Simple Techniques for Lowering the Cost of Zero-Energy Homes - <AUTHOR> http://www.greenbuildingadvisor.com/blogs/dept/guest-blogs/simple-techniques-lowering-cost-zero-energy-homes <comment><USER3> There are so many simple things we can do to make more energy efficient homes but builders and buyers don't care. They will happily spend thousands on dumb things that are highly visible but won't spend a few hundred on something as simple as sealing ducts so 30% of your conditioned air isn't lost.

A carbon tax would go a long way to solving this by giving people correct price information so they can make good decisions. If energy was more expensive people would demand more energy efficient homes.

<comment><USER4> I'd rather see something like nutrition labels but instead efficiency measures in various areas for new homes before a tax.

Having bought a number of homes it's surprisingly painful and infeasible to compare apples-to-apples upfront. "Easy" to get details on a per-house level but just about impossible to filter your search early based on efficiency.

<comment><USER5> This is already a thing at least here in Portugal. This is a energy efficiency certificate that is now mandatory when renting and selling a house:

[http://www.adene.pt/sites/default/files/documentos/certifica...](http://www.adene.pt/sites/default/files/documentos/certificado_adene_reh.v2.pdf) (PDF)

<comment><USER6> All of EU, but in my opinion it's mostly a scam.

Companies that perform this certification lobbied to make it mandatory whenever selling a house. However, the certificate does not tell you the real energy consumption. The calculation is based on "weighting factors" for whatever energy production format the politicians want to favor currently, so at least where I live, in Finland - where energy consumption really matters in the winter - when you buy a house, you pay for a certificate that is not very useful, and then you ask the previous owner for the actual energy bills he had, to asses the real cost and consumption.

The latter is, of course, what everyone did already before this certificate system.

OK, it's just a few hundred euros per sale. A bigger problem in the various energy saving initiatives is that houses built to this code sometimes develop very nasty air quality problems (due to air not changing in some places fast enough, or subtle leakages in the airtight balloon where you live) which then forces costly renovations and in the worst case destroy health.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm amazed that society level efficiencies like these aren't considered a bigger deal.

If people are burning more gas than they need to that's less money for them to spend on everything else. It's like the whole country living on credit card debt and not worrying about the interest because it's in the future. It's making you literally poorer and giving you nothing in return, just due to a lack of foresight and planning.

<comment><USER8> >If people are burning more gas than they need to that's less money for them to spend on everything else. It's like the whole country living on credit card debt and not worrying about the interest because it's in the future. It's making you literally poorer and giving you nothing in return, just due to a lack of foresight and planning.

Only it doesn't work that way.

The deal with the builder has traditionally been (only an example):

1) you pay upfront US$ 40,000 _more_ for the construction of the house in an energy efficient manner

2) we promise you that this will allow you to save US$ 3,000 per year in energy

3) for whatever reasons the savings actualy result in US$ 2,000 per year instead, but that is "normal" and within the expected calculation error, and anyway we already got the additional US$ 40,000, sue us.

4) part of the added US$ 40,000 go in part (heating, cooling, ventilation, windows) that require some added maintenance costs and that won't anyway last 20 years and/or will have higher replacement costs.

5) also consider how the "savings" are dependent on actually living in the house, if you - say - go six months away closing the house, you won't spend anything for energy, while you will be paying anyway the added US$ 40,000 on your mortgage payment, same thing if you rent it, the people living in the house will get the savings, you will still be paying the same.

<comment><USER9> 1- I am not sure what kind of house you are talking about, but typical costs for energy efficiency result in less than a 10% increase in total costs.

2- ok.

3- The savings can be much greater than that. Insulation alone has an amazing bang for the buck. And its passive.

4- Added maintenance for windows? They don't require a diamond polisher to be cleaned. Who replaces their windows and doors every 20 years? What specifically needs extra maintenance?

5- Even if you are not living in the house, you can capture a higher profit margin by including utilities in the rental price, or marketing it as an energy efficient house. This is a real edge case though. Interest rates are about 3.5% now. Even in your inflated cost estimate, that translates to $700 in interest for 6 months. Not exactly game changing IMHO.

You are also missing an important point- energy efficient houses also tend to be a lot more comfortable, there are less drafts, less swings in temperature, less affected by outside noise. And you get the satisfaction of not having to care so much if energy prices increase.

<comment><USER10> > Who replaces their windows and doors every 20 years?

Do modern windows even last that long? From observation of my own and relatives' houses, and from looking at houses when buying, most lose their seal by 15-20 years—so, efficiency goes way down because the gap between the panes is breached, they fog and collect moisture, et c. Replacing is so cheap that even minor problems aren't considered for repair, as labor's similar either way.

"I could charge you $400 to fix this, or $500 to replace it, and the newer ones are slightly more energy efficient, and this one'll probably develop more problems soonish. UV/IR coating on this is torn up anyway, those things rarely last more than a few years, especially with young kids or pets, kind of a joke. Give you a deal—say, $2250—if you just wanna do all 5 on this side of the house so they don't look different, and to get ahead of problems on the others". That kind of thing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> There are two simple things a home builder/renovator can do to make any dwelling super efficient. Insulate with Spray Foam and install a Geo Thermal HVAC system.

The problem is when you tell the customer that Spray Foam at 3" / per sq/ft costs approx $3 dollars (approx 16-20k to insulate a 3000 sq/ft home)they look at you like you raped their sister and killed their mother. Yet when you quote them a kitchen for 40k they smile and have no problems paying $140 a linear ft for counter tops or $10 a sq/ft for carpeting. Cosmetic items can be replaced at anytime (hardwood floors, tiles, kitchens, etc) but try to rip off all the drywall in your home to re-insulate or dig/drill up your property to install geo thermal.

People need to invest more into the mechanical structure of the home instead of the cosmetic details if they are serious about building an efficient dwelling. The building code at all levels needs to reflect a higher level of efficiency and government programs in the form of tax credits should be used to promote these upgrades and it would go a long way in helping reduce emissions.

I keep telling people that Spray Foam and Geo Thermal is free. It pays for itself rather quickly while providing a comfortable environment to live in.

<comment><USER12> Spray foam products are excellent for a variety of reasons, but their effects can be overstated concerning air sealing (one of the techniques in the original article - I know you aren't directly addressing air sealing in your comment). Spray foam provides excellent air sealing immediately after install in as little as 1.5 inches[0].

However, spray foam also doesn't address wood-to-wood contact areas where air leakage can occur. The best air-sealing results are typically achieved with a taped exterior sheathing layer, or a taped sheet membrane (located on the interior, exterior, or mid-wall). The most common air-sealing method that works is the use of Huber Zip panels with Zip taped seams (or another quality acrylic tape). One caveat - I say most common because it is a very common material, but that doesn't mean the correct air-sealing methods are always used.

[0][http://www.greenbuildingadvisor.com/articles/dept/musings/ai...](http://www.greenbuildingadvisor.com/articles/dept/musings/air- leakage-through-spray-polyurethane-foam)

<comment><USER11> When most houses are built the mechanical is typically an after thought. If you look at commercial buildings they typically design the building around the Mechanical. I have seen Schools, Grocery Stores, etc, spray-foamed from the outside to prevent the hot/cold air from even entering the building. The basically spray the inner substrate and of course you still have brick ties so you can brick the outside of the building. You just need to leave some extra room on the footings to allow for 3-4 inches of spray-foam.

A modern day house when built and finished has approx 2000 ft of linear cracks in it. It is the equivalent of keeping your front door open all year around. There have been test cases done where two homes are built exactly the same but the insulation in one of them is spray-foam. They then do a blown door test and the results speak for themselves. The spray-foamed house has almost no leakage.

Here is a couple great sites for anyone in NA to learn more about spray-foam. Demelic is based in Grand Prairie TX and in my opinion makes excellent foam. BASF is another great foam also.

[https://www.cufca.ca/](https://www.cufca.ca/)

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

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> So, all of this seems to apply to house _construction_. What's the best way to retrofit a house, to make make it more energy efficient? Or is there no way and I should just weep bitterly?

<comment><USER14> Insulating your attic is the most effective and cheap thing for most people; cavity wall insulation is more expensive but also effective if you have the right kind of wall.

Then it's unexotic stuff like making sure doors have decent seals on them. Double glazing is pricey and some way down the list.

Retrofitting better insulation to your walls if you don't have cavities is very expensive (you'll have to redecorate the house, too) but effective.

<comment><USER12> Most likely your house has double glazed windows - I only see single-glazed windows in antique wooden windows these days (but perhaps it's different outside of New England).

Good triple-glazed windows are expensive, but there are some vinyl triple systems that are reasonably priced. Anderson and Pella both have triple glazed options, for example.

There is also a relatively inexpensive (compared to imported European windows) option for tilt-turn windows now available: [http://logicwd.com/](http://logicwd.com/)

I haven't installed them myself, but I've bought other systems from that vendor and have been happy.

<comment><USER13> How can you tell if a window is single, double or triple glazed? Is there an easy way, or would I have to have a specialist look at my windows?

<comment><USER12> Generally, an easy way to figure it out is to look at where the glass intersects the frame. On a single pane window you'll see the interior frame, a gap (the glass) and the exterior frame. On a double pane you'll see a gasket between the frames that separates the two panes. On a triple pane you'll see two gaskets separating the three panes.

The gaskets maintain an airspace between the glass panes, which is responsible for most of the thermal performance. On new windows this can even be filled with a transparent gas (like argon or krypton) to increase performance.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> In developed nations, most people live in urban areas, and urbanization is continuing. In many cities, building costs are smaller than the unimproved value of the site. Around half the value is a typical figure.

Although, in certain districts in San Francisco, London, and New York the average land-to-building ratio is near 90%.

Sort on the land share column on this data sheet, and you'll see that SF is near that. Don't have data offhand for London, but given the reporting on it, it actually seems higher.

[https://datatoolkits.lincolninst.edu/subcenters/land- values/...](https://datatoolkits.lincolninst.edu/subcenters/land-values/metro- area-land-prices.asp)

</comment><comment><USER16> The thing that annoys me is that both good passive solar design and utilizing the lessons of "vernacular architecture" are both crippled by trying to make houses that have roughly the same appearance that people are familiar with.

<comment><USER17> Do you have any examples of what unfettered designs might look like?

<comment><USER16> Not really, I'm a dilettante at this. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Village_Homes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Village_Homes) is one of the more successful developments that really focused on passive solar design that I'm aware of.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I've always been really curious to know how ventilation is supposed to work.

In an RV if you're cooking or venting in the shower the directions pretty clearly say something to the effect of "open a window"—those things are sealed pretty tight and the air you're pushing out needs to be replaced with something...

So when you are taking a shower and use a ceiling vent (louvered, I assume) where does the replacement air come from if you're sealing up the house? Otherwise you'd just be creating a pressure difference and the fan wouldn't be moving a lot of air. What am I missing?

<comment><USER8> The issue with a whole lot of "new" and "energy saving" houses is often connected to poor ventilation.

Set aside for one moment the vapour from the shower, and from either the dryer or coming from the natular drying of washed clothes, there is the human generated vapour and that created by cooking.

In modern houses (without an efficient ventilation system) the airtightness causes condensation/moisture (usually in corners of the rooms or wherever there is a thermal bridge) which usually evolves in this (or that) form of mould or mildew.

Some (not all) heat insulation materials make the walls (besides airtight) also watertight, which makes the issue worse.

The idea of creating openings to allow the air in, which may be good in - <USER2> - a kitchen where the air also exits normally via the extractor hood or chimney (at the cost of some energy/heating/cooling dispersion) does not work in other rooms, where the openings most of the time either do not guarantee the circulation of air or behave as "heat dispersion" holes, negating all the savings that the airtightedness gave you.

Not only, people breath and emits, beside vapour, C02.

I know that it sounds obvious, but if you don't let (fresh) air in, before or later you will find yourself in a low-oxygen environment.

Having "normal", not airtight, windows and doors makes continuous ventilation of the interior of the house a "natural" phenomenon (with a cost in energy).

If you make an "airtight" house, additionally "watertight" (as an example using polystirene or similar for heat insulation) you are essentially living in a unhealthy environment, unless you provide a suitable ventilation system, and a ventilation system without an air-to-air exchange (to re-use part of the heath or cold) will negate most of the saving effects of the added insulation/airtightedness.

So, as pointed out by PoachedSausage, heat recovery ventilation is an actual _need_ in energy saving houses, but it is still rather uncommon.

<comment><USER19> It should be noted that pretty much any mold related repair is going to potentially blow away years of energy savings, so you really need to make sure your moisture control situation is in order.

<comment><USER20> My rented property has a master bedroom that is west facing & has a massive tree in in front, that wall never gets the sun so consequently it gets surface moisture, it's a pita every winter, this year I redecorated and am getting a heavy grade dehumidifier to see if that helps, also shifted the heater during decoration so it sits at the bottom of that wall.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> It's interesting to think about a few code changes to reduce the cost of a house too. What if you removed the 120V outlets and wiring from bedrooms and went to just 12V, or USB, or Power over Ethernet) for lighting and small appliance power? A smart "Home Computer" that was the whole home. With more efficient lighting, entertainment, you could cut down on the amount of copper in the building, and the expectation of energy usage.

Of course keep the power places you need it, like the kitchen, bathroom, or entertainment center.

<comment><USER22> How do you vacuum? When you need to use power tools, just run cords or stick to batteries?

<comment><USER23> I wonder if there are low power alternative to vacuum, depending on the surface of course.

For actual power tools well.. I help my kids like indoor biking :heh:

<comment><USER10> > I wonder if there are low power alternative to vacuum, depending on the > surface of course.

If the famous vacuum cleaner repairman Reddit AMA is to be believed, the overwhelming majority of vacuums purchased are so in name only, producing far too weak a vacuum to do any good and relying on carpet-damaging powerful brushes to do the cleaning. So we don't even have working light-ish vacuums, let alone low-power ones, let alone _affordable_ light and low power ones. The ones that actually do what they're supposed to are still heavy and expensive (and, I assume, power hungry).

<comment><USER20> I have one of the first generation Dysons that just won't die, it definitely works as a vacuum cleaner, never use the rotary attachment.

GF has a German brand hoover I always forget that has insane suction.

<comment><USER24> Have had a Miele vacuum for over 25 years. Still works great, rarely use the rotary attachment. It was about $700 though.

<comment><USER20> Miele! that's the one, that thing is an engineering marvel.

Controllable suction, attachments that clip together with incredible precision, the thing feels put together rather than slapped together.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> One thing that I still have yet to see in the United States is a house that is designed without central AC. An energy tip I see quite a bit is to program your thermostat. But why can't I program my thermostat on a _per room_ basis? [0]

If I'm on my computer at night and just want to heat my room, why do I instead have to heat the entire house/apartment? What a waste!

I think this is still achievable using existing systems. Keep the central unit, but modify the air ducts to have programmable valves. Then you can choose which rooms to have the ducts open/closed to. Sure, there will see some loss, but much better than maintaining temp for the entire building.

[0] [https://s26.postimg.org/6ewi90rk9/rooms-e1442847765216-1024x...](https://s26.postimg.org/6ewi90rk9/rooms-e1442847765216-1024x709.jpg)

<comment><USER26> Owning a better built house and having sealed it up and all, it turns out it doesn't seem like that would help terribly much. With good design, heat gain or loss is very limited in the first place. We get most of our heat from a few south windows, and body heat. Once I shade the windows, it will be just bodies, which heat the house the same no matter the room.

Plus the building is usually designed as a unit- the envelope is sealed and insulated, room-to-room is not at all.

So the heat or cool just one room strategy I think is only compelling in a poorly designed building.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> This came from the Zero Energy Project[1] which also has floor plans.

[1] [http://zeroenergyproject.org/2017/07/24/simple-techniques- lo...](http://zeroenergyproject.org/2017/07/24/simple-techniques-lowering- cost-zero-energy-homes/)

</comment><comment><USER28> My house has large eaves on it. This shades the house in summer, and keeps the walls and windows dry during the Seattle rain. This really cuts down on maintenance costs.

The house is also designed to use the "stack effect" to passively cool it in summer, though experience with it shows it could have been done better.

I didn't care too much to super seal air leaks, because of potential indoor air quality issues.

<comment><USER29>
      >> didn't care too much to super seal air leaks, because of potential indoor air quality issues.

It is more energy efficient to open your windows each day (during the optimum daily temperature window), than to have low-level air flow all day.

The time of day that you want air flow varies with the season.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> This is all within the paradigm of convention construction.

The thermal properties of compressed earth brick(CEB) make heating and cool a house a lot different. It would be interesting to see what the financial number are if CEB were used instead of modern stick housing.

</comment><comment><USER31> That name seems misleading... "zero-energy" and then lower zero?</comment>


Why we don't have technical interviews for technical roles at Buffer - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/buffer-posts/why-we-dont-ask-technical-questions-for-technical-interviews-at-buffer-73f8132a8abd

<comment><USER2> Two key points from this article:

\- "We hire everyone who we believe is a fit after interviews for a 45 day full-time contract period" (which is obviously more informative than a 1 day technical interview)

\- "We hire remotely" (which likely opens up the recruiting pipeline to people who would be willing to do a 45 contract instead of FT work)

</comment><comment><USER3> I think its important to match interview style with the company. If you're a very theoretical data-oriented / machine learning company then knowing algorithms and computer science is very important so traditional coding tests are probably pretty important. On the other hand, there are times when all you need is a capable Software Engineer with experience and knowledge of a particular tech stack. In that case, whether or not he paid attention in algorithms is not going to give you a great indication of whether he can work full stack.

</comment><comment><USER4> I'm a big fan of this approach, especially the code show-n-tell. Kudos for recognizing which attributes are important and designing a process to try and uncover them. Technical "gotcha" questions rarely reveal anything useful.

</comment><comment><USER5> Why should someone quit a full-time job to go work for you if there's a 30% chance of being unemployed 2 months later?

Even if it's a 30% raise, it isn't worth it if there's also a 30% chance of being stuck.</comment>


Ask HN: Review My App (SleeperBot - Real-time Fantasy Sports) - <AUTHOR>

SleeperBot is a real-time fantasy football web app with a threaded chat interface.  The first iteration is designed to be a faster alternative to fantasy football breaking news web sites.
Please use the "beta feedback" channel for starting topics and commenting.
http://www.sleeperbot.com/signup beta code: kickoff
I'm looking for feedback / suggestions on improving the product.  Also if you are a fantasy sports fan, try it out tomorrow during game time when most users are on. <comment><AUTHOR> <http://www.sleeperbot.com/signup>

beta code: kickoff</comment>


Ask HN: Do BillingCircle, Spreedly, Chargify, Cheddargetter need Authorize.net? - <AUTHOR>

I'm comparing the 4 services above, but don't yet have an Authorize.net account. Would it be better to get an Authorize.net account first?
The end goal is to move off of PayPal to manage our subscription billing.
Can someone explain exactly what I need? It seems like at least Authorize.net, one of the services above, and maybe also a merchant bank account. Thanks! <comment><USER2> Both Chargify and Spreedly require a payment gateway of some sort, no idea about the others.

I believe Chargify only supports Authorize.net currently, and it looks like Spreedly supports a few more.

Authorize.net is only the payment gateway, so you'll need a merchant account as well. A merchant account with a bank is where you have the transaction fee (flat fee per transaction) and discount rate (percentage per transaction). The payment gateway is a monthly fee on top of that ($10 p/month or so), and then you have the fees for the recurring billing service as well (and any special services they require, for instance Chargify requires the customer management part of the Authorize.net API which is another $20 a month or so).

As far as the merchant account goes, start with this blog post: [http://danieltenner.com/posts/0006-how-to-get-a-merchant- acc...](http://danieltenner.com/posts/0006-how-to-get-a-merchant-account.html)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, very helpful.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> From what I can tell, yes. There's 3 parts to this equation:

1- Logic engine that handles all the complicated stuff (chargify, zuora,etc.) 2- Merchant processor that handles the actual processing of the charges. They're the ones taking 2-3% (or less or more) 3- Bank account that stores your money until you feel like spending it on hookers and blow.

</comment><comment><USER4> You need a merchant account in the name of your business. Whichever credit card processor you use will send your funds directly to that account. So if you haven't incorporated, you will need to take care of that in order to get a merchant account. Be aware that where you incorporate will affect what credit card processors will do business with you and the rates you will consequently get. Things will be easiest if you incorporate in the United States.

</comment><comment><USER5> CheddarGetter does not require a merchant account or gateway while kicking the tires or while you are in the development or testing phase. You will need a merchant account and gateway before you accept real money but the two processes can run concurrently.

<comment><USER6> Yup, we started writing to the CheddarGetter API immediately for ScheduleThing. All of the payment gateway stuff is simulated nicely until you're ready to go live.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Payment gateways, merchant accounts ... there's gotta be someone working on simplifying this side of the equation.

<comment><USER8> Yep... Amazon, Paypal, and Google.

<comment><USER9> Paypal, Amazon FPS, and Google Checkout are all more expensive and require your customer to leave your application to setup another account with on of the aformentioned services. A traditional merchant account/gateway is the only way to go if you want to appear professional and save money.</comment></comment></comment>


John Gruber about Papermaster and "That Damn Antenna" - <AUTHOR> http://daringfireball.net/2010/08/papermaster_damn_antenna <comment><USER2> It's so boring to read Grubers fan posts over and over again.. Why are they so popular on HN? They are usually full of subjective opinions on how great Apple is, nothing more.

<comment><USER3> (a) A significant chunk of HN'ers tend to agree with Gruber, (b) a significant chunk of HN'ers at least tend to learn things from Gruber posts (ie, the scuttlebutt that antenna-exec-guy was canned), (c) Gruber tends to be addressing issues that have captured the attention of HN, (d) Gruber captures the "quasi-official" "pro-Apple" side of those issues better than any other blog, and (e) Gruber's posts are extraordinarily well-written and people like reading them for that reason.

It's incredibly boring --- almost daft --- to complain that Gruber takes Apple's side in these posts. No shit, really, Gruber's pro-Apple, you say? Gruber has absolutely no incentive to be more fair to Apple's opponents than he is. He's not writing for HN; he's getting posted here by people who think he writes interesting stuff.

<comment><USER2> I get that, but that's a shame. It's like stating that the Sun (the magazine) or the "Bild" (german magazine) are well written and respected journals because they are read by millions of people. I always hated how those magazines can be read by so many people.

Or to rephrase that: If it's news (it's Hacker NEWS, right?), the first and most important point is that the article is objective and neutral. Atleast for me. And that's why i don't like those links on the frontpage, just as i don't like the suns, the mirrors or the "bilds" frontpage.

Or to put it yet another way: daringfireball.net is the subjective opinion of a single person who seems to rephrase a lot of apples marketing talk. It's not journalism, it's not news, there is often no objective proof, no scientific proof, just the personal opinion of a single person. It doesn't belong on a page that has a certain quality. In a news magazine, i'd rate that as bad journalism, bad news. And again, this page is for news, i thought.

<comment><USER3> You just ignored 2/3 of my comment to focus on "yes, Gruber is pro-Mac".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Truly, Apple has become the most boring tech company of today. Months and months of discussions about _phones_ , _antennas_ , _internal policies_ , _petty theft_ , and now business executives. It must be hard being an Apple blogger, and feigning excitement over such trivialities.

<comment><USER5> Apple is about as boring as every other tech company when it comes to those issues. The big difference though is, that people talk about it when these things happen there. With every other company everyone just ignores it. That makes Apple one of the most (or the most) exciting tech company to many people.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Gruber claims that Apple caught the antenna bug two years ago. Why then, after all of the reports, did Apple claim to be working tirelessly around the clock for some 22 days to find the issue? Secondly, it isn't "one spot": Touching the antenna anywhere attenuates and detunes it, which is why no other phone has an antenna in places that you touch. The whole bridging antennas thing is a red herring.

I fully expect an upcoming revision of the iPhone -- perhaps even the white version and then a Rev.B black version, to have a coating on the antenna.A simply layer of epoxy and it would still look groovy and would eliminate almost all of the issues. The downside is how that will wear over time, which I'm sure they're testing right now.

<comment><USER7> Reading your comment on my iPhone 4 made me curious: after a few minutes of trying, I can't make the signal drop enough to lose bars by touching it anywhere besides the gap between antennas, which makes me lose two bars every time. Even if touching it anywhere should theoretically cause a problem, it's definitely much more pronounced when you bridge the gap.

<comment><USER3> Agreeing and adding the data point that having band-aided the "death gap" on my antenna, I get significantly _better_ reception on my i4 than I did on my 3G. I think the original commenter's point is a crock.

<comment><USER6> Just to confirm: You believe that touching an external antenna doesn't detune or attenuate the signal. That's a fascinating belief that goes completely against all antenna design.

It's interesting that the iPhone 4 is the first device with a touchable antenna, and that was done purely to reduce the size of the device. Must be magic.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Using realtime CAPTCHAs to help the blind - <AUTHOR> http://ucsdnews.ucsd.edu/newsrel/science/10-07HumanGridWeAreCogs-.asp <comment><USER2> I really like these new captchas that are attempting to solve problems, like reCAPTCHA.</comment>


Caterina Fake's Hunch.com is already redefining 'decision engine' - <AUTHOR> http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology/2009/06/caterina-fakes-hunch-redefines-decision-enginealready.html <comment><USER2> I hadn't heard the term decision engine before Microsoft started using the term in their Bing marketing. Now, around a week later there is already a second "decision engine" according to the media. Of course, this is just a headline written to bait the user because Hunch.com has not been called a decision engine before. I sincerely hope that we do not have a new class of websites branded as decision engines because that term is vapid and nebulous. No feature that Bing offers is a unique one so if it is a decision engine it was not the first.

</comment><comment><USER3> The concept outlined in the article had me until this "First, it figures out what kind of person you are with a long personality test." Anything that requires a large time commitment from users (in this case "long personality test") to see what it is all about is destined to fail.

<comment><USER4> Nothing that requires up front commitment has ever succeeded? Really? "Destined to fail" seems to overstate the case quite a bit.</comment></comment>


Reddit's empire is founded on a flawed algorithm - <AUTHOR> http://technotes.iangreenleaf.com/posts/2013-12-09-reddits-empire-is-built-on-a-flawed-algorithm.html <comment><USER2> There's a Reddit thread between various users and keltranis, (one of the more senior coders Reddit ever had) explaining the code here:

[http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/td4tz/reddits_a...](http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/td4tz/reddits_actual_story_ranking_algorithm_explained/)

And a quotation for those not wanting to click:

      *ProfDrMorph* 2 points 1 year ago
      So that means all posts in all subreddits (when browsing
      'hot') are sorted this way:
      1. all posts with more upvotes than downvotes with the
      order determined by age (newer posts are preferred) and
      popularity
      2. all posts with the same number of up- and downvotes in
      whatever order the database returns them
      3. all posts with less upvotes than downvotes with the
      order determined by age (older posts are preferred) and
      popularity (posts with a lot more downvotes are preferred)
      Because that's what the _hot() function implies if the
      sorting algorithm uses it as a 'key'.

      *ketralnis* 2 points 1 year ago
      Yes that's accurate

<comment><USER3> I'm glad you found that thread and got to the top with it, I hate trying to dive into ongoing conversations and try to change peoples' minds when the hivemind has already made its decision. This comes up every 6 months or so, always with some sensational title like this.

It feels a little weird quoting myself, but I also said:

> The thing is, the two most important pages are the front page (or a > subreddit's own hot page) and the new page. The new page is sorted by date > ignoring hotness, and if something has a negative score it's not going to > show up on the front/hot page anyway. The two other main opportunities to > get popular (rising and the organic box) don't really use hotness either.

> So when it comes down to it, what happens below 0 is pretty moot. Smoothness > around the real life dates and scores on the site is more important than > smoothness around 0, where we don't really have listings that will display > it anyway.

In summary, there don't exist listings in which the discontinuities at 0 really matter

<comment><USER4> That's begging the question. Posts with negative scores are completely banned from the front/hot page _because_ of this bug/feature/discontinuity. You can't justify it with itself.

What you can say is that you _want_ posts to disappear from the hot page as soon as they go to -1, in which case I'll say that it's more than a little weird for the first voter to hold so much power.

<comment><USER5> Maybe some civil disobedience will get their attention. What about a script that automatically downvotes every new post?

<comment><USER6> That's a good way to get banned

<comment><USER7> A lot of accounts + a lot of different IPs would get around that.

<comment><USER8> No, it wouldn't. Do you really think you're the first person to try and game the system like that? You know who else tries that? Spammers who think that down voting every submission but their own actually works.

<comment><USER7> I am not, and I have no plans to do that.

But for the particular problem, it would be a solution, provided Reddit did not have any mechanics in place to prevent that exact thing. And it would be stupid to assume you do not.

I have no interest in doing anything like it, I browse Reddit a lot.

PS: Totally unrelated to this, but please look into the API returning a ton of HTTP 503/504 gateway timeouts. It's been happening to me across several servers in different regions of the world.

<comment><USER8> > Totally unrelated to this, but please look into the API returning a ton of > HTTP 503/504 gateway timeouts. It's been happening to me across several > servers in different regions of the world.

Ironically, that's probably the rate limiting blocking you. Are you hitting the API more often than once every 30 seconds?

<comment><USER7> I have a cron job that looks at comments in a thread about every 2-5 minutes. At most it should be making a call to find a subreddit and then a call to find the comments.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> So, a massively, massively popular site that makes it business by ranking the user generated content on it by importance... is wrong.

> Maybe there is no moral. Reddit screwed up.

...or maybe, they know what they're doing.

Maybe not. ...but when you supply a bugfix, the onus is on the submitter to demonstrate that 1) the fix fixes the problem and 2) _that it doesn 't break anything_ else.

It would appear that no effort has been made at (2), to demonstrate that the proposed change would not have an adverse affect on other high-vote rankings.

To be fair, it would have been nice to see the pull request response ([https://github.com/reddit/reddit/pull/583](https://github.com/reddit/reddit/pull/583)) mention that an alternative algorithm choice would have to be demonstrably better in a large scale analysis before they would even _dream_ of changing their core ranking algorithm, but it's not unfair for them to take that stance.

It's like asking Google to change their page rank algorithm because you don't like it.

<comment><USER10> > the onus is on the submitter to demonstrate that 1) the fix fixes the > problem and 2) that it doesn't break anything else.

 __No. __The onus is on _Reddit 's test suite_ which, ostensibly, would cover voting (one of the core features/functionality of the site!) to demonstrate this. Or are you suggesting that he didn't run the full build?

<comment><USER9> Did /r2/tests suddenly get a hundred new awesome tests in the last 6 months? It's pretty... bare. Or it was last time I looked.

Pull request -> should include tests if relevant ones don't already exist.

<comment><USER10> > It's pretty... bare. Or it was last time I looked.

Well then, that's running with scissors as far as any modern legit open source project is concerned. That should be the VERY FIRST thing rectified.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> tl;dr: Posts whose net score ever becomes negative essentially vanish permanently due to a quirk in the algorithm. So an attacker can disappear posts he doesn't like by constantly watching the "New" page and downvoting them as soon as they appear.

<comment><USER12> No, they just vanish from the _hot_ page, and it's not necessarily permanent. They're still visible on /new, which allows for upvotes-of-resurrection.

<comment><USER13> But as the author pointed out, nobody visits /new.

<comment><USER14> Maybe not the /all/new but I pretty much only visit /new on the subs I frequent. It's a much better way of using smaller subs from my perspective. Lots of things never make it fully to the front page of a smaller sub. The drawback is that subs which get caught in a filter appear to show sorted by their submission date and not the mod approval date so you can miss things on /new that might make it to /hot

<comment><USER15> > Maybe not the /all/new but I pretty much only visit /new on the subs I > frequent. It's a much better way of using smaller subs from my perspective.

And one of the reasons might be that sorting doesn't work quite properly on smaller subreddits?

<comment><USER16> Even if this features didn't exist, something I find interesting but most people don't care about is still easier to find on new.

<comment><USER17> Not just easier, but actually only possible to find on /new.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> So the gist of this is:

"I found a recent post in a fairly inactive subreddit and downvoted it, bringing its total vote score negative. Sure enough, that post not only dropped off the first page (a first page which contained month-old submissions), but it was effectively banished from the "Hot" ranking entirely. I felt bad and removed my downvote, but that post never really recovered...

While testing, I noticed a number of odd phenomena surounding Reddit's vote scores. Scores would often fluctuate each time I refreshed the page, even on old posts in low-activity subreddits. I suspect they have something more going on, perhaps at the infrastructure level – a load balancer, perhaps, or caching issues."

This is partially due to vote fuzzing. More to the point, votes go into a queue and the removal of the downvote might not cancel out the previous action for some time.

As a result, this suggested flaw will supposedly let somebody successfully snipe puffins from the new page of a small sized birdwatching subreddit before they ever get a fair shake. I think if somebody would attempt this sort of manipulation further they would find it an ineffective strategy, there have been (probably constantly are) attempts to game Reddit before and this seems like an excellent honeypot.

Beyond the narrow set of circumstances during a very small time window the flaw disappears, yet if you try to abuse this you'll stick out like a sore thumb.

The true horror expressed in the OP is that the ordering of posts in the purgatory is not strictly logical - the post ranked 10042 should really be ranked 10041. Gasp. Twitch.

This is a very lovable brand of OCD to my eyes. :)

<comment> Sous-Vir I think you'd be surprised on how much on a knife edge the whole process works. It's perfectly plausible that something that ends up on the front page gets only a handful of upvotes in the first twenty minutes, or half an hour. Moreover, once an article has been submitted, you're not supposed to resubmit it, and many moderators will remove duplicates.

I'm actually involved in moderating a fairly large subreddit, and we have periodic waves of neo-Nazi posters gaming the subreddit, and they are surprisingly effective at altering the general mood. You can also see some genuinely shocking opinions as top posts on r/worldnews. These are subreddits with hundreds of thousands of daily visitors. If reddit is operating a system which can easily be gamed, it matters a lot.

In this case, with enough proxy accounts, and a modicum of programming experience, you could anonymously supress stories you don't like, with some ease. Do you not think that matters?

<comment><USER18> You're essentially describing the equivalent of online fascism, neo-Nazi down voting brigades sound suspiciously close to Meatspace Greece at Present.

Any system that mimics democracy, even with active moderators, will succumb to a large enough minority of trouble makers. If they really are a _marginalized_ group that does not represent a _significant percentage_ of the community - even with all the tricks and manual puppet accounts and all the real world parallels - they will remain marginalized. If things turn dark that easily one sadly suspects it has more to do with the flaw in the algorithm of the people rather than the system.

As for programmatically doing what you claim, that hasn't been demonstrated. I'm pretty sure spammers have even more incentive and resources and yet the volume of spam is manageable still.

<comment><USER19> It just shows the old principle that small, organised groups can impose preferences on a disorganised majority. It's a predictable phenomenon in collective decision-making systems. If I understand the economists correctly, it can't really be "solved".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The real flawed reddit algorithm is "controversy". It's basically:

      SORT ABS(ups - downs) ASCENDING

...which means something with 1000 upvotes and 999 downvotes will be considered _less_ controversial than something with 2 upvotes and 2 downvotes.

A much better algorithm for controversy would be:

      SORT MIN(ups, downs) DESCENDING

<comment><USER20> Am I looking at the wrong code? I see

      SORT (ups + downs) / max(1, ABS(ups - downs))

which would give a way higher score to the 1000/999 case than 2/2 - 1999 vs 4.

[https://github.com/reddit/reddit/blob/master/r2/r2/lib/db/_s...](https://github.com/reddit/reddit/blob/master/r2/r2/lib/db/_sorts.pyx)

<comment><USER12> Hmm, perhaps I slightly misremember, but even that algorithm still scores +2/-2 as more controversial (result=4) than +1000/-500 (result=3).

<comment><USER21> And that's right. It's a controversy measure without taking in consideration popularity. That can be applied to the final score separately...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I really really really wish there was a website that broke down code like this into explained text. I can grok a lot of code regardless of language somewhat intuitively because there is so much crossover - but I still have issues often when it comes to breaking down complex and unique segments.

This would really help the learning process but I appreciate how time intensive it is.

<comment><USER23> Have a look at literate programming (I think that's what it's called). It's not exactly what you're looking for (in that the project must be done that way from the beginning) but you'll find it interesting I think!

<comment><USER24> That is what it's called. A site [1] with some examples. Donald Knuth developed the term and concept. It seems fairly popular in the haskell community, and to a lesser extent the scheme/racket communities.

[1] [http://en.literateprograms.org/LiteratePrograms:Welcome](http://en.literateprograms.org/LiteratePrograms:Welcome)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> This is a good example of where something that is fundamentally flawed becomes accepted and popular and then a huge amount of effort goes into rationalizing it.

Which goes to show you that things are the way they are not because that's the way things should be, but just because that's the way things are. Which is a very stupid way to run things, but that is the way our 'society' works.

</comment><comment><USER26> If I was a salesman, I would explain that easily:

1\. If the material is newer and already has attracted the same amount of negative votes in shorter period than another one in longer period -- the first is worse. Push it down.

2\. If people suddenly started hating something very much, that might mean the content is hot and attracts a lot of attention. So pull it up.

"thinking out of the... emm, where is my box???" \</comment><comment></comment><comment>- Imagine two submissions, submitted 5 seconds apart. Each receives two downvotes. seconds is larger for the newer submission, but because of a negative sign, the newer submission is actually rated lower than the older submission.

Imagine two more submissions, submitted at exactly the same time. One receives 10 downvotes, the other 5 downvotes. seconds is the same for both, sign is -1 for both, but order is higher for the -10 submission. So it actually ranks higher than the -5 submission, even though people hate it twice as much.

</comment><comment><USER27> Reddit's algorithm is its community, the rest is just math.

<comment><USER28> This got downvoted but I think it is essentially the right answer. I don't see how Reddit's success is based on the amazing efficacy of its algorithm. For example, I don't think fixing this bug and using the fixed code to launch a competing site would beat Reddit.

Its success is based on attracting an engaged audience, who participated heavily, in turn attracting a larger audience, whose participation further attracted even more people... etc.

The algorithm may have mattered very early, in the beginning, when it was first attracting people who were evaluating it for the first time. But even then, I think that the content that Reddit's staff continuously posted was a bigger factor than the algorithm.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Author here. I posted a quick follow-up with some corrections and other items of interest that came out of the discussion: [http://technotes.iangreenleaf.com/posts/2013-12-10-the- reddi...](http://technotes.iangreenleaf.com/posts/2013-12-10-the-reddit- algorithm-a-recap.html).

And of course, if you would like more articles written by me and an extremely high signal-to-noise ratio (because I post so rarely...), consider subscribing: [http://technotes.iangreenleaf.com](http://technotes.iangreenleaf.com). RSS is not dead, dammit.

</comment><comment><USER30> An argument for the proposition that this behavior was intended is that if the purpose of _sign_ was to get the sign for _order_ , then it was actually entirely unnecessary and they could have just done something like this:

      order = log(max(abs(s), 1)) * ((s) / max(abs(s), 1))

I'd prefer the benefit of the doubt, especially given their previous responses.

<comment><USER31> That's not a very good argument - they could just as easily have calculated sign as ((s) / max(abs(s), 1)) if this was intentional, so the fact they didn't probably just means whoever wrote the code didn't think of that trick.

<comment><USER30> That a good point. Of course, I'm reasoning backward to justify something that's already there, so it started its life as a bad argument :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> I've been very interested in this problem. I ran a community for a few months that wound up being quite popular (40k uniques a day before I closed it down). My attempt to address with problem was to have a min + max time, but most interestingly count the number of _posts_ as well. Even if an opinion was popular if it got a response out of people it would stay around longer before dropping of quicker.

I prioritised community engagement over the communities quality of content. This turned out to be slightly more effective way of ranking content.

<comment><USER33> Interestingly enough, the HN ranking algorithm takes a bit of an opposite stance, punishing posts that generate too much discussion in proportion to upvotes. Both approaches are valid, depending on what your goals for the community are.

HN's system would rather quickly derank a post that is potentially inflammatory and keep good content on top rather than using comments as a heuristic for community involvement.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> I don't understand. The definition of _order_ is

      s = score(ups, downs)
      order = log10(max(abs(s), 1))

and the poster says that "order will always be positive". But that isn't true. It is the logarithm of a number in (0,1], and so is negative or zero. Since we cut the value off at 1 I assume that the _score_ function does something to the votes beyond (ups - downs), scaling the value in a way that makes the logarithm of the score interesting.

<comment><USER29> `ups` and `downs` are whole numbers, so `abs(s)` will usually be >= 1, like 2654 or something. The log is there to reduce the influence of additional votes after a certain level of popularity. See footnote ^2: [http://technotes.iangreenleaf.com/posts/2013-12-09-reddits-e...](http://technotes.iangreenleaf.com/posts/2013-12-09-reddits- empire-is-built-on-a-flawed-algorithm.html#fn2)

<comment><USER34> Oh, good lord. The definition uses max, but I was thinking of min. Face palm.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> It's theoretically broken, in practice it works quite well.

<comment><USER36> Is it even true that it is theoretically broken?

The blog sketches out a corner case that maybe isn't handled well, but posts with net negative votes probably aren't "hot", and I'm pretty sure they have mechanisms in there to make sure that bad voters are at least eventually ignored.

<comment><USER37> I don;t think anyone really cares how submissions are ranked once they are obviously net negative. The concern is for the first few votes; a submissions should not be effectively discarded because the first person to look at it did not like it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> > And notably, they are sorted oldest first, just as I predicted.

This bit is actually misstated. Those posts all have a comparison value of 0 (assuming _score_ is simplistic), and are not affected by the oldest-first ranking of negative submissions. The ordering here is likely insertion order, which just happens to be the same as oldest-first.

</comment><comment><USER39> Just goes to prove you only need to get the parts users care about right. Treatment of some negative score posts just isn't too important and may even help remove spam ASAP at the cost of some good posts. If they had sacrificed some other aspect of the site to get this right, they probably would have been worse off.

</comment><comment><USER40> Wait, so the point is that negative vote-score articles don't show up in "Hot?" Seems reasonable.

<comment><USER37> More that if the first vote a submission gets is negative it can't recover and vanishes.

<comment><USER40> I didn't get that `sign` was not ever re-evaluated from the writeup, can you elaborate?

<comment><USER38> The first downvote pushes the submission down below every positive submission ever, not just below the last 12 hours' worth. It can only recover if upvoted from other views.

<comment><USER40> So, in the minimum case, two upvotes? Like any post? Seems there would have to be an appearance cutoff _some_ where.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Seems about right vis a vis the need for algorithms to be correct. Good enough is, by definition, good enough.

<comment><USER42> Good enough to be plausible to a casual user is not good enough to prevent the algorithm from being damaging. For a lot of people, reddit is their only source of news, if that can be easily gamed, it has serious consequences. Developers have responsibilities beyond increasing traffic.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> So relevant it hurts: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5927904](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5927904)

<comment><USER38> The allegation there, from what I can see, was that a someone had a bot controlling five accounts. That's enough to impact even the corrected version of this ranking, and as such is only moderately relevant.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> If the same post is at the top of reddit and hackernews at the same time I'm pretty sure the internet implodes and life as we know it comes to an end.

</comment><comment><USER45> Maybe this flaw is, through some strange and circuitous social mechanism, the precise thing that has made Reddit so popular in the first place.

</comment><comment><USER46> I think the key point is: Reddit works well enough that they don't, and quite possibly shouldn't, care.

</comment><comment><USER16> For those of you who never are on Reddit, both keltranis and raldi posting here are former Reddit admins.

</comment><comment><USER47> The real flaw with reddit is moderator abuse.

</comment><comment><USER48> If it's stupid, but it works, it ain't stupid.

</comment><comment><USER49> This is a feature that promotes controversial posts.

</comment><comment><USER50> Reddit is designed for SEO gaming.

The point is to have your bots/friends downvote everything but your submission.

It works every time.

</comment><comment><USER51> > _Maybe it's that a good technical implementation is a distant second to a > good product_

This is what computer scientists should take away from this.

<comment><USER52> Nope. This is just survivor ship bias. You look at one successful product and you propose a rule that technical implementation doesn't matter. You need to look at all the dead startups which had a good product but not good implementations (ex, friendster and other FB competitors which were ahead of the game but couldn't scale).

In reality, Reddit is successful by a pure chance. In its initial days it was pretty much barren wasteland for fringe people. Most people had written of it as another me-too without much of a differentiation and Digg was _the_ place to be. Then Digg screwed up and people wanted alternative and suddenly Reddit was overnight lord of link submission evolving in to discussion forums.</comment></comment>


Show HN: A Twitter bot I made that posts real-time deforestation data - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/ForestsWar <comment><AUTHOR> Heads up:

[1] This is a project I've been working in about a year now and is an honorary successor to a similar project a friend started.

You can read in detail how it works at [https://imnotanerd.herokuapp.com/3](https://imnotanerd.herokuapp.com/3).

Basically it takes data from the API at globalforestwatch.org that uses satellite imagery to gather area of potential forest loss and paints it in a map to make it easy to imagine.

There is no consideration about forest regrowth. This bot does not track forestal area changes, it tracks deforestation.

[2] I'd like to get some community feedback. The bot has now been running for quite some time and it looks like now it works with consistency (The GFW API data is not reliable when recently published).

Mainly I'd like to see how this bot can be improved regarding the data treatment and the display of it, as I still think the maps, despite being accurate, are a little "underperformant" and could be improved.

[3] Yes. I posted this twice, I forgot to put "Show HN" in the title the first time and I realised too late. Now I can't edit nor remove the previous submission.

<comment><USER2> I see a number of issues:

1\. no deforestation before July 9th.

2\. In 10 days between Aug4 and Aug14 2% of the area was deforested, signifying all forrest will be gone in about 1.5 years. However forrest area in 2015 was almost the same size as reported total. Can't be right. Are you mixing ha and km2 by any chance?

3\. No tracking between what is part of Forest Management Act, what are is part of designated production forest, and what is illegal deforestation.

4\. No data on loss due to natural causes such as wind, fire, and no data on reforestation numbers.

<comment><AUTHOR> 1\. That's the date the bot started tracking. Actually, deforestation data starts in 2015 but I thought it'd be dishonest of the bot to count in deforestation that happened before the bot release. First drafts of the bot worked this way but that behavior was abandoned.

2\. What do you mean by 2%? I guarantee I'm not mixing units, the remaining area shown is the remaining forestal area for the country in display, meaning that if the deforestation rhythm keeps that way, Suriname will be completely deforestated in 1.5 years.

3\. The GLAD alerts dataset, which the bot takes as data source, don't make any distinction between forestal area of any type, they just track deforestation based on changes comparison in satellite imagery, Landsat 7 & 8 being the main imagery sources.

4\. Then again, GLAD alerts does not provide any info on the causes of the deforestation.

I think globalforestswatch.org have an API based around industrial logging that let's you track industry-based deforestation only, but it's based on in- site reports and it's not as reliable as satellite-based GLAD alerts.

<comment><USER2> Thanks for the reply. For point 2, the source states that from 2001 to 2019 1.3% of the tree cover was lost [0]. However in the twitter feed the loss is 2% per 10 days.

[0] [https://gfw.global/3gm1aRN](https://gfw.global/3gm1aRN)

<comment><AUTHOR> You are looking at the forest cover lost _in Suriname_ only for that time period.

The bot gathers _global_ forest cover loss for a given day and compares the aggregated of every country against the selected country from the list.

I thought I made it already pretty clear on the way the statuses are written, how would you write them to make it clear that its global area compared to that country rather as that country area only?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> "Here we analyse 35 years' worth of satellite data and provide a comprehensive record of global land-change dynamics during the period 1982–2016. We show that—contrary to the prevailing view that forest area has declined globally—tree cover has increased by 2.24 million km2 (+7.1% relative to the 1982 level). This overall net gain is the result of a net loss in the tropics being outweighed by a net gain in the extratropics."

\- Song, X., Hansen, M.C., Stehman, S.V. et al. Global land change from 1982 to 2016. Nature 560, 639–643 (2018). [https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-018-0411-9](https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-018-0411-9)

This does not take into account loss of biodiversity or effects on climate, but the viewpoint that we are "running out of trees" is a common one. There are actually more trees on earth than stars in the Milky Way by an order of magnitude.

I would love to have my opinion changed on this however, so if further data contradicts the above study (not that one single study ever proves anything), please make me aware of it.

<comment><AUTHOR> When I started this project I also had that feeling that we were running out of trees.

But my motivation never was to alarm people that we were running out of them, my intention was to make actual deforestation data accessible and approachable to the public so they could decide how big of a problem this was. I have myself learned that I should probably worry less about it than I used to thanks to this bot, and that's fine.

I also think you are not seeing the big picture here. 30 years is pretty much just the minimum for the average tree to grow to a size where it can foster other biomass. On the bigger picture:

"Forests cover 31 percent of the world's land surface, just over 4 billion hectares. […] This is down from the pre-industrial area of 5.9 billion hectares."

-Earth Policy Institute. [http://www.earth-policy.org/indicators/C56/](http://www.earth-policy.org/indicators/C56/)

1.9 billion hectares down in about a century and a half.

My viewpoint now is that there is a deforestation problem in the sense that we destroy forest dependant biomass faster than what it takes for it to recover, but we are still in the time window where the already made harm and the future impact of our deforestation can be reversed, from the viewpoint of Hansen et al we seem to have reversed the negative tendency in tree cover.

<comment><USER3> Hey, just to clarify this was not a jab at you, I just wanted to present a different viewpoint. Very often people fall into the habit of seeing every environmentalist point as good and true, and anything that contradicts that is false and harmful. A more nuanced perspective is the actual truth.

<comment><AUTHOR> I didn't take it as jab!

I actually appreciate that you put in effort to add to the discussion and I presume you made some research to find the Hansen 1982-2016 research paper.

That is a success to me because my work has achieved it's goal, discussion about deforestation is moving forwards! It's even more exciting that this is coming from someone who is not a close-minded environmentalist. In a way I agree that, despite taking care of our environment should be a priority, doctrine-like following of mantras and lack of proper criticism is actually harmful for any movement and individual.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Hi Daniel, it's really nice project.

Any plan to build a website for more visualization in the future or maybe a newsletter to receive the updates?

<comment><AUTHOR> Kind of.

Not exactly a project inside this project, but maybe a separate visualization tool using the GLAD alerts API to allow people to gather the same information the bot does, but in an easy to use website instead of having to use the package itself inside their machines. Unfortunately I'm not much of a designer so this could take a long time.

The newsletter idea sounds cool. Maybe even send detailed reports? There is more data the bot knows on each request but gets ignored for simplicity of the statuses.

However, as of now I'm more concerned about the continuity of the bot, as mLab (where the bot database is) will be terminating their service by November. Currently looking for a free or affordable place to deploy this app.

<comment><USER4> > The newsletter idea sounds cool. Maybe even send detailed reports? There is > more data the bot knows on each request but gets ignored for simplicity of > the statuses.

Indeed a detailed report would be nice to receive.

About mLab, I think you could give a shot to the MongoDB Atlas Free Tier (M0).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This seems cool, but somewhat unconstructive. Feels like receiving daily tweets about the continuous destruction of wildlife (but being able to do nothing about it personally) is a very negative overall experience, and doesn't seem healthy. It is in effect receiving daily bad news which you can do nothing about.

<comment><USER6> I personally know many people who are now doing whatever little they can only because they got exposed to ongoing wildlife catastrophe through social media. Yes, they may not make a difference on a global scale considering them in isolation, but there are many more such people and the effects add up perhaps to make a minor but nevertheless significant difference in the long term.

Hiding the information away only helps the exploiters to win decisively.

Yeah the data is somewhat sensationalist, but still it is not false data and many people who would otherwise not bat an eye can sometimes be impacted into change by sensationalist or shocking presentation of data.

<comment><USER7> I dunno, speaking personally, the world has so many problems that it's best (for me) to not think that much about them, or be exposed to that much information about them. Maybe this is a bad attitude, but ignorance is bliss.

If I was like Bill Gates or something, I think I would have a different attitude. Only when information can actually inform my decisions does it become meaningful. No matter what I hear about global deforestation, I'm not going to do anything about it. So why even hear it in the first place? It just serves to pollute my mind and make me feel bad.

<comment><USER8> > the world has so many problems that it's best (for me) to not think that > much about them, or be exposed to that much information about them

I think a lot of people feel that way, and it's not an entirely irrational response.

Perhaps the best solution is to choose just one or two problems to worry about and try to help solve. Let other people worry about the others.

The "Think Globally, Acr Locally" mantra suggest it's easier to influence your local community and government, rather than a global, hard to wrap your head around, abstract issue.

Some people may still decide that working on global deforestation is the most important thing to do.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Why does it only tweet about Suriname?

<comment><AUTHOR> It will make map comparisons with Suriname until this country is deforestated, then it will move to the next country in the list.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> What's the Suriname for?

<comment><AUTHOR> Just happened to be the first country on the list.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> How can it be real-time?

<comment><AUTHOR> A little bit of marketing wording I must confess, but it is as real time as you can get with this kind of datasets.

The API that I used for this project along the other APIs by GFW power an app called Forest Watcher that it's pretty real-time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> So if you found a security bug in some networks software you'd just make it public? zero validation? just Tweet it out publicly as soon as you found it?

What due diligence did you do on globalforestwatch.org?

<comment><AUTHOR> I emailed them about each and every flaw of their API that I detailed, and some other details I didn't reveal about it.

Their developers and public relationships people are good professionals but I can't stop feeling they are overworked.

Moreover, I detailed those flaws not as empty criticism but rather as instances of software being problematic not because of undocumented behavior but actually because of "undocumented design".</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What are these "important problems" we keep reading about? - <AUTHOR>

It seems a recurring theme throughout a number of articles and blog posts submitted here outline working on "important problems" as something strongly coveted in the software engineering industry.  Most people would probably define these problems differently, specific to their own domain or recent experiences, but I have a feeling there's a fair bit of common ground.
To generalize, I would consider any difficult yet solvable (in the near future) problem - that upon solving would ultimately raise some standard of living - to fall into the "important problem" category.  And I would also assume, from my own experience, that these problems are either presently unsolved or their current solutions are less than adequate; and producing an optimal answer would be extremely satisfying to the point of feeling like life as an engineer/contributor to society is one step closer to completion.
Conversely, it might help to examine "unimportant problems", ones that might be too monotonous or easy.  Or maybe solving them doesn't quite scratch an itch.  But in solving them, you know you're one step closer to achieving a greater goal.
So with that said, what problems do you consider worthwhile?  What are these "important problems" we keep reading about?
Edit: I should have been more clear and mentioned where I see the term come up most.  It seems to be mentioned almost weekly on various startups' blogs, most of which are geared towards web apps and the like.  It would be interesting to discuss the non-obvious "important problems" from hackers' perspectives. <comment><USER2> Paul Graham defines "ambitious"-important problems differently than others have. I use Dr. Richard Hamming's version, from his talk, You and Your Research: <http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html>

_And I started asking, "What are the important problems of your field?" And after a week or so, "What important problems are you working on?" And after some more time I came in one day and said, "If what you are doing is not important, and if you don't think it is going to lead to something important, why are you at Bell Labs working on it?"_

Hamming constrained important problems not just to global or personal significance, but also added a factor of _solvability._ You had to have a way to attack a problem for it to matter, and if you didn't, you should be working on problems that would lead you there, somehow, maybe, hopefully, indirectly. Broad experience was just as important as technical chops.

 _If you do not work on an important problem, it's unlikely you'll do important work. It's perfectly obvious. Great scientists have thought through, in a careful way, a number of important problems in their field, and they keep an eye on wondering how to attack them. Let me warn you, "important problem" must be phrased carefully. The three outstanding problems in physics, in a certain sense, were never worked on while I was at Bell Labs. By important I mean guaranteed a Nobel Prize and any sum of money you want to mention. We didn't work on (1) time travel, (2) teleportation, and (3) antigravity. They are not important problems because we do not have an attack. It's not the consequence that makes a problem important, it is that you have a reasonable attack. That is what makes a problem important. When I say that most scientists don't work on important problems, I mean it in that sense. The average scientist, so far as I can make out, spends almost all his time working on problems which he believes will not be important and he also doesn't believe that they will lead to important problems._

I tackle important problems for designers in my recent essay, You and Your Designs, published in this quarter's issue of Distance: <http://distance.cc/>

I give examples of five important problems in design, and explain why:

1\. Responsive web design, because it exposes content and content management as a first-order design constraint.

2\. A/B testing, because intentionally and purposefully trying different things goes against how many of us were raised as designers.

3\. The Internet of Things, because it means we can do away with metaphors and have physical objects that contain their own meaning.

4\. "Big data" and "computational X," because they represent the event horizon for designer-as-polymath.

5\. "Immersive I/O" and "natural user interfaces," because they remove our "sensory deprived and physically limited" constraints on interactions with technology.

I wrote in a different comment elsewhere, the interesting thing about entrepreneurship is, _you don't have to be limited by your field of academic research, and your lunch tables of chemists and mathematicians can be those of any industry in the world. Working on important problems means your work will have long-term_ meaning.

</comment><comment><USER3> Couldn't we say that any solution that makes life easier raises the standard of living? A better interface, faster software, etc... Product & idea iterations improve the standard of living in the future because their effects snowball overtime. They are also stepping stones for their creators to move onto better and "more important" problems.

Truly important problems - the ones where a solution would make an immediate and significant positive impact in some way for the human race - would be things like solving multi-planetary existence (figure out how to survive a lifetime on Mars and grow), ending poverty, ending crime, ending corruption, ending world hunger... There's a lot. To me, these are the end steps of whatever these "important problems" solve. For instance, we can't end crime until we end corruption, have a government system that people don't need to circumvent for anything, and have everybody be satisfied enough not to commit even the smallest crime. I once read that in Soviet Russia, people would illegally offer their repair services to individuals and companies that didn't want to wait for scheduled maintenance or replacement (or something similar to that idea.)

The problems we solve today are steps and pieces along the way to reach these end Utopian style goals (living on Mars isn't Utopian.. but the other things I listed are.)

</comment><comment><USER4> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow%27s_hierarchy_of_needs>

Start at the bottom of that diagram and work your way up

EDIT: Based on the edited original post, let me elaborate. The most important things are at the bottom of Maslow's hierarchy of Needs. The "important problems" as I see them are the ones at the bottom - food, water, health, resources. If you found a way to hack clean water, food supply, or disease, those would be important problems, compared to say, a social network, or video sharing site (these would be at the top of the pyramid).

<comment><USER2> The trouble with Maslow's hierarchy is that it's a psychological framework that sounds good, but has no basis in fact.

The "Criticisms" section of the article touches on most of the major concerns, so if you consider taking this advice, please consider digging into it properly, not superficially.

<comment><USER4> The hierarchy is just for illustration purposes. I'm sure you would agree that a startup that solves problems of food, shelter, health, or resources is solving a more important problem than one addressing creativity or self esteem? What would you address first if you were shipwrecked on a deserted island? This is true regardless of what Maslow said.

<comment><USER2> Except, it's not true regardless, that's the whole point of the criticisms.

First, we're not all shipwrecked, and I don't think trying to solve problems for those who are is going to be a valuable enterprise in the long term.

Second, the criticisms specifically circle around both an egocentric and ethnocentric view of psychology _which has not borne out in testing._ Different cultures in different contexts _prioritize things differently._

<comment><USER4> s/shipwrecked/third world/

The original poster specifically mentioned that he was looking for problems to raise the standard of living:

 _I would consider any difficult yet solvable (in the near future) problem - that upon solving would ultimately raise some standard of living - to fall into the "important problem" category_

In that context, a startup that made a device that could desalinize water cheaply would be solving an important problem. A startup that helped me share files between my phone and computer would not, though it would probably be more profitable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> See here: <http://www.paulgraham.com/ambitious.html>

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. Although I was hoping to get some real, personal examples of what folks here consider to be important problems.

<comment><USER5> Personally, I would say the (probably obvious) examples would be medicine (or quality of life improvements approaching old age), reduction of famine, and freely available and easily accessible information / learning.

<comment><AUTHOR> I should have been a little more clear as what I was getting at. I wrote it pretty hastily. See my edit on the original post.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


"Learn More" links are a problem - <AUTHOR> https://www.nngroup.com/articles/learn-more-links/ <comment><USER2> I wonder whether the trend began as the amount of low quality click-bait on the web increased. 'Learn More' maintains a purposeful ambiguity - if users have read the summary, they're likely to have a fairly good idea of what they are reading about and whether they want to know more about it.

If there is not much more content to actually be seen in the article, it works in favour of those producing quick and easy content to hit metrics as they won't be over promising.

</comment><comment><USER3> I remember being taught never to use "Click here" (which has the same issues) about 15 years ago. It staggers me that in this day and age of responsive design and tableless layouts, we've still got the same old problems...

<comment><AUTHOR> Wasn't Click Here proven to be effective in testing? I swear I read that at some point.

I always go with something like __Download the annual report (380KB PDF)__ rather than the client-suggested __Click here_ to download the annual report_. But I think a combination was proven to be effective.

<comment><USER3> I remember reading that putting "click here" in banner adverts produced better click-through rates, as sad as it may sound. I can well believe that the same is true of links, though it ruins the page for screen readers (I went on some training for this once, which advocated link text exactly like your former example, and was told that its common practise for experienced people with visual disabilities to simply listen through the list of links to more quickly navigate to the information they need).

<comment><USER4> I guess an element of that would be down to the fact that a banner and (or image, in general) doesn't necessarily look clickable without "click here". Text links should always be able to avoid that problem, though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> On a related note, what people's take on using "read more" style links on blogs (especially ones publishing longer form content)? Meaning, the main list of articles on a blog shows the first few paragraphs of the posts, and then have a "read more, or "continue reading" link for the full article.

Does this make the blog's information more manageable, or is it also crappy design?

<comment><USER6> Trade-off, evidently. Better to get an overview of what the blog is about, worse to read the actual entries.

I personally dislike it very strongly. Reminds me of feeds without the full article, and means to generate clicks.

<comment><USER7> I was similarly opposed to those but then I found myself writing quite long posts and enabled "Read more" links for the sake of making the front page useful. Google searches return links to full articles anyway.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I like the conclusions the author draws, but the proposed solution falls short of being a better alternative. The example replacements don't feel like links to me, nor do they offer much more information that what I would have expected from "learn more" coupled with the context of the headline.

If the destination page doesn't jive with the previous context, then that's a problem with the two pieces of content and the very notion of linking them, not the link text itself.

It's probably also worth mentioning 3D Touch and how it can help the problem.

</comment><comment><USER9> Glad this wasn't called "'Learn More' Considered Harmful"</comment>


Cocos2D And Box2dWeb on JavaScript - <AUTHOR> http://cocos2d-javascript.org/demo?demo=box2d <comment><USER2> A few months back I played with Box2D inside of libgdx[1] using JBox2D[2] and thought the performance of untextured 2D entities was OK... seeing this running in JavaScript sort of floors me. I forget (regularly it seems) how far JavaScript has come.

This is every so cool... I can fathom a future, very soon, where something like Angry Birds would be a CSS3/JavaScript app running at a decent framerate.

[1] <http://code.google.com/p/libgdx/> [2] <http://www.jbox2d.org/>

<comment><USER3> :) Angry Birds using html5, javascript and WebGL already exists.

<http://chrome.angrybirds.com/>

<comment><USER4> It also relies upon Flash.

<comment><USER5> flash for audio, just to be clear. I think this has to do with queueing up a bunch of small sounds and playing them at precise moments, which browsers currently suck at.

Erik Moller at opera wrote about an interesting approach to the problem since then[1], and hopefully we'll see browsers improving their audio support in general.

[1] [http://my.opera.com/emoller/blog/2011/06/13/emberwind- week-1...](http://my.opera.com/emoller/blog/2011/06/13/emberwind-week-1-flash- free-audio)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I don't know why you would opt to write a browser game from scratch in JavaScript and then use libraries with horrible garbage characteristics. Even these simple demos have horrible collection pauses.

Bundling a local development server with their dev tools is a good move, though. Doing development against file:// is basically impossible at this point due to how badly modern browsers mishandle requests for non-http resources.

<comment><USER7> Garbage collection pauses are a problem, but Mozilla and Google are aware of it and working to improve the situation. The GC in IE9 seems to be surprisingly good (well, "fast" at least) already.

What do you mean with "write from scratch"? There are libraries (like this one, or ImpactJS[1]) to help you out. If you develop a new browser game, HTML5 has a lot of advantages over Flash today - mobile browser or even "native" mobile support[2] is one of them.

And yes, file:// URIs are horrible to deal with. Most browsers have a very broken "same origin policy" for file:// URIs - e.g. you can't manipulate images loaded from a file:// URI, because file://c/foo/bar.jpg is handled as if not loaded from the same "domain" as the hosting file://c/foo/test.html (Opera got this right, though).

Disclaimer: I'm the ImpactJS guy.

[1] <http://impactjs.com/>

[2] [http://www.phoboslab.org/log/2011/04/ios-and-javascript- for-...](http://www.phoboslab.org/log/2011/04/ios-and-javascript-for-real- this-time)

<comment><USER8> I don't understand why people have to build everything with Javascript. Objectively there is nothing that makes Javascript better suited for games than Flash/as3. I don't think that last ~0.5% of lacking Flash adoption is bothering anyone. There are no good IDEs for javascript. Library support is bad (Greensock? Flixel?) You don't honestly think that your 99$ library holds its own against these completely free features: <http://flixel.org/features.html> Also People can much more easily steal your code and images than in Flash.

As soon as Javascript really catches up with Flash on most of these things (which will still take a few years) we hopefully can program in Native Client which will destroy both Javascript and Flash.

Extra topic on why browsers refuse to implement native client: If someone could explain what stake Browsers have in Javascript, I'd love to hear it. I have two theories: Browsers want to keep the web as "open" as possible. This means Javascript, because native binary executables would close this up immediately. On the other hand, I don't really understand the point of this openess. Every other market in existance goes by fine with binaries. Vendors give you tutorials and examples on how to build software. So what is the point of being open? To steal code? I don't see any other reason anymore.

So I don't really think it's about being open for browser vendors. It's about control. If anyone can trivially write their own layout engine, has their own favorite language on the client....what are browsers worth then? Absolutely nothing, they would be degraded to cURL.

It can't be security. Obviously javascript can call c code too, Nodejs does it. It's about sandboxing, and I see zero reasons why it can't be possible to sandbox pure c properly.

<comment><USER9> >. I don't think that last ~0.5% of lacking Flash adoption is bothering anyone.

iPad, MacBook air?

<comment><USER8> With Flashbuilder you can deploy on iOS just fine.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> You can experiment with box2djs separately at <https://github.com/HBehrens/box2d.js>

There are a few other javascript ports of box2d floating around, but this one seems the newest. It's fun stuff, and I can get well over 100 fps in a 640x480 canvas in Chrome.

<comment><AUTHOR> The cocos2djs also says that it was using box2dweb[1] but changed to box2d.js due to being more compatible with commonjs. Which is very interesting, as I've used box2dweb and found it quite a competent port.

[1] <http://code.google.com/p/box2dweb/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Can someone explain this to me?

        var sprite = cocos.nodes.Sprite.create({file: '/resources/ball.png'});

And then it's assigned to a box2d object:

        var bdy = world.CreateBody(bodyDef);
        bdy.sprite = sprite;

How does box2d know how to deal with a cocos2d sprite object?

<comment><USER12> That's just to keep a reference to the sprite along with the body. There's no real magic to it. Later in the 'update' function it loops over each body and updates the attached sprite:

[https://github.com/ryanwilliams/cocos2d-demo- box2d/blob/mast...](https://github.com/ryanwilliams/cocos2d-demo- box2d/blob/master/src/main.js#L62)</comment></comment>