Yes, You Should Delete Facebook - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/s/story/yes-you-should-delete-facebook-heres-why-bc623a3b4625 <comment><USER2> Why do people go to extremes about Facebook? Every single submission I see here on HN, and most of the comments as well, are either about using and abusing Facebook for every single aspect of their lifes or about eradicating it from the face of the Earth.

Is this part of the American culture? I'm from Europe and while there is a lot of people sharing every single thing on Facebook here, I would say that most of the people never really post or follow stuff on Facebook. People don't really care that much about the social showoff. Most of people use Facebook because it is really convenient for contacting other people and organizing events, and that's it.

Can't you just use Facebook when you find it convenient and then just move on with your life?

<comment><USER3> > Why do people go to extremes about Facebook? Every single submission I see > here on HN

Are you a paid anti-GDPR propagandist? You are somewhat convincing. You almost made me back out of deleting my account but instead I went through with it just now.

> Most of people use Facebook because it is really convenient for contacting > other people and organizing events, and that's it.

Well also at the expense off FB mining every little interaction and tidbit of you. Sure Google is doing the same. But might as well control what you can.

<comment><USER4> > Are you a paid anti-GDPR propagandist?

That breaks the site rule against insinuating astroturfing or shillage without evidence. Please don't do that on HN—it's one of the most toxic tropes around.

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

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I deleted Facebook years ago, but so many of my friends have persisted or increased their usage.

I think instead of scaring people about privacy you have to first understand and appreciate the value people get out of Facebook. For me, it's that I can quickly "feel" connected to and get validation from my friends and community.

Trying to scare people into giving up something they enjoy doesn't usually work. Instead, we should be helping people realize how they can build connection outside of Facebook.

For me, I just gave up on the "did you see on Facebook" conversations with my friends, but not everyone is willing to just abandon a category of shared experiences with friends.

The day will come when we see Facebook as a net negative, but I think it's a long way off unfortunately. The number of people leaving Facebook has to increase to a critical mass where "did you see on Facebook" conversations become un-cool.

<comment><USER6> Call me old school... But what about meeting a friend for a coffee or dinner? And then getting validation that way?

Rhetorical questions probably. Because Facebook has reduced all that friction. Being connected and getting validation gives you that same dopamine hit you get from connecting with someone in person...multiple times over.. and you can do it from your smartphone

<comment><USER7> As the world becomes increasingly unbound from geography more people are going to have friends outside of the "lets meet for coffee" radius. I think it's arrogant to the extreme to suggest that people should go back to giving up on their connections just because you've made a judgement about a company's business model or privacy tradeoffs.

<comment><USER8> You think it's arrogant in the extreme to argue that we should boycott a company because of its immoral actions? That seems like a very reasonable, non-intrusive thing to do. Further, you assume that "leave Facebook" and "leave social media" mean "give up on your connections [with people far away]". That seems quite silly to me-- I've found that Facebook helps me maintain a few sort of distant-friend/acquaintance connections that I care about, while all my close friends who live far away connect with me by phone. Group text chats or email exchanges are also fun ways to connect that are just as good at doing their job as facebook is.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'm not a huge facebook user, and really eschew social media in general. I only use these sites for promotion, as I have no personal gain from it. None if my friends use Facebook much, and that hasn't stopped us from keeping in contact.

In any case, I'm just not sure why people go on and on about deleting these sites. Those who are concerned aren't that active (if they use it at all). Posting on Hacker News is preaching to the choir. Anyone who's had this discussion with regular Joe's and Jane's knows the dead eye glaze all too well.

If it makes people happy to use Facebook or whatever, we aren't supposed to judge them. We, as the tech community, ARE the problem, and we add to it with every new IOT device, AI invention, and every database we build. It's up to us to take responsibility before being called on it. We are supposed to be the trusted ones, and we can only betray that trust because of the ignorant masses.

</comment><comment><USER10> Maybe we're seeing an awakening that's different from previous episodes.

Just like people woke up about tobacco use, high-fructose carbonated beverages, and workplace sexual abuse, maybe we're at a cultural inflection point with Facebook.

Facebook will soon require 500 million people to consent to a long list of new terms and conditions to comply with GDPR. There will be no option to decline the new terms, only "accept and continue". What if 5% of users don't accept?

That doesn't sound like much, but that 5% is probably the most media savvy and influential cohort on the platform. 5% defection could be a big deal in continuing the awakening.

What if 25% of the people who remain with Facebook don't feel as good using it any more, and they use it 25% less. That's another 6% of activity and engagement that evaporates, making the platform less "sticky" for everyone.

Just like positive network effects amplified Facebook's importance, negative network effects could cascade into tectonic changes in how people use social media.

No, most people won't delete it completely. Facebook will be with us for many years.

But if I owned Facebook shares, I'd be worried.

<comment><USER11> I own Facebook shares. I'm not worried. Facebook owns several other properties and has the cash horde to buy more properties.

<comment><USER12> Yes, and this is important to understand about Facebook. Let's say for the sake of argument (and I don't really think it will pan out, but let's pretend for a sec) that Facebook takes a serious hit from the Cambridge Analytica fallout and the company is weakened considerably. Well, they're shown before that they can spin off a new "communications product" under a new name and effectively shed a lot of the ill will surrounding the parent company, but still leverage the massive benefits of their cash reserve and talent.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I don't get the argument that giving data to Foursquare / Swarm is somehow better. It seems to be the same misaligned incentives as he argues exists with Facebook, they just haven't taken in as much data yet. For years people have been making the same argument about Facebook (the data makes the ads more relevant).

<comment><USER14> The difference is that foursquare isn't a monopoly and facebook is. Quiting foursquare if you don't like them is easy (nothing to loose other than a service you didn't like for whatever reason), quiting facebook because you don't like them can be hard because it has a monopoly over your friends.

When it's hard to quit something that you don't like, that thing can easily evolve in ways against you, essentially you've removed the democratic aspect of the thing and you have a dictatorship - facebook.

I think this problem is a little unique to social networking, it feels like it's inevitable that one will prevail above all others because people _want_ to all be on the same platform. If social network is to survive in a healthy way it would seem that a cross network protocol would need to exist to make it easy to switch between them, but that will likely never come from facebook.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Which sends the stronger signal: deleting the account or just never logging in again?

I haven't visited Facebook since I removed it from my Firefox start page a couple months ago. I was visiting it out habit but getting so little value that just having to type the URL in is too high a barrier for me to visit now.

Is it worth the effort to log back in and actually delete the account?

<comment><USER16> Currently your information is accessible. Removing everything may not (yet) remove it from facebook servers, but it means it's less accessible than before, and come GDPR a good chance they'll have to remove it.

<comment><USER17> Afaik, if you delete now, and ask them to delete all after gdpr, they have to obey same as if you waited until gdrp to ask them

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> You can minimize your Facebook footprint by removing unnecessary data from Facebook and your profile, never using Login with Facebook on websites (and switching any you do to a proper login and strong password), using an ad blocker to block Facebook like/share/login/comment on third party sites, and only using Firefox in a contained way. I use it in Firefox with the Facebook container ( [https://www.mozilla.org/en- US/firefox/facebookcontainer/](https://www.mozilla.org/en- US/firefox/facebookcontainer/) ) which keeps your Firefox browsing separate and doesn't bleed the data to other sites.

<comment><USER19> > using an ad blocker to block Facebook like/share/login/comment on third > party sites,

Would blocking domains used for Facebook embedded content using the hosts file also work for this purpose?

I would think this would have the advantage of applying to all browsers on ones machine, and not requiring the code to remove the references from the pages on each page load (instead doing stuff when resolving the domains).

Is there a reason this wouldn't work as well?

<comment><USER20> You can do it this way. Though as I have repeatedly said, blocking Facebook is more of a symbolic gesture that you dislike tracking, rather than actually disabling tracking. There are many other companies that are tracking you, who collectively have far more data about you than Facebook does, and because they are lower profile, they can do things with that data that actually are nefarious (unlike in the case of Facebook). If you don't want to be tracked, give your smartphone to a homeless person and cancel your Internet service.

Still, if you want to bother with the drop-in-the-ocean strategy and block Facebook domains with your hosts file, see:

[https://gist.github.com/thomasbilk/1506210/2d20f47bbcca75b2f...](https://gist.github.com/thomasbilk/1506210/2d20f47bbcca75b2f78d6909c1637501000d846f)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> > Be the customer not the product.

Didn't someone from the Facebook executive float a paid version of Facebook in an interview recently? I'm not on Facebook but what would be a reasonable price for the services they provide right now, and would anyone pay it?

<comment><USER22> I believe this was raised via an inference during the Zuckerberg testimony[1]. That is, since he stated with significance that there would always be a free version of facebook it suggests that there is at least a non-free version on his "whiteboard".

[1] [https://www.cnbc.com/2018/04/10/mark-zuckerberg-there- will-a...](https://www.cnbc.com/2018/04/10/mark-zuckerberg-there-will-always- be-a-version-of-facebook-that-is-free.html)

<comment><USER23> The COO also hypothesized it: [http://fortune.com/2018/04/07/sheryl-sandberg- says-facebook-...](http://fortune.com/2018/04/07/sheryl-sandberg-says- facebook-users-would-have-to-pay-for-total-privacy/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> It is hilarious how people believe that free application/site A sells user data for profit and that application/site B does not. I just wonder what logic is going on in their heads. It's like saying that if I close my eyes and doesn't see the monitor in front of me then it doesn't exist. Writing stuff like this is delusional:

"These are apps where I volunteer my location, travel, eating, and shopping habits, and I've never had the slightest sense that Foursquare was using this data in a way that made my life worse." (c)

</comment><comment><USER25> I am visiting a small town in Texas near the border, I am living here with a friend for few months (originally I live in NYC), and Facebook is really the only place where I can find info about local restaurants and events. There is no delivery.com here and google maps often list places that were closed. I have never used really Facebook but I am finding myself now this being the only option to connect with locals online.

</comment><comment><USER26> It's too much low quality data. If you yourself agree that you neither contribute nor can find valuable data, do Facebook a favor and leave.

They probably have enough vacation and family reporting to not need anymore of that. They are interested in finding trends, so if you are trendy enough and use facebook for trending, feel free to try to take advantage of it and hope you wont _miss out_.

</comment><comment><USER27> For any ad on Facebook, you can click on it and see why you're seeing it. They are not listening into your conversations.

You can review your ad preferences, including what information is used for FB's ad targeting, here: [https://m.facebook.com/ads/preferences/](https://m.facebook.com/ads/preferences/)

</comment><comment><USER28> If you're experiencing withdrawal symptoms due to a lack of attention from people on the internet after deleting Facebook, you can just re-enable your account. There's no need to write yet another article about why you did it.

</comment><comment><USER29> I already did.

<comment><AUTHOR> So did I a couple of weeks ago. And I have to say: The world did not come to an end.

Since I muted most of my contacts posts and used it like a newsreader, I had to find a newsreader alternative. Feedly is a pretty good replacement so far. And I am thinking of reading a printed daily newspaper again. I feel like on a digital detox path. And I haven't finished my journey yet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> I think this is the beginning of the end for Facebook as we know it

<comment><USER31> Facebook as I knew it ended some time ago.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> _And as for staying up to date on my friends lives… well I just do it the old fashioned way. Talking to them._

We hear this bromide constantly from people in the #DeleteFacebook movement, but it's facile. It is because it assumes that a "friend" on FB and a friend IRL are equivalent but they're not, and intelligent people know this. There are people in your life that you either want or need to passively keep up with rather than actively socialise or reach.

I've been critical of Facebook's lack of privacy and other issues surrounding the company but I can't get too worked up about the danger of perpetuating passive/active friend distinctions because I think it exists outside of social media and is simply a reflection of the meatspace, and it's actually healthy to do.

</comment><comment><USER32> > And since we've been sipping the Facebook friend juice for so long, it's > legitimately scary to quit. How will you know what events are going on? How > will you know if something big happens in your friend's life? How will you > stay in touch with people?

> The simple answer is… all the ways we did for the last 100,000 years. > Talking to people. Being an active consumer of information and knowledge > about your friends' lives instead of letting it passively wash over you.

That's a nice sentiment and one I absolutely agree with, but there's a big problem with it - how do we _do_ this?

Before the Internet, the answer was obvious; talk to them. That's because friendships tended to be mostly local; you probably knew your friends' addresses and phone numbers.

When the Internet got popular, friendships were made on a global scale, and instant messaging became a thing. A lot of people grew up with AIM, Yahoo! Messenger, and MSN. It's important to note that these services weren't provided by companies whose soul reason for existing was to provide communication platforms. They were all secondary platforms provided by companies whose main business was elsewhere.

Now, all of these services are gone. In its place are apps like Twitter, WhatsApp, Instagram and Discord, which would be great, except that WhatsApp and Instagram are owned by the very company you're trying to escape from (Facebook) and Discord is a company whose soul product is their communication platform and thus have the mother of all motivations to make money from your data (even if they don't do that right now, thanks to unsustainable VC funding). Twitter is also a platform owned by a company which has the communication tool as its soul product, and to its credit hasn't made too much controversy in its long tenure, but even though it can be used for direct communication (and is used more for this purpose than Facebook), it's still primarily a "push" platform; for the most part, tweets come to you, as determined by algorithms.

Yes, there do still exist chat platforms provided by companies whose main product isn't their communication platforms: GTalk (or Hangouts) and Skype. Unfortunately these are both owned by companies who have been proven to behave in predatory fashions to their users: Google and Microsoft.

There are free and open-source programs that can be used. Jitsi allows instant messaging and video conferencing via XMPP, for example, Mastadon is a recent Twitter-like platform, and Signal allows for encrypted conversation. Each of these (and others) allow communication with users connected to other servers (and in most cases using other protocols), but even so the problem is that it's unlikely that your friends use programs that communicate over these protocols and are compatible. (The exception is GTalk, which uses XMPP.)

Then there are the numerous decentralised free/open-source methods. Mumble provides text-based and audio-based communication, numerous IRC servers provide text communication, etc. On a wide scale, the biggest issue with these are that you can't communicate with anybody unless they're connected to the same server as you. That might be desirable in the case where you have groups all interested in the same thing or otherwise tied by a common bond, but people can't be expected to join multiple servers just to keep in touch with their friends.

Of course, all of these _can_ be used as primary methods of communication, particularly among small groups of friends, and maybe this is actually what the article is arguing for.

I personally would _love_ if Mastadon became more popular, even though it's a "push"-style system like Twitter, because I think it has the best shot at doing so and it allows communication with potentially your entire circle of friends while simultaneously having differing servers with different policies. It's probably the closest thing to democratic messaging that we have.

<comment><USER32> I apologise for using 'soul' where I should have used 'sole' in this reply. I promise I know the difference but I was clearly tired when I wrote this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> tl;dr Guy who had researched Soylent got targeted by ads for one of their competitors, called Ample, and uses that as a basis as to why you should delete Facebook.

Really? My guess is that he wound up on a page with the FB pixel as a result of a Soylent search. Ample was likely running a Lookalike audience ad. It doesn't take any sort of deep knowledge, illegal/immoral data processing, or any other of the nefarious things he is implying to make that connection.

Let's remember that Ample didn't actually ever have this guy's data. An algorithm on Facebook's side said "this guy lives in San Franscisco, has lots of friends in startups, and has searched for articles related to Soylent before" and showed him an ad based on targeting parameters setup by Ample. This is all data that he voluntarily gave to Facebook. Unless he clicked on the ad and then voluntarily entered his personal information into the Ample's site, Ample does not and will never know anything about him, including whether or not he ever was shown their ad.

If you want to avoid this kind of thing, unfortunately deleting Facebook is just the beginning. You'll have to never search the internet (all sites that you click on from any search engine know what you were searching for when you click over), turn off all cookies (which means you can never log in, anywhere), and disable javascript. That doesn't even begin to address the elephant in the room: your ISP knows just about everything you do.

The genie is out of the bottle. Referrers are sent by browsers. The Internet works by first connecting to a network provider, which means they know everything you do. Even in the world of SSL everywhere, DNS queries provide a very telling map of your behavior. Almost all sites rely on cookies at least for login purposes, and those can be used to track your behavior. Just want to disable third party cookies? Go ahead. How long will it be until a service shows up for sites to band together and correlate their first party cookies with info about your IP and achieve the same mission?

So if you're worried enough about your privacy to delete Facebook, then it's hypocritical of you to be reading this message on the Internet at all. You should not be accessing the Internet if you do not want to be tracked.

<comment><USER33> You don't seem to consider the possibility of having control over that data -- knowing and editing who knows what about you.

I've been actively filtering any ad not coming from a network where I had a good knowledge and detailed access over my profile (Google and Facebook); filtering any cookie not justified by my direct usage, and it hasn't really hampered my usage. I can't read things on Forbes and Business Insider, but that's hardly a loss.

It doesn't mean my information doesn't get leaked, but it means that, starting next month (I'm in the EU) if I see an advertiser in my Spam box, or on [https://www.facebook.com/ads/preferences/](https://www.facebook.com/ads/preferences/) I will be able to ask how they got around our agreements and not be given evasive answers.

<comment><USER20> I think you're putting far too much faith in regulation of companies outside of the EU. It hasn't yet been tested whether or not a given entity (in the US for example) will be able to be fined by the EU and actually have it enforced. While it's theoretically possible, even then, there are ways to avoid the enforcement of any such judgment.

The GDPR experts I have spoken to have said that if we don't block EU traffic, as a US entity, we should simply have an LLC setup that actually owns each site we run, and have those LLCs pay 100% of their profits as a license fee to a different LLC for its content and domain. The LLC that technically operates the website can then be fined to death and the website will still exist with no actual lost revenue. There are even more effective shell games that can be played in other countries, and there many countries where no such games have to be played because they will simply not enforce EU judgments for fines under the GDPR.

At this point, we've just decided to block EU traffic entirely, but others will likely just proceed as normal and not worry about these heavy-handed regulations, knowing that it is unlikely that penalties can ever actually be enforced against them.

<comment><USER34> > and have those LLCs pay 100% of their profits as a license fee to a > different LLC for its content and domain.

I think courts have ways around it if it is that clear cut : )

> There are even more effective shell games that can be played in other > countries,

It seems even the Irish sandwich is failing now.

I'm no expert but my understanding is we have reason to be somewhat optimistic in this case.

<comment><USER20> _I think courts have ways around it if it is that clear cut : )_

You'd be amazed at how difficult it is to pierce the corporate veil in the most popular states for LLCs and corporations (Nevada, Delaware, etc.).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> None of this is new information, just another FB hit piece - likely paid.

I'm sick of people trashing facebook when they can only wish for the data collection ability of the NSA. Oh, and there's no opt out there.

<comment><USER33> Who do you suspect is paying for pieces like that? I don't really see a lot of upside from attacking Facebook.

<comment><USER20> There are many political action groups etc. that would like to see Facebook go down.

<comment><USER33> What are their actual objectives? I can't imagine taking Facebook down is the end game.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> No, you should not delete Facebook.

Not because it's not a good response to recent events, but because it's like fighting climate change with conserving energy at home; primarily a token gesture that will change little (mainly due to not enough people ever doing it).

If you actually feel strongly about this, do something about it. I have been setting up a Diaspora* pod for my friends (and exploring the similar [https://www.scuttlebutt.nz/](https://www.scuttlebutt.nz/)), have been trying to be active on Minds.com (social media is one place crypto may actually make sense, but the community is tiny and highly toxic as is), supporting the idea of a paid-model for FB, and generally thinking about this. Facebook is a powerful tool that is best used to do these more productive things to help create a viable alternative - leaving Facebook is not going to change anything.

I also own the domain name hnsocial.club , and have been wanting to try and setup a Diaspora/Scuttlebutt pod to try and get the HN community to embrace it so the network effects of a large community being on such a platform are felt. I don't have much time for this (I am a PhD student at Stanford), but if you think this might be a good idea get in touch to collaborate!

<comment><USER37> Not sure where your idea that fighting climate change by conserving energy at home is token gesture. In the UK 4,000 GWh/day are used for heating during winter, about half of that will be domestic and so moving to something like Passivhaus would be a big step forward in both domestic energy bill reduction and green house gas emissions. To put that 4,000 GWh/day in context the UK hovers around 1,000 GWh/day for electricity and 1,500 GWh/day for transportation.

<comment><USER36> It is a token gesture because there is little chance of it being done by enough people to make a difference. I base this off the documentary Before the Flood, in which DiCaprio says that in the early 2000s the big tactic was to promote home energy conservation but it amounts to very little and it has been realized that other more involved strategies are needed. This is stated explicitly early on, and it seems very plausible to me

<comment><USER37> I prefer the approach promoted by David Mackay: a combined strategy of energy use reductions in all sectors combined with diverse renewables and nuclear power sources.

I agree that silly measures like turning off electrical items in stand by mode is like trying to loose weight by trimmeng your toe nails (you are technically lighter but not in anyway that matters) but to say the domestic energy reductions is pointless is a cop out to make people feel better about not trying.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> This obsession with Facebook is getting really annoying.

When I lived in the States 15 years ago Publix (and I guess other stores, or maybe my bank) already sold a list of everything I bought with my debit card to advertising agencies, along with my full name and home address. I would get ads to my house, tailored to what I had bought a few days before, I'd say at least once a week.

There are also hundreds of other companies that sell data besides Facebook.

No one is talking about the companies that _buy_ the data, either. Can't the case be made that that's unethical too, and if they didn't happily buy the data Facebook would have to find another way to make money?

My point us that it's all good to spread the word about questionable practices employed by companies that people use, but do we have to exclusively focus on Facebook forever, like it's the source of all evil and everyone else is a saint, or can we talk about someone else for a change..? Even in this article other companies are mentioned barely to prove the author's point against Facebook.

<comment><USER39> If a million people are upset with the practices of a million companies, each company loses a customer and nothing changes. If the million people concentrate on a single company, that company notices. And when the next company tries the same shenanigans, they can be reminded about what happened to the first once. That's a bigger when for society than spreading out the protests.

<comment><USER38> If we're talking about efficience, I would argue that concentrating on letting governments know would be even better. Facebook knows that regular users have no idea about privacy and it would take years to lose a big enough portion of users to even matter.

<comment><USER39> Sure, but nothing gets governmental attention like a million angry users being featured on the news.

<comment><USER38> I see, you're probably right.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Skype Founder: 'No Reason a Company Like Ours Couldn't Come Out of Berlin' - <AUTHOR> http://www.spiegel.de/international/business/0,1518,798240,00.html <comment><AUTHOR> Being a German resident (living in Hamburg) I like to give some viewpoints on the German Startup-Scene</comment>


US Attorney General Holder: We Won't Torture or Kill Snowden - <AUTHOR> http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/closeread/2013/07/holder-we-wont-torture-or-kill-snowden.html

<comment><USER2> If the general attorney has to step up to the podium and assure an American public that a whistleblower won't be killed or tortured you've got a country in dire straits.

Especially since it seems that not all Americans believe him.

<comment><USER3> His statement said nothing about using "enhanced interrogation methods" against Snowden.

By their own legal definition, the US government "tortures" no one. Water boarding, sensory deprivation, psychological torture, stress positions and starvation are not considered torture by the administration.

<comment><USER4> Utter bs... Obama and Holder have stated repeatedly that "enhanced interrogation" IS torture.

On January 22, 2009 President Obama signed an executive order requiring the CIA to use only the 19 interrogation methods outlined in the United States Army Field Manual on interrogations. [http://www.whitehouse.gov/the_press_office/EnsuringLawfulInt...](http://www.whitehouse.gov/the_press_office/EnsuringLawfulInterrogations/)

<comment><USER3> Check out the UN investigation into the treatment of Bradley Manning. [http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/mar/12/bradley- manning-...](http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/mar/12/bradley-manning- cruel-inhuman-treatment-un)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Considering that the US Government no longer considers things like waterboarding and sleep depravation to be torture, I take little comfort in Holder's statements.

<comment><USER6> Untrue. One of the first acts of the current administration was to ban waterboarding and other interrogation methods that are widely considered to be torture: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waterboarding#Obama_administra...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waterboarding#Obama_administration)

The historical revisionism in this thread is nonsensical, I think you all know perfectly well that there's a sharp partisan divide on this issue.

<comment><USER7> Is there? [http://www.salon.com/2007/12/09/democrats_9/](http://www.salon.com/2007/12/09/democrats_9/)

And solitary confinement is still fine, apparently. If people were waterboarded again, would anyone be punished? Maybe the private contractor doing it would be fined a portion of their annual profits. Maybe someone might step down -- down right into a private industry position or speaking tour. Seemingly every year since 2007 up to 2012, more and more people were pardoned for torturing. What's different in 2013?

<comment><USER8> > If people were waterboarded again, would anyone be punished?

Yes -- the whistleblower who said people were being waterboarded.

<comment><USER9> Untrue, the US executed the Japanese who tortured US servicemen with water boarding in WWII. Just make sure you're certain what side you're on before doing it, and you'll be fine. [http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waterboarding](http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waterboarding)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> It would be really nice to know how they legally interpret "torture" and "kill" since so many other common English words often mean completely different things to the U.S. Government.

<comment><USER4> [http://www.whitehouse.gov/the_press_office/EnsuringLawfulInt...](http://www.whitehouse.gov/the_press_office/EnsuringLawfulInterrogations/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Snowden is charged [1] with:

      * 18 USC 641 - Theft of government property
      * 18 USC 793(d) - Unauthorized communication of national defense information
      * 18 USC 798(a)(3) - Willful communication of classified communications intelligence information to an unauthorized person

None carry the death penalty. All carry a prison sentence of "not more than ten years."

[1] [http://apps.washingtonpost.com/g/documents/world/us-vs- edwar...](http://apps.washingtonpost.com/g/documents/world/us-vs-edward-j- snowden-criminal-complaint/496/)

[EDIT formatting]

<comment><USER12> Of course, we're talking about a government that is in this predicament precisely because they just ignore the law when convenient.

<comment><USER13> > Of course, we're talking about a government that is in this predicament > precisely because they just ignore the law when convenient.

No. The NSA surveillance is, at least putatively, permitted by the current laws in the US. You can argue about the appropriateness of the laws, even their constitutionality, but the NSA (and larger federal government) is almost certainly not ignoring the law in this case.

<comment><USER14> Actually, they kind of are.

There are no _cases_ directly on point, and they are arguing by analogy to existing cases where it was held retrieving small amounts of phone data about one or two individuals did not violate a reasonable expectation of privacy, and thus, not a search

This is not the same as "what they are doing is permitted by the current laws of the united states".

I'm aware folks like Orin Kerr think this doesn't make a doctrinal difference: [http://www.volokh.com/2013/07/17/metadata-the-nsa-and-the- fo...](http://www.volokh.com/2013/07/17/metadata-the-nsa-and-the-fourth- amendment-a-constitutional-analysis-of-collecting-and-querying-call-records- databases/)

The thing is, he's an academic (prior to his current job, his job at the DOJ CCIP division was being an expert in those notices you see when you access government computer systems). He likes to think in academic terms about whether things should matter. For example, he also believed the "mosaic theory" was a bunch of bullshit and would be struck down by every level right up until the supreme court fully endorsed it (see, e.g, [http://www.volokh.com/2010/08/06/d-c-circuit-introduces- mosa...](http://www.volokh.com/2010/08/06/d-c-circuit-introduces-mosaic- theory-of-fourth-amendment-holds-gps-monitoring-a-fourth-amendment-search/) and other posts)

So while i certainly trust his view of "the state of the caselaw as it currently exists", i take his view of "what a court is likely to decide" with a huge grain of salt. On that front, IMHO, he's been wrong more than he's been right.

For example, when he says "If obtaining pen register information on one user is not a search, the obtaining that pen register information for 100 or 10,000 or 1,000,000 or more users is still not a search. Katz tells us that the Fourth Amendment protects "people, not places," and it's not clear how surveillance that is not a search when provides information about one person can become a search when it provides information about many."

This tells you everything you need to know. It is a typical ivory tower viewpoint. He doesn't see how a judge is going to decide that there is some line that has been crossed when you do something to a million people instead of 1. As the saying goes, "bad facts make bad law". If everything was doctrinal and academic, bad facts wouldn't matter.

FWIW: The FISA authorization is completely and totally irrelevant in this case. Entirely. The fact that the FISA court said "sure, whatever" does not make something _legal_ , only _authorized_ , because they are not ruling on a constitutional challenge, only the validity of a search warrant. These are not the same, no matter how much the government wants it to be.

This is the same as a valid search warrant that later turns out to have been facially invalid; It is not a legal search warrant that has "gone bad". It is illegal. It was authorized, but illegal.

<comment><USER15> _So while i certainly trust his view of "the state of the caselaw as it currently exists", i take his view of "what a court is likely to decide" with a huge grain of salt. On that front, IMHO, he's been wrong more than he's been right._

As a minor defense of Kerr, I think he does do some good descriptive/realist analysis of how courts are likely to actually decide as well, as in his "equilibrium-adjustment theory of the 4th amendment": [http://www.harvardlawreview.org/media/pdf/vol125_kerr.pdf](http://www.harvardlawreview.org/media/pdf/vol125_kerr.pdf)

I think there's a good argument that equilibrium-adjustment could actually explain courts' desire to make the rare/pervasive distinction here that Kerr elsewhere claims doctrinally shouldn't work.

<comment><USER15> Responding to myself, in case anyone runs across this. Kerr briefly acknowledges this point in his article against the mosaic theory:

 _The mosaic approach is animated by legitimate concerns: it aims to maintain the balance of Fourth Amendment protection as technology changes, a method I have elsewhere called "equilibrium-adjustment." But it aims to achieve this reasonable goal in a peculiar way. By rejecting the building block of the sequential approach, the mosaic theory would be very difficult to administer coherently. Even if courts could develop answers to the many questions the theory raises, doing so would take many years—by which time the technologies regulated by the theory would become obsolete. The mosaic theory would also deter enactment of statutory privacy regulations and force judges to consider questions that they are poorly equipped to answer. If courts must broaden Fourth Amendment rules in response to new technologies, the better approach is to rule that certain steps are always searches. The model should be the Supreme Court's famous decision in _Katz v. United States _, not the concurring opinions in_ Jones _._

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Unfortunately, there is basically no trust left in the US Government. They've used it all up. Why would Snowden believe proven-to-be pathological liars?

The US Government will put you in solitary confinement for years and waterboard you and it's not considered 'torture.'

</comment><comment><USER12> Holder pretty much _has_ to say this (because seriously, what is he going to say? "Go ahead and give him asylum, we'd just torture and execute him if we got him back."), but it's abundantly clear what the US Govt thinks of Snowden and his Constitutional rights (which, mind you, supersede any other part of the USC) [1][2].

This is an administration that has killed US citizens without due process, tortured prisoners, and deeply extended the grasp of the police state. We're supposed to trust that they'll just be nice guys and do the right and legal thing now?

[1] [http://www.tubechop.com/watch/1318893](http://www.tubechop.com/watch/1318893)

[2] [http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130714/00393923792/white-...](http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130714/00393923792/white- house-believes-ed-snowden-shouldnt-have-any-free-speech-rights-attacks-russia- letting-him-speak.shtml)

</comment><comment><USER17> Golly, how magnanimous of you, it is almost as if you are a human.

<comment><USER18> No, but he plays one on TV.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Did anyone check to see if he had his fingers crossed behind his back when he said it?

</comment><comment> cupcake-unicorn Don't they realize how weird it is for them to have to be spelling it out like this? There's a bigger problem when it's just assumed by everyone the government is going to do this...

<comment><USER19> It's not that weird, since they are known to torture whistleblowers.

<comment> cupcake-unicorn Well, that's what makes it so weird, honestly. By making the statement, they're in a way admitting that yes, that's what they're known for, otherwise it wouldn't have to be clarified.

You'd think that if they could keep Prism under wraps for so long, that they'd have resources to cover up the torturing stuff!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> >Wyden then asked Director Clapper, "Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?" He responded, "No, sir." Wyden asked "It does not?" and Clapper said "Not wittingly. There are cases where they could inadvertantly perhaps collect, but not wittingly."

>On July 1, 2013, Clapper issued an apology, saying that "My response was clearly erroneous – for which I apologize."

<comment><USER21> A contemptible apology. "Erroneous" strongly implies a mistake, and thereby adds another lie to the lie he's "apologizing" for.

<comment><USER22> What else was Clapper supposed to say to Wyden's question? If he answered truthfully, he'd illegally reveal classified information. If he said that he could not answer without revealing classified information, he'd effectively reveal classified information. Wyden knew all this and asked the question anyway, most likely to try to get Clapper to reveal classified information.

<comment><USER21> You're saying he was justified in lying. I disagree, but let's leave that aside.

He could have said "I lied, but I had to for national security reasons. I don't apologize. The question was inappropriate and Wyden should apologize for asking."

He could have said "I lied, and I shouldn't have. I apologize." (A resignation would be nice.)

But he's quoted as saying "My response was clearly erroneous – for which I apologize."

To me, this sounds like "I thought I was telling the truth but later learned that my statements were incorrect. I apologize."

Which is itself either 1) an admission of incompetence or 2) an additional lie. #2 is much more likely.

Do you see why I called this "apology" contemptible?

<comment><USER23> I presume he could also have refused to answer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> BBC version of the news available here: [http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world- europe-23468459](http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-23468459).

Link to actual letter: [http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/shared/bsp/hi/pdfs/26_07_13_attorney...](http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/shared/bsp/hi/pdfs/26_07_13_attorney_general_letter_to_russian_justice_minister.pdf)

Edit: fixed typo

</comment><comment><USER7> Just like how Bradley Manning was treated totally legally and torture-free [http://www.emptywheel.net/2013/07/26/eric-holder-well- maybe-...](http://www.emptywheel.net/2013/07/26/eric-holder-well-maybe-just-a- little-forced-nudity-and-solitary-confinement/)

</comment><comment><USER25> I wonder if this constitutes the administration's promised response to the Snowden pardon petition[1]

[1]: [https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/pardon-edward- snow...](https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/pardon-edward- snowden/Dp03vGYD)

</comment><comment><USER26> What a ridiculous statement for a government official to make in a country that has sentences determined by a democratic court system.

How can Holder know what the punishment will be on top of what the jury will decide?

<comment><USER27> Because there is a cap on what punishments are allowed, whether the jury likes it or not?

All Holder has to do is prevent his US Attorney from issuing charges where death penalty is an option and that part is dealt with. Torture is also not permissible _anyways_ so it's kind of redundant having to mention it. If the police do torture Snowden at least one of the many judged in the district+appellant review chain will throw the case out completely and he's a free man (for example, see Ellsberg who had his charges thrown out for much much less than torture).

<comment><USER26> I was referring to the death penalty when I made the parent comment. Not the possibility of him being tortured.

Is treason not a crime punishable by death in the United States?

According to this link, it is: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treason#United_States](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treason#United_States)

<comment><USER27> Unfortunately for that argument, treason carries a very specific, Constitutionally-set, definition. It is the only crime with such a definition, and Snowden is not likely to ever be convicted of it for that reason.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Even if we believed him, it doesn't matter. Sending him to prison forever is still unacceptable. Ask me again when you're ready to give him a full pardon.

</comment><comment><USER29> " He could even get a lawyer. "

<comment><USER30> To be fair, that was a quote from the guy who wrote the commentary, not from Holder.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> This is the face of Fascism in America.

</comment><comment><USER32> Of course he won't. He will be tortured at Gitmo.</comment>


Ask HN: Who needs part-time help? (September 2018) - <AUTHOR> Please state:
- duration of help needed (eg. 4 months) - hours range per week (eg. 10 - 20) - language (eg. Node.js or Golang) - level of experience desired (eg. 2 - 5 yrs, or 7+) <comment><USER2> I really appreciate this thread and I think this should be one of the monthly posts by /user?id=whoishiring .

However, if the poster is really looking for part-time jobs, my advice is to answer in one of whoishiring's post.

<comment><USER3> I agree with you. I'd like it to be part of the monthly posts.

<comment><USER2> Do you have any idea on how to make the mods notice this post ?

<comment><USER4> You can email them using the Contact link in the footer. In the past they've frowned on posts attempting to mimic the official posts.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


How my little hacker dream get started - <AUTHOR> http://www.kahfei.com/?p=242 little story of how I came across Paul Graham's essay, hackerdom, and trying to transform myself to a developer. <comment><USER2> Unless you're internet famous, you have to tell me what "this" is in the title or I'm not going to look.

<comment><AUTHOR> hey, you are absolutely right. I have revised the title, hopefully it is more meaning full now.

<comment><USER2> And now I looked. ;-)

"You do something so clever that you somehow beat the system, that's called a hack"

"After completing the test project, although the employer commending on the effort I put on, he couldn't take me as he is looking for a permanent fulltime remote employee, not a part-timer. And he doesn't have the budget to match my current fulltime salary.

"I tell him frankly I might not have a lot of real world rails experience, but I really like web development and would love to have the opportunity to work on the project. So we discussed about the possibility of a part time arrangement on hourly rate. We come to a rate that is much lower than if I were to divide my fulltime salary by the hour. But heck, I am starting out and just glad to get my first freelance rails gig.

"So far I have been in it for about 2 months, I work on the project by waking up early at 4 or 5 a.m. before going to work on weekday, then a total of 8-10 hours on weekend."

You hacked your freelance gig.

Congratualations on opening your eyes to something bigger. Thanks, and good luck.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for looking ;-) and the wishes, I need that.

This is really nothing to shout about compare to people pulling out weekend projects, selling off apps for millions, or coding something really cool at much much younger age. I am just starting out, hopefully there are bigger things down the road :-)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Beyond Peace and Quiet – An Addiction to Silence (2008) - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2008/nov/08/sara-maitland-silence-addiction <comment><USER2> I loved the article. On interesting point: "For the first few days I wallowed in freedom: no phone calls, no emails, no neighbours."

Maybe she is talking about email notifications, because most email are text, so silence. But if you stop to think, when you read email, your brain can process this as an audible memory, so noise. Much like you read some author famous quote, and you can "hear" in your mind his voice. :)

</comment><comment><USER3> Very interesting!

"This is an edited extract from A Book Of Silence, by Sara Maitland, published by Granta on November 13 at £17.99. To order a copy for £16.99, including UK mainland p&p, go to theguardian.com/bookshop or call 0870 836 0875."

[https://www.amazon.co.uk/Book-Silence-Sara- Maitland/dp/18470...](https://www.amazon.co.uk/Book-Silence-Sara- Maitland/dp/1847081517)

[https://www.amazon.com/Book-Silence-Sara- Maitland/dp/1582436...](https://www.amazon.com/Book-Silence-Sara- Maitland/dp/1582436134)

</comment><comment><USER4> I've tried earplugs, IEMs and noise cancelling headphones(Bose) and I wonder if theres something better out there.

I wish there's some sort of an procedure/implant that I could go through so that I could have a mute button for my ears. When it is switched on, it will 'deactivate' my eardrums so that I could become deaf temporarily.

<comment><USER5> White noise generators (aka static), there's e.g. an open source android app ("chroma doze" \- named for adjustable freq distr by colour bars), or a fan works too.

I need quiet to concentrate, but curiously find the background conversation of a busy cafe just as good as absolute silence - and _far_ better than people whispering, or eating apples, crisps or celery in an otherwise quiet area... Celery

<comment><USER6> I've wondered if I'm unusual in finding white noise mentally exhausting.

<comment><USER7> You are not alone. For me, it activates my tinnitus if the source is close enough to my ears. Even before it started doing that, it was just plain annoying.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I must admit that I am addicted to silence myself, sometimes. I deliberetly put earplugs into my ears in order to focus more whenever I got hard work to do or just am tired and overwhelmed.

<comment><USER8> BTW, if it is indeed true that one prefers a modality of senses in order to experience the world, then that sense becoming more fatigued than the others would make perfect sense...

also [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isolation_tank](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isolation_tank)</comment></comment>


Traffic from Y Combinator - <AUTHOR> http://bluntobject.wordpress.com/2008/01/22/traffic/ <comment><USER2> How much traffic does news.yc have, anyways?

<comment><USER3> I think it's 7K daily in the meantime.</comment></comment>


Hidden Features of Java - <AUTHOR> http://stackoverflow.com/questions/15496/hidden-features-of-java <comment><USER2> Java.util.concurrent is one of the most attractive features of java for server programming. ConcurrentHashMap is faster, cleaner and much easier to use than locking every time you need a access a shared HashMap. Not only that but it doesn't lock the entire hash, just a partition of what ever you will be accessing.

Also AtomicInt,Float,Long make life easier when dealing with threaded programs.

<comment><USER3> Don't forget ExecutorService and the whole concept of sending chunks of work back and forth across synchronizing queues. Best way to write concurrent code in any language IMO, analogous to go's channels/goroutines and erlang's whatever they're called.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> >closed as not constructive by Robert Harvey♦ Oct 5 '11 at 5:49

>This question is not a good fit to our Q&A format. We expect answers to generally involve facts, references, or specific expertise; this question will likely solicit opinion, debate, arguments, polling, or extended discussion.

I appreciate StackOverflow's active moderators, but this question was actually pretty interesting. What harm would it do to let the question open?

<comment><USER5> As a pure matter of observation, StackOverflow seems just as deletionist as Wikipedia, except they actually keep stuff up sometimes. It's interesting to ponder why these sites develop deletionist culture.

<comment><USER6> I suspect it has to do with the kinds of status competition/display that are possible in the online area, the personality types that thrive under such a constrained domain, and the side-effects of necessary policing/self-defense.

There are some similarities to the observations about leadership in realspace organizations made by (sci-fi author Jerry) Pournelle's 'Iron Law of Bureaucracy' and (sociologist Robert) Michels' 'Iron Law of Oligarchy'.

One of the clearest ways to demonstrate 'authority' in an online site is to say and enforce a 'No', so No's may be oversupplied.

At some point it starts to resemble an auto-immune disorder, a mis-calibrated system attacking itself.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> <http://monocaffe.blogspot.com/2011/10/javas-ghost-jvms.html>

"how does tools like JPS, JConsole or VisualVM know the JVMs running in a system? They simply look in the folder /tmp/hsperfdata_foo where a 32KB data file with the PID as name is created for each JVM."

Not a hidden feature of Java, but of Sun's (Oracle) JVM which I'm not sure if happens in other JVMs but it's kind of useful for doing different stuff.

</comment><comment><USER8> The example in the linked ThreadLocal documentation appears to have a mistake.

In getCurrentThreadId it should read

return uniqueNum.get();

not

return uniqueId.get();

</comment><comment><USER9> My preferred initialization for lists of strings (shorter than the anon class + instance init e.g.)

      List<String> fruits = Arrays.asList("apple,orange,pear".split(","));

<comment><USER10> Why not

      Arrays.asList("apple", "orange", "pear")

<comment><USER11> I personally prefer Guava's immutable collections:

        List<String> fruits = ImmutableList.of("apple", "orange", "pear");

It also works for sets and maps:

        Set<String> fruits = ImmutableSet.of("apple", "orange", "pear");
        Map<String, Integer> fruitCounts = ImmutableMap.of("apple", 3, "orange", 2, "pear", 6);

[http://code.google.com/p/guava- libraries/wiki/ImmutableColle...](http://code.google.com/p/guava- libraries/wiki/ImmutableCollectionsExplained)</comment></comment></comment>


The 5 causes of failure as an entrepreneur - <AUTHOR> https://www.swabbl.com/en/business-news/the-5-causes-of-failure-as-an-entrepreneur/ <comment><USER2> great and real, thanks :)</comment>


Logo on Steroids - The new video game Kodu - <AUTHOR> http://www.slate.com/id/2222546/

<comment><USER2> Looks neat but this definitely has very little to do with logo. Logo was basically a kid friendly interface sitting on top of a very Lisp like language, this is much more like @dustmop says, Game Maker or Klik & Play.

<comment><USER3> The point is not that it is a successor to Logo, but that it attempts to reach the same goals as Logo. In playing with it on the Xbox, the programming seems more like Scratch than Logo.

On a side note, does anyone have a link to the PC version? The Kodu site states that it runs on Xbox or PC, but I can only find the Xbox version.

<comment><USER4> According to wikipedia the current release is xbox only.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Here's a slightly lengthier walkthrough that shows a Frogger-type game being created:

<http://vimeo.com/2443941>

</comment><comment><USER6> Sort of reminds me of Apple's Cocoa (no, not the Objective-C toolkit). It allowed you to create games by demonstrating what you wanted to happen in certain situations; it came with an icon editor for graphics, basic variable support, and triggers for keyboard presses or when certain conditions were met - it was a pretty neat system to play around with.

<http://homepage.mac.com/senorwences/Cocoa_Projects.html>

</comment><comment><USER7> After watching this video: [http://xbox360.ign.com/dor/objects/14310459/kodu/videos/ces2...](http://xbox360.ign.com/dor/objects/14310459/kodu/videos/ces2009sync_kodu_dem_010909.html) it looks to me not like Logo, but like all the existing Windows game creators - Game Maker, Klik & Play, Multimedia Fusion - but with a nicer UI and easy 3d. Seems neat, looking forward to me.

</comment><comment><USER4> I'm impressed. Just went and bought it on my xbox, (400 points so about $5). Built a world or two, it took a bit of practice getting the controls down but then it was pretty fun. Some options are hidden in what I would consider weird places but I'm excited to take it and show the game to my younger siblings, I think they could really get into it.

</comment><comment><USER8> Borland tried something similar, awhile back. It was called ObjectVision, and was before its time. It was not game oriented, more generic. You placed a graphical object in the window and then programmed its behaviors...

I got 2 months into a point of sale system until I ran into too many rough edges.

</comment><comment><USER9> Next time, please submit the single-page version: <http://www.slate.com/id/2222546/pagenum/all/>

<comment><USER10> I did but no one voted

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=697806>

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> This looks like an evolutionary relative of Charles Simonyi's intentional programming efforts.</comment>


Show HN: Profile your typing – touch typing analytics - <AUTHOR> https://sfount.com

<comment><USER2> look really clean! I've been using 10fastfingers but always wondered about where the "instant result" and this makes it easy to see it as I go

suggestion:

\- if the title of the passage could be displayed in the result page it'd be cool too, sometimes I can't look at the title of the passage while typing.

\- turns out I mess up up typing a lot, would you consider allowing use of "ctrl + a" to select entire word for faster deleting of the text?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! I hope that it can find a balance between instant feedback and useful information and statistics over time.

I'll look at adding the title now; would it be useful to have the option to see the entire passage after completion?

Thanks for the feedback!

<comment><USER2> having the option to see the entire passage and its source after completion would be awesome!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Always looking for a tool to do this, your solution looks really elegant and handy - love the report page.

What do you plan to do with the "recommendations" feature?</comment>


Ask HN: Whats the best way to learn C++ for Deep learning? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> I'm not sure how C++ for DL is different from regular C++ so take my advice with a grain of salt.

I took a class under Bjarne Stroustrup and he highly recommended Tour of C++ [0] as the best way to learn modern C++ for someone who already has some programming experience. That and of course, Effective C++[1] by Scott Meyers.

[0] - [https://www.amazon.com/Tour-C- Depth/dp/0321958314](https://www.amazon.com/Tour-C-Depth/dp/0321958314)

[1] - [https://www.amazon.com/Effective-Specific-Improve- Programs-D...](https://www.amazon.com/Effective-Specific-Improve-Programs- Designs/dp/0321334876)

<comment><USER3> I'd agree with the shout out for Tour of C++ as a good first book. Unlike most C++ intros, it's concise (192 pages) and up-to-date enough to exemplify C++'s standard forms (esp. 98 and 03). If you plan to develop in C++ you'll want other books with more examples and reference, but these will shift the focus more onto trees than forest (at ~1000 ppg).

Accelerated C++ by Koenig and Moo is another nice short overview of C++, but assumes more familiarity with C and OOP principles.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I think python is generally used for AI and data science stuff, so you'd probably be better off learning that.

That said, I think one of the best ways to learn how to do something is dive right into it. I'm currently in the process of writing a deep learning library in C: [https://github.com/siekmanj/sieknet](https://github.com/siekmanj/sieknet)

So if you're dead set on C++, I'd say the best way is to try to build something cool right off the bat.

<comment><USER5> I just checked out your github repo and you've got a really cool project going there. What made you decide to start writing it?

<comment><USER4> Thanks! Mostly it was out of a desire to learn more about the actual algorithms behind AI, and trying to figure out if it's a field I might enjoy working in. I really enjoy building things from the ground up, and understanding how each part works.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> What is your reason for learning "C++ for deep learning"?

This will kind of define _how_ to go about doing it.

I can think of a few different reasons you might want to do this:

* You DL code in another framework is slow, and you have some custom C++ you want to write to speed it up. For this, you probably want to learn both high performance C++ and/or CUDA kernel development. You can probably avoid diving completely into C++, and just call a couple of optimized routines from python (and whatever other deep learning framework you are using in python). In this case, it might be worth looking into Tensor Comprehensions.

* You are taking someone elses DL algorithm and moving it to C++. In this case, you still don't need to be diving too much into C++, Ideally, you probably want to use something like ONNX and Caffe, and then call into them with some python wrapper. If you want the whole thing to be in C++, then you are still going to use something like ONNX and Caffe, but you will be writing mostly application code to support it.

* You want to help with the development of Pytorch, Tensorflow, Caffe or anther deep learning framework. In this case, you need to know CUDA kernel development, performant C++ idioms, and good C++ application development idioms.

These are pretty different flavors of C++, which makes it hard to give you a good answer.

<comment><USER7> I'm very much into the last point, do you have more detailed resources/suggestions?

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> You can look at examples from DyNet ([https://dynet.readthedocs.io/en/latest/cpp_basic_tutorial.ht...](https://dynet.readthedocs.io/en/latest/cpp_basic_tutorial.html)) or the C++ Pytorch bindings ([https://pytorch.org/cppdocs/](https://pytorch.org/cppdocs/)). I would strongly recommend python though, as most deep learning work is done with it.

<comment><USER9> Seconding this. Keep in mind you're not in a "normal" C environment when dealing with GPUs. It's a profoundly negative experience dealing with chip manufacturers (Nvidia) that push proprietary hardware and actively thwart your efforts at producing stable and correct code. It made me realize why Linus had such animosity towards them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> With 1.0, PyTorch now has an official legit C++ frontend: [https://pytorch.org/cppdocs/frontend.html](https://pytorch.org/cppdocs/frontend.html)

PyTorch was apparently used in ~43% of the ICLR papers (a big prestigious deep learning conference) ([https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/9kys38/r_f...](https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/9kys38/r_frameworks_mentioned_iclr_20182019_tensorflow/)) and it's market share is growing at an incredible pace. I would expect it to beat Tensorflow in popularity at least for research very soon.

That's definitely where I would start if I absolutely had to do deep learning in C++. Otherwise I would do Python, which is likely used by 95% + of the research field.

</comment><comment><USER11> Just like if you were going to learn Python for Deep Learning, you're going to need 3 things:

1\. Understanding of Deep Learning

2\. General familiarity with the language

3\. Understanding of packages/tools that will help you accomplish your goals. If this were python we'd be talking Numpy/TensorFlow/PyTorch/Keras/etc.

We're talking C++, I'm guessing you'll want to work with less abstraction than TF and the like, so BLAS, LAPACK, and maybe the whole CUDA family (CUDA, cuBLAS, cuDNN, etc).

Otherwise, TensorFlow, Caffe, CNTK, and other popular deep learning frameworks are available for C++, even though they might be better known and more heavily used in other languages.

</comment><comment><USER12> If you look into deep learning, I think you'll quickly learn that the programming language doesn't matter that much. I think a great place to start would be the "Two Minute Papers"[1] Youtube channel. A lot of what he presents there is deep learning material, with links to the actual papers and often the source code as well as a plain English explanation of what's going on and why it's important. After looking at the source code of a handful, I think you'll realize that focusing on learning a single language won't be of any use.

I think it's also important to point out that it's not a great way to ask for help without giving some details about your background and your motives. If you've been programming in any language for quite a while, you'll need a completely different approach to "learning C++ for deep learning" than someone who's never programmed before. Likewise, if your goal is to work in the industry producing cutting edge work, you'll take a completely different approach than someone who just wants a rough understanding of the details just to satisfy your curiosity. So, without providing that context, you're going to get answers that are all over the place, almost all of which will be useless to you.

[https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCbfYPyITQ-7l4upoX8nvctg](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCbfYPyITQ-7l4upoX8nvctg)

</comment><comment><USER13> Might be 3 different skills here:

1) learn c++ 2) learn deep learning 3) learn c++ with deep learning: much easier once you have done 1) and 2)

<comment><AUTHOR> I am familiar with Python and learned deep learning that way. Now would like to learn C++...

<comment><USER14> C++ is IMO a bit at the deep end of the pool. I would begin with tutorial information (Meyers and Stroustrup) and work with that. At some point you will get tired of tutorial exercises and start to see how you can use C++ for the topic of DL. I can't comment on Peters as I am not familiar with that.

Hmmm... It seems not possible to search for "The C++ programming language" on amazon. As fast as I type '++' Amazon deletes the characters. >:( Luckily a search for "The C Programming language" also lists the 4th edition of Stroustrups book. ... And after searching via Google, the Amazon page now works. Weird!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> If you are looking for a computational graph toolkit that is based on clean C++ go for Dynet.

It is very complete. Similar to pytorch (which borrowed some ideas from Dynet) and backed up by top academia (not big tech, hence its lower profile). It has a python wrapper as well, as everything nowadays.

If you are into deep learning for sequence to sequence (machine translation) Marian is also C++ centered. Fastest MT around. Complete (transformer and the like), extendable. Not that reading friendly from what I have heard.

Disclaimer: Python type of guy here.

</comment><comment><USER16> Plenty of examples with CNTK [https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/cognitive- toolkit/cntk-libr...](https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/cognitive-toolkit/cntk- library-api)

Also Nvidia have a course [https://courses.nvidia.com/courses/course-v1:DLI+C-AC-01+V1/...](https://courses.nvidia.com/courses/course-v1:DLI+C-AC-01+V1/about)

But I am also curious why... this is deep-end stuff if you'll forgive the pun. Why not start with Keras and only dip into the C++ if you need to?

</comment><comment><USER17> DL libraries are pretty complex and sparsely documented which can make for a painful learning experience, even if you already know C++. Maybe go and learn some graphics programming with C++. You'll encounter plenty of matrix manipulation, shaders, OpenGL and the like, and there are plenty of really good learning resources and the immediate visual feedback makes for a compelling experience. Then you can return to DL and understand where things are coming from.

Make sure you learn how to use a debugger. You'll need it.

</comment><comment><USER18> Besides the already-mentioned pytorch and tensorflow bindings, [http://dlib.net/](http://dlib.net/) is an option if C++ is really a hard requirement. It is opinionated and incomplete, basically being a one-man-show, but it has some weird-but-cool ideas like each neural network topology having its own template type.

</comment><comment><USER19> I guess for me, having been using c++ as my preferred language for 25 years I just now read api's. When new C++ features are added I get to know then by practicing using them in small programs then into production code.

Stroustrup and Meyers are the two most well known names. I buy all their books and I read them and practice all exercises and problems if the book has them.

</comment><comment><USER20> Since half the people are ignoring the question and chipping in their own language recommendations. I will join the bandwagon.

Use Java and enjoy C++ like syntax with 80% equivalent performance (based on my experience)

Then try this library - [https://deeplearning4j.org/](https://deeplearning4j.org/)

<comment><USER21> Yes, DL4J is a very nice DL framework. I definitely second the recommendation to give it a shot.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Or C++ for general software development purposes...

</comment><comment><USER22> Deep lesson: learn C#. decrement.</comment>


Contact Tracing Can Foil Covid-19 and Big Brother - <AUTHOR> https://ncase.me/contact-tracing/?v=2&fbclid=IwAR3eTwVIrz91YNcsditiKR6fgKTbGfcYfWezi423vCF3A7OVrzXFSxd2C5c <comment><USER2> Perhaps they should write a proper protocol specification, so that different implementations are interoperable and can be used with different kind of devices.

<comment><USER3> Indeed, TFA appears to link to one or more protocol specifications [0],[1]. However, it is not clear if these are proper/true Scotsman protocol specifications.

[0] [https://github.com/DP-3T/documents](https://github.com/DP-3T/documents)

[1] [https://github.com/TCNCoalition/TCN](https://github.com/TCNCoalition/TCN)</comment></comment>


Response to "Unexpected mutations after CRISPR-Cas9 editing in vivo" - <AUTHOR> http://www.biorxiv.org/content/early/2017/07/05/159707 <comment><USER2> All begins with this comment [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/28557981/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/28557981/)

<comment><USER3> I love that. Xiaolin Wu is really going in on them. More science needs to be like that.

<comment><USER4> In most labs there are journal clubs that function as this, but a lot of the discussion stays within the institute.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> They did whole-genome sequencing for mice treated with CRISPR-Cas9 and compared it to a _different_ mouse to see if any mutations were caused?

Why didn't they just take samples from the mouse before and after?

<comment><USER6> Some of my colleagues speculated that this was not the intended study. Originally, they might have tried to delete a gene, but the expected phenotype didn't show up, which would have put an end to that line of research. But instead of completely abandoning the project they figured they could sequence the mice that were still around to see what the off-target effects were, and they thought they found something surprising and important.

<comment><USER7> Does that qualify as "p-hacking?"

<comment><USER8> Of all the stupidity and hype around blockchain tech, the idea of committing the hypothesis of your research to an immutable record _beforehand_ so as to avoid p-hacking seems to be one of the best ideas I've heard, provided you could avoid the problem of people simply committing a tournament of alternative answers...

<comment> semi-extrinsic Even more interesting is the proposal I've seen where you submit the intro, theory and methods section for review at a journal _before you do the expeiments_. Once what you're planning to do is deemed good and interesting by the reviewers, you get the go-ahead, and the journal will publish your results _no matter what they are_. Not only does it prevent p-hacking, it also removes bias against negative results.

FWIW, anti-p-hacking measures are already implemented for clinical trials; they have to register expected outcomes at the beginning.

<comment><USER9> Journals should not be given the power to implicitly decide what research gets done and conversely they will never accept to be forced to publish all results because of the vast amount of research that goes nowhere.

The whole value for a journal is to be able to select _once the results are known_ because that's how you build prestige.

All you are doing in effect is to lay out a good case why journals should and probably will simply die because this level of transparency would be a great thing to have but is incompatible with the publishers model.

<comment><USER10> Many of the journals currently publishing these kind of Registered Reports only publish special issues, which might help with your concern about journals being given control over what work is done in a field, though it also limits how much of the literature can benefit from the new approach.

Another way of thinking about a journal's incentives is that, by moving the primary peer-review stage before a study has actually been conducted, you greatly expand the number of studies that a journal will interact with, which may provide a larger and more valuable role for entities like journals in world where actual publishing is a trivial matter.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> They have a response paper though :

"Here we provide additional confirmatory data and clarifying discussion, including sequencing data showing extensive heterozygous mutations throughout the genome in the CRISPR treated mice, which are all progeny of inbred mice purchased from a commercial vendor (JAX). The heterozygosity in these cases cannot be parentally inherited. The summary statements in our Correspondence reflect observations of a secondary outcome following successful achievement of the primary outcome using CRISPR to treat blindness in Pde6b/rd1 mice. As the scientific community considers the role of WGS in off-target analysis, future in vivo studies are needed where the design and primary outcome focuses on CRISPR off-targeting. We agree that a range of WGS controls are needed that include parents, different gRNAs, different versions of Cas9, and different in vivo protocols. We look forward to the publication of such studies. Combined, these results will be essential to fully understand off-targeting and can be used to create better algorithms for off-target prediction. Overall, we are optimistic that some form of CRISPR therapy will be successfully engineered to treat blindness."

[http://www.biorxiv.org/content/early/2017/06/23/154450](http://www.biorxiv.org/content/early/2017/06/23/154450)

<comment><USER12> Thanks, I was looking for this info earlier ([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14448371](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14448371)):

>"In our case, 56 zygotes were harvested from six pregnant females bred to six stud males and injected with CRISPRCas9." [http://www.biorxiv.org/content/early/2017/06/23/154450](http://www.biorxiv.org/content/early/2017/06/23/154450)

So they started with 56 zygotes, of which 11 survived injection of Crispr/etc. Of these 11, five and two mice showed some evidence of containing NHEJ/HDR cells, respectively.

In the case of NHEJ, they do not tell us what percent of cells were "edited" per mouse (or I missed it when I read that paper earlier). However for HDR it was only about 1/3 and 1/5 for the two mice they found. So this suggests the "editing" is occurring not at the zygote stage, but somewhat later (based on the percentages, perhaps at the 4 or 8 cell stages).

Assuming the edit/mouse rate is similar for NHEJ and HDR (somewhat dubious), it looks like 4x56 = 224 to 8x56 = 448 cells were treated with crispr/etc and ~ 7 got "edited". This gives ~1-3% "edits" per treated cell.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> A few other responses: [http://www.biorxiv.org/content/early/2017/06/21/153338](http://www.biorxiv.org/content/early/2017/06/21/153338) [http://www.biorxiv.org/content/early/2017/06/30/157925](http://www.biorxiv.org/content/early/2017/06/30/157925) [http://www.biorxiv.org/content/early/2017/07/05/159707](http://www.biorxiv.org/content/early/2017/07/05/159707)

</comment><comment><USER14> Great example of why the peer review system is broke.

I've seen first hand how the peer review system works in the United States. Foreign Postdocs studying in the United States are desperate for a Green Card. They peer review as many papers as they can as quickly as they can to prove _something or other_ for the purposes of a securing a Green Card. Some of these foreign postdocs do a good job, many do not. Also, overworked professors don't always take the time to carefully read a paper and don't care. The result is that a lot papers make it through peer review that shouldn't.

I'd rather have my paper peer reviewed live on the internet by allowing people to comment on it beneath a PDF link than to suffer through another drawn out peer review process. People who care have a text-box where they say what they want, and if no one cares then it indicates I need to do research on something else!

<comment><USER15> I do not think this is correct, at least for most of the sub-fields of computer science and physics. Prestigious conferences and journals invite only well known researchers to review, who are mostly professors. Few post-docs get invited. Each paper gets multiple reviews (3-5), and conflicting reviews get discussed making the review process quite rigorous.

Reviewing a paper is mostly charity and gets you nothing in return, except the fact that when you submit a paper, someone will do the same. It does not help in the Green Card process at all, or boosts your academic credentials.

Regarding overworked professors, they are allowed to delegate reviews internally to students to ease the time they have to spend.

<comment><USER16> > I do not think this is correct, at least for most of the sub-fields of > computer science and physics. Prestigious conferences and journals invite > only well known researchers to review, who are mostly professors. Few post- > docs get invited.

What about PhDs? You've never seen PhDs review papers in CS? It happens for prestigious conferences too.

<comment><USER17> CS is diverse in field cultures but ya. You don't even need a PhD to be on a PC, but usually every field has a crowd of reviewers that defines it by constantly being on PCs.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Steam Is Banning Sex Games with Young-Looking Characters - <AUTHOR> https://kotaku.com/steam-is-banning-sex-games-with-young-looking-character-1830949017 <comment><USER2> Thank god!

I had a conversation with one of these kiddie porn paddlers on Twitter. They bought Twitter ads to advertise their Steam-sold child porn game where not only were their underage girls, but you took pictures of them in change rooms without consent and so on. I said something to the effect of "how can you sleep at night selling clear images of child sexual abuse" and their reply was literally "it sells".

Reporting it to Twitter went nowhere and I continued to see ads for the game for some time. Thanks ad algorithm.

While it annoys me that Activision, EA and Ubisoft all have their own stores instead of using the neutral Steam store, I totally understand that few would want their games on such a pedophilic cess pool. I'm sure revenue sharing is the bigger cause, but god damn. Make a fucking Half Life game instead of being a host for interactive child molestation. Fuck.</comment>


SUSE details its EFI Secure Boot plans - <AUTHOR> http://www.h-online.com/open/news/item/SUSE-details-its-Secure-Boot-plans-1664699.html

<comment><USER2> I don't actually care how elegant and wonderful this method of preventing me from booting what I want to boot on my paid-for hardware is.

I reiterate: once you pay the Danegeld, you can't get rid of the Dane.

(My apologies to current residents of Denmark: it's a thousand year old historical reference.)

<comment><USER3> Sure, but the practical truth is that the Dane is here to stay anyway because all your neighbors already paid him off.

Secure boot isn't going away. It has some value to consumers (albeit not nearly as much as some people want to think). So we have to live with it as best as we can. The Fedora/SUSE compromise (load a shim which then checks a signature for the real bootloader) seems straightforward. The Ubuntu one (sign a shim that will load anything) is preferable to me personally, but IMHO isn't likely to survive as it's basically a security hole by definition.

<comment><USER4> Is it really a security hole? Or does it just get us as close as possible to where we are now?

<comment><USER5> It permits the circumvention of the entire process, so if you think there's any security then it's a security hole.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Wikipedia CPU microbenchmark measures 19% improvement in visitors devices - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/MonsieurPerf/status/1252184196426104832 <comment><USER2> In other news, Wikipedia runs benchmarks on your device.</comment>


Mod_js: Server-side JavaScript - <AUTHOR> http://www.modjs.org/

<comment><USER2> i'm working on a similar project using rhino 1.7 on the jvm.

i've added a pretty seamless package management and script loading system on top of rhino (you can say 'package('foo.bar.baz')' and it does what you expect), and done a servlet that will invoke scripts written in it.

on top of the basic language and servlet infrastructure i've written a little glue to allow seaside-style continuation stuff, except that the continuations can be serialized and consumed inside another process so it can be clustered. i'm deeply indebted to attila szegadi for many of the techniques used to do this.

it's very cool (and quite fast/scalable) and js 1.7 is actually a very modern and powerful dynamic language (lexical scoping, comprehensions, generators, etc.). my company is in the process of open-sourcing it but if anyone wants a sneak peek let me know and i'll ship out a tarball.

oh and libraries aren't an issue, i've gotten everything i've needed by calling into the standard java library. we've written real applications with this thing.

<comment><USER3> I'd be interested in checking it out.

I've been using Rhino a lot recently, and I must say it's pretty awesome. You get all the functionality of pretty much _any_ Java library out there for free, without all the cruft of Java.

However, I did a quick benchmark of Rhino, Spidermonkey, and JavaScriptCore (WebKit's engine) and jscore beats the crap out of Spidermonkey and especially Rhino. I don't remember the exact numbers, but it was something like this:

        JavaScriptCore: 0.5 seconds
        Spidermonkey: 3 seconds
        Rhino: 6 seconds

To be fair, the benchmark was very specific to the project I'm working on and involved a lot of regex and string manipulation. Rhino's regex implementation is known to be pretty slow.

<comment><USER2> the regex implementation is extremely slow, but in general it's quite reasonable. i wouldn't use it for number crunching, but for all the things that we've been using perl/ruby for it seems much faster (and it has jvm concurrency, which means we can thread really nicely which helps too).

i'm going to be at web 2.0 next week but when i get back i'll put together a tarball that has some examples and stuff in it and send it along. the project is called 'jetstream' by the way. please send me an email to remind me.

cheers, ben

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> So, is the next big web framework going to be ECMAScript?

Obligatory: [http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2007/02/next-big- language.ht...](http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2007/02/next-big- language.html)

</comment><comment><USER5> Aptana has been marketing their GPLed Jaxer server ("the Ajax server") which includes things like database access from javascript:

<http://aptana.com/jaxer>

</comment><comment><USER6> Anyone know what JavaScript engine they use?

<comment><USER7>
        AC_MSG_CHECKING(for --with-js)
        AC_ARG_WITH(js, [--with-js=PATH Path to spidermonkey source tree],</comment></comment>


High-density hybrid powercapacitors: A new frontier in the energy race - <AUTHOR> https://newatlas.com/energy/toomen-powercapacitors-kurt-energy-high-density-supercapacitors/ <comment><USER2> You don't need a power plant to charge, you just need a bigger capacitor sitting at the gas station that's been filling up for a while and ready to dump into your car.

<comment><USER3> And then you'll leave the station and stop/go/hills/regen further "flexes" a similar dedicated powercapacitor bank onboard (separate from the Li/Co/Mn/Ni long term reservoir which is expected to contain thousands of cycles whereas capacitors are tested in the millions).

If you're highway bound often this may mean faster decay of battery throughout the decade because of which side gets cycled.

<comment><USER4> I thought brake regen to battery was already really high efficiency. Hm, apparently it's 60-70%. capacitors might add a couple percent but I bet there's inevitable heat loss from running the motor backward.

<comment><USER5> I think parent is more getting at component lifetime. Every charge/discharge on the batteries is a bit of their lifespan gone.

Although I was under the impression that the impact on lifespan is much greater the deeper you cycle the batteries, so it might be better to be perpetually topping them up.

<comment><USER3> Yeah deeper cycle reduced life - highway static travel speed would idle onboard capacitor bank.

You make me wonder if it would be better to charge every hundred miles in your 250mi range rated EV as a way to preserve long term battry health on a long interstate road trip.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> They write that they'll be at the Battery Show 2020 in Stuttgart (28 to 30 April, Booth C229.): [https://kurt.energy/visit-us-at-the-battery- show-2020-stuttg...](https://kurt.energy/visit-us-at-the-battery- show-2020-stuttgart/)

EDIT: Maybe they could partner up with the capacitor-electrode-made-from- Durian people? [https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/03/super-stinky- durian-...](https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/03/super-stinky-durian-fruit- could-charge-your-cell-phone-someday/)

</comment><comment><USER7> From what I keep hearing, current EV acceleration is limited by the battery discharge rates. I haven't seen anyone talk about creating a multi-tiered (hybrid) battery.

Have a comparatively small capacitor sit as a "battery cache" for short (5-10 second) bursts of acceleration, and let the battery be the slow but efficient & steady main energy store. This would mitigate many potential downsides to capacitors (e.g. cost, leakage, energy density, etc etc).

<comment><USER8> > From what I keep hearing, current EV acceleration is limited by the battery > discharge rates

Acceleration today is mostly limited by available traction. It's not at all clear that a liveable car could get appreciably faster acceleration than we have today without a breakthrough in tire technology.

<comment><USER9> Can't the tires just continue to get wider and wider until the rear tires are even about 4 ft wide?

That should provide lots of traction.

<comment><USER10> But friction is dependent on the pressure between the contact patches. More area of contact reduces the pressure per unit of area. So you'd need more pressure on said tires without augmenting mass (because then you'd need yet more friction to accelerate that mass, that's why wings are a thing, more pressure on the tires without adding mass that you'd have to turn accelerate.

Problem with wings is that they not only add drag but they are not affecting anything at launch. Maybe if you had a big electromagnet under the car and a steel path under the asphalt.

<comment><USER11> Just pack a giant fan onto it, kinda like an up-side-down hovercraft.

<comment><USER12> Why not going full hovercraft? Use the obsolete tire technology only for transition and slow speeds, thereby eliminating all that rubber dust!1!!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> They say in the intro that capacitors don't explode. My past time as EE student tends to prove otherwise.

<comment><USER14> Usually a cap blows it's top if you either exceed it's voltage rating or it's polarized and the voltage on the pins is the wrong polarity.

Outside these two conditions, the only other thing is age, other than that, they tend to not explode.

<comment><USER15> Tantal capacitors can actually start burning

source: [https://www.vishay.com/docs/49268/tn0003.pdf](https://www.vishay.com/docs/49268/tn0003.pdf) other source: at $WORK we are having some problems with igniting tantal caps

<comment><USER16> Tantalum capacitors break to form a short while essentially any other option breaks and becomes an open circuit.

A short dumps a pile of current across the capacitor. an open circuit usually just means your circuit doesn't work well.

Don't use tantalum without a careful plan to deal with this issue... why are you forced to use them instead of a modern electrolytic?

<comment><USER15> I am in the lucky position to develop the firmware for the device / not being the electronics guy

The reason is a mismanaged project. Power budget on a CR2032 is tight and initially a supercap with much bigger capacity was planned. The company producing those went out of business and people were forced to somehow get it to market, working. We did, but now those new tantal cap problems arrived.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> If I read the article in the worst possible way it suggests the hybrid capacitor stores 260 Wh/kg and produces 300 W/kg.

The Tesla battery stores 272 Wh/kg and produces 207 W/kg.

So this suggests the hybrid capacitor would charge 1.4 times faster.

Next question is the price, the article doesn't give a straight-forward answer other than that it's significantly more expensive. In theory (no hard proof) the hybrid capacitor would last longer.

Regardless, a promising development.

</comment><comment><USER18> What does C as a unit mean in this context?

From the article:

> The power-focused variants were delivering densities of 80 and 100 Wh/kg, > and were charging and discharging at 10 and 20C.

I don't think it is Celsius, and Coulombs (which would be the correct SI unit) doesn't really make sense. Some number of Amps would make sense, but 10 or 20 isn't very impressive.

Does any one know?

<comment><USER19> "A C-rate of 1C is also known as a one-hour discharge; 0.5C or C/2 is a two- hour discharge and 0.2C or C/5 is a 5-hour discharge. Some high-performance batteries can be charged and discharged above 1C with moderate stress."

[https://batteryuniversity.com/learn/article/what_is_the_c_ra...](https://batteryuniversity.com/learn/article/what_is_the_c_rate)

<comment><USER20> Racing drone batteries can be charged around 4C and discharged at close to 100C (Unsure how many of those C is marketing), but then I think they safely qualify as high stress..

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Something seems fishy. Capacitors voltage versus charge conforms to the equation C= 1/2 _C_ V*V with half the voltage you have only 25% of the charge remaining! With a battery, you have the 2 half cell potentials that sum to the rated voltage. As you discharge, this is a flat line voltage until the charged element is depleted and it goes to zero, (discharged). This has the ring of a scheme to get investor $$

<comment><USER22> Agreed. Stories like this keep popping up, because this is something the whole world desperately needs. EEStor was one of the previous claimants to the title, but they flew by night.

After so many disappointments, I'm down to "Let me know when I can buy one at Fry's, until then, I am not holding my breath."

<comment><USER21> Can anything be bought at Fry's these days? I had heard they are in a serious decline?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> They did not mention volume, only weight. Or did I miss it? So they have a good energy/weight ratio? But bad energy/volume?

<comment><USER24> Yes that seems to be the trade-off.

See their specs page[0] for energy density. 236 Wh/Liter compared to 250-730 Wh/Liter in Li-ion.

They would probably make arguments about cooling requirements damaging that value for Li-ion at pack scale however.

[0] [https://kurt.energy/products/products_cells/](https://kurt.energy/products/products_cells/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> extraordinary claims

<comment><USER26> Not only that, but this article shows a major warning sign of a fake breakthrough: [massive] understatement of the potential impact.

This company claims a _hundredfold_ improvement in capacitor capacity! And yet they also claim to be drop-shipping from a Chinese company I cannot find anywhere but their website. Where is the Chinese media to stump for what would be quite possibly the greatest discovery in China since gunpowder? Where are the physics papers discussing the necessarily entirely new mechanism of storage in this device?

This situation is _extremely_ suspicious.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Seems like an eternity we've been hearing/waiting for super capacitors to become a thing. They seem to be the final puzzle piece in EV adoption. Not having to wait hours to "fill up" at the recharging station will be huge.

<comment><USER6> The article talks a bit about this, and fast charging seems to bring some problems with it, though:

_Theoretically, these power capacitors could be wrapped up into a big battery pack and used to power a long-range, super fast charging EV. The high-power versions can charge to 75 percent in five minutes, for example. But Verhulst doesn't believe this tech will flood the automotive market. "You need a charger that can handle it," he tells us. "A 10 kWh pack charged in five minutes means you'd need a 100 kW charger. If you then go to the big ones, say a 100 kWh battery, you'd need a megawatt charger. That's a lot. That's a whole power station. So scalability is still an issue."_

<comment><USER28> Electrify America / ionity / Tesla superchargers these days already output 250-350kWh. You could also use those super capacitors in the charging station itself to level out demand.

Using them in the grid itself is an even bigger aspect, either for simple storage that can act as a peak power plant or to act like a high frequency energy trader.

<comment><USER16> Battery backed renewable power is competing primarily with natural gas in being able to absorb and release power. They have to last 10-20 years. Batteries heat up when you charge or discharge them, which causes lifetime decrease and efficiency losses.

If these capacitors have lower internal resistance (and it sounds like they do) and last reliably for 10 years... yeah, I can see these being a next generation alternative to battery based storage at the grid level.

If they can manufacture them in a rectangular plate kind of form factor like a cell phone battery, I imagine there could be a huge benefit there. I think people would pay a premium to be able to charge their phone to last for 10 hours in 12 minutes (50C charging rate).

This is exciting. That they're in production and being tested by outside partners is a huge validation point that this is real.

<comment><USER29> > Batteries heat up when you charge or discharge them, which causes lifetime > decrease and efficiency losses.

Isn't that why the batteries have active cooling systems?

<comment><USER16> Yes, which in any fair analysis decreases their efficiency.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> It's weird for someone selling an ostensibly breakthrough EV energy storage system to say that he's mostly focusing on plugin hybrids. Batteries aren't the major contributor to cost or complexity in PHEVs.

<comment><USER4> But if the cost is higher than lithium battery cells, their better discharge rate, (perhaps) regen efficiency, and cycle advantage would justify the premium in hybrids.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Here is the actual manufacturer:

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

</comment><comment><USER32> 260 Wh/kg sounds really impressive. I will keep an eye on this technology.

<comment><USER33> EEStor was claiming 385 for that particular metric, over a decade ago. Has yet to pan out.

<comment><USER34> EEStor was lying through there teeth and never allowed anyone outside the company to directly measure ED, just gamable proxies for ED (such as capacitance).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Lithium batteries don't explode. They melt down and then catch on fire when pierced. You have plenty of time to get away, just don't get stuck right next, under or above them.

<comment><USER36> Depends on how well encased they are. They can definitely build up enough pressure to explode if internally shorted and not pierced.</comment></comment>