineer in this case - and other cases - <USER2> well be guilty - both legally and morally - of mistakes.

What I'm trying to understand is, what would make an experienced senior engineer prefer such shortcuts over doing the right thing.

The article says, "Faced with a deadline, DeGiorgio replied: If increasing the torque will destroy the switch then do nothing. Maintain present course. Under no circumstances do we want to compromise the electrical performance of the switch.".

I interpret it as the deadline being a root cause. At the heart of any complex issue lies one or more root cause(s). What were they here? What made him behave that way? Fudging the records is a consequence, not a root cause.

<comment><USER7> >What I'm trying to understand is, what would make an experienced senior engineer prefer such shortcuts over doing the right thing.

Organizational failure. An onerous documentation change/approval management scheme. Covering up a mistake. A culture that causes people to fear losing their jobs, especially for cost reasons, or the feeling that company management are looking for reasons to cut staff. Having your group be blamed for an expensive product recall makes you an easy target. One of the last things a middle-aged engineer in the US auto industry wants to be right now is laid-off.

We naively expect a senior engineer to do the ethically correct thing without respect to whether it has negative personal consequences. The problem with this idea is that the consequences for being "that guy" are too great; and both engineering societies and state licensing boards have been derelict in their roles of helping to protect engineers who refuse to do the ethically gray/wrong.

>I interpret it as the deadline being a root cause. At the heart of any complex issue lies one or more root cause(s).

There are so many things wrong with product engineering management, but yeah laying a deadline that no engineer has the courage to break would definitely be one of them.

<comment><USER8> It doesn't sound like such a horrible position to be in; working for a multi- billion dollar company that was trying to force you to ship a part that could kill people. Whistleblowers get 1/3rd of damages, it's like wining the lottery for ethical people.

How long does it normally take to design one of these switches, when you've been doing it most of your life? Knowing absolutely nothing about the complexity of these switches, but knowing what small hardware teams have been able to accomplish at companies I've worked at, 3 years sounds like a more than reasonable time frame.

<comment><USER7> >It doesn't sound like such a horrible position to be in; working for a multi- billion dollar company that was trying to force you to ship a part that could kill people.

It's probably not a case of some moustache twisting monocle wearing fiend who was the manager and the engineer was absolutely convinced that it was a faulty part that would ultimately be responsible for death and destruction. It was more likely one of a number of similar sub-assemblies, all having some questionable attributes and people trying to ship things under the guise of "perfect is the enemy of the good". At some points along this road, various people probably began realizing that there was a real problem, one that they might have some culpability in. Why the people involved continued to make poor decisions, I don't know.

>Whistleblowers get 1/3rd of damages, it's like wining the lottery for ethical people.

It's a nice theory. I've yet to see it happen consistently in practice (or pretty much ever). Engineering ethics case studies are littered with cases where engineers tried to alert management of problems and were punished for their efforts.

>How long does it normally take to design one of these switches, when you've been doing it most of your life?

Not very long given ample resources and nothing else to do. I doubt they were working under those conditions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Question: What were they trying to achieve with the 2005 version of the ignition switch, which required a new design, that couldn't be provided from a 1975 switch design? It seems that a lot of effort and money is poured into redesigning every component of products every few years, when this was a solved problem many decades ago. After all, the ignition switch has to 1) be turned with an authorized key, 2) provide electrical contact for accessory, run, and start positions.

<comment><USER10> Have you had a car made in the last 15 or so years?

Nowadays ignition switches do everything but starting the ignition system. As the car is fully controlled by a computer, the key is an electronic gizmo that authenticates the driver as the owner and signals the starting sequence. The revolving movement is completely unnecessary and just provided for familiarity purposes, there are cars that instead of a key have a card and start by pushing a button.

My bet is that maybe in 2005 GM was building the first switches under this principle, thus the need to preserve the electrical characteristics of the system, so the data transmision channels between the key and the computer wouldn't get compromised.

<comment><USER9> Ah, that explains it -- my F150 pickup truck is 14 years old, the only technology it has is an RFID chip in the key (which I assume is read by a sensor in the location of the ignition switch, fed to the engine computer, but otherwise not requiring any other re-design of the key switch).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> When I read this story, I thought of parallels to large complex software projects (of course). You could call a large software system that would take more effort fix than has been been spent to create it so far "totalled", like a badly crashed car. It happens (usually with government payroll systems it seems).

GM seems to have "totalled" their entire lineup of cars designed and produced over the last 20 years - the quality of their organization's work has been so low that it's not really possible for GM to find and fix all the serious problems on all the cars they've made. They would have to dissect all the parts from a sampling of cars of each year, since they can't even trust that the same part number is really the same in different years! It's probably cheaper to make a couple new car models, really make sure they're not defective, and provide everyone who still has a GM car with a replacement car. Cheaper, but maybe still not possible. "Good enough" massive recalls will have to do.

</comment><comment><USER12> So the writer describes the guy who does the CSI on the car as a "grease monkey" and implies he is an uneducated hick. Yet it was his work that figured it all out.

Have you ever used a Tech 2 scanner to diagnose one of those cars? They are quite complex, with mutliple computers networked over the canbus system.

Grease Monkey. Like Code Monkey or Porch Monkey. Derogatory.

<comment><USER13> I didn't read anything implying he is an uneducated hick unless you think the term "grease monkey" itself has that implication. But I don't that that term has the connotation you're saying it does. Whenever I've heard "grease monkey" it seems more like the car equivalent of "hacker" – that tinkering with cars is something you deeply understand and enjoy, not just a job.

<comment><USER12> "Charlie Miller has been a grease monkey for almost his entire life. Born in Tippo, a tiny town in the heart of the Mississippi Delta, Miller overhauled his first engine when he was 12. He put himself through a local college working as a mechanic while supporting an addiction to drag racing and after he graduated he become a professional hot rod driver. In 1974 he opened an auto repair shop in Merigold, but it was 15 years before he was asked to offer an expert opinion, and only because of happenstance"

That didn't sound very complimentary to me. Maybe it could have been written like:

"Charlie Miller was asked by a friend to help in a court case. His friend has asked for help because of Charlie's unique background. Charlie had a love for cars since he was a child, and was smart enough to overhaul an engine at the age of 12. He was not only good with tuning an engine, he could also drive. He competed in drag racing as an amateur before becoming a professional driver. A graduate from a local college, Charlie was able to combine his love of cars, his self directed education and his keen diagnostic sense to solve his friends problem as an expert witness, and that is how he started his path to become the guy who solved the biggest recall in automotive history. "

<comment><USER14> There is nothing insulting in the bit you quoted. It describes someone from a rural background who turned a teenage racing hobby into not one but two careers. Maybe you're so sensitive to country folk getting shit that you think just mentioning his rural background must be done with a snicker and a sneer, but I don't. It's the plain facts.

And "grease monkey" is not an insult. It's more of a compliment, if anything.

<comment><USER12> If it is such a compliment, then why not go to an auto shop and say "Hey you grease monkeys, how are you?" and then see if you get punched. I am not brave enough to do that, and I have been working in automotive for 25 years.

It would not be the same as talking to computer programmers and calling them 'hackers'

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Absolutely horrified.

> The Cobalt's engine shut off and the lights inside and outside the car > dimmed. Melton hit the brakes, but no power from the engine meant no anti- > lock brakes and no power steering.

I wasn't aware that anti-lock brakes (is that ABS?) is not a purely mechanical system. Also, was power steering hydraulic or electric? Shouldn't it be run of battery for short period of time?

> While Brooke's lap belt glued her waist to the seat, her shoulder harness > went slack the instant the engine shut off.

Now that's just criminally stupid.

EDIT: I guess I need to read through to the end to the article but that's a hard read for me for some reason.

<comment><USER16> That's not quite right. The Cobalt, like a lot of cars, has a seat-belt pre- tensioner. This is an explosive device that pulls in the seat belt by about 4 inches when the air bags fire. The seat belt's basic inertial locking function still works without power.

Anti-lock brakes, on the other hand, definitely require power. They're computer-controlled, using pulse counters in the wheels, electrically- controlled brake valves, and rate gyros. With ABS, jamming on the brakes is just fine. Without ABS, jamming on the brakes is awful. In the first crash mentioned, the driver not only jammed on the brakes, but having entered the skid, turned away from the skid, which makes it worse. It was also a side crash, so the air bags would not have fired. Who practices non-ABS skid recoveries in cars any more?

Losing electrical power in that car is a big deal. You lose propulsion, power steering, power brakes, anti-skid braking, seat belt pre-tensioning, and air bags all at once. That's bad design. All those electrical functions should be enabled until the transmission is in PARK.

<comment><USER17> And the airbags wouldn't go off, either, without the key turned on.

But having your car suddenly go from having abs -- where jamming the pedal down is probably the right thing to do -- to a state where the driver must pump the pedal is probably more than virtually all drivers can handle.

<comment><USER18> Given my experiences i personally feel she has shown terrible lack of skill - why slam on the brakes? The car was fully controllable. I`ve had my engine stall once and i mistakenly turned my engine off (and the hydraulic power steering went off) midturn and it wasn't a light car. I was completely fine.

On the other hand i find american buisness practices despicable and sickening.

<comment><USER19> > why slam on the brakes?

Maybe she wanted to stop the car she had lost control of?

The reason for ABS to exist is that slamming the brakes is a very natural thing for (most of) us to do in a dangerous situation. If you're designing a car for a human to drive, you should keep this in mind.

<comment><USER20> To amplify that observation: ABS was banned from Formula 1 because it made braking too easy. Modern ABS can outperform people who are paid in excess of $40 million/year to be the best drivers in the world, who have unreal reflexes, complete mastery of a vehicle, and the ability to make good decisions under high-pressure driving situations.

The idea the average driver is an adequate substitute for ABS is laughable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> For those of us who are programmers, if you wrote software that lives depended on, how confident will you be that lives won't be lost? My take away from this is to work harder towards excellent, better quality control, more documentation and don't change a working system without following process that informs other.

In the software domain, there's this bravado about hotfixing an issue in production. Raymond DeGiorgio did that, he fixed the problem without going through proper channels, not thinking of "legacy" cars, and those one's failing to get patched, cost lives.

</comment><comment><USER22> At some level, I am horrified at what was done with prior knowledge by this institution. At another, this incident makes me wonder how this ties into the diffused nature of responsibility within corporations. Was the diffusion of responsibility within these corporations was so great that they could perpetuate these acts without any one individual bearing the moral responsibility of what happened? If so, then these corporations inadvertently have created an entity that is independent of the individual stakeholders and their moral pangs. That is a very frightening prospect...

<comment><USER23> It is not only responsibility but also knowledge. The ignition switch engineer may not be aware of what exactly it turns on and off; even if that engineer is, other engineers are not. (See page 1 of the GM Valukas report)

Analogy: does your DBA know about flushing to disk?

<comment><USER24> Very good point. In huge systems such as a car everybody can not know everything. But in this case, if the ignition switch team does not know how their component affects everything about the car or how important it is the responsibility should move up to whoever writes the specs on the ignition switch. First of all for designing a system with a single point of failure in the first place, secondly for not loudly notifying ignition switch team that their component is vitally important and a single point of failure. As i also said in a post above, way too much attention is given to the faulty switch when this is actually a much larger system design error.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Seems to be a lot of things at play, but what surprised me was the ability to issue a modified part without a change to the model number. Seems like something that could be enforced automatically? Like a version control system? Are we running out of numbers?

<comment><USER26> Well, it's either a way to perform a coverup, or a cost savings by not needing to make new tooling with the new part number on it.

<comment><USER27> A new part number doesn't necessarily mean new tooling. However, you are correct in saying that it is a way to cut cost by not issuing a new part number. A new part number means:

\- Entirely new release/approval cycle. That means going through design, release and QA stages (QA is extremely expensive in automotive industry). Remember auto industry is not the software industry, there is no "agile" \- waterfall is king because once the product is released, it is infinitely more expensive to change it

\- Recalling old part numbers and shipping new ones

\- Even the cost of printing new labels and making new packing materials can be non-insignificant

That said, a change in part equals a new part number, period. So, this was very likely a coverup AND an improper cost-reduction exercise.

<comment><USER26> I agree with you.

I did happen to notice from pictures that these particular parts have the part number cast on to them, so new tooling may be required.

<comment><USER27> Ah yeah, good observation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Along with the other posters here, I am also "horrified".

But isn't this more-or-less the same at most/all other companies? They become old and sclerotic and hidebound and resistant to change. Aren't most old companies guilty of the equivalent of the "GM nod"?

       a staple of GM managers, nodding in agreement
       at steps that should be taken then doing nothing

Maybe companies like GM eventually run their course, and should be allowed to die. Maybe we were wrong to bail them out in 2009? Would the country be better off if a new company could take GM's place?

But, of course, GM couldn't be replaced "as is". It could only be replaced by something more in tune with the times. It's only a {relatively speaking} tiny company, but Elon Musk and Telsa could be "the next GM". Until Tesla eventually runs its course!

<comment><USER29> Not one company should be bailed out. If a business fails, those who think they can run that sort of company better should step in and buy the assets and give it a go.

In the many or most cases where companies have built what has become core infrastructure, regulations already exist for orderly shutdown and sale of assets without disruption of service.

If a company becomes 'too big to fail', this means regulatory capture has already occurred and you have far greater problems to resolve than mere bankruptcy.

<comment><USER30> I disagree. Bail out big companies who fail miserably. THEN do the next step:

Take ownership of said company. If We're paying for it, We should control it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Still wondering why make physical ignition switches that actually mechanically cut the flow of electricity.

For years, cars have been equipped with all kinds of 'convenience' electric components such as Bluetooth, touch panels, and on top of that all critical elements in the engine have been controlled by an ECU for decades -- yet still only some cars have electrically, not mechanically, controlled ignition.

The car key doesn't even have to be wireless: you could still have the lock and ignition key as now if you really wanted but turning the key would only give a signal to the car's computer to wake up from sleep, authenticate the key, close the main circuits electrically to let the components start drawing the big current from the battery, and start booting sequence, self-tests etc. and eventually drive current to the starter motor to crank the engine up.

That's a huge number of things to do, and it had best be left for the computer to handle. Pulling the key from the physical ignition switch is aking to starting and stopping your PC by pulling and inserting the plug from/to the wall socket. You'd better push the suspend button and let your laptop put itself to sleep and let it wake up by itself.

It's also much easier to design a system that will handle startup and shutdown by itself, rather than a system that must survive opening and closing the main circuits at any time.

<comment><USER32> I think there's a change happening, some new cars can be started by button- press when the transponder (replacement for the key) is somewhere in the car (e.g. in your trousers' pocket).

And then, of course there's the other aspect that in some cases you absolutely want to be able to cut power to your engine. Wasn't that exactly the case with Toyotas drive-by-wire throttles that apparently made people unable to stop their cars?

Still: When you look at the electrical system for, e.g. a commercial airplane, you'll see a dozen different independent power-supply busses that can be fed from each other, different engines, or batteries. So that in case of power- loss in one or a few of them, not all safety critical systems black-out.

I don't claim that such complexity is helpful or desirable in a car, but with the majority of drivers relying on computerized systems it probably makes sense to make power supplies more redundant.

{probably that's already happening, and I'm just unaware of it?}

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> These kinds of scenarios could appear in the "negative" column of a positives and negatives analysis of whether to work in a safety critical, regulated industry. Because even if an individual does his job diligently and ethically, there is a risk that corporate motivations can coat you in shit.

Articles like this, and the Ranbaxy pharmaceutical article, make me wonder if the satisfaction of working in safety critical industries is worth the risk.

</comment><comment><USER34> > _While Brooke's lap belt glued her waist to the seat, her shoulder harness > went slack the instant the engine shut off._

Jawdrop ... what? Those things should be purely mechanical, locked in place by masses undergoing acceleration.

Shoulder belts requiring engine power is just monumentally stupid.

<comment><USER35> This was a case of 12V power disappearing to a lot of systems; that still doesn't explain the slack harness, but electric pretensioners would certainly fail to work in a crash under such circumstances.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> If anyone else is feeling a sense of déjà vu in reading this article — there was another in depth story about some of the technical details behind this fault in the NYT in March 2014, [http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/29/business/a-florida- enginee...](http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/29/business/a-florida-engineer- unlocked-the-mystery-of-gms-ignition-flaw.html) .

This Pando article has re-reported the story with lots of additional details and does some great storytelling, so I'm glad to see it. Just wanted to add a note for anyone who is wondering (like I was) "whoa, haven't I seen this before?".

<comment><USER37> I liked the storytelling as well, the only part that annoyed me was the way he continued to drop back into the romanticizing of the characters. You've already hooked me, I want to know what happens next, I don't give a shit about the lifestory of the engineer, I only care that he's an engineer and how he got involved in the story.

Other than that, I thought it was a great writeup.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> All sympathy to the families involved; what makes this the worst auto scandal in history? Are there numbers for this or is this based on public opinion?

Disclosure: I have been a GM employee since 2013

<comment><USER38> I've read the article and this blew my mind:

"[...] if you took all of the cars that GM has recalled this year and lined them up bumper to bumper, you'd end up with a line that would wrap around the earth four times."

That's 30 million cars.

<comment><USER30> And if you took all the software that has been recalled, it would line up to nothing... Because software doesn't have dimension.

And aside radiological software incidents (Therac 25 and similar), software errors usually don't kill people. Engineering design failures usually do.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Previous HN discussion when this appeared in the NY Times:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7492595](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7492595)

</comment><comment><USER40> > 'Despite the conclusions of the police accident report, which claimed that > Brooke had been driving too fast for the road conditions and lost control > when she hydroplaned over a sheet of water...'

I would love to see an article on statistics of how many police reports are factually inaccurate, even if only proven inaccurate by later reporting/exposition.

</comment><comment><USER41> I'll probably get flamed, but...

I'm shocked that everyone here is so against GM on this.

Given the complexity of a car and all the things that could go wrong, this is a very minor issue. The brakes still work (no ABS though), steering still works (it's just harder to turn), and lights still work. It basically turns into a car that's 20 years older, not a coffin on wheels.

The driver also knew there was a problem, wasn't happy with it, but still drove her car regardless and then wasn't able to cope when it happened again. She wasn't forced to drive it.

Maybe it's because I tend to drive older cars, but I'm all too aware that they're machines and they break. I've had all kinds of things fail when driving and I've had to try and cope with them safely. Luckily I have, but if I hadn't been so lucky I wouldn't blame the car manufacturer.

100 years ago you could get killed by all kinds of things and it was more or less just accepted - why are we now at the stage where a switch that's a bit too easy to turn is the cause of all this blame?

<comment><USER42> Can't tell if this is supposed to be sarcasm.

I think the coverup or moral dilution at GM stands to be pretty damn awful.

engineering a failure situation and not playing out how it's most dangerous scenarios might end is pretty bad. I don't think anyone would drive a car over 20 mph if they knew it would shut off and literally have to "cope" with the stress and impending accident and hope to manually steer the car to safety.

I'm shocked you don't hold manufacturers to a higher standard.

<comment><USER41> It's not sarcasm, I'm just very surprised that everyone's opinion is so one- sided about this.

I think if you put yourself in the engineer's position, he probably didn't believe that having a switch that was a bit easier to turn would lead to anything more than mild inconvenience.

I think if GM honestly thought this would cause even one death they would have changed the lock barrels. Even if you ignore the human side, the potential costs damages from something like this would totally outweigh the cost of changing them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> The ignition switch in question seems totally unremarkable. I wonder why it was redesigned in the first place? Why not use one of the many existing parts GM had at the time?

Also—somewhat of a nitpick to an otherwise good article—the Bronco II is a completely different model from the one driven by Al Cowlings during the O.J. Simpson chase. That was the full-sized Bronco. When details like that are wrong, it usually makes me suspect the accuracy of other facts in the story (although in this case, the article seems otherwise accurate).

<comment><USER44> I also wondered this since the story broke.. Why do they redesign core components like this, instead of just iterating on previous designs? I fight this every day in the enterprise space. My only conclusion is ignorance: sharing previous design or infrastructure knowledge is hard (or at least, not prioritized). So folks end up recreating the proverbial wheel.

<comment><USER45> I guess that might be due to parts' supply and logistics problems. When production counts in hundreds of thousands and millions, getting all parts together and in time is quite a challenge.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> Not really relevant to the article but bugs me because it was incorrect. The Bronco II is not what OJ Simpson drove on his infamous low speed chase. He was driving the full size Bronco. The bronco II was the mid size ford ranger based suv(at least the article gets that right)

<comment><USER47> Perhaps you misread the article?

> _A cultural touchstone, the Bronco II was not only infamous for having been > the little brother to the Bronco, which ferried a fleeing O.J. Simpson as a > battalion of police cars and news helicopters gave chase on national > television…_

That sounds correct to me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> Waffle_ss , change your user name.

<comment><USER48> I should have added some historical context to this request for those unaware of it.

It's hard not to see the user name Waffle_SS as an unnecessarily hurtful trivialisation of the Waffen-SS, the Nazi paramilitary force. See [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waffen- SS](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waffen-SS) for more information.</comment></comment>


Why scientists need to be better at data visualization - <AUTHOR> https://www.knowablemagazine.org/article/mind/2019/science-data-visualization <comment><USER2> When I was a Ph.D. student I was surprised that in academia (my field was: quantum information theory) the majority of researchers put zero effort, and thought, in presenting data in a clean and clear way. (As a reaction I devoted a section in my thesis to say what is data vis.) One my day "but it is for other specialists". Nope, it is not the problem. Of course, every data vis should be tailored for a specific audience. But there is typically zero though put their either. See section 3.1.2 from [https://arxiv.org/abs/1412.6796](https://arxiv.org/abs/1412.6796).

From a more recent one ("Simple diagrams of convoluted neural networks", [https://medium.com/inbrowserai/simple-diagrams-of- convoluted...](https://medium.com/inbrowserai/simple-diagrams-of-convoluted- neural-networks-39c097d2925b)):

"[In academic] research, visualization is a mere afterthought (with a few notable exceptions, including the Distill journal, [https://distill.pub/](https://distill.pub/)). One may argue that developing new algorithms and tuning hyperparameters are Real Science/Engineering™, while the visual presentation is the domain of art and has no value. I couldn't disagree more! Sure, for computers running a program it does not matter if your code is without indentations and has obscurely named variables. But for people — it does. Academic papers are not a means of discovery — they are a means of communication."

<comment><USER3> In my experience, it's just about cost-effectiveness. Proper visualization is hard, researchers have a lot of ground to cover and theory and proper experiments are just more important (not only for journal reviewers). Sure, if have a big research group with man hours to spare someone should focus on that, but it's rare to have that capacity.

<comment><USER2> Sure, creating a really good custom data visualization takes time and effort. Using default color themes in a non-ugly library - only minimal care.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> A key aspect that this misses is the target audience. The general public is not the target of most scientific visualizations. Instead, it's other scientists in the field. There are invariably lots of conventions and general historical trends that it's important to follow to communicate clearly.

For example, in seismology high sonic velocities are always shown in blue/cool colors and low sonic velocities are always shown in red/warm colors. This is non-ideal for colorblind users and confusing for other audiences (red != high value), but it's a near-universal convention. We can use a more perceptually uniform red to blue colormap, but keeping the warm/cool convention is very important.

If your audience is used to seeing a certain type data in a particular way, you'll confuse people if you don't follow that convention. Clear labels and legends are great, but people follow convention first, labels second.

When the goal is clear communication, following established convention is much more important than making a "better" visualization. That's not to say that these guidelines aren't very important, just that it's vital to keep your audience's expectations in mind.

> "Scientists also tend to follow convention when it comes to how they display > data, which perpetuates bad practices."

In my experience, scientists follow convention because it enables clear, consistent communication with other scientists in the field. Violating convention is okay, but should be done with utmost care and the knowledge that you'll need to spend more time explaining things.

<comment><USER5> the article even talks about cultural expectations making visualizations harder to read if the cultural expectations are violated. Except that the article completely ignores your point. Science has a culture and violating that culture to make a "better" visualization must be done with care.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> While I absolutely agree that scientists need more formal training in data visualization, the claim that "few scientists take the same amount of care with visuals as they do with generating data or writing about it" doesn't ring true to me about the scientists in my field (genetics/genomics). There is a widespread recognition that effective figures are the strongest way to communicate your message, the question is what is the the best way to create those effective figures. Part of the problem is that as datasets get bigger, it's rarely sustainable to put a lot of care into each and every version of a plot, but automating creation of figures is really hard.

If I were going to start designing a course in creating scientific figures, I think I'd have a roughly even split between the psychophysics of visual perception (e.g. distinguishing between similar quantities of lengths/angles/colors/etc; designing for color-blind readers; ) and hands-on work in a real programming environment turning data to figures.

<comment><USER7> > Part of the problem is that as datasets get bigger, it's rarely sustainable > to put a lot of care into each and every version of a plot, but automating > creation of figures is really hard.

That's actually a good reason to learn R and the ggplot2 package. Whenever I write a paper, what I do is that I make a quick shell script that invokes Rscript, with a simple R program that takes a CSV file and outputs a PDF file of the plot, which can be automatically loaded in LaTeX.

Whenever the data changes, it's just a matter of updating the CSV file and running the script that rebuilds the figures and the LaTeX document. As an added bonus, it makes keeping the data with the paper easy, since they're part of the same source control repository.

<comment><USER8> Is there a reason you don't use RMarkdown in RStudio? It's built precisely for this use case

<comment><USER7> Mostly because I wrote those scripts many years ago and I've been reusing them since. I'll look into RMarkdown for the next paper, thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Everyone needs to be better at data visualization. If for no other reason than to be an informed consumer. If Mark Twain had lived through informatics I'm sure it would be four ways to lie: "Lies, Damned Lies, Statistics, and Charts"

There are a lot of bullshit techniques used in data viz that are tantamount to lying and people are often sincerely shocked when you call them on it.

"I didn't do that on purpose," as if they didn't learn when they're 4 that it doesn't matter if you meant it if you did it. You still have to apologize and try to make amends.

Things people do from ignorance or malice:

Remove the origin on the graph and the relative height of the lines is skewed. 3d pie charts are 'larger' on the bottom half. Circle charts conflate diameter with area (humans are bad at judging area). On a log scale plot, a fat enough line can make anything look like a trend, because the end of the line is literally orders of magnitude wider than at the origin.

Friends don't let friends use any of these techniques, and the jaded instantly distrust anyone who is using them.

The used bookstore on the closest university campus has an entire shelf full of old editions of Edward Tufte books. I don't know if you'll be so lucky, but it's well worth a shot.

<comment><USER10> Dogmatically insisting on origins-at-zero is silly: it depends too much on the data, the message, and the audience.

For example, my lab studies the electrical activity of brain cells. A neuron normally sits at -70 mV relative to the extracellular space. When it fires, it can briefly cross 0 mV (though it probably won't reach +70 mV) and sometimes you might want to show that complete spike. Other times, subthreshold changes in the cells' activity are more important to a hypothesis, and then you'll zoom in on a smaller range (maybe -90 to -55 mV). Neither of these situations would benefit from a plot centered at zero; in fact, it would look decidedly odd.

(Your other comment about log-log plots also seems odd to me, because the width of the line is almost never meaningful, unless there's something like a confidence/credible interval band, which case that's the whole point.

<comment><USER11> I don't think the comment on log-log plots is limited to just log-log plots, and the point is that there are times when the width of the line of best fit, together with the size of data points, misleads the reader to think that it's more linear than it actually is.

Problematic presentation of a similar type is particularly pronounced in, for example, finite-size scaled curves, where the perceived goodness of fit is heavily influenced by the line widths of the curves, the size of the data points, and the resolution of the plot.

These misleading data representations are something that can be found even in recent publications in prestigious journals (I don't think it's always intentional and therefore won't include any references); also, sometimes it's difficult to notice there are issues unless you are very familiar with the methods, or have tried to reproduce the results (and have wasted months or even years of your life by then).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This is like a non-programmer telling programmers they need to comment their code better. In a sense, it's probably true most of the time. But it's also sort of hard to take very seriously, because the non-programmer doesn't have any real understanding of the day-to-day challenges and trade-offs faced by people who write code for a living.

<comment><USER13> One major difference is that code comments aren't at all meant for public consumption (even in open sourced code, comments have a very constrained expected audience).

If anything, public documentation is probably a better analogy -- expected audience of developers, but of potentially wildly different experience levels.

And in that case, it's generally fair for say a novice to complain about the lack of examples, clarity,etc.

And these charts are the same -- this is the primary entry point for a novice in the subject, and a helpful tool for experts. A poor chart would be harmful for all expected audiences.

<comment><USER12> The fact the code comments aren't meant for public consumption, and figures are, is completely irrelevant to the analogy. The point is that lots of things we do could be done better, but having an outsider focus on one of them, and tell you you could be doing it better, is not super-helpful. It's like being told by three people that you need to put a cover sheet on your TPS reports.

That said, and having looked at the article more carefully (ahem), most of the concrete suggestions they offer are sound, and are things that I think are pretty well-known, at least to the practicing scientists I talk to. "Pie charts are bad", and "Beware of false color images, especially ones that use the 'jet' colormap." are both (parapharases of) statements that I hear from working scientists.

But then there's this: "And yet few scientists take the same amount of care with visuals as they do with generating data or writing about it. The graphs and diagrams that accompany most scientific publications tend to be the last things researchers do, says data visualization scientist Seán O'Donoghue. "Visualization is seen as really just kind of an icing on the cake.""

This bears zero resemblance to my experience. Most scientists of my acquaintance make the figures first, and then write the text. And certainly I'd say that more care is taken with the figures than the text.

I guess I just feel like I see a certain amount of fetishization of beautiful scientific illustrations (Tufte, etc), out of all proportion to its actual importance to the scientific endeavor. The readers of most scientific articles are probably not going to be flummoxed by a pie chart. And of course, time spent focusing on this kind of stuff is time that might very well be better spent doing experiments.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Alberto Cairo recently released his "How Charts Lie". It's a delightful read.

[https://www.amazon.com/How-Charts-Lie-Getting- Information/dp...](https://www.amazon.com/How-Charts-Lie-Getting- Information/dp/1324001569)

</comment><comment><USER15> I remember a decade or so ago, the only way for me to figure out certain material values (this was material science / electrical engineering / chemistry) was to open up MSPaint and manually draw lines on chart data to find intercepts. Has the field gotten better about releasing raw data for papers?

Granted, this was sometimes because the only team that had measured a particular substance did it back in the 70s.

<comment><USER16> There are many programs to automate that, e.g., I use g3data. Unfortunately raw data is still rarely released today. One tip if the raw data wasn't released as a computer file: Look for a dissertation associated with the journal article you want data from. Dissertations often have tabulated data in an appendix.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I do simulations for a living aka numerical modelling. The results that I obtain need to be explained using plots. How behaviour changes with time, how component sizing will affect xyz parameter etc.

What I would dearly love is some way to animate the systems I simulate. A way to show HOW MUCH flow is going through a pipe, or how much heat transfer is happening in a heat exchanger. Something that's easier to grasp than dull plots.

Sadly, a) I do not even know what to google to find solutions for this, and b) all my primitive searches seem to lead to Blender, which has a large learning curve and way too much time investment requirements.

<comment><USER18> [https://yt-project.org/](https://yt-project.org/) \-- yt for python was used by a few of my old colleagues for visualizing astrophysical simulations. There is yet another program that I've since forgotten but will try to come back here and comment if I remember.

If you can generate a single static figure, you can manually generate animations by generating each frame separately using your favorite plotting software. You can then stitch them together using many different tools (I use matplotlib) to generate an animation (video, gif, etc.).

What language do you like to use? What's your background -- are you a Matlab person?

<comment><USER19> I work on yt, and I just wanted to comment to say that whenever I stumble on a mention of it somewhere, I genuinely feel warm inside. Thank you for thinking of us!

One of the things we've tried to do -- especially by leveraging the technology and innovations in the tools we build on (especially matplotlib!) -- is to make it easier to make visualizations and plots that are "by-default" communicative and information-rich.

And, of course we have lots of room for improvement, for picking up and encouraging "best practices" at the library level, but it has been really enjoyable and illuminating to have the opportunity to explore that with the community.

<comment><USER20> Thanks for all the work on yt.

Did you consider replacing the rainbow color map images on your front page?

<comment><USER19> Yup, and we don't use a rainbow colormap by default anymore! We do provide a few custom ones that were developed with viscm, which I believe was used by in development of viridis, magma, etc. I think the specific examples are all from the published literature, and we accepted them as submitted by users -- but a refresh would be good!

I opened an issue: [https://github.com/yt- project/website/issues/70](https://github.com/yt-project/website/issues/70)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> This is very true, don't get me wrong. But we have a problem, which is that scientists already need to be good (and efficient) at:

\- Doing research \- Supervising students \- Teaching \- Giving talks in a clear way \- Writing papers in a clear way \- Writing grants in an enticing way \- Performing administrative tasks

This unfortunately is one of the causes why, in certain fields, industry research is much better than academic research. Google is draining brains from compsci departments all over the world, because a scientist at google is mostly a scientist. And there is much, much more teamwork.

</comment><comment><USER22> The "challenges" included in that article are a bit confusing to me, in particular the pie chart. It asks for the third largest segment and claims the answer is B. To me, it seems like B is the second largest and H is the third largest. I did some thresholding of the image and it also shows the order being C, B, H, D. Maybe I'm missing something?

<comment><USER23> We've updated the story and added an editor's note at the end with the correction. Thank you again for spotting! -Katie, Knowable Magazine

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Most charting packages have a terrible default: set y axis original point around y min, which is rarely appropriate in data visualization. In my opinion, the default should always be zero.

Another one is bars in bar/column charts are horribly wide.

<comment><USER25> > In my opinion, the default should always be zero.

This won't work well for a lot of cases. Imagine plotting the atmospheric CO2 concentration time series in the past 200 years. Setting the original point at zero ppm would not make sense because it can never happen. I'd say setting y axis original point at y min is a good trade-off since the plotting package is agnostic about the underlying nature of the plot.

<comment><USER26> I have mixed feelings. I agree that "y-axis should start at zero" should not be been as a sacred guideline by any means. But I reflexively feel that in the context of a data viz library, the default should be zero; thus requiring the user to explicitly set a minimum when needed, and to conscientiously do so.

But I do realize that practically speaking, it is much easier to set a y-axis to 0 (i.e. a constant value), rather than having to calculate the y-min or near-y-min for every chart.

<comment><USER10> How would that work with negative data?

<comment><USER24> What do you mean? Zero original point does not work with negative data?

<comment><USER10> The OP's suggestion was that the y-axis should start at zero by default, not min(y). However, this seems like it would lead to empty plots when the data is all or mostly negative.

<comment><USER24> Not really. Plot can be shown above and below the x-axis.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> A web site talking about information visualization and includes an obscuring top bar and throwing a huge pop up after loading. Yeah, that's a tab closing.

</comment><comment><USER28> Not only scientists. Politicians too. That would hopefully change the discourse to be more material and fact based and less retorical.

</comment><comment><USER29> Maybe if they used something prettier than R it would help?

<comment><USER30> ggplot2 is pretty damn nice

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Didn't even start reading, with the prominent pie-chart directly above the article. Not sure the author has any reasonable knowledge about visualization at all.

<comment><USER20> Disadvantages and advantages of pie charts are discussed sensibly further down in the article</comment></comment>


How to make online newspapers profitable  - <AUTHOR> http://randomstrings.posterous.com/business-idea-how-to-make-online-newspapers-p

<comment><USER2> Newspapers have been kicking around similar ideas for years (<http://bit.ly/cTOokG>) but bundling comes with its own inherent problems, including anti-trust issues, complexity of login, and the fact that similar content is usually not only cheaper to get elsewhere, but easier: No password hassles, no tedious billing, no worrying about if it's part of your network.

Still, some are trying and there will be more efforts on this ground in the next year. Maybe some will succeed.</comment>


Ask HN: What content types do you gzip and why? - <AUTHOR>

I am currently using gzip * at level 9. Standard advice seems to be, do not compress graphics files and PDFs.
I read moot's post yesterday about saving a few transmission bytes and I did an experiment. I got some pages from 6 big web sites and saved all the files and http headers. From the Content-Encoding in the headers they do not seem to gzip any graphics files. When I measured the file sizes with and without compression I found gzip on level 9 gave a total 1.36% saving on JPG, 1.1% on PNG and 6.95% on GIF. Particularly the larger GIFs were worth compressing. I tried excluding the files which increased in size when 'compressed', this could be done automatically on the server, and it made almost no difference to the totals.
I tried gzip on a couple of random PDF files and they gave big savings. <comment><USER2> Had you used tools like qpdf, optipng, pngcrush, gifsicle or jpegtran on those files before compressing them?

<comment><AUTHOR> No I just used gzip on maximum against the graphics files I was given by the pages on the major web sites. I did not try to optimize them before the gzip. The two PDF files were just random ones on my computer, not sure where they came from.</comment></comment>


The Culture War, Part I: The Rise of Newchurch - <AUTHOR> https://www.devever.net/~hl/newchurch <comment><USER2> As a Christian I am happy to see a non-religious person agree with me that the strident left does constitute a religion. But unlike the Christianity of the last hundred years or so, there is no opting out of this religion.</comment>