Getting Ahead by Being Inefficient - <AUTHOR> https://fs.blog/2019/01/getting-ahead-inefficient/ <comment><USER4> Most of the commenters here get it.

Efficiency is an outcome of optimization, and optimization is a form of specialization with respect to the environment/assumptions. With any kind of specialization there's a trade off. If the environment or set of assumption changes, one can be worse off than if one did not optimize at all.

Also, optimization at the wrong level of detail/abstraction can be costly. One example is in auto manufacturing.

U.S. car manufacturers have traditionally tended to spec tight tolerances at the component level, with the assumption that everything will fit when assembled. This can be very expensive to get right, and the assumption of perfect final fit is not always borne out.

Japanese auto manufacturers however, despite their reputation for perfectionism, have tended to be looser with component level tolerances, but paid more attention to assembly tolerances (functional build [1]). They understood what tolerances needed to be tight and those that mattered less in the final build. They embraced natural imperfections, and made sure the rest of the system accepted the lower part tolerances. It turns out this led to higher overall quality at lower cost. (Detroit has now embraced functional build)

(The Japanese approach is analogous to focusing on integration testing as opposed to exhaustive unit testing)

[1] Functional Build [https://www.adandp.media/articles/building-better- vehicles-v...](https://www.adandp.media/articles/building-better-vehicles-via- functional-build)

<comment><USER5> Extending your example: I've heard from mechanics that looser tolerances also lead to cars that age much better as the components change in shape due to wear and corrosion. Expensive cars have expensively machined parts to avoid the need for gaskets, while ordinary cars use gaskets to avoid the need for expensively machined parts. This trade-off is counter-intuitive for most car buyers.

<comment> castle-bravo I too watch Scotty Kilmer.

[https://m.youtube.com/user/scottykilmer](https://m.youtube.com/user/scottykilmer)

<comment><USER6> That guy is way more entertaining than he has any right to be. His voice, the way he waves his hands around when he's talking; his love for ancient Toyotas; He just has a great personality for that kind of thing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Tom Demarco wrote Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency[1] back in 2002. It talks about how keeping slack in human systems makes them more resilient and humane. I first heard about it from Joel Spolsky, who started Trello and Stack Overflow[2].

Slack is a great read for those responsible for managing software teams and illustrates that there are no new ideas under the sun; there are just repackaged ones.

[1]-[https://www.amazon.com/Slack-Getting-Burnout-Busywork- Effici...](https://www.amazon.com/Slack-Getting-Burnout-Busywork- Efficiency/dp/0767907698)

[2]-[https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2005/11/22/reading-list- fog-c...](https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2005/11/22/reading-list-fog-creek- software-management-training-program/)

<comment><USER8> Oh boy, the rabbit hole. Check out this: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slackware](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slackware)

Yep, a linux based on the idea of Slack, developed '93.

And just as there's the Spaghetti Monster, there's also even a religion around Slack: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_of_the_SubGenius](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_of_the_SubGenius)

developed '79, short quote from wikipedia: "the group holds that the quality of "Slack" is of utmost importance—it is never clearly defined"

<comment><USER9> I've been using Slackware as my primary OS for a few years now (even my work computer runs it). In retrospect, Slackware fits the article's mentality remarkably well; instead of the approach taken by most Linux distros (where everything is neatly and tightly integrated with a dependency-resolving package manager and dependency-resolving init system and all that jazz), I instead work with a system that sure, maybe some of the pieces don't fit together perfectly, but they're readily adaptable to all sorts of different situations. It's a less fragile system specifically because it's built around accepting the components for what they are instead of trying to patch them to "perfection". And of course, the conservative component choices certainly help, too.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Efficiency is a sub-goal of getting things done. IF you cannot get the job done you are out of the running no matter how efficient you are at your failure.

Henry Ford got more and more efficient at making the model T. At first his customers appreciated the lower prices he was able to deliver for them. However as time went on his competitors who were not as efficient at building any one car were able to build a new car with features like electric start that were worth paying extra for. The model T could never get that as the assembly line was too efficient to allow the extra steps to add new parts, the jigs had been optimized to the point where they couldn't be changed without a large set of other changes that his line's couldn't handle.

<comment><USER11> Is that a fact or an analysis? Why is it hard to add a step to the line but easier to train _all_ the car assemblers to install/assemble the electric starter That's the whole assembly line innovation that is going strong till today

<comment><USER10> Various books report that, but I don't know how true it is (given the politics in Ford it is probably impossible to say).

Ford optimized his assembly line. To add a step you need to physically move all stations on the assembly line - these were bolted (or even welded) in position. Plus you would have to move all the sublines feeding the line after that step over one as well. Before you can start that you need to expand the building because everything was designed to fit exactly what the model T needed. Sure you could add a step, but only at great expense (and you would have to deal with the politics, CEO Henry Ford was against changes to his car)

Today all manufactures know their assembly lines need to last longer than the cars. They design slack in from the beginning so that an additional station can be added someplace. They also make sure that you reconfigure the operations easily. That isn't to say an assembly line will produce anything, just that the line will be built with enough room that minor changes can be made from year to year. Every few years they will tear down assembly line and rebuild it over a month to make a whole new type of vehicle.

Note that Honda does one line for everything, while Ford has assembly lines for only the F150. There are trade offs to flexibility as well. Honda cannot make large trucks because they wouldn't fit in their stations. Honda also is limited in how many models they make because eventually they run out of space for their jigs at each station. By contrast Ford doesn't have to pay for space to store jigs that aren't being used at the moment and all the complexity to get the right one in place as needed. These are complex trade offs and both companies have made their bets. Both companies have been successful.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I remember in the late 90s when the place I worked at was all about JIT. Not compiling, but physical stock - having the items they needed just as they were needed. This was the Physical Plant for a large university campus, so considerable money was involved in storing and shipping goods.

The execs were delighted with the idea of saving money.

The grizzled workers just raised an eyebrow, made a few passive-aggressive comments about how, in their day, having the last box of something used because it was needed with no backup was considered a disaster waiting to happen, then shrugged and did as they were asked.

I left before I saw how it played out, but I suspect that there was some good trimming of backlogs and storage of materials that really could afford to wait, but far too many cases where JIT wasn't IT enough. It's like...creating a breeding ground for Black Swans.

The article made me think of that - high efficiency all the time means little- to-no-buffer for unusual needs.

<comment><USER13> Shouldn't an _efficient_ JIT process define an ideal inventory quantity level that triggers restocking?

"Qty=1" is definitely inefficient.

<comment><USER14> My local grocery store switched to JIT stocking of shelves: they're now perennially out of 1 in 10 basics, and I just shop online. Amazon Fresh can routinely be out of things too, but at least they don't waste my time doing it.

The only value in a grocery store was that it was a warehouse of food stocks that smoothed out the irregularities suppliers face. If I have to deal with supplier problems because they JIT stock, I may as well just get deliveries directly from suppliers.

You can't "JIT" when your entire value is supply smoothing, because you're increasing the failure modes of your core business for tangential benefits.

People keep showing me math that says it works, and places keep trying it, but I've yet to see it do anything but significantly damage their core business for questionable benefit.

<comment><USER15> It can be done well as seen with Japanese convenience stores. They keep no stock but never seem to be out of anything.

I'm not an expert but I think it's a combination of insanely good modeling for each specific store and a super efficient and fast restocking pipeline.

<comment><USER16> I can't seem to find a reference, but I remember hearing years ago someone trying to adopt Japanese convenience store stock strategy. Apparently, the small stores have a good relationship with their peers and exchange goods as needed. The distributed nature compensates for deep stock.

Similarly, when I worked for Pizza Hut years ago about once a month we'd run low or out of something and would phone up 1 or 2 nearby stores and send a driver out to make the swap.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Inefficiency isn't the same as adaptability. It has no intrinsic value. Ineffective people aren't automatically great generalists and ineffective companies aren't better suited to adapt to new market trends.

This is a bad case of one-dimensional thinking.

All the anecdotes in this thread are about optimizing for a particular outcome and failing to anticipate variations there. Even the human body stores fat not because it's an inefficient machine, but because it has adapted to (sometimes rare) situations of low food availability.

So, let's not celebrate slacking by claiming it to have some intrinsic value.

<comment><USER18> OK, no they're not the same things, but there is a trade-off there.

Large companies in stable markets reward efficiency. Staff KPI's are all about reducing costs, because that's where the profit growth is (because the market is stable and so is revenue).

But efficiency is achieved by streamlining processes. That streamlining is almost always at the expense of adaptability. The processes become optimised, but brittle and resistant to change. Which is obvious if you think about it - the process becomes designed to do one thing incredibly well, and the staff become adapted to that one process. Trying to change the process (or staff) makes it more expensive, by definition: because if it made it cheaper it would be an optimisation and would have happened already. "cutting out slack" does equate to making the process less adaptable.

Then something changes and it's hard, if not impossible, to get the process to change and the people to think differently. Managers whose bonuses are tied to their KPIs are reluctant to make necessary but costly changes to their department if those KPIs are all linked to efficiency. This is why large organisations are doing their innovation thinking in smaller, separate "skunkworks" or "labs" units.

Also, why large companies are incredibly efficient at producing profits from a stable market, but get out-competed instantly by smaller, more adaptable, less efficient startups.

<comment><USER17> > _Also, why large companies are incredibly efficient at producing profits > from a stable market, but get out-competed instantly by smaller, more > adaptable, less efficient startups._

Because if they're worth their money, they can afford to. Large corporation routinely buy small competitors with profits made from their streamlined operation.

<comment><USER18> true. And then immediately destroy them by trying to make them efficient ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> The example given in TFA is poor, as is (IMHO) the entire thesis. The actors change their behavior on an evolutionary timescale, whereas the environment sees periodic rapid events ("punctuated equilibrium"); to which any individual, specialized actor cannot react quickly enough.

Whereas we, as SWEs or ops or devops or business managers, can react to a changing environment. When you are in a highly competitive environment, it pays to be more efficient. Unlike the bird, however, whose beak (eg) may be specialized to reach a specific berry on a specific bush, and is immutable, we can change our beak as the needs demand.

The article isn't even very good for specialized industry, say making metal coils. Your machinery has to be specialized for it. You don't have a machine that can make both coils and tubes. Because you're able to make very, very specialized coil winding machines, you corner the market on coils. Then the coil market collapses (thanks for nothing, disruptors!). OK, your business fails. SO WHAT! You move on to make specialized tube flatteners or some such.

A better thesis would have been along the lines of not being static. Specialization is good.

</comment><comment><USER20> I would take a different approach to reach a similar conclusion.

Assign a task to a junior dev.

\- Efficient: copies blindly a solution from stackoverflow in 30 minutes

\- Inefficient: copies the same solution but tries to understand it before committing it, taking 90 minutes.

The inefficient lad is on his path to become a senior engineer. :)

<comment><USER21> There's always a trade-off between exploration/exploitation - in any optimization, we're incapable of enumerating every path to our intended goal or the associated cost. We need some time to experiment, fail and learn - <USER2> ultimately discover a more optimal pathway.

I guess that's the motivation behind Google's 20% time (if that was/is ever a thing).

I'd also be interested to know how Amazon approaches the problem. From the outside, they look like a much more top-down organization than Google - <USER3> to hear if/how that gels with "encouraging experimentation and failure".

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> So back when I was much much younger & brasher, my email signature was "Laziness is an Optimization Protocol". I used that email for applying to my Master's programs, including some of my country's most prestigious (and ergo competitive) places.

And I think one reason I got into one of them is because my future advisor saw this, chuckled, but then proceeded to have a conversation with me about the importance of being "smart" about how we approach questions, and being efficient about resource use (including time)..

I was being cheeky; but he saw that I was kinda / sorta aware of a deeper idea, and helped me develop & identify it. It has stayed with me since.

</comment><comment><USER23> There is a similar argument about how you don't want your systems running at capacity because there is no headroom for an emergency.

<comment><USER17> That's a dogmatic approach. A practical one would be to estimate the frequency and duration of emergencies based on experience and the cost of being out of order and compare this with the cost of running below capacity all the time.

<comment><USER23> Sure, or you could run low-priority tasks that can be dropped when it becomes necessary. This increases utilization without increasing risk.

An example is using water in "wasteful" ways during wet years in order to make sure there is something easy to cut back on during a drought year.

Another example is using flood-prone land for recreation rather than building housing there.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> In the machine learning world, this is the equivalent of overfitting to the training dataset. You can have a model overoptimized to the data used for training and it craters when used in production because the production data has maybe drifted over time, or the training set was not representative for a range of reasons. This is why early stopping is often a good idea when training models, rather than getting the most optimal model for the data being trained on.

</comment><comment><USER25> I believe I've got the gist of it: Keep your options open, and don't put all your eggs in one basket, because s __* happens.

</comment><comment><USER26> Does it make sense to apply the idea from the article to the native vs webview apps competition?

Writing an app in native (C/C++, or Java for Android, Swift for iOS) will give you the best efficiency, but the app will not adapt to platform changes so easily compared to using webview.

It is also interesting to think about whether VMs or transpiler techs (e.g. web assembly, Haxe, GraalVM) will give us the best of both worlds.

</comment><comment><USER27> This only works if you're strong enough to be able to endure the increased costs. If you're in an environment where suboptimal performance means elimination, deliberate inefficiency like this can break you.

Can't say I know what to do if you're in a situation like that though.

</comment><comment><USER28> _"If we all reacted the same way, we 'd be predictable, and there's always more than one way to view a situation... It's simple: overspecialize, and you breed in weakness. It's slow death."_

</comment><comment><USER29> It's interesting, since one would assume that most people here would be at least to some degree aware of Information theory and the necessity of redundancy.

</comment><comment><USER30> Sure, guess trying to be the best programmer is bad coz in case of a nuclear war i won't be as good at digging as i could.. [/s]

</comment><comment><USER31> This is a good article in context of what I have been going through over the past few months. The lure of perfection is too great.

</comment><comment><USER32> We could soon see the impact of a lot of efficient JIT supply chains being disrupted if the UK leaves the EU without a deal.

<comment><USER33> Not sure why you're being downvoted, as this will be a huge, sad show when it starts. The Economist's article on no-deal disruptions:

[https://www.economist.com/briefing/2018/11/24/what-to- expect...](https://www.economist.com/briefing/2018/11/24/what-to-expect-from- a-no-deal-brexit)

They even stockpiled paper themselves to survive the potential disruption and keep on printing:

> _Disclosure: The Economist is stockpiling around 30 tonnes of the paper on > which the covers of our British edition are printed, which comes from the > Netherlands._

<comment><USER32> It's impossible to make a factual statement on BREXIT without drawing flak. (I'm actually in favour of it for long term reasons) But the car industry and fresh food supply chains will be affected in the short term. How can they not? It'll be a good test of the article's thesis.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Efficiency that can adapt to change would be even better

</comment><comment><USER35> Inefficiency safes us from over-optimization. And over-optimization is the biggest problem of our capitalistic society. A lot of time people think only about optimizing and reducing cost etc. But they fail to recognize that one can over-optimize things as easily as under-optimize them.

So control your greed, don't over-optimize the money you can make from your customers. Otherwise your marvelous growth will break down immediately when the climate just changes a little bit. Think about what happened to [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kodak#Shift_to_digital](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kodak#Shift_to_digital) .

</comment><comment><USER36> This is a very important article.

It's also absolutely vital to understand that efficiency is _not_ subject to the greedy algorithm. If you try to make every single part of your organization efficient, you will kill your organization.

It is easy to understand this if you are a software developer, because you get to deal with servers. If you run a server at 100% load (for any of the definitions of load -- 100% CPU, 100% memory, 100% bandwidth utilization) what happens? Obviously very often something will eventually mechanically fail, but what happens before that? You see a latency spike -- 100% load is practically the definition of how DDoS works. The efficient utilization of the one component translates to a globally worse outcome, roughly because the component you're optimizing for is not the "right" component. Similar things often happen when a company decides to fire a worker and rebalance their load across their peers: very often this looks very attractive on paper at first since you save costs on a salary, but then it starts to hit the remaining deadlines pretty hard, a swift kick right in your revenue stream. Which is not to say "never fire anyone", but just that a lot of folks do not evaluate this sort of effect on their cashflow position before they start issuing layoffs. I know of one company (but not directly, I was not a part of this, take my words with a grain of salt) which had an office in NYC but got into a bit of a tight position and was acquired strategically by a company in Chicago, but got caught in this death-spiral. After a year or two the entire East Coast NYC office was closed and the new Chicago CTO had to drive a U-Haul from NYC to Chicago with whatever supplies he could salvage, and the whole company was shrunk to just two or three folks working out of the sister company's office in Chicago -- I don't know if they had to relocate from Chicago or were new hires, but if they relocated then it was presumably on their own dime. All of this when the situation seemed quite tractable and solvable before those first layoffs started. There may have been some problems that I don't know about, like the company might have been in a much worse shape than advertised, so again please take my analysis with a grain of salt, but my understanding is that the latency caused some already a-little-dissatisfied customers to bail, which caused another round of layoffs which then caused a bunch more latency which caused many customers to get really extremely pissed and bail, which caused the closing of the NYC branch, so that only the least-dedicated customers who were the least likely to notice the changes were left as a trickle of the former revenue.

It works the other way, too. The above is about "inefficiency is excess capacity is fat," and warns that fat is biologically necessary to cushion you against biological variability. But very often you don't just "trim" the excess capacity, you make more work so that you can utilize a resource to 100% capacity. So instead of just shrinking your server, we're talking about the equivalent of pre-calculating as many web pages as possible so that you can serve them from a cache. This can be a great idea, in moderation -- it is an awful idea if you drive the server or cache to 100% load in this way, again because of latency spikes on the inevitable unforeseen loads. On the human level, this is not a layoff but rather yelling at folks who are idly talking to each other, "you lazy folks, wasting the company's time!" ... And in addition to losing latency because your one-off requests now have to wait for a developer to task-switch, you lose oversight of your organization. Everyone is "busy" with something, but mostly it's something unimportant, so it is harder to just see "here are the places where people are stuck on important tasks" so that you can intervene. Say your caching-server is very well-behaved and yields to any other requests you have, but it periodically drives the database load to 100%: now whenever you are looking at your system as a whole, you are desensitized to any other requests that drive the database load to 100%. "Probably just the caching server caching that one expensive page" \-- but no, it's not, something is seriously wrong and someone is suffering quietly because of it.

</comment><comment><USER37> i think there is generally a tradeoff between optimising for efficiency at the cost of robustness, or optimising for robustness at the cost of efficiency. e.g. one way to get more robustness in IT systems is to add redundant infrastructure. there's even more robustness if the redundancy is decorrelated : e.g. decorrelated in space (multi-region) or decorrelated in terms of vulnerability to other risks ( [https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2011/10/27/monoculture/](https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2011/10/27/monoculture/) ). it's clearly cheaper to build this stuff in the short run if you dont invest in any diversity. have one of a thing, or a monoculture of 12 things.

There's also another aspect: often becoming more efficient at doing something is at the cost of investing capital and increased ongoing maintenance costs to maintain the new systems required for the efficiency. maybe achieving the first efficiency takes low investment for relatively large reward - a "low- hanging fruit", but the second or the third one give diminishing returns, i.e. more cost of capital or ongoing maintenance drain versus the reward, but still enough reward to be worth doing. then if the context changes -- so the specialised task is no longer worth doing -- you're left with the upkeep & opportunity cost of all of this now pointless specialised infrastructure.

Joseph Tainter argues something vaguely along these lines for civilisation collapse, with the diminishing returns of increasing efficiency from increasing social complexity:

> For example, as Roman agricultural output slowly declined and population > increased, per-capita energy availability dropped. The Romans "solved" this > problem by conquering their neighbours to appropriate their energy surpluses > (in concrete forms, as metals, grain, slaves, etc.). However, as the Empire > grew, the cost of maintaining communications, garrisons, civil government, > etc. grew with it. Eventually, this cost grew so great that any new > challenges such as invasions and crop failures could not be solved by the > acquisition of more territory.

> In Tainter's view, while invasions, crop failures, disease or environmental > degradation may be the apparent causes of societal collapse, the ultimate > cause is an economic one, inherent in the structure of society rather than > in external shocks which may batter them: diminishing returns on investments > in social complexity.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Tainter#Diminishing_ret...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Tainter#Diminishing_returns)

Nassim Taleb has written a bit about robustness, fragility, "antifragility", of investments or occupation, if you can deal with the writing style it's worth reading a book or two. E.g. the concept of a "barbell strategy" to diversify: [https://www.nuggetsofthought.com/2018/04/02/nassim-taleb- sen...](https://www.nuggetsofthought.com/2018/04/02/nassim-taleb-senecas- barbell) .

Taleb also spends some time writing about the difference between the realised outcome and the distribution of possible outcomes --- the focus should be on the process -- was the decision making and understanding of the probabilities involved sound --- not on the outcome . Applying this perspective to the bird and the mammal in the farnham st blog, before the change in environment, if focusing on realised outcomes, we might rank the bird population as more successful than the mammal population -- perhaps there is a larger population of birds, or they get more leisure time, or whatever. but when trying to assess the unrealised outcomes, we might conclude that the bird population is in a far less robust position, their outcome to changes in environment or context is much worse than the corresponding outcomes for the mammals. so in some sense, not focusing on the current realised outcome, the mammals are "doing better" even before the turquoise-berry-bush catastrophe.

<comment><USER38> The point about how quickly investments can turn into liabilities is really insightful - thank you!

There's a social aspect to it, as well. Within one person's head, it's Sunk Cost fallacy. I'm not sure what the term is when the fear of change is spread across multiple groups (coordination problems? I'm open to ideas). But it's clearly a huge problem for complex systems that must manage change.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> I haven't yet read the article, but the title immediately made me think of Paul Graham's Doing Things that Don't Scale[0].

[0] [http://paulgraham.com/ds.html](http://paulgraham.com/ds.html)

<comment><USER39> After reading it, it also has some "perfect is the enemy of good" messaging.

It also purports that being too efficient (and therefore specialized) reduces agility and can be dangerous by preventing pivoting.

<comment><USER40> Overoptimized systems often lose resilience and become fragile. Slop provides a buffer for give and take. This is analogous to materials that have a wide plastic region vs materials that have very high rigidity but a small plastic region.</comment></comment></comment>


Triumph of His Will - <AUTHOR> http://www.esquire.com/features/americans-2012/elon-musk-interview-1212-4

<comment><USER2> Wow, this article really makes Elon Musk sound pretty creepy... :O

[Which is an interesting change from the usual Elon-Musk-is-so-cool articles...]</comment>


Email Encryption Is Broken - <AUTHOR> http://motherboard.vice.com/read/email-encryption-is-broken <comment><USER2> HSTS for email won't fix this. PGP or similar is probably the only thing you can do to ensure your email isn't read.</comment>


Cross-Laminated Timber - <AUTHOR> https://avc.com/2019/10/cross-laminated-timber/ <comment><USER2> This comment on the article is more interesting than the article itself IMHO [http://disq.us/p/24slwwt](http://disq.us/p/24slwwt)

<comment><USER3> Unshortened: [https://avc.com/2019/10/cross-laminated- timber/#comment-4643...](https://avc.com/2019/10/cross-laminated- timber/#comment-4643481053)

<comment><USER4> That commenter is doing a lot of gymnastics to avoid talking about reinforced concrete's hidden failures. It's difficult to determine reinforced concrete failures before it gets bad, and repairing it is very expensive. Concrete can get really complex depending on how you make and apply it, and what it's exposed to.

I agree with the author that water is now a bigger deal than fire for wood construction, and we need way more testing for taller construction, perhaps even designs tailored to the material.

<comment><USER5> _" The issue with CLT as a building system is exactly that -- its behavior as a whole when subjected to differing forces as statistically magnified by the great number of joints. There are a ton of connections in a CLT building. Thousands of them. One connection failure can create a cascade of failure that may destroy the building. Each connection has the fingerprints of a single worker. One bonehead can wreck a connection."_

That's a non-negligible practical problem and a perfectly valid point.

And it's difficult to take the residential approach of "just over-spec" when you're building mid-rise+.

<comment><USER6> But yet elsewhere in the world they can build multi-storey CLT buildings

[https://www.theb1m.com/video/top-5-the-world-s-tallest- timbe...](https://www.theb1m.com/video/top-5-the-world-s-tallest-timber- buildings)

<comment><USER5> \- completed in 2012

\- completed in 2015

\- completed in 2017

\- completed in 2015

\- completed in 2017

Mmhmm.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Here in San Francisco, CLT won't be legal for buildings over six floors until about 2023 because of dumb policies. California uses the International Building Code as its base building code and then modifies it based on particular laws we have here. This modification & ratification process takes about two years. Then San Francisco does the same thing, adding another two to three years (because surely _our_ engineers are better than a consortium of the world's best structural engineers...)

The 2018 International Building Code provides codes for tall CLT structures, which won't get adopted in the CA code until late 2020, which won't get adopted in the SF code until late 2022 or 2023. At that point, developers can start applying for permits for CLT buildings, which takes about four to five years. Then add two years of construction.

So SF won't see CLT structures over six floors until about 2030. Makes you realize how unseriously we're taking climate change when the only carbon- negative structural building material in existence won't exist here for another decade.

<comment><USER8> > At that point, developers can start applying for permits for CLT buildings, > which takes about four to five years. Then add two years of construction.

Permits take longer than the building?!

<comment><USER9> I subscribe to HN for the insights into technical subjects I might not otherwise have exposure to. My primary takeaway has been "this is why we can't have nice things", whether it's safe air travel, affordable housing, or affordable healthcare.

Demolition on the Waldorf-Astoria began on October 1st 1929. Unforeseen financial difficulties slowed progress. Construction began January 22nd 1930. The steel structure of the Empire State Building was completed on September 19th 1930. Construction was completed April 11th 1931.

These days it's more difficult- impossible- to get permitting for low rise medium density housing buildings in a city with significantly more financial resources and significantly more demand for floorspace.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> My house has some LSL (Laminated Strand Lumber) beams which, like CLT, are engineered, but are built up from wood strands of and a lot of glue instead of from boards like CLT. As a result, they can be made from the remainder products of milling lumber.

They can even be made from rapidly harvestable plans like bamboo:

[https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S095006181...](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0950061815001117)

This company appears to be making them:

[https://www.moso.eu/en/products/bamboo-beam-panel- veneer/bam...](https://www.moso.eu/en/products/bamboo-beam-panel- veneer/bamboo-beams)

<comment><USER11> Where does that glue come from and how good is it for humans/the environment?

<comment><USER12> a more important question is what happens when it's exposed to water, either through flooding or a leaky building.

<comment><USER13> There are many forms of fungi (mold, various rot) that can feed on wet wood. There are not many forms of fungi that can feed on cured adhesive, which also functions to prevent the wood that is there from getting wet. Thus, I'd expect engineered/laminated timber to be better at repelling rot than standard untreated timber. Done well, it could last longer than steel.

<comment><USER5> If anyone on HN has never hoisted an LVL beam (or even glulam), I would highly recommend it.

Suffice to say they're 'quite a bit' heavier than wood.

That weight is the adhesive and/or compression. So we're very much not talking about 'tree wood' at this point.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I can't believe nothing in this article, nor in the articles linked from this article, actually says what CLT is.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross- laminated_timber](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-laminated_timber)

<comment><USER15> My understanding is that it's identical to plywood, just with thicker layers.

<comment><USER16> Yes. Tricky thing is plywood uses veneers (very thin pieces) because wood expands at about a 10x different rate in width versus length, so cross- laminated joints can be subject to an incredible amount of stress. The thin veneers cannot develop enough stress to break the glue joint.

<comment><USER17> > _so cross-laminated joints can be subject to an incredible amount of stress_

OK, plywood overcomes the stress by having very thin laminates. So how does CLT overcome the stress due to different width vs length expansion rates? Shouldn't the problem be much worse with thick laminates?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Well this is timely. In case anyone else is from Brisbane, Australia - we're home to the world's largest CLT building: 25 King St.

It's open to the public this weekend as part of BNE Open House: [https://brisbaneopenhouse.com.au/building/25-king- street/](https://brisbaneopenhouse.com.au/building/25-king-street/).

There's also a talk this evening: [https://www.eventbrite.com.au/e/brisbane- open-house-tall-tim...](https://www.eventbrite.com.au/e/brisbane-open-house- tall-timber-buildings-taking-on-climate-change-tickets-70864384281).

</comment><comment><USER3> 99pi episode "Built on Sand" talks about mass timber aka CLT: [https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/built-on- sand/](https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/built-on-sand/)

</comment><comment><USER19> I'm looking for a model of the carbon emissions of a concrete house vs a mostly timber house.

That is, a program writen in code or text with parameters such as : square meters, number of floors, wood species, distance travelled.

It looks like open source carbon models are almost unheard of yet.

<comment><USER20> We looked into this with a completely open toolchain [0]. You could email either of the two first authors to get the code (not sure why it wasn't in the paper supporting information).

Building open carbon models isn't difficult, it's the input data that normally require licenses. I have built an open source life cycle assessment (LCA) software which has some traction [1], and there are alternatives for LCA [2] and integrated assessment models [3, 4]. However, data availability, especially on the level of completeness and detail you need to answer a specific question like carbon performance of a structure over a given period of time is a challenge. We are working on building a large open database to answer these kinds of questions[5], and Hacker News readers are welcome. Happy to chat via email if you want more info!

[0] [https://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/acs.est.5b01735](https://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/acs.est.5b01735)

[1] [https://brightwaylca.org/](https://brightwaylca.org/)

[2] [http://www.openlca.org/](http://www.openlca.org/)

[3] [https://github.com/JGCRI/gcam-core](https://github.com/JGCRI/gcam-core)

[4] [https://github.com/iiasa/message_ix](https://github.com/iiasa/message_ix)

[5] [https://bonsai.uno/](https://bonsai.uno/)

<comment><USER19> Thanks for these great resources.

What I'm trying to do is, I believe, complementary to these LCA tools. I'm building a website [https://futur.eco](https://futur.eco) that bridges carbon models with our every day life as citizens.

Sorry, it's in french for now, but I have some hopes that you read french :-)

Behind the website is a database of open source and extremely simple LCA models, expressed in a new redable programming language. All of it resides in this single file : [https://github.com/laem/futureco- data/blob/master/co2.yaml](https://github.com/laem/futureco- data/blob/master/co2.yaml).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Since this is basically plywood++, does it have similar failure modes? Like what happens when there's a leaky tub frequently wetting a structural piece of CLT?

<comment><USER22> I don't know about all of CLT's failure modes, but Oregon State University is building a structure (for their College of Forestry) out of CLT and had some delamination issues: [https://www.oregonlive.com/news/erry-2018/08/4965f0c7df3495/...](https://www.oregonlive.com/news/erry-2018/08/4965f0c7df3495/problems- at-peavy-faulty-timbe.html)

That's just like plywood. I have to imagine other similar problems affect CLT. Your example of moisture damage essentially has to affect wood, though there are ways to engineer the CLT that will mitigate moisture damage.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> The first thing that jumps to mind is wondering how they compare fire-safety wise vs. "traditional" concrete and steel framed buildings?

<comment><USER24> Steel performs more poorly than you would expect in a fire

<comment><USER25> I actually wonder if CLT/wood would perform better than steel during an all- out fire in terms of the structural integrity, at least for an initial period of time.

The steel structure would more likely survive in-tact, but the wood structure could guarantee a certain minimum bound in terms of evacuation time available to occupants (which might be superior to steel).

From my very novice perspective, I feel like wood does not attenuate in structural integrity as its temperature rises (at least not in the same way as steel), and it seems it would also absorb and conduct heat much more slowly than steel.

On the other hand, I feel that once a wood-based structure gets hit with a big enough fire, the entire building is guaranteed to be lost due to how hard it could be to fully extinguish the fire (e.g. if the steel in a skyscraper could burn openly, what would that be like?).

I did find this related paper which may be of interest to HN: [https://www.fpl.fs.fed.us/documnts/pdf2012/fpl_2012_kukay001...](https://www.fpl.fs.fed.us/documnts/pdf2012/fpl_2012_kukay001.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I can see CLT replacing steel, and possibly CMUs, but concrete in general?

\- It can't be poured into arbitrary shapes.

\- Much lower acoustic isolation

<comment><USER27> Re: acoustic isolation - having recently dealt w acoustics/concrete (laying a floor in a concrete apartment), I found out there's not necessarily "concrete in general" so acoustic (and other) properties can vary from concrete to concrete.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> See also [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engineered_wood](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engineered_wood)

</comment><comment><USER29> Anybody know how these stand up to earthquakes?

<comment><USER30> The answer is basically that they don't know at this point. (Reference: I did extensive research on CLT as part of a project in LA a few years ago and talked to CLT experts from the Wood Products Council)

CLT is stiffer than plywood, and the construction techniques are closer to steel/concrete, so it'll likely need reinforcement or dampering. Traditional wood buildings these days are designed to flex in earthquakes.

But it hasn't been extensively tested for seismic properties yet

<comment><USER31> Is the main difference between CLT and plywood that CLT is a crossed grain stack of sawn lumber instead of peeled veneers?

<comment><USER22> Pretty much, CLT is basically plywood with very thick laminations.

<comment><USER32> True, but worth noting plywood is spiral shaved veneers which are unrolled glued with the curves counteracting This is quite different from sawn dimensional lumber. Plywood is entirely cut tangent to the grain / tree rings.

Plywood is much weaker essentially because trees evolved to withstand wind and the veneers are cut perpendicular to wind loads.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Complete Guide to Fasting - <AUTHOR> https://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2018/12/30/complete-guide-fasting.aspx <comment><USER2> I would be extremely wary of anything promoted by Mercola - he's a renowned pseudoscience quack peddling woo and bullshit to gullible people and his site is largely full of it.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Mercola#Views_and_contr...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Mercola#Views_and_controversy) [https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/9-reasons-to-completely- ign...](https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/9-reasons-to-completely-ignore- joseph-mercola-and-natural-news/)

etc.etc.

<comment><AUTHOR> Well, it is an interview to a doctor, Dr. Jason Fung. Based on its patients results.

<comment><USER2> I have edited my comment to reflect more accurately that I was talking about Mercola. Apologies for the confusion.

<comment><AUTHOR> Interesting, I will read those posts. Thanks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> > Insulin is the primary hormone that tells your body whether to store energy > or burn it. When you eat, you're taking calories in and insulin goes up. > Higher levels of insulin signal your body to store energy. When insulin > falls, it tells your body to release energy. When you develop insulin > resistance, your insulin levels remain chronically elevated, hence your body > is in constant fat-storing mode.

Best definition of insulin I ever read.

I liked his thoughts on fasting too.

</comment><comment><USER4> Generally I avoid Mercola, but I have Dr Fung's book and it's pretty rigorous...so skeptically optimistic

</comment><comment><USER5> whaaaat</comment>


California just replaced cash bail with algorithms - <AUTHOR> https://qz.com/1375820/california-just-replaced-cash-bail-with-algorithms/ <comment><USER2> There's this growing trend of... "Well look, this person in a lab coat with a clipboard did some complicated things with a computer, using all the trendy words like 'algorithms', 'machine learning', and 'big data'! Their results must be very accurate and unbiased, and much better than a human looking at things."

I'm more and more convinced that most of these cases are just stuffing an excel spreadsheet into a black box, and shaking it. Hearing that we're using "algorithms" in criminal justice doesn't give me warm and fuzzy.

<comment><USER3> >Their results must be very accurate and unbiased

That is the assumption that scares me. The algorithm _encodes_ the bias and applies it in every case.

This _feature_ will only save you from a _shifting_ bias.

<comment><USER4> Up until now we were saddled with the extremely biased and unjust bond system. Calls to make the algorithms transparent are well taken -- but let's not go back.

<comment><USER5> Your thinking is very dangerous. Even if the algorithm is transparent and fair, that does not necessarily equate to a step forward because of the bias already present in the system. The algorithm will be[0] _applied_ equally, sure, but that does not mean outcomes will be equal.

For instance, consider that owning a major asset probably decreases flight risk. That seems fair. But, this means that poor people are probably more of a flight risk than a middle- or upper-class homeowner. So if the algorithm considers this, poor people would be disproportionately affected.

Also consider that having family abroad or being from another country probably increases flight risk. Hence, immigrants would be disproportionately affected.

But now, when there is an unjust outcome, there isn't even an _option_ to avoid jail time (even if that option is difficult to reach or undesirable); and the human responsible for the decision to incarcerate can simply wash their hands of it, since the algorithm gave the suspect a grade of "D". No need for empathy, sympathy, or guilt.

Then there are the pending discussions about what is 'fair' and the answer to those questions is politics...

[0] - Edit: _Could_ be

<comment><USER4> Those critiques are all indeed things to watch out for, but progress is possible -- see New Jersey.

The status quo is a roaring injustice and ongoing disaster, and by insisting on the perfect over the good you are condemning millions of people to continue suffering indefinitely. How is your thinking not "very dangerous" to all those wronged day after day by the current system?

<comment><USER5> You've completely misunderstood my point if you think I'm advocating for the perfect at the cost of the good. I'm advocating caution rather than a blind faith that _this_ solution is _ipso facto_ forward progress, that just needs some tweaking.

The danger here is doubling down on the existing injustices, removing the limited accountability and positive exceptions that exist, and effectively sweeping conversation under the rug or arguing ideologies about the fairness of tweaks to the algorithms at the cost of real human lives.

<comment><USER4> You're making a distinction without a difference -- whether it's because of "caution" or whatever, no progress will be made if you have your way.

According to you the solution lies in "politics". Yet, this law is the product of California's government, a political body -- is that not legitimate "politics"?

So what _would_ make for a "political" solution that would qualify for your stamp of approval? Chasing a consensus with the "tough on crime" crowd who benefit from felony disenfranchisement disproportionately suppressing minority votes? No such consensus will ever happen.

<comment><USER5> Again, you either misunderstand or misrepresent my points.

> According to you the solution lies in "politics".

My post was _critical_ of the role of politics in determining the fairness of the algorithm. It removes the human lives factor and provides a platform for politicians and ideologues ("tough on crime" or otherwise) to either do nothing, argue about the ideology of fairness, or ignore ground truth about outcomes and pre-existing bias in the system.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> A little over a year ago I was the victim of some crimes including:

-kidnapping with a deadly weapon

-assault with a deadly weapon/firearm

-car jacking with a deadly weapon

The defendant has bonded out twice in the case. The first time there was only a charge of grand theft of my car, and bond was revoked after the investigation and the other more serious charges were filed. Thereafter, the defendant bonded out again after all the charges were filed, and posted $300,000+ bond. As the victim (and a lawyer) I knew the defendant would be granted bond (although I believed the defendant was both a flight risk and danger to the community and bond should have been denied), so I requested gps tracking. Less than a week later the defendant was rearrested for violating the terms of bond...all based on the gps tracking.

I'm not sure I trust an algorithm to determine if someone is a flight risk or danger to the community. Historically, the cash bond was like the carrot and stick to making sure a released defendant showed up to court. I think technology, like the gps tracker, can probably replace cash bond in almost all cases.

<comment><USER7> Was the defendant rearrested by police or by bail agents?

<comment><USER6> I think on the first violation/revocation of bond the defendant was arrested by police (but the defendant was in another county at the time, so they had to extradite back to the county). The 2nd violation/revocation of bond, I think the warrant was executed by police (but in the same county as the case).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Sounds like the sort of thing GDPR's regulations of automated decision making is intended to deal with: [https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/guide-to-the- general-da...](https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/guide-to-the-general-data- protection-regulation-gdpr/individual-rights/rights-related-to-automated- decision-making-including-profiling/)

Specifically, even if you're allowed by Article 22 to perform automated decision-making (and decisions on bail that are mandated by law, as in the case at hand, would be allowed) must still:

* provide meaningful information about the logic involved in the decision-making process, as well as the significance and the envisaged consequences for the individual;

* use appropriate mathematical or statistical procedures;

ensure that individuals can:

* obtain human intervention;

* express their point of view; and

* obtain an explanation of the decision and challenge it;

<comment><USER9> GDPR does not apply to sovereign nations and states. The European Commission is not the boss of the world.

That said, it may be a useful framework to adopt for uses such as regulating pre-trial risk assessment algorithms.

<comment><USER10> Not OP, but they never claimed that what California is doing is unlawful because of GDPR. Their comment is still insightful because it shows an example of legislation that, if applied, could ensure more transparency and humanity to automated decision making.

The lack of such legislation becomes more glaring as more and more examples are demonstrated.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I think there are valid reasons to not trust an algorithm to determine whether someone is a flight risk or danger to the community.

But there was already an algorithm that came up with the cash bail amount for a defendant, which was purportedly based on the defendant's flight risk and likelihood of endangering the communoty.

I don't pretend to be an expert so I may be wrong but I think the algorithm boiled down to something like "let the judge decide".

I think transparency around the algorithm is incredibly important, so anything that explicitly makes the properties of the algorithm part of the debate I think is good.

</comment><comment><USER12> This worked _really_ well in New Jersey. However, California's implementation of county-by-county standards as opposed to a statewide system could still leave a lot of room for error.

<comment><USER13> There is a good Planet Money episode about New Jersey's overhaul of the bail system: [https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2018/08/29/643072388/epis...](https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2018/08/29/643072388/episode-783-new- jersey-bails-out)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Several of this bill's original co-sponsors ended up opposing it due to the lack of accountability in the risk assessment system and the fact that it gives police even more power over the justice process: [https://siliconvalleydebug.org/stories/silicon-valley-de- bug...](https://siliconvalleydebug.org/stories/silicon-valley-de-bug-s-letter- of-opposition-to-california-s-false-bail-reform-bill-sb10)

</comment><comment><USER15> I post this too often, but its very applicable here.

[http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/entries/78691781-c9b7-...](http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/entries/78691781-c9b7-30a0-9a0a-3ff76e8bfe58)

</comment><comment><USER16> While there are some valid concerns about using algorithms I'm quite happy that they got rid of cash bail. Making presumed innocent people pay to get out of jail has never made any sense to me.

For serious crimes, the number of people who say "well I would run for it to try and most of the rest of my life in prison, but I won't because then I (or whoever put the money up for me) won't get my bail back" has to be tiny.

For non serious crimes the number of people motivated by bail and not by avoiding spending the rest of their life as a fugitive has to be tiny.

<comment><USER17> Isn't the rational that somebody needs to vouch for release and prove trust by risking loss of the money?

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Our courts here in New Mexico got bamboozled by the use of the "Arnold Tool"which is basically the same thing. Anyways, Yada Yada Yada, we're now worst in nation for auto theft because of it and we have no recourse against it unless we want to change our state constitution because our Supreme Court mandated it as it was sold as being more fair. All it did was put repeat offenders on the street the next day. My car has been broken into three times since the change. Garbage in, garbage out.

<comment><USER19> Your anecdote about petty theft is so valid

<comment><USER20> Auto theft is _by definition_ not "petty theft".

<comment><USER19> Except they didnt steal his car just broke into it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> This points to one of the dilemmas that societies will be hard pressed to confront. Are we capable of accepting decisions underpinned by algorithms even when the outcome is negative in a few cases? Inevitably an individual released as a result of one of these algorithms will commit a criminal act and the argument will arise that had an individual been responsible for making the evaluation and that had cash bail existed then such crime would not have occurred. I think people will have significant difficulty in accepting even the slightest of errors with algorithms (particularly with respect to violent crime) even if the overall result is lower than if humans had been the sole deciders. In many ways it's analogous with the ongoing debates about so-called driverless cars.

</comment><comment><USER22> So we are moving toward a world where one person gets out, while the other has to languish in prison for months or years awaiting trial because an algorithm said so. And the accused aren't allowed to know what's happening behind the scenes of the algorithm because we need to protect the competitive advantage of the vendor who sold the software to the state. This is total and complete insanity and elected officials should pay with their jobs and their reputations for even suggesting something so unjust.

<comment><USER4> Where is your outrage about how poor people are wronged by the current system?

<comment><USER22> I am absolutely outraged about the way the current system treats and traps the poor. But we need to be clear that this isn't a fix; it's a further obfuscation of the problem. I have little doubt that said algorithms will continue to wrong the poor at similar or greater rates - the only difference is that it will be significantly harder to detect.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> As governments start to implement more algorithms in public policy decisions, it becomes increasingly important that ALL algorithms be open sourced for public review unless there is a national security risk.

Having a summary of how the algorithm works is necessary but not sufficient.

</comment><comment><USER24> Shouldn't the "algorithm" need to be published? Surely someone being held prisoner by a computer program should at least have the right to examine and potentially challenge the source code and data being used.

<comment><USER25> Actually, they're being held because they were arrested, right?

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> One step forward, and well who knows how many back.

</comment><comment><USER27> Machine Learning Algorithms are severely racist towards defendants. We know, for example, that AI algorithms mistake Black people for primates... but they are no more racist than the criminal justice system at large. And they have a better chance of getting fixed.

[https://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/26/opinion/sunday/artificial...](https://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/26/opinion/sunday/artificial- intelligences-white-guy-problem.html)

<comment><USER28> Bond is severely racist too, if you take those criteria. Black people get assigned higher bond, and often have a harder time getting it together. As such there are many people in jail that are in no way a risk but are held because they can't afford bond.

<comment><USER4> Our awareness that machine learning algorithms have the potential to make racist decisions gives us something to watch out for as these systems roll out. Hopefully addressing any flaws will be a matter of ordinary debugging.

Regardless, the cash bail system is terrible and I'm anticipating big improvements as we move away from it.</comment></comment></comment>


Bloom Box Fuel Cell Device is Revealed - <AUTHOR> http://www.fastcompany.com/1557348/bloombox-bloom-box-fuel-cell-60-minutes-kleiner-perkins-kr-sridhar-green-energy-google

<comment><USER2> _The box also produces carbon dioxide as a byproduct--a potential downside depending on how much it generates._

The amount it generates is of little concern - what matters is where the methane (or other fuel) comes from. If the methane is produced from fresh biomass then the box is carbon neutral. But if the fuel comes from oil then it won't be carbon neutral.

<comment><USER3> Also, how much CO2 it generates depends only on the amount and type of fuel it consumes[1] - e.g. 1 CO2 molecule emitted per CH4 molecule consumed - so that statement is nonsensical to begin with.

[1] unless it also produces carbon monoxide, which is unlikely considering the efficiency claims. Other than H2O, I'm not aware of any other possible byproducts of methane oxidisation.

<comment><USER4> >> Other than H2O, I'm not aware of any other possible byproducts of methane oxidisation.

The same was said for the ICE, and now our cars emit all sorts of crud. Ideally, that's all you get: CH4 + O2 ---> 2H20 + CO2. Practically, you get sulfur and other impurities. Specifically sulfur scrubbers ([http://www.duke- energy.com/environment/air-quality/sulfur-di...](http://www.duke- energy.com/environment/air-quality/sulfur-dioxide-scrubbers.asp)) are often used to reduce the amount of sulfur, but they raise the amount of CO2 byproduct. It's a no-win situation.

<comment><USER3> The sulfur is an impurity of the fuel, though, it's not produced out of thin air. How the engine deals with impurities will depend on the exact chemical reactions, but you're not going to get more CO2 molecules out than carbon atoms go in.

<comment><USER4> Of course. But my point is that cleaning fuel is an energy intensive task. Moreover, in the past it has resulted in additional CO2 being output.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> _Bloom estimates that a box filled with 64 ceramic disks can produce enough juice to power a Starbucks._

So, how many Starbucks to a Library of Congress? How about not estimating and giving us some useful metrics, preferable based on this newfangled "watt" unit?

<comment><USER6> I figure about 30kW per box.

Elsewhere in the article, they say Ebay got 100k USD of electric power from using 5 boxes for 9 months. Assuming 10c/kW.h, that's 1 MW.h in 6408 hours, coming out to about 154 kW for all five boxes.

Adjust for actual utility rates and exact usage.

<comment><USER7> yeah, but such hyperbole is a classic sign of a con. if they were serious they'd just tell you the I/O.

<comment><USER8> On the other hand, the source is a 60 minutes puff piece- their audience has no conception of what a watt is.

<comment><USER9> Their audience knows what a hair dryer (1500-1800 watts) and a 100 watt light bulb are.

30kw - can run 300 100 watt light bulbs continuously.

They could even throw in a refrigerator or two.

<comment><USER10> Actually, they did mention how one 'disc' or wafer powers one lightbulb.

The problem with comparing a lightbulb or refrigerator, etc. is that the average person has to think... ok, so how many discs are in a box? how many lighbulbs do I have in my house? etc.

In the piece (which I admit is very fluff), the founder shows a box and says 'this is a european house', grabs another box and says 'this is an american house, or 4 asian houses'.

These are methods of explanation that the 60 minutes audience can understand.

The actual company is apparently launching on Wednesday, so I'd expect that on that day we'll hear more details.

Seeing as the device can use a different gases as fuel, wouldn't we expect that the output would be dependent on the fuel supplied?

<comment><USER9> > Seeing as the device can use a different gases as fuel, wouldn't we expect > that the output would be dependent on the fuel supplied?

It depends on where the limits are.

Consider the typical gas furnace. I understand that natural gas varies considerably in energy per gram (or per cubic feet at a standard pressure). Within limits, the system adjusts the amount consumed to account for that and appropriate output. Meanwhile, an electric hair dryer doesn't - it's heat output is determined by the input voltage, current, and wave shape.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This is essentially a solid-state microturbine.

You can order a 65-kW microturbine from Capstone Turbine Corp for about $40,000 USD.

Natgas-powered microturbines have commonly been used for distributed power generation in industrial settings (hotels, hospitals, etc...)

See Ingersoll Rand: [http://www.ingersollrandproducts.com/IS/Category.aspx- am_en-...](http://www.ingersollrandproducts.com/IS/Category.aspx-am_en-18218)

See Captsone Turbine Corp: <http://www.microturbine.com/prodsol/solutions/chp.asp>

Try Googling for "microturbine".

[edit] Also, "Microturbines: Applications for Distributed Energy Systems" is a good book on the subject. Amazon: [http://www.amazon.com/Microturbines- Applications-Distributed...](http://www.amazon.com/Microturbines-Applications- Distributed-Energy-Systems/dp/0750684690)

<comment><USER12> This might eventually scale down better than a microturbine (65kW is enough electricity for a large neighborhood (on average), and enough heat for a handful of homes), and I would bet it also operates better at part load.

Microturbines aren't especially quiet either, but it's hard to know how much noise this thing makes without more information.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Is that more effective than burning natural gas in turbine?

EDIT:

In the movie there is a statement that it is twice as effective.

Another question: How much a natural gas turbine of the same output costs?

</comment><comment><USER14> I think the fact that you'd need a natural gas pipeline, or a propane tank out back, kind of negates the "disconnected from the grid" thingy.

Also, where does one get the energy to heat the magic box to 1800 F?

<comment><USER15> from the box itself, i'd guess... electric heating elements?

<comment><USER10> electric heating elements to get 1800F? Wouldn't that take more power than this thing would create? I missed the part about heating to 1800.

<comment><USER16> The chemical reaction heats up the box. However, large amounts of insulation is needed to retain the heat.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I'm really excited about this. But it won't be actually 'revealed' until Wednesday.

</comment><comment><USER18> "we can use fossil fuels, or renewable from land fills..." "solar?" "we can use solar". Sounds pretty much like a hoax.

<comment><USER19> I was watching the interview on 60 minutes and it seems like they edited out something that was said about "solar". As if he probably qualified that answer but the producers decided that it wasn't really relevant.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> How long is the predicted life on these big boxes though? The thirty years quote was abut how long a fuel cell _should_ last. How long do these ones last though?

Well. It can't be worse than coal.

<comment><USER21> It does seem rather unexciting, given that "ebay has saved $100,000" over 9 months with 5 boxes, and the boxes cost $800,000 apiece--that's a 30 year payback.

<comment><USER22> How long does it take to pay back the construction of a conventional power plant?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I had to stop watching the video half way though, because I was laughing so hard. To me this looks like a _definite_ energy generation hoax, of which there have been many in the past. A wafer of sand (silicon) painted green is not going to produce much (if any) electricity.

Suspend your suspension of disbelief and engage physics 101.

<comment><USER24> I guess the boxes that eBay and Google are using have hamsters inside them instead?

<comment><USER23> The people at Google are no doubt hotshot software engineers, but how many of them are physicists/chemists I wonder. Has there been an independent scientific confirmation that the underlying mechanism of electricity generation is valid, and produces significant net energy gain? I very much doubt that.

Do we have anyone here on HN who can actually confirm that these devices have been installed at Google?

I've taken an interest in various energy generation ideas over the years, and a fair amount of hoaxing has always gone on. Sometimes the hoaxes are quite sophisticated an investors who like what they see but know little about physics end up being defrauded out of large amounts of money. From what I've seen in this article/video this raises all the classic red flags which you could expect from a hoax operation.

<comment><USER25> Yes, the classic energy hoax of "marginal improvement over a well known and understood chemical process that obeys the laws of thermodynamics."

I have a feeling you missed the part where they put hydrocarbons in one end.

<comment><USER23> I watched the rest of the video, and noticed the big gas pipeline. So whatever is going on here it's not clean energy - it's basically a generator burning fossil fuel or gas from waste decomposition as usual. It seems unlikely that individual homes or companies could produce enough decomposable waste products to generate the gas needed.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Top 20 Most Sold and Most Read Books of the Week - happy-go-lucky https://www.amazon.com/charts <comment><USER2> It says something about how my impression of Amazon has changed over the years, but when I first saw that headline, I thought this was going to be a competitor for Google Charts.

<comment><USER3> I was really hoping for some kind of replacement for the god-awful Cloudwatch dashboards, which AWS doesn't even use internally because they are borderline useless (source, worked in AWS and built many dashboards)

<comment><USER4> I was really hoping it would be 7 new SDKs and 65 new billing metrics.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Amazon tracks what & when you read on kindle but doesn't share that information with you. I wrote a little script that extracts and visualizes your reading history:

\- [http://roadtolarissa.com/kindle-tracker/](http://roadtolarissa.com/kindle- tracker/)

\- [https://github.com/1wheel/kindle- tracker](https://github.com/1wheel/kindle-tracker)

</comment><comment><USER6> "Oh, the Places You Go" being in the top twenty sold reminded me that it's graduation season.

I feel silly for initially underestimating the amount of overlap between the Most Sold books and Most Read books. I assumed the Most Sold would be more pretentious than the Most Read books. Still surprised there's not at least one Danielle Steele (or equivalent) in Most Read

<comment><USER7> There's also a slight difference in between the most sold and read lists -- sold is all books (Kindle, physical, bulk buys, etc) while read is Kindle-only (because there'd be no way for Amazon to know you read a physical book except self-reported through Goodreads)

It could account for a few of the discrepancies, too. I'd expect "Oh, the Places You'll Go" is most likely going to be physical purchases for graduates, so I wouldn't expect it to show up in read even if all the grads read their copies.

<comment><USER8> Minor quible: most read is Kindle and audible ("into the water" was heard more often than read).

<comment><USER7> Oooh good catch, I missed it on my quick scan. I'd love to be able to break it down more than just Fiction/Nonfiction into listening vs hearing, various sources, etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Why is this so highly upvoted ? this is just a standard best seller list, for books. What's so interesting about it ?

<comment><USER10> Seems like Amazon is trying to replace every book's "NY Times Bestseller" with "Amazon Bestseller"? Another move by Amazon to more deeply penetrate consumer culture with a quick hack.

<comment><USER11> The NYT Bestseller list is human curated instead of just ranking the raw sales numbers.[1]

If the Amazon ranking is based on pure order count[2], Amazon Charts would be an interesting alternative list. It can't fully "replace" the NYT list because I assume many readers want that newspaper's editorial filtering.

[1] [https://booklaunch.com/the-truth-about-the-new-york-times- an...](https://booklaunch.com/the-truth-about-the-new-york-times-and-wall- street-journal-bestseller-lists/#022117)

[2] possibly related: [http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/8-things-people-dont-know- amazo...](http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/8-things-people-dont-know-amazons- bestsellers-rank-sales-rank/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment> VuWall-Matt Wow, I guess I'm both surprised and not surprised to see the Harry Potter series in 5 of the 20 top read fiction spots.

<comment><USER12> What's up with Order of the Phoenix in the highest spot, though? I thought it was easily one of the worst of the series, and Goodreads ratings more or less agree with me, ranking only Chamber of Secrets lower.

<comment><USER13> I think it's the best of the series, but I find that when conversation turns to Harry Potter, I'm often alone in my view.

<comment><USER14> weird, basically everyone I know says it's the best in the series

<comment><USER15> Count me in the "worst" bucket. I liked the first four books (and, oddly, the sixth).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Having done analysis on Amazon books sales I'm very surprised they decided to filter out harlequin style romance novels. They are easily the top selling Kindle category.

<comment><USER17> Makes a lot of sense. The last thing Amazon would want is for Kindles to become known as smut readers.

And it's the last thing Kindle-owning smut readers would want.

So, a win-win, right?

Having seen a few romance novel reader's Kindle suggestions, Amazon isn't shy about promoting the genre to the right audience.

<comment><USER18> The knowledge that they're censoring the list is big for me. Especially since they don't appear to even acknowledge it. Instead of being an honest look at what people find enjoyable to read, how can I trust it to be anything other than purely manufactured marketing? These are the top 20 most read books! (out of the 20 books we were willing to put on this list)

<comment><USER19> They don't show adult novelties on their main website either, you have to dig and search for them. Many companies censor adult items. I would fully expect they would keep sexually explicit or pornographic books off of the list.

<comment><USER18> It's not that I have a problem with them keeping sexually explicit books off the list. The problem is that the criteria for filtering is not disclosed. Therefore the list cannot be "trusted" in the sense that it can be believed to be displaying what it says it's displaying. In fact, we know at least in one sense it's not displaying what it claims to display.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Love the title of Neil Degrasse Tyson's book "Astrophysics for People in a Hurry". So apt for today's readers.

Maybe "for people in a hurry" will become the new "for dummies" franchise? I did a quick search on Amazon for the quoted phrase, there are very few books with that title (although someone called Lynda Hudson seems to have cashed in on the phrase).

</comment><comment><USER21> Every new iteration of book charts completely mixes up my intuitions on which books are there, how long they stay, and how contemporary they are.

For instance, I thought after Bill Gates tweeted his regard for Pinker's Better Angels book, that would be in the top. I would not have expected "Nudge" to be there, but not (for instance) one of Gladwell's books or Freakonomics.

Fiction wise, I can see the effect that TV and movies exert but, with the exception of Potter, it seems they have to be on the air now. (Q: Will Game of Thrones show up when the show starts?)

<comment><USER22> Better Angels is way too dense for me to imagine it ever getting up towards the top of the bestseller lists. Gladwrlls stuff is a lot more tuned for mass appeal.

<comment><USER15> > Better Angels is way too dense for me to imagine it ever getting up towards > the top of the bestseller lists.

If Oprah recommended a book, a lot of people would buy it even if they had no intention of reading it, and similarly for other major cultural figures.

<comment><USER22> Ah thanks for the info. I have no idea what books Oprah recommends but I'm surprised this was one of them. I've read it, and I liked but not loved it, but it certainly wasn't in line with what my vague understanding of Oprah's book club was.

<comment><USER15> I'm not claiming that Oprah recommended any book. I'm saying that "Better Angels is too dense to be a bestseller" doesn't work as a counterargument to "a celebrity recommended it, so I thought Better Angels would have better sales".

<comment><USER22> I disagree. The reason I was surprised when I thought you were saying Oprah recommended it is that Oprah doesn't really recommend books like this. That's not unrelated to the fact that her audience would think "man, Oprah's book recs suck" if she kept recommending books too dense for her audience.

<comment><USER15> Of the millions of people who bought Obama's biography, how many do you think read it? It's dense. But for a lot of people, the point of buying a book is to let other people know that you bought it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Amazon continues to underwhelm with their lack of delivery on the potential presented by their vast store of purchase history. In some ways, this justifies their high stock price as they have this valuable asset they have yet to tap. Some day they will turn their gaze towards unlocking its potential. In the meantime, it reeks of incompetence at worst or a puzzling lack of focus at best when they keep urging me on my Kindle lock screen to buy a self-published bodice-ripper or diapers when nothing in my purchasing history could possibly suggest this as a good use of advertising effort.

<comment><USER24> Indeed. I trialled the Amazon Prime Kindle library and trying to browse what was on offer just brought me to page upon page of what I can only describe as 'shite'. Endless self-published thrillers and erotica with stock photo covers. Why their recommendation algorithms failed so spectacularly in that case I can only wonder (and before you ask, that is not my normal reading material!)

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> The moral of the story is that if you want a book to become popular and go mainstream you need to make a movie or tv show about it first...

It doesn't matter if the cinematic version is good or not, a lot of people will read the book only to be able to complaint about how they screwed it with the script and be that one friend that is the authority about X or Y show, because you know... he read the book...

Up Next: Harry Poter And The Bayesian Statistics

<comment><USER26> "Harry Poter And The Bayesian Statistics"

Already been written: [http://www.hpmor.com/](http://www.hpmor.com/)

<comment><USER25> The more you know... hahaha

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I found the prominence of the agent's name noteworthy. Compare to the NYT Bestsellers list where the agent name is missing: [https://www.nytimes.com/books/best- sellers/?_r=0](https://www.nytimes.com/books/best-sellers/?_r=0)

Is Amazon doing this because Amazon envisions a future where publishers aren't important but agents still are?

</comment><comment><USER28> Amazon used to have "what people in your city are buying?" charts when it was still a bookstore. I loved it, so much more useful than generic bestseller list. I think privacy concerns killed it....

</comment><comment><USER29> What people are reading ... makes me want to rip all my Kindle/Google/Nook books using DRM removal tools and read them in a reader app that doesn't report all my metrics back.

<comment><USER30> c'mon man. Myself and everyone else are dying to know what you're reading.

<comment><USER29> You know it's not even the individual thing. It's the fact that our miniscule data is used to track how entries countries are moving and thinking at scale (although in this case, only for Kindle customers). That should worry us.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Having most read vs most sold is an interesting delta that only Amazon can really do. It would be interesting if they publicized other stats like "most/least completed"...

<comment><USER32> Average number of pages they read before giving in....

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Very strange UX, too much whitespace, too much info hidden behind non-obvious clickable regions. Rating stars too small. Doesn't feel like Amazon.

<comment><USER34> I don't get it. Why is there no price for any edition of the books listed?

Also, the two buttons (one shaped like a shopping cart, the second one shaped like a book) made me think that the first one is to add the book directly to a cart, and the second one to download a sample to my Kindle. But nope, the first one brings you to an actual Amazon page about the book, and the second one, even though it's located on read.amazon.com subdomain (the same one used for Kindle's Cloud Reader) has a different interface underneath it, not tied to your Kindle account. I've noticed that because Chromium is "not supported" while read.amazon.com is supported just fine when viewing it in Chromium.

Hovering over these buttons gives me no indication of what those buttons were and I had to apply the "click and see what happens" tactic.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> It looks like a new front-end on Zeitgeist (which looks like it's completely disappeared from the category pages).

<comment><USER36> I'm pretty disappointed in the performance just from poking around a little.

There's a noticeable delay switch from Most Read to Most Sold and from Fiction to Nonfiction.

My Dev Tools are showing it takes ~500-700ms for that switch to occur.

<comment><USER35> Note that this page is separate from a landing page (like the front page or a category) and a product page. Those have very strict requirements for how long a page component can take to render. This one is allowed to break the rules.

I wonder what they've got backing these pages. DynamoDB? memcached in front of S3? Redshift or AWS Lambda?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> The alternating binary star colors on the hover state almost create a strobe effect. For a moment, I thought the rating reversed on hover and I had to pause and analyse what was going on.

</comment><comment><USER38> Says something that my immediate reaction was that this would be a web service to create charts. And my next thought was that they'd all probably default to not having a Y-axis ;-)

</comment><comment><USER39> SO much harry potter.

<comment><USER40> Ironically, that series is one of the cultural artifacts of the late-90s that fueled the growth of e-commerce. I remember ordering a copy of the first Harry Potter book from Amazon just for the novelty of shopping online.

<comment><USER41> Late 90s? Is it really that old?

I'm old.

When HP came out I thought it was a series for children, and I never picked it up. Some of my friends did, though.

Someday I'll get around to it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> I was expecting Kotlin books.

</comment><comment><USER43> Anyone has any recommendations on the top non-fictions books on this list?

</comment><comment><USER44> Maybe one of the first pieces of non-shit UI work I have seen from Amazon

</comment><comment><USER45> That's funny how the titles aren't actual links. Oh, well.

</comment><comment><USER46> Really? The data is only grouped by week? Despite how much I'd love to read 52 books a year, the actual number is closer to 10.

Best books of the month/year is an order of magnitude more useful to me than what people are reading this week.

<comment><USER47> I also prefer seeing how my information ages:

[http://www.modernlibrary.com/top-100/100-best- novels/](http://www.modernlibrary.com/top-100/100-best-novels/)

[http://www.modernlibrary.com/top-100/100-best- nonfiction/](http://www.modernlibrary.com/top-100/100-best-nonfiction/)

I'm more inclined to the Board's list than the (self-selecting, possibly motivated) Readers'.

WEF have a list of the 20 most influenctial books:

[https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2015/11/the-20-most- influenti...](https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2015/11/the-20-most-influential- books-in-history/)

Wikipedia has an (IMO) fascinating list of the most-sold books of all time. The Bible and Quotations from Chairman Mao (a/k/a "The Little Red Book") each have claims of over 1 billion volumes (1-6 being the range) sold. The next highest-selling book, _Don Quixote_ , at 500m copies.

Contrast that with the most-viewed YouTube video of all time -- Gangnam Style has amassed 2.8 billion views in five years. That's still the YouTube record so far as I'm aware.

That makes me wonder what the highest number of impressions of _any_ one media work has been.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best- selling_books](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_books)

[https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=9bZkp7q19f0](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=9bZkp7q19f0)

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> Did anyone else think this would be a javascript library?

</comment><comment><USER49> And how many of them are available in Kindle Unlimited?

<comment><USER50> I checked the most read non-fiction and only one is available on Kindle Unlimited: #17, Think and Grow Rich.

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> I like the idea of seeing books people actually read. There are some notable cases of books that sell but are never read...

</comment><comment><USER52> Lots of confusion if this is a JS charting library.

Mods, Please expand on title and add - The Top 20 Most Sold & Most Read Books of the Week

</comment><comment><USER53> So "most read" doesn't include people who actually read physical books! Just people who listen to books via audible, and people who swipe pages via kindle ( ok that still counts as reading, but real reading in my books ahem...would definitely count people reading a real book).

"most sold" is problematic as well - everytime you download a free sample, it is counted as sold?!!! I probably download 10 free samples every month, end up actually buying very few. Yet I have been "sold" all these books ?!! Come on.

That said, as a newly naturalized citizen who is still trying to find his bearings in this country, the taste of the public fills me with despair - <AUTHOR> formulaic Baldacci James Patterson Stephen King on every list. Even the nonfiction isn't much better. Maybe HN should do one of these charts - you can at least get a few books actually worth reading.

<comment><USER47> There's a reason that traditional dead-tree bookstore bestseller lists were called "bestsellers" and not "bestreaders".

Some information is ... difficult to acquire.

Though spending patterns are at least a form of honest signalling of intent, regardless of fulfillment or achievement.</comment></comment>


Propaganda Games: Sesame Credit – The True Danger of Gamification - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lHcTKWiZ8sI <comment><AUTHOR> Can anyone based in China provide more information on this? Is there such a system? Is it working as explained in the video?</comment>


StartPage vs. Google – 10 reasons - <AUTHOR> https://startpage.com/eng/top-ten-ways-startpage.html

<comment><USER2> "StartPage protects you from NSA surveillance and spying": And how do you save me from NSA owning CA's and decrypting the SSL Traffic from you? Please explain. (I wish https was any good against NSA - is it?)</comment>


Demystifying PR Event in New York City from Hackers & Founders, November 17 - <AUTHOR> http://plancast.com/p/2oyi

<comment><AUTHOR> Putting together a great event discussing the ins/outs of getting buzz for your company. Hoping to have a live webcast as well.

</comment><comment><USER2> Not sure I understand how Plancast works.

I logged in via Twitter, and now I can't look at the main home page without picking a password, etc.</comment>


How to win a hackathon - <AUTHOR> http://blog.rumma.ge/post/18897267184/how-to-win-a-hackathon

<comment><USER2> I can not understand this at all. Can someone please explain this strange cultural phenomenon?

I'm serious. What could possibly make someone work on anything for 30 hours straight (with only one hour break)? I couldn't imagine myself spending 30 hours straight on any activity voluntarily. What about the health implications?

This reminds me of gamers dying of cardiac arrest after spending days on end in front of a computer.

<comment><AUTHOR> We built a credential in 30 hrs that can give us more recognition for our startup than we potentially would have gotten for months or more of normal work. We're not celebrity founders, we don't have press connections, and we don't know investors. We came in as nobodies on Saturday, and pitched to Dave McClure, Naval, et al on Monday. Now, we have a great hook we can use to start any conversation about our company.

As far as health, yeah – kind of sucks to be taken out of commission for a few days, but a very small sacrifice and completely worth it in our minds.

<comment><USER3> > We built a credential in 30 hrs that can give us more recognition for our > startup than we potentially would have gotten for months or more of normal > work

The importance of this can't be stressed enough. Winning the Facebook Hackathon within a month of starting university was the catalyst to applying to and being accepted at a YC company for the summer as well as a ticket through the interview processes at Google, et al.

More importantly, it also forged connections with local investors and angels that would have taken years to create had I gone through the normal routes, and that wasn't even a large event, so I can only imagine what an AngelHack placing would do

<comment><USER4> Hehe, this is really true: I got an internship immediately from one of the companies sponsoring a hackathon I got second place at. People at other companies I talked to also liked it.

And, beyond that, it was some of the most fun I've had, for the longest time in a single go. Even if I didn't place, it would have been great.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Also want to add that Firebase should definitely do a write-up about their Angelhack sponsorship. We were so impressed by the way that they helped and encouraged everyone there. Andrew, the CEO was giving us advice at 4AM on a Sunday morning! Seriously, these guys are amazing--basically, anytime anyone is building anything real-time, I'm going to refer them to Firebase.

<comment><USER6> The Hackathon.io website also used utilized Firebase for all the messaging. We really can't stress enough how awesome that team is and how useful their tech is! We didn't do justice to the potential of the system, but the parts we touched were simply a developer's dream! Looking forward to rebuilding the messaging with a deeper integration (and timestamps, sorry everybody!) and some useful goodies

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I've been wondering about why people do this sort of thing, so thanks for answering that.

I found it curious that Startupbus, which I believe is going on right now, seems to never have had much traction on HN, and when it did, it appeared to be astroturf. It seems like an unforgettable and intense experience, but combining a hackathon with cabin fever and gross bathrooms just doesn't seem like a lot of fun.

<comment><USER8> I was also on the StartupBus last year and it was the best hackathon I have ever done. I did not take my first nap until 52 hours into it. Had a blast, met a lot of great people, and gained a lot of press <http://kennedysgarage.com/projects/lemonade-stand>

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Hah, they mentioned the Firebase guys. They're awesome - been using them for a while now doing 'live' things. Good to hear hackathons are digging firebase.

</comment><comment><USER10> Looks great, will you be keeping the site up and running?

edit: When I am signed in and 1.) click "Load Craigslist Listings" then 2.) click "Cancel" 3.) I get "We're sorry, but something went wrong."

I'm not sure how frequently users will be clicking cancel or if it happens in every browser but FWIW this is happening in Safari(desktop).

<comment><AUTHOR> Whoops, I need to check the logs! Thanks for the heads-up. We do plan to keep SnapStore.me running. Currently deciding how best to divide our time between our two projects.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> HN-ed || ./-ed || reddited - it seems. Hardly loading ... Off topic: Is there a way of detecting which effect a site is experiencing?

<comment><USER12> >Off topic: Is there a way of detecting which effect a site is experiencing?

I'm not familiar with a way. Some ideas:

* Have Alexa/etc. report real time data including referrers. This requires that work is done by one of the few companies that gets this data.

* Create a site that just monitors which links show up on a manually created list of popular URLs. This would only be an estimate, though since it wouldn't view actual traffic.

* Have people who run sites that might get killed include some code that checks the logs/analytics and reports heavy activity. This is problematic since it requires each site in question to prepare for getting lots of traffic.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Is there a hackathon alert service which will notify me of upcoming hackathons?

</comment><comment><USER13> Very, very cool idea. A couple of remarks:

1) How does this get around the Craigslist TOS (if it does at all)? Not being accusatory -- and I doubt this kind of use would be draining on CL -- just interested if that was at all an issue to deal with?

2) It's encouraging to hear that you used Rails 3.2's ActiveStore on a production app. That's a cool feature but I was wondering if it was stable enough to use.

<comment><USER14> re: 2), the implementation is trivial, and rests upon serialize, which has been in rails (in one form or another) for a while now.

[https://github.com/rails/rails/blob/5daf07704ad21d8856612162...](https://github.com/rails/rails/blob/5daf07704ad21d885661216281ffc48b6ea6adfb/activerecord/lib/active_record/store.rb#L31)</comment></comment>


Researching tech due diligence question lists - <AUTHOR> Since my last post here I've been researching a lot. Last post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15958717
My seniors are already somewhat experienced at one topic: technical due diligence for startups or the lighter version code reviews to provide a report about the status of a "tech company". Sometimes this takes 1 - 3 days, sometimes it takes a few minutes.
Story: we (dev/engineering/ops 5 person agency) do about 1 - 2 technical due diligence (code reviews) a week for other tech companies, I think we're going to productise this into a "scan". Do you know any more lists besides this one: https://decodingvc.gitbooks.io/p9-startup-tech-due-diligence-calculator/content/
thank you <comment><AUTHOR> After some comments via slack/telegram, the second link is not our survey its from point 9 capital. I'm interested if there are more like this. Thank you</comment>