Facebook Timeline - <AUTHOR> http://www.facebook.com/about/timeline <comment><USER3> I'm amazed I'm the only one it seems that things this is pretty lame and not going to be that popular. People _already know_ your life story, that's usually why their your (at least close) friends. Do you really want to see your workmates "life story"?

For those that think this is genuinely going to be a good and popular thing, could you explain why? You probably all know much better than me, so I am interested to hear why people think this'll be popular (which they obviously do, looking at every other comment here!)

I guess it could be useful to turn Facebook into a dating site - is that the bit I'm missing?

Edit: To downvoters: I'm more than happy to accept I'm wrong, I'd just like to know why I am. Cheers.

<comment><USER4> I think this is more geared towards the narcissist in all of us. You read your own timeline, not your workmates'.

<comment> brown9-2 I hate to be a tin foil hat on this, but it really seems like a perfect way to get people to turn over even more personal/private information (especially the kinds they don't usually post in a day-to-day status update, like date of graduation, age, schools, etc) for Facebook to sell to advertisers.

<comment><USER5> Facebook doesn't sell anyone's data to advertisers - we let advertisers target ads based on certain criteria. I'm curious what makes you think we sell people's data? (I'm an engineer at Facebook.)

<comment><USER6> Which criteria?

<comment><USER7> Criteria like age, location, education, interests etc. You can see the entire list when creating a Facebook ad: <http://www.facebook.com/ads/create/>. But the advertisers don't get to see what belongs to who, unless someone clicks on an ad, buys something and they backtrace all of that. They only target it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This in short is a great piece of design. Especially coming out of facebook this is amazing (well they now have one of the most talented designers so not that surprising).

However, as a business this is killer and shrewd. Everyone would want to save a log of their life. More app permissions to add to timeline > more auto posts in ticker > more connection for Facebook.

Well played!

Disclosure: I am working on something similar as a place for all the memories of your life (<http://momment.com>) so the above text comes in view of having actually thought about this problem for months now.

<comment><USER9> How cool is this going to be for kids who grew up with Facebook and their kids and their kids' kids? I would love to have had insight to this level of detail for my ancestors.

<comment><USER10> Yep. And I wish there was a way to capture everything in my life in this Timeline-like fashion, without any extra effort from me.

The one condition I have, though, is that I don't share it with anyone except someone I explicitly want to share it with. With everything being absolutely private and in my control to carry with me, by default, it would be killer. But this could well be opposite to Facebook's own direction.

All-in-all, this is a rehash of the news feed with a few more controls. But the presentation is really nice.

<comment><USER8> You will not be disappointed then by what we are cooking up.

<comment><USER11> Cool, it looks interesting. I put my email on the list. I hate hate hate the "sign up your friends now! The more you sign up, the earlier you get in!" thing that shows up after I do. I don't know anything about your site, so I'm not going to go recommend it to anyone.

I can see how the practice started; help spread the word. It just doesn't inspire confidence in me for a site where I'm going to end up posting all sorts of details of my life...

Still, I'll be interested to check it out _myself_ once I can.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Does anyone here remember when Facebook had this feature back in 2004/2005? It was a little simpler, but exactly the same idea. They killed it a long time ago, but I guess they just decided to bring it back.

The dude in the video has sure aged and accomplished an impressive amount in Facebook's 7 year history.

<comment><USER13> Facebook used to be more of a social network for finding people you don't know, and now it's a social network for the people you know.

I really miss searching through profiles. I made a lot of friends randomly that way at my school. I'd click on a band name, a movie, a person or anything, find all the people that liked that band, find out a person was really awesome, hang out with them, etc... Then you could find people at other schools, people that went to your high school, etc... which was also really nice because I went to 8 different schools over 5 years and lost touch with a lot of people. I became better friends with people who used to be just acquaintances. I probably added 2/3 of my friends now on facebook within

Myspace didn't have anything close to that, just name search, and facebook has sort of regressed into that largely in the name of privacy I'm sure.

<comment><USER14> "Facebook used to be more of a social network for finding people you don't know, and now it's a social network for the people you know."

That's because within the first couple years they figured out that over 90% of their users were primarily using it to connect with people they already knew. (And these were the folks who were both early adopters and college students.)

Also, if you design a social network around meeting new people then that network will cap out relatively quickly and die due to 'triadic implosion'. This is where person A is friends with person B and C. Once person B meets person C, the open triad becomes a closed triad. I forget the exact percent, but once the closed triads are more than a certain percentage the entire social network dies. However, networks that are designed to connect you with your existing friends don't run into this problem.

Also, designing the social network around your existing friends is more conducive to generating lots of new content cheaply and often automatically by using exterior behavioral residue, which is essentially what this new update is all about. Originally Facebook was designed around the existing social science combined with Zuckerberg's intuition, though at this point Facebook is mostly designed around its own proprietary social science that has been created for internal use. In the short run they are maxing out their stickiness before the IPO, though in the long run it wouldn't surprise me if they ultimately undermine their original appeal by straying too far from the basics.

<comment><USER15> > but once the closed triads are more than a certain percentage the entire > social network dies

I'm pretty sure you're misinterpreting a research paper that I'm familiar with. A common measure of network structure is the clustering coefficient, which is the ratio of triads to all possible triads. In real networks, the average clustering coefficient is generally orders of magnitude less than 1%.

Besides, the network is continually growing, and people generally continually meet new people. It's highly unlikely that the FB network is going to stagnate because "everyone already knows each other". At least not for another decade...

<comment><USER14> Perhaps, this is the paper I'm thinking of:

[http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1150402.1150412&coll=&...](http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1150402.1150412&coll=&dl=ACM)

Unfortunately I no longer have a copy of it on my computer to check. This was my understanding though from the last time I looked at it:

[http://alexkrupp.typepad.com/sensemaking/2007/05/triadic_imp...](http://alexkrupp.typepad.com/sensemaking/2007/05/triadic_implosi.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I can't help but think of bitrot.

You spend an afternoon "scrapbooking" in real life, and you get something that your grand-grandsons might, one day, inherit and read in awe.

You spend an afternoon scrapbooking on FB, and in ten years FB goes bust or whatever (Geocities, anyone?), and you've got nothing.

I guess the real test will be my wife -- she loves scrapbooking.

(this, and the first time I went through the presentation my brain was screaming MYSPACE really, really loud.)

<comment><USER17> Never mind them going bust in ten years, in a year or two they'll redesign part of the site again and lose it anyway.

For example, a while back they managed to lose parts of my profile (something to do with "pages" I think), and I used to be part of a group for my year at high school which, as far as I can tell, has silently vanished.

<comment><USER18> If it was an old-style group, it's gone from your profile, but you might be able to still see it here: <http://www.facebook.com/?sk=2361831622>. However, they are apparently now "scheduled to be archived" and converted into new- style groups: <http://www.facebook.com/help/?page=18966>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Whatever happened to just "being a utility"? All of these new features really don't line up with Zuckerberg's vision of Facebook.*

*At least my impression of his vision, given that he often describes Facebook as a utility.

Edit: sorry, what did I say that was so offensive? In every single interview I've seen with Zuckerberg, he talks about Facebook being a utility. How does adding various features (like the timeline) correspond with that at all?

<comment><USER16> "FB as a utility" can happen only if they maintain their humongous userbase.

Nobody signs up to FB "because I'll have a single-sign-on identity to use somewhere else"; they sign up to interact with their friends/family/peers, play silly games and post pictures of their cats. Zuckerberg has to constantly throw them a bone to keep them sweet while he goes spreading "Like" buttons and SSO apis through the web.

The way he's managed to eat Google's lunch for five years, by coming to the SSO problem from a completely opposite trajectory, is impressive and quite cunning in its own way. I do believe however that in the long run G+ will probably do to them what IE did to Netscape.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> This was the first time in awhile I got that "evil empire" vibe from something. Not to say that what Facebook is doing is inherently _evil_ , but something about cataloging life into such a precise order seems...strange. From a technical standpoint, however, what Facebook has achieved is quite impressive. The design is gorgeous as is the interaction (and that's speaking without having actually used it). This definitely marks an exciting and encouraging time to be in this industry, but I hope it doesn't mean that we'll be living life via the timeline.

</comment><comment><USER21> Looks like a digital, semi-automated scrapbook. From my understanding, it's not an overhaul of the profile, but another view of your online identity. If they pull it off it could be pretty cool.

<comment><USER22> The examples that they are showing look awesome. I wonder if they will surface ex-girlfriends as "important" parts of your timeline.

<comment><USER23> I have always wondered why people are so shamed of their past emotions. Ex- girlfriends are part of your life, part of who you are even if you don't want to admit it.

I suspect it to be somehow a configurable feature or you can always remove those manually.

<comment><USER24> It's not a matter of being ashamed of ex-girlfriends (maybe sometimes it is). The problem is my wife doesn't want to go on my Facebook profile and see pictures of a dozen ex-girlfriends. And I don't want those showing up in there automatically and having to explain.

<comment><USER23> I see your point and it's a good one but humor me.

What is there to explain? Why doesn't your wife let you be the person you are?

<comment><USER25> Where's the line?

Rating how good your past girlfriends were in bed? Describing how you had the best valentines day with a previous girlfriend, and not with your current wife?

People like to believe they're special. Talking too much about ex-gf/bf's is a recipe for disaster. They can't handle the truth!

Do you tell your wife her ass looks big as well? ;)

<comment><USER26> > Where's the line?

Wherever you and your wife (partner) deem it to be.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> It will be interesting if/how this affects Facebook as a platform for apps.

Apps appear to be more visible in this design, as well as having more of a purpose. Perhaps part of the motivation of this design was to encourage developers to make use of the Facebook platform.

It may be a good opportunity for web apps to make their users more public about their choice of apps. While apps can currently publish to a user's wall, I prevent this from happening because it seems spammy and pointless, but I wouldn't have an issue with an app having a dedicated space on my profile where it displays specific information.

</comment><comment><USER28> This is great.

The majority of social networks and social sharing sites are obsessed with the now. This stemmed from Facebook and Twitter pioneering the UI with the timeline format. However, try to go back really far in any timeline, and you'll usually be greeted with a wall.

Timeline will hopefully make Facebook (and other sites) realize the potential there is in browsing through and curating older content. Sure, people will still be obsessed with the newest stuff, but at least there will be a way to open up the time horizon a bit and reflect on the forest.

As the FB generation grows up to become grandparents, it'll be fascinating for the grandkids to actually see a complete and browsable timeline of their grandparents. Just imagine if you had that today.

Sidenote 1: FB is now starting to encroach on 1000memories's space.

Sidenote 2: FB should really sell automatically generated (but high quality) timeline storybooks. Parents and relatives would go crazy for that.

<comment><USER18> Just to make sure, you do realize you are talking about an eight-year-old website and making predictions about how its users will behave in approximately thirty years, right?

<comment><USER28> Oh don't get me wrong. I think it'll be a longshot that well be browsing our timelines on FB in 30 years. But, i am an optimist: I believe our data will still be accessible in some form in a more federated manner by then.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I've heard a lot of people on HN call Facebook a toy, which at some point was probably a fair criticism. This is the first thing I've seen from Facebook in a long time that truly feels like important and worthwhile work.

<comment><USER30> "truly feels like important and worthwhile work"

Would you please care explaining why?

<comment><USER29> I think timeline addresses some common needs and desires- personal reflection, recording your experiences, bonding over shared experiences. The profile and news feed have always seemed tailored to a certain type of content- what's happened recently. But it never really seemed important and the profile doesn't help you know someone. It feels like timeline lowers the virtual barrier between participants in online communication and lets them express themselves in a meaningful way. It feels like a departure from frivolity.

Of course, I have only seen the pitch at f8 but I haven't used the product yet so right now I think exactly what Facebook wants me to think :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> So the question is if you want to live your life on Facebook are you also willing to document your life on Facebook?

What comes next? Genealogical charts? Medical records? That's not how I want to use Facebook.

</comment><comment><USER32> My only response is "sweet, now I can quit trying to do that banner-across- the-top-photo-thumbnails thing on my burlesque identity's page". Anything else is lagniappe.

</comment><comment><USER33> Wonder what Freeman and Gelernter think about it.

<http://cs-www.cs.yale.edu/homes/freeman/lifestreams.html>

</comment><comment><USER34> Have they added a way to change the date on a photo? Because those scanned 80's photos in the demo aren't going to show up in the 80's if you uploaded them in 2010.

Edit: Sounds like you drag the existing photos to the timeline to add them in the appropriate place. Better than nothing...

<comment><USER35> Timeline wouldn't work without a way to change the dates.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Is this similar to <http://path.com>?

<comment><USER37> It's what Path is trying to capture, but they're such a new service that they don't have the problem of displaying multiple year's worth of data (in their case photos). If people keep using the service, I'm sure they will eventually have to come up with a better way to find the most interesting moments.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> I think a lot of mom's are going to enjoy this. Younger people may like it too, especially girls, but mother's are going to have a field day creating a scrapbook like this with Facebook.

</comment><comment><USER39> Looks really interesting. Wonder if G+/Picasa will be creating a similar feature - I've almost moved away from facebook completely.

</comment><comment><USER40> If everything happens as Mark Zuckerberg envisioned with this timeline then they have to make sure that they save all the information to last thousands if years. If our civilization ends one day and archaeologist from the future discovered Facebook's servers preserved it will tell them everything they need to know about us as a people. How we lived our lives, our dreams, our aspirations, the challenges we overcame. Just imagine if the Romans had this 2,000 years ago, we will see post like "Today I almost died fighting this gladiator from Gaul, good thing he got jumped by that lion first!" I wonder how many likes that post would have made, of course it would be in Latin.....LOL

</comment><comment><USER41> I didn't watch the Keynote, but based on Nicholas Felton's feature on the timeline page and what I've read, Facebook gave him a lot of credit.

For those who don't know, Felton is a graphic designer hired in April [[http://www.fastcodesign.com/1663718/facebook-hires- infograph...](http://www.fastcodesign.com/1663718/facebook-hires-infographic- gurus-nicholas-felton-and-ryan-case) for more info].

The simple graphical layout of Timeline in the preview page reminds me of MySpace. But given how Felton is a big part of this. Facebook's designs have largely ebbed and flowed, but this looks like a cool concept and Felton's involvement has me excited.

</comment><comment><USER42> This is really smart.

Those years of updates and photos on the timeline are data that only Facebook has. It's a unique asset and they're putting it front and center.

If people like the timeline a lot it will be an enormous barrier to entry for competing social networks.

</comment><comment><USER43> I have been an internet junkie for ages, but i beg to differ. While fb has made it a norm it seems about sharing information, i dont think it is as inherent in the human psyche to share everything than getting what you need.While it served its purpose of making the web more open and engaging, a more fundamental trait is the concept of need and selectivity, which is what makes each individual unique.And due to the traction FB has gained over the past half decade, i think the web overall has missed the point, addressing individuality in terms of what you do instead of who u are, and what you need.

</comment><comment><USER44> Looks like a ripoff of Google's Dear Sophie, without the emotional impact.

<comment><USER39> I had to look up "Dear Sophie", and it was a great video. However, the underlying tech is just email with attachments - nothing new. Facebook's timeline seems to be quite a bit more, with a visual aspect and ability to comment, share, etc. It's probably been done before but far from a ripoff of email...

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> Interesting to note that Facebook Timeline uses Microsoft's Bing maps for all mapping presentation. Direct shot across Google's bow?

I'm a Facebook developer and followed these instructions from none other than TechCrunch to get my timeline profile up and running.

[http://techcrunch.com/2011/09/22/how-to-enable-facebook- time...](http://techcrunch.com/2011/09/22/how-to-enable-facebook-timeline/)

In any case, I thought the Bing Maps integration is a pretty significant item to note the growing competition between Facebook and Google on the social scene.

<comment><USER46> Also, Microsoft owns part of Facebook, so there's that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> Have I missed any Spotify - Facebook announcements? I know there's been some buzz on FB live-streaming music - this seems to indicate (in the Apps section) that it will do so using Spotify.

<comment><USER48> Actually.. it's being discussed right now. Spotify CEO just walked on the stage.

<http://www.livestream.com/f8live>

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> A tangent: I allow G+ to auto-upload the pictures and short videos that I take with my Droid. Since I spend a little time deleting all but my favorite pictures and videos, this will eventually be a good private timeline (private because auto-uploaded material is not public until you share it).

If someone spent a few minutes a day also annotating pictures and videos then this would be a good resource for remembering the past.

Hopefully Google Takeout exporting facility will soon also provide download ZIPs for auto-upload materials.

</comment><comment><USER50> Looks like a Flipboard of your life, plus you can customize its content for different groups of visitors. Glad FB is focusing on design, it looks beautiful.

</comment><comment><USER51> For some of us, best thing about facebook will always remain the same: not to have a facebook profile at all.

What happened to catching an old buddy after ages, in real life, and getting to hear each others story over a cup of coffee or dinner table. I would always prefer that to getting to know every other detail about my friends living far away, throwing every little detail of their life at me, every 10 minutes.

</comment><comment><USER52> I imagine this just killed erly.com's collections.

</comment><comment><USER53> What a coincidence! We implemented this kind of timeline in our DjangoDash 2011 project (Jul 30-31) - <http://familyfeed.vorushin.ru/vorushins/Marta/> (source code - <https://github.com/vorushin/FamilyFeed>)

</comment><comment><USER54> Their intro ad is incredibly similar to Google's ad they ran a while back documenting a kid's life story. I guess time will tell on the transitory nature of information on th Internet.

Also I loved how all his stuff only had three likes. He must have pricks for friends I only a handful of people liked his daughter saying 'dada' ;)

</comment><comment><USER55> Call me cynical, but I can't help feel that this has been produced to convince people to provide Facebook with even greater access to their lives and what they do.

It provides a degree of justification for harvesting personal data - <USER2> perhaps negates the fact that this data is useful to Facebook as well. Smoke and mirrors ...

</comment><comment><USER56> Google - "Tell me more about you" Facebook - "Show me your friends and I will tell you who you are"

<comment><USER55> Facebook log a lot of behavioural data as well - so in a sense they are also asking 'tell me more about you'.

</comment></comment><comment><USER57> For extra points they should have ended the timeline with Andy Sparks in a coffin.

<comment><USER58> My thoughts exactly. I found the whole "timeline" quite trite and deeply depressing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER59> Spotify is alright, but I use iTunes far more and wish it could integrate.

</comment><comment><USER60> I wonder how many businesses and hopes facebook killed today. Many of those features are things that you could imagine someone might offer as an app.

Soon they will begin to bet against their own market.

</comment><comment><USER61> So do they want us to put up every potentially embarrassing part of our life up there as well, or I guess not? This Timeline feature is about as Stepford as you can get...

</comment><comment><USER62> It's lifepath.me with features! Not necessarily an improvement.

</comment><comment><USER63> This is a very nice thing to have, if it were detailed enough that I could scan it and reminisce.

But if it were that detailed, I wouldn't want it made public.

Can we timeline privately?

<comment><USER64> That's my thought too. This seems like a nice landing page for a profile, but it's trying to do two very different things. It's great for your top items, but the entire timeline history should be a different product.

</comment></comment><comment><USER65> How wide are Facebook's designers' screens? My laptop is 1280 pixels wide and I can't see the full width of this page.

Please cap your designs at 1000 pixels.

<comment><USER66> It should fit in 980 pixels or so, without the chat bar

<comment><USER66> Why the downvotes? I am an engineer at Facebook who worked on parts of Timeline. That was posted from my phone, but I just tried it and it definitely fits under 1000 pixels if you close the chat sidebar.

<comment><USER67> The top-level post is referring to the timeline intro page (<http://www.facebook.com/about/timeline>), not timelines themselves.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER68> Isn't this basically what Path was trying to become?

</comment><comment><USER69> This feature is giving me visions of "The Final Cut"

</comment><comment><USER70> What would be great to use the timeline to create slideshows with the music you were listening at that time. Like a life radio station.

</comment><comment><USER71> I'm not a big fan - I really don't like the idea that if I just connected with someone they can see updates I posted from 2007...

</comment><comment><USER72> ...this rather awesome. I think this'll be a good way to make the profiles more engaging and visually interesting. Good move!

</comment><comment><USER73> The design of this About page looks remarkably similar to an Apple product page, the title font especially. Very well done.

</comment><comment><USER74> It looks tumblr-inspired. I expect tumblr to get back at them with a similar timeline.

</comment><comment><USER75> Facebook is moving further and further from the "young and cool" demographic.

<comment><USER76> The problem with "young and cool" is that there are not that many of them and they are universally poor.

</comment></comment><comment><USER77> Does anyone have a mirror of this, or screenshots? Facebook is blocked here!

</comment><comment><USER78> This does look quite cool. Will be interesting to see it for real.

</comment><comment><USER79> [http://techcrunch.com/2011/09/22/how-to-enable-facebook- time...](http://techcrunch.com/2011/09/22/how-to-enable-facebook-timeline/)

</comment><comment><USER80> Ring structure! (The microphone.)

</comment><comment><USER81> Now all they need is a text-to-speech feature to fully rip off Qwiki in this new(ish) innovation.

</comment><comment><USER82> the myline ipad app offers a similar functionality with a cool interface.

</comment><comment><USER83> huh?

</comment><comment><USER84> I like how every picture on that page is of a white person.

</comment><comment><USER85> Disgusting. Who would put their life story on Facebook? A crippled kind of human. Life is not pictures and facts, and this product pretends it is.

<comment><USER15> Yes, while you're at it, who would put their life story in a scrapbook. Oh, wait...

<comment><USER86> You don't typically put your life scrapbook on your front porch.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER87> Facebook just announced their Timeline feature. The first beautiful interface from Facebook. A product with a lot of feel good elements but a great way for Facebook to integrate themselves even further into the life story of it's millions of users.

Facebook is trying to be a place for social groups to interact online and also for the individual self to be discovered. I don't think both can be done effectively. There's just too much noise on Facebook as it is. I think this feature, really just a visualization of the feed, will just lead to more stalker type behavior.</comment>


Megapack: Utility-Scale Energy Storage - <AUTHOR> https://www.tesla.com/blog/introducing-megapack-utility-scale-energy-storage <comment><USER3> The energy regulatory model in Australia is complex, and broken. And rather than simplifying it, it is going to be made even more complex, and probably more broken, to resolve the problems.

Tesla is not the problem, the 30 minute bidding model, and the state/federal divide on energy policy, and the monopoly capital rent-seeking behaviour of encumbent privatized generators using coal and gas, and guaranteed yields on capital investment, and weak regulatory oversight, and a lack of national coordination, maybe they are the problem.

But Tesla exposes the problem: the Neoen battery stack has been fantastic, but needs to be kept in perspective: To use this for more than FCAS (frequency stability services) nationwide, means re-building the national transmission grid to favour battery models. Parliamentarians got up on their hind hooves and brayed about how it couldn't keep lightbulbs on for more than 20 minutes and was a waste of money: They didn't for one minute admit it wasn't designed as a longterm power store, but as a frequency-control store, stability, and for peak-price bidding to cap off supply-price disfunctions, its working fine: Something like 60% of its capacity is for private bid to earn money, 40% contracted to the state for their goals. It is a real game changer but needs to be understood, its not like a Pumped Hydro unit, or a synchronous condenser (although it is more like that, than PHES) It is its own beast. Its response speed is so fast, the regulatory behaviour models have to adapt to cope with it.

A Five minute bid pricing model is coming in under 2 years I think. I hope the majors don't work out a way to "game" it because my hope is, other mega-scale battery and PH systems will be onstream then, and be able to survive in it, and drive some more coal and gas out of the system.

We have a fictional belief in "base load" power here rather than responsive power. We also lack useful tools like demand management which can be used to bid alongside supply for pricing to avoid having to turn on nasty dirty generators, when the option to time-shift load exists (supermarkets and places with huge thermal mass can time-shift their AC and cooling or heating budget, and so avoid load)

Meantime, people are arguing for a de-centralized model using household batteries where resilience is kept in the customer distribution net, as well as at the transmission net level. There are competing pressures around "how shall we fix it" which are not simple.

If you want to read a good overview of this, look for stuff written by John Quiggin, an economist in Queensland who has written on the stuff-ups in privatized energy supply in Australia and the market failure.

<comment><USER4> > means re-building the national transmission grid to favour battery models.

You literally can't store enough energy in batteries to power the network. Yesterdays demand for SA was [0] 218,247,760 kWh. At even the most optimistic battery price no one has ever managed to achieve as scale of $100 USD per kWh betteries that's $21,824,776,000 (21 Billion Dollars) for one state, in Australia.

You need to double or triple that to deal with summer heat waves, having enough storage to deal with intermittent renewables etc. You'd be looking at $200 billion for SA alone, with 1.7mil people, to move to battery power, without any of the infrastructure change.

Oh and lithium ion batteries lose half their charge every 10 years or less. So you will need to invest $100 billion every decade. That's $128,381 per person in SA to move to battery power once, and then $6,419.05 per year to replace the lost capacity.

This is a pipe dream wilder than cold fusion.

[0] [https://www.aemo.com.au/](https://www.aemo.com.au/)

<comment><USER5> > Oh and lithium ion batteries lose half their charge every 10 years or less.

Most Teslas sold today will still be driving with their original batteries and well over 60-70% of their capacity well beyond ten years. Tesla warranty actually covers them up to 8 years up to 70%. Meaning they are fully confident they can promise that and keep their money in the bank.

> even the most optimistic battery price no one has ever managed to achieve as > scale of $100 USD per kWh

Cost keeps dropping: [https://about.bnef.com/blog/behind-scenes-take-lithium- ion-b...](https://about.bnef.com/blog/behind-scenes-take-lithium-ion-battery- prices/). Ten years is a lot of time and Tesla just announced the desire/goal to increase production capacity to about 1 Twh/year (i.e. about a 35x change relative to production today). Whatever the cost is going to be in ten years, it's going to be nowhere near what it is today. Well below 100$/kwh in ten years certainly.

> Yesterdays demand for SA was [0] 218,247,760 kWh.

You seem to assume a complete lack of wind and solar on a day (unlikely) is going to require 100% battery reserve. That scenario is very unlikely. It might happen locally a couple of times per year but you could simply import power for regions elsewhere in Australia via a cable. Or you could install some over capacity solar to ensure that even at reduced efficiency you still get some power and use the surplus that you end up having for other purposes (clean water, producing hydrogen, etc.).

In any case, nobody is talking about rolling out that much battery. So we're talking way less battery that will cost less than you assume and lasts much longer than you assume and that will allow for the retirement of some very expensive aging coal/gas plants (which you should factor into your numbers).

<comment><USER6> And Tesla batteries are living a harsher life than grid storage cells. Thermal management, charge levels, and charging speeds are much more difficult to balance in a car than in a grid battery.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I sincerely hope that Tesla can increase cell production to keep up with demand for all their products.

When you look at product lines like this it makes you realise the scale and breadth of Elon Musk's influence and even if only half of his endeavours prove to be as successful as they seem like they will be he will be written about extensively in history books.

<comment><USER8> Someone on HN had a wonderful writeup previously about ALL the companies Musk is building are directly applicable to colonizing mars...

He is piloting and testing them all as colonization building blocks here first.

However - I wish that he would start by building a moon base first...

<comment><USER9> I believe the standard working hypothesis is that Elon Musk is a lonely alien trying to get home, and started a car company because it seemed nicely inconspicuous.

<comment><USER10> s/started/joined/

<comment><USER9> Okay, but no quibble re. the lonely alien part?

<comment><USER10> I'm agnostic on that :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> As much as I love what Tesla is doing there, I'd like to point out that they are not the only or even the biggest player ine the field:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battery_storage_power_station#...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battery_storage_power_station#Largest_grid_batteries)

There are other tech than lithium ion (namely, Sodium-sulphur) that seem more appropriate for applications where weight is not an issue.

<comment><USER12> The downside on those ones seems to be that they need to be heated (and kept at a heat) of 300-350 degrees and they are quite corrosive if there is an emergency. Not saying li-ion batteries are safe, but they and how Tesla has modularized them give me a lot more confidence to leave in an unattended location. Of course, it's all situational so there's a place and purpose for these things as well.

<comment><USER13> If weight/volume is not an issue, there are lots and lots of technologies that will work well for energy storage. Compressed air, flywheels, heated water, lead-acid.

<comment><USER14> Are those (e.g. flywheels, compressed air) production-ready or just start-up ideas? Also flywheels have a pretty destructive worst-case failure mode...

> heated water

How does that work (specifically for storing _electricity_ )?

<comment><USER15> Re energy storage generally, heating is a top energy user in many parts of the world and I think relevant to the conversation. In places with CHP plants and district heating systems, the thermal battery concept is tried and tested. Since the system is already based on circulating hot water around, putting some storage tanks/caverns in the system is straightforward.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> One thing puzzles me. LI batteries are appropriate for cars because of their high energy density. But for grid applications, density is not much of an issue. They can have large, heavy batteries. So why not use a cheaper/joule battery technology for grid applications?

<comment><USER5> That might happen long term but short term the lack of production capacity is the problem. And right now a lot of companies are investing in vastly expanding production capacity for lithium ion batteries. We've simply never needed batteries at this scale before EVs started happening.

Tesla seems early in the grid storage market. Probably some companies are trying to come up with cheaper ways to do that. So, long term, I think cost will go down by quite a bit. Ten years from now, there will probably be a few companies cranking out cheap batteries for grid and domestic use that are optimized for $/kwh instead of kg/kwh.

<comment><USER17> > We've simply never needed batteries at this scale before EVs started > happening.

Is that _really_ true?

There a a LOT of lead acid batteries out there, considering there's been at least one sold alongside nearly every internal combustion engine larger than a handheld tool.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> This is actually huge. Tesla is again thinking and executing way ahead of anyone else. I don't attribute it all to Elon Musk. But there is some life force in Tesla that's pushing it along even when naysayers, sometimes criminally, try to destroy Tesla.

<comment><USER19> There are other players in the modular utility scale energy storage space. GE and Fluence are two examples.

[https://www.ge.com/renewableenergy/hybrid/battery-energy- sto...](https://www.ge.com/renewableenergy/hybrid/battery-energy-storage)

[https://fluenceenergy.com/](https://fluenceenergy.com/)

<comment><USER18> Yes, but Tesla is actually doing equally good or better than the incumbents. And this is on top of a car company. It is hard to overstate what Tesla has achieved. There is a reason why Tesla has crazy fans.

<comment><USER20> What do you think is a mistake Tesla is currently making?

I may agree with you in part, but overall your tone is just so overwhelmingly positive it makes me curious where you have dissonance?

<comment><USER18> Not sure if my comment seemed otherwise, but I am overwhelmingly pro Tesla.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> What Tesla did -- use the contract from Australia as a MVP for their generic utility scale product offering. Took their lessons learned from the Australian offering and streamlined it so they can make an "easy" product for deployment reducing custom costs. A good marketing piece for any utility considering installing a product of similar specs. Also distracts from some of the other narratives taking place.

<comment><USER22> > A good marketing piece for any utility

This seems like a win-win-win to me. Tesla gets paid, the utility gets to show off how cool they are (and how they are investing in going green) without breaking the bank, and the rest of us (hopefully) experience less carbon emissions.

Ideally, that utility runs the battery for a while and it proves to be useful/profitable enough that they decided to change some of their future plans to include more renewable/battery tech.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I don't always agree with the way he's conducted himself and I don't understand why people overshare on Twitter when the upside is minuscule and downside is huge. But Elon does seem to be pushing make the world a better place. I've a feeling he will be viewed more favorably by future generations. I work in energy and I am super excited to see alternatives to fossil fuels come online.

</comment><comment><USER24> The impressive thing is that this is competitive even before we have a carbon market in place which would make all gas peaker plants too expensive if they had to pay a market rate for dumping/storing their carbon.

</comment><comment><USER25> I wonder why Tesla is selling these systems instead of deploying them directly and profiting off the arbitrage? If Autobidder was as good as they imply, then realistically Tesla should be in position to capitalize off global energy markets on their own, earning far more than just the sale of the system.

<comment><USER26> To do that would require them to _become_ a power company in each jurisdiction that they wanted to do this in. Those markets are generally highly regulated - the amount of distraction & overhead this would create would be staggering, _immense_.

I think Tesla already has enough on it's plate.

<comment><USER5> Actually they will do this by selling to consumers directly as well with the same technology. They are getting ready to sell solar + battery directly to home owners at a huge scale (bottle-necked on some production capacity issues currently). Once they get there, they will have a virtual power plant that they can operate and control. So, Tesla is going there but just not in the way people expect. In the same way vehicle to the grid technology is a substantial battery resource that people overlook. Not a stretch of the imagination that a battery + solar solution for your home would play really nice with the Tesla parked in front of it. Vehicle to the grid technology already exists. There's just no way that they are not planning for that.

<comment><USER26> That seems fairly obvious to me - SolarCity/Tesla have always talked about building a "virtual" utility via residential solar+battery, with the cars working as an (occasionally) mobile battery component.

But the OP's question was why don't Tesla install MegaPaks that they own themselves, into diverse energy markets around the world - and become a traditional utility.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> "on a three-acre footprint"

Is there a reason these installations are always shown laid out very flat? Is there a disadvantage to stacking them up or at least putting them on different floors of an appropriately-reinforced building?

<comment><USER28> Probably just the simple economics of cost of land vs cost of construction of a new building + ongoing maintenance.

I'm sure if they ever saw need to place this in a city they would construct a building. But for now, it's probably cheaper to just build out where land is cheap (and possibly closer to generation source) and then transport the energy to where it's being used.

<comment><USER29> How safe would it be to put large quantities of a potentially unstable alkali metal in close proximity to lots of humans?

<comment> core-questions I mean, we all sleep with phones under our pillow, so

<comment><USER30> I'll have you know that my phone is _at least_ eight inches away from my head at night.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> This is fantastic, incremental progress like this adds up quickly.

</comment><comment><USER32> I'd imagine that this minimum size of 3MWh is ideal for fast charging locations, combined with solar panels on the roof. A by-product of SCv3 development? If it costs around $200/KWh or less, it's very attractive for a variety of commercial applications with PV capability and non-uniform electricity needs.

<comment><USER33> I would not be surprised if Megapacks are what will power the Megachargers for the forthcoming Tesla Semi. A simple-to-deploy solution for carriers that doesn't require significant site prep. Inverter power output of 1.5MW would align very well with the stated charge rate and buffering 3MW of energy is probably sufficient for 2 full charges without requiring a massive and rapid draw on the grid.

<comment><USER34> Fast charge is DC, they wouldn't use an inverter. Theoretically if the semi can handle it and the voltage were the same they could connect the semi pack directly to the megapack battery to charge. It would only get you to 80% charge but it would be simple to implement.

<comment><USER33> The inverter could be used to recharge the Megapack from power mains. Though if it is connected to a solar array the inverter might be skipped. I'm sure they can exclude that component for such installations.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> I'd be interested in an examination of how the purchasers and vendors of these battery storage installations manage the balance of capacity and life expectancy vs wasted cost. If you build an installation that exactly matches your needs, you're putting a full charge cycle on the batteries on a regular basis, which reduces their ultimate lifespan and limits your ability to cope with unusual power demands.

On the other hand, if you overbuild for your needs, you increase the total lifespan of the installation and your emergency capacity but at the cost of greater initial investment as well as the inescapable fact that even the unused portion of the capacity has a finite lifespan which is always (very slowly) expiring regardless of whether it's being used, so your per-dollar lifespan could be lower with a larger capacity.

I'm also interested in how well real-world installations are matching the expected figures when it comes to amortized cost and life expectancy. Does the operating budget for something like the Hornsdale Power Reserve include the cost of replacing the entire thing when its cells are worn out in 10-15 years?

<comment><USER12> It likely wouldn't be a big bang replace job, just a few cells / year. That won't do much for the total cost of ownership, but would avoid bursts. Also, I don't know what that would cost, nor how much the alternative solutions currently in place cost. I'm sure Tesla will spin it so that their TCO looks a lot more attractive than their competitors.

Also, who knows where battery technology might be in ten years; given that these are modular batteries, they could replace them over time with higher capacity ones.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> This is good news! Are there competitors in this space or is Tesla going to absorb marketshare for the next few years? It seems like it could be a very big market.

I'd be happy if we end up seeing more inexpensive battery production.

</comment><comment><USER37> I assume they are just using a bunch of 18650 cells?

<comment><USER38> probably 2170, but yeah, small cylindrical batteries

</comment></comment><comment> _-_T_-_ Tesla has been quietly installing 'powerpacks' in New Zealands power grid for the past two years.

</comment><comment><USER39> For comparison, 3 MWh allows a MacBook Pro to run for about 15 years continuously.

</comment><comment><USER40> Anyone have any estimate on the cost of these Megapacks?

<comment><USER41> The best number I've heard for the Australian battery is $500/kWh after full installation. Individual battery cells are less, but inverters, packaging, and heat control add up.

I'd guess that for a big install they could probably get closer to $350/kWh these days, but that's a WAG.

<comment><USER12> So one of these units would cost 1-1.5 million (if my math is correct) - <USER2> doesn't actually sound too expensive for utilities like this, especially given how operating costs would be lower than the gas peaker wotsits that were mentioned earlier.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> Awesome. I hope they get a ton of orders. These will probably use the dry battery electrode tech they got from Maxwell?

</comment><comment><USER43> They say it scales _up_ to 3MWh but whats the smallest purchasable unit?

<comment><USER44> The Powerwall.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> When they have large purchasing power they have price leverage on cells

</comment><comment><USER46> When they come to Europe (CH at least), Tesla's gonna eat up the lunch (in the ancillary services field at least) of everyone. Even more so with the new renewable capacity added every day.

<comment> semi-extrinsic I dunno, it seems like the function of these Megapacks is to replace natural gas driven peaker plants? Europe doesn't have nearly as many of those as the US does.

AFAIK Switzerland in particular has exactly zero, thanks to all that lovely hydropower that can be turned on and off to match solar/wind fluctuations.

In fact, Switzerland alone has hydropower equivalent to 10 000 Megapacks. This basically means you can install all the renewables you want.

<comment><USER47> The coal and nuclear phase outs across Europe will lead to a need for new flexible capacity. That should at least partly be covered by battery peakers.

<comment><USER48> Nuclear isn't flexible capacity; plants are always run at max output. If it is to be phased out the replacement needs to have more long-term output than a battery, unless the renewables become incredibly overprovisioned.

<comment><USER49> > Nuclear isn't flexible capacity; plants are always run at max output.

In France and Germany, nuclear reactors are configured and permitted to run in load following mode. It's harder on the valves and similar equipment, but it can and is done. [1]

> unless the renewables become incredibly overprovisioned.

Which is the likely outcome, as solar and wind are still declining in cost and in some places the cost is as low as 2 cents/kwh. The generation will be cheap (what's the old saying? "too cheap to meter"?), and it'll be the storage that'll cost a bit more.

[1] [https://www.oecd-nea.org/nea-news/2011/29-2/nea- news-29-2-lo...](https://www.oecd-nea.org/nea-news/2011/29-2/nea- news-29-2-load-following-e.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> Lithium batteries seem like a weird choice for large-scale power storage that just sits in one place. Lead is a lot cheaper, and its heaviness doesn't matter in that application.

<comment><USER51> Lead batteries have a shorter lifespan and require more maintenance. The additional weight and volume also increases shipping costs.

Oddly enough, you can get a lithium ion car battery jump starter for less than the cost of a car battery.

<comment><USER52> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_battery](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_battery)

<comment><USER51> [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economies_of_scale](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economies_of_scale)

The amount of effort spent reducing Lithium Ion costs has resulted in dramatic price reductions. Technologies that looked extremely promising just 10 years ago are having a hard time keeping up.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> >All Megapacks connect to Powerhub, an advanced monitoring and control platform for large-scale utility projects and microgrids, and can also integrate with Autobidder, Tesla's machine-learning platform for automated energy trading.

Oh. My. God.

pow(What_could_go_wrong, 2);

<comment><USER54> It's just trading. Maybe the ML makes some mistakes and someone loses some money while someone else gets some free or negatively priced electricity.

<comment><USER53> Hmm, valid point. I hadn't thought of the risk factors on the downside.

That just leaves the common attack-vector concern for any grid adding this into their ecosystem.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> 4 meter radius bore, go 2km down, then bore a 10 km tunnel. fill it with water to generate power, pump water out to store power losing 20% roundtrip.

(pi * ((4 meters)^2) * (10 km)) * (1 (kg / liter)) * (9.81 (m / (s^2))) * (2 km) = 2.73946879 gigawatt hours

<comment><USER56> Another thing to consider with the 'dig a hole' based pumped storage approach is that you can only 'suck' water about 15ft vertically (well technically you can't really suck water any appreciable distance, but the atmosphere can push it up about 15ft) so it means that your pumps need to be at the bottom of the hole.

You might be able to get away with some sort of remote actuated pump head like that used in an oil well (energy for pumping provided by a reciprocating metal rod) but the efficiency of such schemes is never going to get anywhere near the 80% you were targeting. Better hope that the pumps don't fail while the hole is full!

<comment><USER55> Yea, I've been thinking about the requirement that the pump is in the bottom is probably the Achilles heel. I'm more keen on dropping heavy blocks of metal now :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> They make the claim the giant lithium battery grid is "cleaner" than the "dirty" natural gas "peak power" plants.

I'm curious, what's the environmental damage of this overall? These battery packs likely degrade, lithium has to be mined, etc. Natural gas also has a cost to mine, to burn (though if I recall, the off gases are co2 and water vapor, lower levels of NO2, etc)

Looking from the outside it looks like both options honestly may pollute or have the same environmental impact long-term. One is just a cost we don't see immediately (or is don't me in another country)

<comment><USER58> > Looking from the outside it looks like both options honestly may pollute or > have the same environmental impact long-term.

Not sure how you come to that conclusion. Lithium is not a _fuel_ that is consumed in the process. It is a recyclable component. And there is no dangerous imbalance in the global lithium cycle. Which can't be said about the carbon cycle.

Just because every technology entails some environmental impact does not not mean all impacts are the same.

<comment><USER59> >It is a recyclable component.

In theory, batteries are not currently recycled in any scale equivalent to these proposals. Plastic is also recyclable but most of it ends up in landfills due to it being uneconomical.

<comment><USER58> Time will tell. Right now no industrial-scale deployments have reached EoL, so it's not surprising that there's little recycling. Plus those things also contain cobalt, which is significantly more expensive, plastic doesn't have that incentive.

<comment><USER42> No cobalt in the new dry battery tech they got from the Maxwell acquisition.

I hope Tesla has a plan for recycling the batteries they manufacture

<comment><USER49> Tesla is already recycling batteries at Gigafactory 1.

[https://www.greencarreports.com/news/1122631_tesla- launches-...](https://www.greencarreports.com/news/1122631_tesla-launches- battery-recycling-at-nevada-gigafactory)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> _...Autobidder, Tesla's machine-learning platform for automated energy trading. Tesla customers have already used Autobidder to dispatch more than 100 GWh of energy in global electricity markets. "_

Tesla is in Enron's business?

<comment><USER60> I used to work for a company in California that does this. I'm not sure how commonplace this is, worldwide, but there are definitely companies trading energy.

[https://www.ferc.gov/market-oversight/mkt- electric/californi...](https://www.ferc.gov/market-oversight/mkt- electric/california.asp)

The California Independent System Operator (CAISO) operates a competitive wholesale electricity market and manages the reliability of its transmission grid. CAISO provides open access to the transmission and performs long-term planning. In managing the grid, CAISO centrally dispatches generation and coordinates the movement of wholesale electricity in California and a portion of Nevada. CAISOs markets include energy (day-ahead and real-time), ancillary services, and congestion revenue rights. CAISO also operates an Energy Imbalance Market (EIM), which currently includes CAISO and other balancing authority areas in the western United States.

CAISO was founded in 1998 and became a fully functioning ISO in 2008. The Energy Imbalance Market launched in 2014 with PacifiCorp as the first member or EIM Entity. The EIM serves parts of Arizona, Oregon, Nevada, Washington, California, Utah, Wyoming and Idaho.

<comment><USER8> Wasnt the whole business model of Enron was to trade energy, and price fix to their advantage?

I recall in january or feb of 2001 - right when Enron was at their peak douchebag-ness... I lived in San Jose ca - and my energy bill jumped to $900!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER61> I know it should be obvious, but when I read 'Utility Scale Storage', I was thinking "Oooooooo, have they come up with an improvement to Lustre file stores? Or were they rolling their own?" Of course they're talking about energy storage :-)</comment>


DAM Key and identity requirements - <AUTHOR> https://email@example.com <comment><USER2> I don't understand why this needs a new "key endorsement" infrastructure - isn't that exactly what certifications ("signing other people's keys") is meant for? Why not use one of the existing OpenPGP signature types to differentiate "old style" signatures from new "key endorsements"?

<comment><USER3> As the post says: « Each person has and keeps having their own policy for signing keys. ».

Many people will only sign keys if they have confidence that the name on the key is its controller's "real name" in some sense.

Maybe there'd be a way to model this new kind of endorsement in the distributed database made up of keys and signatures (using signature types or whatever), but it doesn't surprise me if the Debian account maintainers think that a centralised database of assertions that exist for Debian's purposes is going to give them an easier life.

<comment><USER2> This does not answer my question: You can still use the OpenPGP Signature _scheme_ to implement this, and pick or invent a signature type to avoid the mix-up with existing signatures. You can still enforce "A centralized database", which in fact they _already do_ with the Debian keyring. Such "endorsements" is exactly what OpenPGP signatures, and key upload protocols, are made for.</comment></comment></comment>


The "dead and alive" cat myth - <AUTHOR> https://gutoe.wordpress.com/2016/12/11/the-dead-and-alive-cat-myth/ <comment><USER2> No, this is wrong. If the box is made of glass and you can see what's happening inside, the photons that reflect off the cat collapse the wavefunction so the cat really is alive or dead. In the case of the metal box and the completely isolated system, the cat is really in a fundamental way in a superposition of alive and dead - you can construct an experiment [1] that shows that entanglement can't be explained by local hidden variable theories.

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

</comment><comment><USER3> Nothing about this makes any sense. The cat is an analogy, the box is an analogy. Everything about that thought experiment is an analogy.

The moon is still there, even if noone looks up into the night sky. The cat is either alive or dead because it is constantly "observed." That's why there's no differnce between a glass box and a metal box. Observation in the quantum mechanical sense doesn't mean that the author has to eyeball an object. It means that the object interacts with its environment (e.g. the particles of the cat interact with each other and the particles in the air).

The analogy with statistics, that quantum mechanics is simply the evolution of "what we know" is not correct either. A superposition is much more than that. When a particle is in superposition of two states, it can interact with itself as if it was in one state and as if there was another particle in the other one (but there has never been a second particle).

If you simply assume that you "don't know" in which state it was and that it would still behave classically, you would not be able to explain the double- slit experiment. You also wouldn't be able to explain why light is slower in a dielectric. Also, physics would be way easier.

P.S.: What the hell are those little snow flakes on that website. At first I thought I was seeing stars and that I was about to pass out...

</comment><comment><USER4> I'll just leave these here:

[https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Talk:Richard_Feynman#.22If_you...](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Talk:Richard_Feynman#.22If_you_think_you_understand_quantum_mechanics.2C_you_don.27t_understand_quantum_mechanics..22)

[http://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/law-of-social-media](http://www.smbc- comics.com/comic/law-of-social-media)

</comment><comment><USER5> While I agree that the box cat is not a valid thought experiment, just dismissing quantum superposition is not a solution.

The double slit experiment (while tangential) shows that discrete events can somehow be connected.

</comment><comment><USER6> I am a particle physicist, and this article is confused. The substitution of a glass box _fundamentally_ changes the experiment by allowing phenomena inside the box to correlate with phenomena outside (including your senses). This isn't magic, it's the natural result of light exchanging between stuff inside and out. In the biz, we call this smearing of correlations 'decoherence.'

As for whether the cat 'is' both "dead and alive" in the true black-box Schrodinger scenario, that's very much up for debate. Theorists and philosophers have yet to reach a consensus on how to interpret quantum mechanics, though progress is being made--our quantitative understanding of 'decoherence' being one example.

Don't be fooled: this is an open question.

For more on interpretations: [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interpretations_of_quantum_m...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interpretations_of_quantum_mechanics)

</comment><comment><USER7> >But if we instead use a glass box, we can then observe the cat along the way.

The use of the word observe is what makes me think this is a troll. Collapsing the waveform through observation is such a common phrasing, it seems silly to assume the author wouldn't have come across it.

</comment><comment><USER8> We effectively have the whole cat thing going on because the alternative is pilot wave. but that means that a quantum even on the other side of the universe can have repercussions here on earth "instantly", and that was not something physicists were happy to contemplate.

Crazy thing though is that the "holy" double slit experiment can be replicated using water and drops of oil. Set a wave going on the water, and then add drops of oil (particles). What you get out the other end is an interference pattern even though each drop only travel down one slit.

</comment><comment><USER9> This seems to be just an argument for the Ensemble interpretation of this experiment in opposition to the more commonly held Copenhagen interpretation.

In the Copenhagen interpretation, a system stops being a superposition of states and becomes either one or the other when an observation takes place. Where as the ensemble interpretation states that superpositions are nothing but subensembles of a larger statistical ensemble. Where the state vector would not apply to individual cat experiments, but only to the statistics of many similarly prepared cat experiments.

So it's not that the author is incorrect; they're a proponent of an alternative interpretation.

</comment><comment><USER10> "I can't possibly be the first person to notice that Schrödinger's cat experiment does not change a bit if the box in which the cat resides is made of glass."

Nor are you the first one to have missed the role of the observer in a quantum-mechanical thought experiment: you change the experiment UTTERLY by observing the cat.

There's a very detailed writeup of some similar thoughts in the Fenyman Lectures, focused on the particular case of the electron double-slit experiment and the observational consequences of trying to "see" the electrons passing through one slit vs the other using different wavelengths of photons.

<comment><USER11> Of course. Not to mention the "reality" of QM still has parts open to interpretation.

Just a few years ago people were debating if QM meant the future could change events in the past. In one interpretation that could be true, but further learning has mostly ruled it out.

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

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> >The words crackpot probably flashed through your mind

In fact that's what makes this post interesting, it's a great example of a crackpot.

Another nice thing about this post is it makes fake news easier to understand. Lots of laypeople could find this plausible.

What in the human brain creates the state of crackpotism? These people are intelligent, usually have some technical understanding, etc. Yet it wouldn't occur to this guy to write up a scientific paper?

</comment><comment><USER12> A bit unrelated, but there's a possibility that quantum mechanics are not exactly probabilistic and that they're actually deterministic, while still being compatible with observed quantum phenomena. This video explains it well [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WIyTZDHuarQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WIyTZDHuarQ)

</comment><comment><USER13> Is there any reason to think the wavefunction "collapses" rather than simply spreading to the observer? Any explanatory power gained? Or is "collapsing" an illusion caused by the basic fact that no version of you gets to see more than one universe?

</comment><comment><USER14> What a ignorant jackass. The quality of posts here has taken a sharp dive downward.

The observer collapses the wave function of the system. It's like he doesn't understand the original thought experiment, or quantum mechanics at all.

<comment><USER11> No, please see mo other post, it's good to study crackpots sometimes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> This is what happens when statistics educators teach frequentism.</comment>


Acta protests: Thousands take to streets across Europe - Tim-Boss http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-16999497

<comment><AUTHOR> A quick shot from the protest that took place in Bucharest: <http://imgur.com/Eu5zX> , at -10 degrees Celsius and under a rather unpleasant snowing. Around 2,000 people took part. I couldn't resist there for more than one hour, but at least I took part :)

</comment><comment><USER2> It's funny how SOPA, ACTA, and Bill-C11 are so coordinated. It's almost like someone in the industry is pulling a lot of strings in the government.

</comment><comment><USER3> Around 200 protesters gathered in central London outside the offices of several major rights holders.

mhhh.. in munich were around 16000 protesters.. why only 200 in london!?

Berlin: 6000-10000

[http://video.golem.de/internet/7210/demonstration-gegen- acta...](http://video.golem.de/internet/7210/demonstration-gegen-acta-in- muenchen.html)

<comment><USER4> As a reasonably tuned in Brit, i had no idea these protests were happening until reading about it after the fact. I think sopa-fatigue probably set in more with the relevant section english speaking population.

<comment><USER5> only found out about the saturday march to be held in dublin late on friday evening. currently on crutches so unable to attend unfortunately. fairly unorganised as far as i could tell from people who were there.

edit: if i were to speculate i would say that most of geeks and nerds i know who care about these things don't use facebook and the dublin march seems to have been organised on facebook. i only found out when one person who linked their twitter and facebook accounts crossposted to twitter.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I was one of the 16000 protesters in Munich. The message came to me via the evening TV news about germany delayed signing ACTA. It was impressive to see how many people care about that topic. 200 attendants in London sounds like no protest at all.

</comment><comment><USER7> An youtube video from the protests in Sofia, Bulgaria: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aCualP99mNs> . According to the organizers there were about 4000 people there.

</comment><comment><USER8> A youtube video of the protest in Cluj Napoca, [http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=8OWGzMLDfMY#t=39s) . Cluj Napoca is a city in Romania, not a big one but 2000+ protested against ACTA.

</comment><comment><USER9> Protests in Estonia: 1500 in Tallinn and 700 in Tartu. <http://www.360pano.eu/stop-acta/#.TzaolywVaW0.twitter>

</comment><comment><USER10> I'm convinced the internet we know today is very quickly going to get fragmented into distinct regions (china-style). This worldwide plan "known by many names" (SOPA/PIPA/ACTA) has obviously already been decided during the last G8 summit. These clampdowns of the internet are going through, one way or another. The G8 governments are scared to death of the Internet. They've been watching the Arab spring movement in absolute horror at how quickly citizens can organize over a free internet and overthrow their government, which is obviously quite threatening if you're in a position of power, and you're pilfering your citizens wealth with draconian economic actions.

</comment><comment><USER11> Freenet.Org

<comment><USER12> A technical solution to a social problem. Freenet & co rely on our right to private communication with whomever we choose and to run whatever software we want on the machines we own.

You cannot have Freenet on a locked-down box that only connects to registered sites (google Minitel for an example of such thing.) That's why it is essential not to rely solely on Freenet/Tor/Mute/whatever.</comment></comment>


Nginx HTTP/2 server push support - <AUTHOR> https://hg.nginx.org/nginx/rev/641306096f5b <comment><USER2> I've recently spent more time using H2O over nginx, mainly because of its more complete support of HTTP 2 (push, cache-aware push, ..) but also out of the box support for brotli compression and mruby (think lua landscape for nginx). Even though nginx made it easier to build and ship third party modules separately, I feel like the module community (as well as distro maintainers/packagers) haven't followed suit. There's obviously pre-baked packages like openresty which has lua world, but then there's no brotli.

<comment><USER3> been using ngx_brotli with my Centmin Mod Nginx stack for what seems like years now [https://community.centminmod.com/threads/how-to-use- brotli-c...](https://community.centminmod.com/threads/how-to-use-brotli- compression-for-centmin-mod-nginx-web-servers.10688/) :)

<comment><USER2> The upstream repo from google hasn't been updated in over a year; issues are being opened questioning maintainership. It additionally breaks against more recent version combos of nginx/brotli.

There's an active fork here (which I also use on my remaining nginx instances) [https://github.com/eustas/ngx_brotli](https://github.com/eustas/ngx_brotli)

<comment><USER3> yup i am using eustas fork for ngx_brotli works well :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Just a heads up, we tried to enable H2 with haproxy 1.8.3 last week and had to roll it back because of a Firefox bug. I believe it's this one, which doesn't seem to be getting much attention: [https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1427256](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1427256)

<comment><AUTHOR> That bug has been fixed in 1.8.3 ([https://www.mail- firstname.lastname@example.com/msg28501.h...](https://www.mail- email@example.com/msg28501.html))

Source: [https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1427256#c7](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1427256#c7)

<comment><USER5> Glad to see the bug is now updated/fixed, but the person you're replying to said they were already using 1.8.3. I guess you're saying their issues were caused by a different bug.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Please correct me if I'm wrong in anything I say here. I haven't had any real- world deployment experiences with HTTP 2.0.

Every time I've tried looking into it, I've found it underwhelming. Infrastructure support and tooling is still heavily lacking as far as I can tell. To really take advantage of server push it seems like you'd need to have really good build tools available.

Don't you risk sending useless data with server push? How do you handle cached resources? Just because a view depends on some resources, it doesn't mean you always need to send em down to the client.

Having server push doesn't always mean you should avoid bundling and minifying resources. Won't a gzipped bundle typically produce a smaller payload?

Maybe I'm totally wrong or I've misunderstood something, but the general impression I've gotten is that the benefits of server push are a bit overstated. Does anyone have links to resources which discusses these issues in depth?

<comment><USER7> Good questions. I was looking at H2O and they solve this using what they call http-casper: [https://h2o.examp1e.net/configure/http2_directives.html#http...](https://h2o.examp1e.net/configure/http2_directives.html#http2-casper)

> When enabled, H2O maintains a fingerprint of the web browser cache, and > cancels server-push suggested by the handlers if the client is known to be > in possession of the content. The fingerprint is stored in a cookie...

That sounds interesting solution.

Actually it looks like this tool along with nginx pagespeed would work well and require no changing in build tools.

Nginx pagespeed supports parsing and optimizing the html (and linked resources), including inserting prelink headers. Which will now get pushed. It requires no change in build process.

> Won't a gzipped bundle typically produce a smaller payload?

With http2 it's better to unbundle these days as the best reason for bundling was to not create new tcp connections which require ramp up time to be useful. Now with http2 the same tcp connection is used but multiplexed. So the main reason for bundling goes away. As to it producing smaller payloads, it might be the case but not that much smaller that it's worth it since it's the same tcp connection. Better to have it in unbundled then it gets parsed and processed in chunked streams of files. The client is able to use and process the files as they come in without having to load the whole bundle and process at once. Making the site a bit more responsive.

<comment><USER8> That is the theory. The real world however can be very messy. More than two years ago Khan Academy measured how this would work for them - [http://engineering.khanacademy.org/posts/js-packaging- http2....](http://engineering.khanacademy.org/posts/js-packaging-http2.htm) \- here was their summary:

> The reality is not so rosy. Due to degraded compression performance, the > size of the data download with individual source files ends up being higher > than with packages, despite having achieved 'no wasted bytes'. Likewise, the > promised download efficiency has yet to show up in the wild, at least for > us. It seems that, for the moment at least, JavaScript packaging is here to > stay.

My personal experience has been you have to confirm the theory of how HTTP/2 related changes will perform with actual measurements. I've seen some pages get faster in HTTP/2 by no longer bundling, and in other cases seen then become slower. So far the only way to know for sure is to measure the result.

<comment><USER9> > Due to degraded compression performance

Are there any efforts underway to fix that? Seems like you could solve that problem by sharing the compression dictionary between documents transmitted over the same connection.

<comment><USER10> There are (SDCH), but they are basically abandoned and are close to being unshipped in chrome (which is the only browser that supported them): [https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/forum/#!topic/blink...](https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/forum/#!topic/blink- dev/nQl0ORHy7sw)

I looked into using SDCH for topojson, since it seemed like a match made in heaven (a lot of repeated bytes in many files that are usually static), but since it never took off in usage it is being removed. The only major site that used it is linkedin.

EDIT: the continuation of this is basically what brotli is. Gather a dictionary of the most common byte-sequences on the internet, pre-ship that in every client and use that as the shared dictionary. But it will never be as good for specific use-cases.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Here's a really nice write up on server push optimization from the Chrome team.

Rules of Thumb for HTTP/2 Push

[https://docs.google.com/document/d/1K0NykTXBbbbTlv60t5MyJvXj...](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1K0NykTXBbbbTlv60t5MyJvXjqKGsCVNYHyLEXIxYMv0/edit)

</comment><comment><USER12> Interesting video about HTTP 2.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0yzJAKknE_k](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0yzJAKknE_k)

<comment><USER13> Excellent talk & speaker, slides [https://www.slideshare.net/Fastly/http2-what-no-one-is- telli...](https://www.slideshare.net/Fastly/http2-what-no-one-is-telling-you)

Follow up talk _Revisiting HTTP /2_ given Jan 31, 2018 [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wR1gF5Lhcq0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wR1gF5Lhcq0) & slides [https://www.slideshare.net/Fastly/revisiting- http2-87148462](https://www.slideshare.net/Fastly/revisiting-http2-87148462)

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> They did a static analysis and fixed a null pointer dereference here: [https://hg.nginx.org/nginx/rev/8b0553239592](https://hg.nginx.org/nginx/rev/8b0553239592)

<comment><USER14> They might want to consider using clang nullability annotations (_Nullable etc) when compiling on clang. Can use a macro so it becomes a noop when the compiler does not support it. The static analyser would then get a lot of more information to work with, and it also serves as a kind of documentation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Server push in Python [https://pgjones.gitlab.io/quart/serving_http2.html#server- pu...](https://pgjones.gitlab.io/quart/serving_http2.html#server-push-or-push- promises)

(I am the Quart author, thought this would be interesting and relevant).

<comment><USER16> As someone who loves Flask and finds Django infuriating, I've been keeping an eye on Quart, it looks really interesting.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> For those interested, I wrote a lengthy blogpost about HTTP/2 a few years ago, detailing the architectural/infrastructure changes needed to support it for your endusers: [https://ma.ttias.be/architecting-websites- http2-era/](https://ma.ttias.be/architecting-websites-http2-era/)

</comment><comment><USER18> How are you going to signal nginx what to push?

Are you going to be able to push stuff from your application if using Nginx as a proxy? For example, a dynamic view that includes a css file hosted by nginx.

<comment><USER19> Quoting the OP:

> Also, preload links from the Link response headers, as described in > [https://www.w3.org/TR/preload/#server-push- > http-2](https://www.w3.org/TR/preload/#server-push-http-2), can be pushed, > if enabled with the "http2_push_preload" directive.

So you send down some headers in your response which tells the proxy server resources it should push. Pretty elegant, and fails gracefully. I believe this is the same mechanism as other http2 servers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> How is browser support for server push nowadays? Back in March Jake Archibald noticed a lot of oddities in mainly Safari and Edge: [https://jakearchibald.com/2017/h2-push-tougher-than-i- though...](https://jakearchibald.com/2017/h2-push-tougher-than-i-thought/)

</comment><comment><USER21> This doesn't seem to have a level of "cache-aware server push" that h2o (awesome http/2 server) has. Is there any info on how Nginx deals with cached server push?

<comment><USER3> been testing Nginx 1.13.9 via master branch with my Centmin Mod Nginx stack and HTTP/2 push testing by setting up cache aware HTTP/2 push via conditional preload link resource hints headers which only show up when a cookie is absent [https://community.centminmod.com/threads/hurray- http-2-serve...](https://community.centminmod.com/threads/hurray- http-2-server-push-for-nginx.11910/page-2#post-59423)

works so far but still waiting on bug fix [https://trac.nginx.org/nginx/ticket/1478](https://trac.nginx.org/nginx/ticket/1478) as Nginx has pushed back 1.13.9 release until next week [https://twitter.com/nginx/status/963442197436678144](https://twitter.com/nginx/status/963442197436678144)

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> As more software is adding support for HTTP/2 server push, I hope they'll start supporting a higher-level, implementation-agnostic, declarative way of specifying resources to push, which operates at a layer higher than server config directives.

Google has a dead-simple JSON format [1] for this from 2015.

[1] [https://github.com/GoogleChromeLabs/http2-push- manifest](https://github.com/GoogleChromeLabs/http2-push-manifest)

<comment><USER10> Most servers just read the preload headers from the backend and use that as a push. That won't work with "HTTP 103 Early Hints" (Since it needs to know what to push before the backend responds), but for now a preload header is a good compromise between ease-of-use and good-enough.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Glad push support is finally about to ship.

</comment><comment><USER24> Are there any good general guidelines on when you should use HTTP2 push?

Edit: Oops, I missed out "push" at the end.

<comment><USER25> I would suggest using HTTP/2 whenever possible. Features like connection multiplexing and pipelining alone are huge benefits.

<comment><USER13> Research by Homaan Behesti of Fastly (above at [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16365413#16365605](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16365413#16365605)) suggest that _you_ test h2 with _your site_ and see how h2 compares to h1.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Can somebody explain in simple words what HTTP/2 push means? Example?

<comment><USER27> Client: may I get /index.html please?

Server: sure, here's index.html, theme.css, and jquery.js.

Client: hey wait! I didn't ask for... oh, nvm, good call. Now I can display all this without asking you for anything else.

EDIT: See this: [https://youtu.be/0yzJAKknE_k?t=30m52s](https://youtu.be/0yzJAKknE_k?t=30m52s) for more details

<comment><USER28> And add-track.js, flash-banner.gif?

<comment><USER29> This is just fancy cache-prewarming. The client still decides what resources to request, but those it wants to fetch are available locally at request time.

("just" as a qualifier for nefariousness, not usefulness)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Awesome. Is this going to make it into stable 1.12.X?

<comment><AUTHOR> No, new features don't usually get backported to the stable branch.

It will ship with 1.13.9 (mainline) in 6 hours (at the time of writing).

For stable branch, you need to wait until the 1.13 milestone is completed, which according to their roadmap ([https://trac.nginx.org/nginx/milestone/1.13](https://trac.nginx.org/nginx/milestone/1.13)) will be completed in 8 weeks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Still no HTTP/2 backend support?

<comment><AUTHOR> No.

Maxim's answer on this issue: [https://mailman.nginx.org/pipermail/nginx/2015-December/0494...](https://mailman.nginx.org/pipermail/nginx/2015-December/049445.html)</comment></comment>


For first time, MIT's free online classes can lead to degree - <AUTHOR> http://bigstory.ap.org/article/c3264c4bce46440ab5cd78029759ae72/1st-time-mits-free-online-classes-can-carry-credit <comment><USER2> I think this kind of degree is better given to computer science classes.

Compute science assignments are easy to grade, especially project classes where you can auto-run against a set of tests. In the article, the degree is supply management, we need a lot more free form education in computer science than supply side management.

<comment><USER3> I agree. Academia is really resistant to the idea (see MOOCs), but the quality of this style of education can be quite high for CS.

Plus there are guys like me who are excellent at the CS / math, but were awful at everything else in undergrad who could really shine.</comment></comment>


In Search of 256 - <AUTHOR> http://members.optusnet.com.au/nickma/ProjectArchive/256mode.html <comment><AUTHOR> The site is hosted on the free web space provided by the author's ISP, so just in case it goes down, here's an archive link:

[http://archive.is/PZZiu](http://archive.is/PZZiu)</comment>


Starfighter: We're better at hiring than any tech firm - <AUTHOR> http://starfighters.io/

<comment><USER2> This is a beta-application form for a process that hasn't been released yet.

<comment><USER3> Starfighter is new, but there are (at least?) two members coming from Matasano who used the crypto challenges (cryptopals.com) as a hiring tool in the past.

If you haven't tried the cryptopals challenges, they're basically coding exercises to illustrate common crypto problems and weaknesses. While giving the people maintaing the challenges concrete, comparable coding samples to see how people tackle non-standard coding problems.

It will be interesting to how this evolves, I found the other challenges interesting in that even if the participant wasn't interested in job hunting / didn't make the cut they still walked away learning something.</comment></comment>


Apple Patents Using iPhones and iPads as Input Devices for Creative Desktop Apps - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2015/04/28/apple-patents-using-iphones-and-ipads-as-input-devices-for-creative-desktop-apps/

<comment><USER2> Filed in April of 2010. Anyone got examples of prior art?</comment>