MoviePass reportedly changed passwords to prevent users from seeing films - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2019/8/9/20799145/moviepass-subscriber-passwords-accounts-limit-change-films-tactics <comment><USER2> LOL explains why I kept "forgetting" my password and had to reset it a bunch of times!

PS. Thanks to the investors of MoviePass for giving me an appreciation of independent and foreign cinema.

<comment><USER3> I used my moviepass only to buy tickets to my local independent cinema!

I have to thank those venture capitalists.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> "with the hope that a majority of users wouldn't see more than one movie a month, much in the same way a gym offsets high overhead by relying on members who hardly ever show up. The problem is that people enjoy going to the movies in a way that they don't particularly like going to the gym"

Ha !

<comment><USER5> never heard of my dad then that will put a dvd in on loop for a few weeks. He has a player going into a TV splitter, so or movie channel is literally _a_ movie.

<comment><USER6> i used to have a raspberry pi wired up for exactly this purpose. it just played random files from a folder on a NAS.

the main advantage being no UI to run on the pi at all.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I've experienced something similar with ebay and paypal, 100%.

Suddenly and out of nowhere I couldn't login to either and had to do "forget my password" for both of them.

This triggered a several month long incident of my old passwords allowing me to log in and my new password working _some_ of the time. I have absolutely no explanation of it but it got the to the point of having the small number of passwords I've used for both of them written down next to my computer. I could type in the same password three days in a row and it worked, and then the fourth day it stopped working and the another old one worked.

Deeply frustrating and still no explanation for it.

<comment><USER8> Bank of America just tells you your password wasn't right if you are on a VPN. It's terrible from all angles and the only way to find out is to guess what they're problem is or search for forums where people have had the same thing happen and figured it out.

<comment><USER9> They must use a boolean of "is-vpn" as a (part of) salt for your password.

The worst thing is that they can't even tell themselves if that boolean has to be true or false because of all the hashing.

/s

<comment><USER10> Sounds more like they have a blacklist of VPN IPs and just give the "wrong password" message if you try to login from one.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> In terms of financial strategy and moral compass, this company looks like a good fit for a takeover by Uber.

</comment><comment><USER12> We have a similar subscription model in the UK for Cineworld. For a monthly fee you can go to the cinema as much as you like.

The key difference is, the monthly fee costs about 50% more than a single ticket, and you'll be lucky to have more than 2 or 3 movies you want to watch each month, with the obvious dry-spells where nothing really appeals. Since it also gives a discount on snacks (already hugely expensive), it's just a way to sell more sweets and pop.

It pays for itself after two films, when there _are_ two worth watching, and as long as you don't bother with snacks. Cineworld easily claws back some of that money when you skip the cinema for one month, or only go once.

It seems a lot better thought through than what turned out to be a free-for- all cinema subsidy with MoviePass.

<comment><USER13> It's the same with AMC stubs A-list in the US except for more of a premium; ~200% of a standard adult movie ticket, $22 a month (if you don't go to certain states) and only 10% off concessions. It's better if you have a theatre near you with IMAX/Dolby/etc. showings since it's the same price.

[https://www.amctheatres.com/amcstubs/alist](https://www.amctheatres.com/amcstubs/alist)

<comment><USER14> Also lets you jump in front of people in the concession line. With the result that I (a non-A-List-member) will never buy concessions from them again. Which is kind of a good thing for me all around, actually, since I probably shouldn't have been in the first place.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Pretty sure NordVPN have recently started applying a similar tactic. The apps (on all platforms) have all seemingly started logging you out between use (after a small period of time has elapsed). Presumably the hassle of logging back in decreases usage, but customers keep paying.

<comment><USER16> Why would they do that? I'm renting VPS for around $1/month and it can serve 5-10 VPN connections (well, not very loaded I guess, but it works just fine for average users). They're asking $2.62/month. So their margins are massive.

<comment><USER15> They quite literally have thousands of servers all around the world, many of which they need to go the extra mile with to keep off Netflix blacklists etc. so the service itself is very different to spinning up a single VPS.

In terms of utilisation; a significant portion of their users use the service for P2P (there's even dedicated P2P servers) and many more users such as myself for streaming (around geo-blocking).

Utilisation is public and many servers are indeed frequently near max utilisation, even when there are hundreds in a region. Decreasing utilisation at that scale will have a significant impact on profitability.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> lota-putty Is there any fail-safe law out there that catches all loopholes in existing laws?

<comment><USER17> There is no need for laws for this stupidity. Unless you want to consider the laws of economics.

Namely: Create a shitty business model that depends on treating your customers like shit and you can expect to out of business as soon as your venture funds dry up.

This is the sort of problem that solves itself.

Either that or people can keep giving these jokers money, wait for some lawsuit to happen and then in 7 or 8 years after the lawyers take their cut you can expect a check in the mail for 4 or 5 dollars.

<comment><USER11> > This is the sort of problem that solves itself.

Unfortunately it doesn't. If you've ever watched the UK TV series "Watchdog" you'll see time after time people set up businesses, rip people off, go bankrupt, rinse and repeat. Game theory trumps economic models here - and the rules of the game are whatever loopholes these people can find.

To be fair these cinema clowns haven't done anything much worse than a 'fair usage policy' on a mobile phone offering 'unlimited calls' would do. They were sly about it rather than upfront. They could have just introduced new terms as of the next payment. But the general point is about the free market sorting this sort of thing out doesn't work.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I think there's a general pattern here.

A subscription company can make its service hard to use and decrease usage and therefore costs to increase profit.

But it's at the expense of long term profit as users gradually get fed up and leave.

<comment><USER19> Remember, the ideal situation for a business to be in is you paying them, while they do nothing.

Moviepass took this to a whole other level.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I find it strange that the overall concept seems to work fine in the UK but not the US.

...like I'm basically in the cinema 2-3 times a month and that's been going for years

<comment><USER21> It works in the US too. All of the major chains offer subscription services now.

It didn't work for MoviePass because they are a third party and charged less than the price of a ticket per month.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> It does beg the question, does changing a user's password without their consent violate the CFAA?

<comment><USER23> At the very least I smell potential fraud with the trip wire limits then associated messages saying no more screen times and password resets. CFAA could potentially be applied but I think since it's their platform and done by an authorized agent it may be a stretch. But some state AGs could read into these actions and open wider lines of investigation, and compel other evidence. If this is what they are okay talking about, think of the other dirty deeds that were kept hush hush..</comment></comment>


Help/Advice needed with starting a startup  - <AUTHOR>

I've pretty much conceptualized all aspects of a new web application that I'm rather excited about. (I know that kinda sounds like what everyone does these days, but I have!) I've talked to a few people about the idea (mostly entrepreneurs themselves) and they've advised me to go ahead with it without wasting time.
However, the major problem is this: I have mainly had an education in Business Management with some programming experience interspersed in between simply because I enjoy it as a hobby (a few questions on Project Euler as and when time permitted). But because I have treated programming as a hobby, I'm afraid I don't find myself competent enough to develop a relatively advanced web app on my own.
So what I'd like advice on is this: Do you recommend I learn the skills first and start development before looking for co-founders to help with development (there's no way I can do this alone anyway) or just look for an interested programmer/designer first and learn with him on the go? (The reason I say designer is that my conceputalisation pays a lot of emphasis on UI and UX).
Would appreciate some advice! <comment><USER3> I was in a similar position three months ago. I had an idea for a website that I was incredibly excited about, but no programming experience. (And no business experience, either! My major is creative writing.) At first I did the natural thing for a "non-technical co-founder": I asked every programmer I could find if they wanted to build the product for me in exchange for equity in my unfunded company. Needless to say, this did not work out.

I decided to teach myself how to do it, which meant starting from the very beginning. I bought a "For Dummies" book on HTML, CSS and JavaScript (Yes, it was really that bad! Back when I took a web design course in high school, they were still teaching us to format with tables.) and worked my way up to more serious books on MySQL, PHP, and jQuery, all the while working on my website. I now have a beta version of the site online, and I'm testing it with friends and family. I've also learned enough about programming to get a part-time job as a developer at another company. (Not the highest-paying developer job, but still! Real US currency, and the beta version of my website was my only resume.) There are still tons of things that I want to add to my website that I don't know how to build yet, and many aspects of the design that I'm not happy with, but that's okay! Only three months ago I didn't even know CSS! At least now I have a working demo that I can show to potential team members, investors, and future clients.

If you're already programming as a hobby, you'll probably love programming as a job, and you're a lot further along than I was when I started. The only way to build a web app is to build it. And I promise you that until you start building it you have not even _begun_ to conceptualize it! Don't underestimate the difficulty of the intellectual challenges you're going to face.

But don't be daunted by the challenges, either. I can speak as someone who started with literally "just an idea". I think you'll be surprised by how much you'll be able to build in just six months.

<comment><AUTHOR> Whoa! This seems absolutely like my position. Great job! Would love to have a look at your website (if you'd care to share the link).

Thanks for the advice - hugely helpful!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I would advise you get started coding as soon as possible. And there's two reasons I'm giving you this advice:

(1) no "learning experience" in the world compares to actually _having_ to do something to your app's code -- I've been doing development for 10 years, and this is basically how I "learned" everything; by actually having to do it.

(2) your idea will probably change once you start working on it; they always do.

And don't worry: it's very unlikely that someone will just decide, out of the blue, to execute the exact same idea as you. And even if they do, the thing to remember is that it's the _execution_ that matters, not the idea itself.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, I understand that point - but I'm still a bit unsure how to hit the ground running - you know, the initial qualms, what's the point that I start at? Do I just dive in and learn on the go? Or learn a bit, create, learn more and develop and so on.. ? Glad to have some pros provide some great advice!

<comment><USER4> What I would do -- what I actually do do, as a matter of fact -- is dive right in and learn on the go.

Necessity is the mother of invention -- or, in our case, the mother of resourcefulness. I.e. nothing will make you learn something faster, and better, than having your website crash/not-work if that particular something isn't done right.

That being said, don't go overboard; or be overconfident. Do practice the basics, before diving head first into your new website/app. And by "the basics" I mean getting a website up and running.

Then, you take that and you run with it -- as fast and for as long as you can. There; that's the secret to startups, right there :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I would get cracking on web development if I were you. You can definitely do it alone for a while. That way you're not at the mercy of a programmer and you will have learned a useful skill in the likely event your idea doesn't make it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Appreciate the advice, but I primarily wanted to know how much importance to give to the "time factor" - you know, I could spend 6 months developing skills for something I wanted to do only to realise that someone's get their foot into the hole I had my eyes on? I'm sorry if this sounds puerile or naive, but it's just the first time I've had an exciting idea for a startup so I really want to see this come to fruition soon!

<comment><USER5> I think it depends how much money you have to spend. If you have money then see about finding a developer. If you don't have money and you don't expect investment then I would say take your time. 6 months is not that long. Unless you're idea is fully developed it will probably take that long to figure out what it is you're really going to end up building based on feedback.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, I think more than money, the reason I am actually considering learning development myself is that it gives me some sort of "ownership security" - <USER2> know, the feeling that I didn't just have an idea but I own what I made of that idea rather than having got it done by others. Thanks for your advice!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> <http://www.axure.com/tour.aspx> \-- secret is -- they will give it to you for free if you're/were a 3.0 + student. Just email them from university domain, and request a 'good student' copy.

If you need help getting ramped up on their software, let me know.

JB

</comment><comment><USER7> I would say you pick the programming language to get an idea what is possible in your web application and what is not. Meanwhile, never stop recruiting, it is not easy to find good developer.

I think you need a designer too. Most developer an't good at design work. Then you have a decent team structure.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I'm primarily looking to develop a Rails app. (Sorry, missed that out!)</comment>


Peach Is a New Messaging App from the Founder of Vine - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2016/01/08/peach-is-a-slick-new-messaging-app-from-the-founder-of-vine/ <comment><USER2> The arcane keywords are really terrible design, IMO. Normal users shouldn't have to remember this sort of a thing. It's a regression _past_ burying everything in a hamburger menu.</comment>


Ask HN: How to Find a Growth / Marketing Business Partner? - <AUTHOR> As a software developer, I've had hundreds of ideas and never really launched anything meaningful, in fact most of my products I've started never saw the light of day.
I've decided to build 12 lean side projects in a single year. I would like to find someone who has experiencing with user acquisition to partner up 50/50 on these.
I'm a bit of an introvert and have Autism, so meeting people is always a challenge for me.
My question is how would you as a dev find a partner in growth and marketing to launch businesses with little to no startup capital for marketing? <comment><USER2> The proposition seems a bit as if you are asking the partner to perform ordinary grunt work in their spare time. Few people have user acquisition as a hobby. Programming is your hobby. 12 Projects in 12 Months means user acquisition is running in circles.

Working on user acquisition yourself will increase your skill and focus your work. For most people it is harder than programming.

Good luck.</comment>


Pursuit Bond – Investing in Future Success and Outcomes - <AUTHOR> https://www.pursuit.org/bond <comment><AUTHOR> Gist:

> Pursuit provides four years of training and services to students with no > upfront costs, loans, or debt.

> Students who get jobs in tech and earn annual incomes of more than $60,000 > pay back a percentage of their earnings as part of the Bond Income Sharing > Agreement (Bond ISA). Students pay 12% of their earnings for three years > after they get their first tech job.

> Pursuit returns funding to the investor on behalf of the program graduate.

They're a 501(c)(3) non-profit.</comment>


The Engineer's Lament - <AUTHOR> http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/05/04/the-engineers-lament <comment><USER2> There's a _very_ strongly held opinion in certain places in central Japan that the Toyota sudden acceleration issue has _at no time ever_ actually been a true statement about engineering reality, and that it has been at all times an outright fabrication on the part of the American government to protect the domestic auto industry which is presently owned by the American government.

I would be more skeptical of this but for the reports coming out from the NHTS confirming "Yep, there is no there there" combined with the multi-billion dollar fines. It has the appearance of it just _not mattering_ whether there were any faults in the vehicles.

<comment><USER3> There was a court case later that investigated the firmware of the drive by wire throttle control system software. Basically, design choices in the software implementation couldn't rule out the software as the source of unintended acceleration. All bets are off after stack overflow and continued execution.

Also the "brake override" wasn't a feature included at all which one could argue should have been part of the design.

In fact, software for car control systems should go through the same rigorous testing, documentation, control etc... (similar to what is required for FDA medical devices).

More: [http://www.edn.com/design/automotive/4423428/Toyota-s- killer...](http://www.edn.com/design/automotive/4423428/Toyota-s-killer- firmware--Bad-design-and-its-consequences)

<comment><USER4> The court case showed that the throttle control programming was shoddy in various ways, but I don't think they demonstrated any observably buggy behavior, let alone any proof that software faults were behind any particular accident.

I think it's also quite possible that there never were any abnormal unintended accelerations, but the media debacle caused people to carefully investigate the cars, at which point they discovered that the programming was bad.

<comment><USER5> They actually demonstrated buggy behaviour, as well as the number of paths that could lead to that behaviour (very large).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> My 'Bait & Switch' light turned on half way through:

The author tries to move between mech-eng analysis (under controlled experimental conditions) - "what happens to this piece of metal in a 25 mph crash? how about 30?" vs. social-science analysis - "what happens to crashes when the state changes the excise tax on alcohol?"

It's not like there could be any confounding variables between states Oregon vs. Kentucky, the 1970's vs. the 1990's etc. It's all just data and engineers, right?

<comment><USER7> This article was written by Malcolm Gladwell. He frequently does that sort of thing in his books/essays.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> The Pinto wasn't an engineering failure ("it was a two-thousand-pound car on the road with four-thousand-pound cars. It got hit. It lit up. What do you expect?") but a Public Relations failure.

Jason Vines was the PR guy for Ford during the Firestone/Explorer disaster. And he had one guiding principle: Don't blame the customer. Which is what Toyota did with the unintended-acceleration problem.

[http://www.amazon.com/What-Did-Jesus-Drive-Christianity- eboo...](http://www.amazon.com/What-Did-Jesus-Drive-Christianity- ebook/dp/B00O70IM1I)

"PR in a crisis cannot be cleaning up after the elephants in a parade. The PR team needs to have a seat at the table before, during, and after a crisis."

<comment><USER9> The engineering failure (as told to me by a college case study) was that there were exposed bolts directly in front of the gas tank, so a collision would almost always lead to a puncture, especially in a rear-end collision.

The fix was a 2-ounce, $2 piece of square plastic - it would cover the bolts, providing a flat face for the gas tank to impact the support beam. But Ford's leadership (Iacocca?) were too sold on the "sub-2000 pound car" and didn't allow this plastic piece, along with a ton of other features that were removed from the design.

<comment><USER10> The article suggests, though, that other compact cars had a similar bumper and fuel tank design, including sharp objects near the tank. The issue wasn't unique or exceptional. The one cherry-picked metric that came out of it was that the Pinto experienced puncture for rear end collisions at a marginally lower speed than other cars, and, after regulations were put in place to increase that minimum, fatality rates were not affected at all.

Any fatality effect is noise compared to the other causal factors in fatal accidents: highway design, speed, weight of the objects of collision, level of alcohol intoxication. And even factors within Ford's control trumped the Pinto gas tank design in importance. It's just that one particularly grisly and tragic death makes for some really bad PR.

Disclaimer: I've got no knowledge of the Pinto case besides hearsay and what's in this article.

<comment><USER11> Shouldn't you have put the disclaimer first? Gladwell has cherry picked reality to weave the narrative he wants.

<comment><USER12> I trust Gladwell and his research and interview access more than I trust your blanket, ad hominem dismissal of his work.

<comment><USER13> Unfortunately, this attitude is unjustified. Gladwell does research, but he'd be basically as reliable if he didn't bother. He doesn't use or understand the research he does.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This is really weird, I thought it was established that the Toyota acceleration WAS a phenomenon brought on by faulty microprocessor design:

[http://www.edn.com/design/automotive/4423428/Toyota-s- killer...](http://www.edn.com/design/automotive/4423428/Toyota-s-killer- firmware--Bad-design-and-its-consequences)

Toyota's problem wasn't that they shouldn't have blamed the customer when it was the customer's fault, their problem was that they shouldn't have blamed the customer when it was Toyota's fault.

<comment><USER15> Toyota released an independent analysis of their electronic throttle system through their press website:

[http://toyotanews.pressroom.toyota.com/article_display.cfm?a...](http://toyotanews.pressroom.toyota.com/article_display.cfm?article_id=3593)

It's a fascinating report that includes a code review with PolySpace and hardware-in-the-loop testing. TL;dr, Exponent didn't find any hardware or software design defects that could cause "uncommanded acceleration". Barr's analysis in the linked article sounds like he found problems that should have been caught by their coding standards and design reviews, but it doesn't sound like he found or could suggest a specific event sequence that could lead to an UA.

<comment><USER16> If Toyota had anything to do with that analysis then it wasn't independent.

My recollection of the Barr analysis is that a particular failure case was in fact described which occurs during certain conditions of memory exhaustion:

[http://embeddedgurus.com/barr-code/2013/10/an-update-on- toyo...](http://embeddedgurus.com/barr-code/2013/10/an-update-on-toyota-and- unintended-acceleration/)

"the team led by Barr Group found what the NASA team sought but couldn't find: 'a systematic software malfunction in the Main CPU that opens the throttle without operator action and continues to properly control fuel injection and ignition' that is not reliably detected by any fail-safe."

<comment><USER15> I don't see why an independent analysis commissioned by Toyota would be any more or less credible because Toyota paid for it than an analysis by an expert witness paid for by a plaintiff in a civil suit. I should think they deserve equal scrutiny.

Reading the transcript of the court proceedings, it sounded like Barr Group were able to induce a fault that could lead to an unintended acceleration, but the evidence that this fault actually happened was circumstantial.

Also, I don't find the jury's decision against Toyota to be relevant, given that there are so many other elements that figure into the calculus of a jury decision. I can't fault Barr Group for trumpeting that they were a key expert witness in a successful trial of this magnitude—it's phenomenal advertising—but I don't see how it follows that their failure proposal is actually what happened (nor do I think that the Barr Group would say with certainty that it did happen).

<comment><USER14> How would it be anything other than circumstantial that it "actually happened"? Those cars crashed and people died. You could make the same case about any bug; "I duplicated the behavior, but that doesn't mean it actually happened in the original bug report". That kind of developer comment would raise eyebrows.

Toyota's original defense was that it was user error because unintended acceleration couldn't happen; they blamed it entirely on driver error. They were making a "forall" argument, and all Barr had to do was show an "exists". He did. Toyota was completely wrong.

<comment><USER15> > How would it be anything other than circumstantial that it "actually > happened"?

Because the fault could trigger a DTC. Barr's argument was that the right kind of bit flip event could cause a fault and it would not be logged as a DTC. The beauty of Barr's theory is that it leaves no evidence if it was the cause of a real-world accident. The plaintiffs successfully argued that Barr's theory was the most plausible explanation for the accident, not that it was the cause.

> You could make the same case about any bug; "I duplicated the behavior, but > that doesn't mean it actually happened in the original bug report".

I think this analogy is misplaced, here, there would be no bug report other than "the system crashed" (no pun intended). In which case, your statement would be accurate and proper.

> Toyota's original defense was that it was user error because unintended > acceleration couldn't happen; they blamed it entirely on driver error. They > were making a "forall" argument, and all Barr had to do was show an > "exists". He did. Toyota was completely wrong.

Toyota's defense was that user error was the most likely explanation; the plaintiff via Barr argued that a software defect was the most likely. The plaintiff prevailed, but that has no bearing on what actually (or likely) happened.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> This is a great example of the difference in mindset between software developers in modern companies doing non-embedded work, and folks in more traditional mechanical or chemical engineering roles. Very, very different calculus.

EDIT:

Interestingly, we've got potentially _much_ better instrumentation and analytics on our side...note how long it took to get those accidents reported, and then think how long it takes to do that kind of analysis on your production systems of what users have had problems when.

</comment><comment><USER18> There's a crucial decision the Toyota engineers made, as described by the article, which was that if the stuck accelerator was not preventing the driver from using the brake and slowing the vehicle, then the stuck accelerator is acceptable (we're talking about a small number of reports) and no fix should be made.

It's not easy to understand why they would make that decision. I imagine a stuck pedal is likely to cause confusion in a driver. It would take some time before a driver will process what is happening, and realize that the accel pedal is indeed stuck. It seems like surely it would cause accidents.

Furthermore, it's not a tough problem to design a pedal that moves back and forth in high humidity or high temperatures that a car interior is going to see. And it's not expensive.

But we're seeing this fault in isolation. The engineers are likely thinking, "Suppose we fix this problem. That's fixed, and it cost $2 per car. Now, what are the 1000 other items that could fail and cause a similar moment of confusion, of the kind that might contribute, or seem to contribute to an accident? What will it cost to fix all of them, because fixing just one doesn't solve the problem."

<comment><USER19> But they _did_ fix the problem. They just didn't recall the existing cars. According to the article, they fixed the pedal for subsequent models of the car.

> _Furthermore, it 's not a tough problem to design a pedal that moves back > and forth in high humidity or high temperatures that a car interior is going > to see. And it's not expensive._

According to the article, the problem was that the material of the pedal was unexpectedly degrading in that environment, causing it to become stuck. This isn't a matter of it being expensive to produce a better pedal, it's simply a matter of an unforeseen interaction (which would argue that it _is_ in fact hard to design a pedal that works flawlessly in that environment). And so they fixed it on subsequent models. But fixing it on all the existing cars out there would amount to an expensive recall that seemed to be rather unnecessary.

> _I imagine a stuck pedal is likely to cause confusion in a driver. It would > take some time before a driver will process what is happening, and realize > that the accel pedal is indeed stuck. It seems like surely it would cause > accidents._

According to the article, at the time when the issue first cropped up, there were no known cases of an accident caused by the stuck accelerator (note: I don't know if any happened later). Furthermore, the natural reaction to "my car is unexpectedly accelerating" is to slam on the brakes. I could easily see someone panicking, but a panicking person doesn't forget that the brake pedal exists, especially since all drivers have been conditioned to understand that pressing the brake pedal is how you stop the car.

Based on this, their response seems pretty straightforward. Yes, there's a relatively rare issue with a stuck accelerator, but (at least at the time) there's no known cases of this leading to an accident, and the natural response by a driver upon encountering the problem, which is to hit the brakes, is sufficient to neutralize the issue. Therefore, no expensive recall is necessary.

That said, they obviously had a PR problem. And it was magnified by the media's propensity to hype up situations like this, turning it into a newsworthy story (because that gets more viewers). It seems the vast majority of incidences of unexpected acceleration were not even caused by the stuck accelerator, they were either caused by poorly-fitting third-party floor mats, or by people inadvertently pressing the accelerator when they meant to press the brake, both of which are issues that are not unique to Toyota cars (in point of fact, to the best of my knowledge, every incidence of someone unable to stop the car by pressing the brake pedal was in fact pedal confusion, where they were pressing the accelerator thinking it was the brake, and therefore not caused by this defect at all).

Ultimately, I think Toyota had the right engineering response, they just needed to fix their PR response. Don't let the engineers dictate communication to the customers. Understand that reality and public perception are often at odds with each other, and that public perception is just as important as reality. That's not to say that they should have issued a recall, because they shouldn't (if anything, that would have reinforced public perception that the cars were dangerous). But they should have realized that they needed to communicate with the public in a different fashion.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> This is the whole idea behind the article:

>"The Toyota guy explained this to the panel," Martin went on. "He said, 'Here's our process.' So I said to him, 'What do you imagine the people are thinking? They're shaking like a leaf at the side of the road and after that whole experience they are told, "The car's fine. Chill out. Don't make mistakes anymore." Of course they are not going to be happy. These people are scared. What if instead you sent people out who could be genuinely empathetic? What if you said, "We're sorry this happened. What we're worried about is your comfort and your confidence and your safety. We're going to check your car. If you're just scared of this car, we'll take it back and give you another, because your feeling of confidence matters more than anything else." ' It was a sort of revelation. He wasn't a dumb guy. He was an engineer. He only thought about doing things from an engineer's standpoint. They changed what those teams did, and they started getting love letters from people."

<comment><USER21> Thats a double edged sword. The thing is, it was not their job to make people feel better, it was their job to evaluate the situation. There is a good and a bad side of that trade off...

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Yep. The exceptional error gets the grease, even though its a one-in-a-million event. Invoke the feels, and the majority of people lose their shit. Give them data, and their brains turn off.

BUT THINK ABOUT THE CHILDREN!

<comment><USER23> "BUT EMOTE ABOUT THE CHILDREN!"

FTFY. =)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> An interesting paper. "The Myth of the Ford Pinto Case":

[http://www.pointoflaw.com/articles/The_Myth_of_the_Ford_Pint...](http://www.pointoflaw.com/articles/The_Myth_of_the_Ford_Pinto_Case.pdf)

<comment><USER24> PDF warning

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> This is a brilliant quote:

" _Surely this is why Jimmy Carter remains the most puzzling American President in recent times. We have too often insisted on trying to understand him using the default modes of identity politics: as a white, Southern born- again Christian. But Carter was by profession and training an engineer—a disciple of the greatest and most influential engineer in the history of the U.S. Navy, Admiral Hyman Rickover. Rickover, Carter once said, had more influence on him than anyone except his parents. In his literalness, his relentless candor, his practicality, Carter was the Toyota engineer by the side of the road doggedly lecturing us on how to drive the car. Carter's true nature is puzzling only if we remain rooted in the fantasy that the world we inherit somehow matters more than the world that we chose for ourselves—and that surrounds us, from nine to five, every working day of our adult lives._ "

<comment><USER26> I thought it was abrupt and reaching. It felt like the author has this tidbit about Carter laying around that he'd been holding on to, but wasn't sure where to use it. He thought it could maybe fit here, but it just was jarring. Not to mention that Carter isn't quite recent enough for me to really have any context about the comparison (what policy decisions set Carter apart?). Finally, the injection of race and religion in this otherwise unrelated article was just out of the blue.

<comment><USER27> Yeah, the Carter bit made no sense. I remember Carter, and a lot of his bad decisions were very much NOT the result of "engineer thinking". One that comes immediately to mind is his executive order outlawing breeder reactors, which has basically saddled us with being unable to cleanly reprocess reactor waste back into usable fuel. Never mind the fact that only a very specific type of breeder reactor produces weapons-grade plutonium, and never mind that as a nuclear enginner he SHOULD have known this, he still banned them in a bizarre attempt to ingratiate himself with the 70's "disarmament/anti nuke" movement that never seemed to fully grasp the distinction between nuclear WEAPONS and nuclear POWER.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> The most ridiculous fix to a serious car problem, to me, was that with the GM Cobalt et al. cars: [http://engineeringethicsblog.blogspot.com/2014/06/the- switch...](http://engineeringethicsblog.blogspot.com/2014/06/the-switch-from- hell-gms-barra-and.html)

Anyone can see that the 'fix' was half-baked. This is a weird analogy, but it popped into my mind to fit the unbelievable situation:

It's like designing a traveling laptop-cooling station where the laptop sits on a strainer, which is almost touching a pool of water. The fix was to increase the gap between the strainer and the water by 1cm. Surprisingly, laptops would still get wet after the fix.

<comment><USER29> What's more bizarre is that turning the key should completely devastate the car. Faulty switch or not, that sounds pointlessly hazardous. I'm hoping there's a good reason for this, but it sounds really terrible.

Do "keyless" cars immediately shut off when you press the stop button while driving?

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> There is an entertaining video of Milton Friedman discussing the same issues with an audience member:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jltnBOrCB7I](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jltnBOrCB7I)

<comment><USER31> Very interesting. I was amazed that the video seemed to be uploaded with the intent of showing what a disgusting human being Friedman is, when in fact his points (in this particular discussion) are quite uncontroversial.

<comment><USER32> Yeah though his point that if consumers want to pay $13 less for a Pinto without the plastic block they should be free to do so is impractical from the point of view of consumers being able to analyse that stuff. (4m55)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> I find it strange that the shadow, or wake, of the 1960s Ralph Nader case ( [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unsafe_at_Any_Speed](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unsafe_at_Any_Speed) ) is not mentioned.

Rather large elephant.

</comment><comment><USER34> > Also in part because of that, the F.A.A. has close to fifty thousand

> employees—an order of magnitude more employees than we do. We have six > hundred.

Am I missing something? 50,000 vs 600 is two orders of magnitude difference.

Perhaps the person quoted was speaking colloquially, but I would argue such a quotation should have a [sic] in it.

<comment><USER35> One thing you're missing is that 25,000 of the FAA employees are Air Traffic Controllers. There is no equivalent function that NHTSA does that would require that many employees.

This whole comparison grated on me. Either the NHTSA guy is an idiot or Gladwell is an idiot or both, likely both. Or they're deliberately prevaricating and hoping that most people won't notice. I can't stand sloppy "factoids" like that. Context is essential.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> In physical engineering two principle tools are used to control projects : specifications and tolerances.

I software we have a kind of specification (generally dimensioned and rather fuzzy) but no concept of tolerance.

But also software quality seems to me to be more fundamentally about perception than anything else.

<comment><USER37> The problem with software is that the software is the specification. Any sufficiently detailed software spec will need to be written in a formal language that might as well be code.

<comment><USER38> I know that's received wisdom in some parts, but is it actually true? Is it true for other engineering disciplines? Is it true for hardware design? If not, what makes software special?

I think it only _seems_ true because of the amount of money people are willing to invest in software development, relative to other ventures.

<comment><USER37> It's just a property of the artifact you're building. You're designing a process instead of a product. The artifact you produce is a description of that process--code.

The closet thing I can think of is anyone who works on processes instead of products. If you look at disciplines that design processes, the larger the scope of the process, the less exact the methods to design them (mainly because the number of variables grows too large).

At one end, industrial engineers who design assembly lines have very rigorous design methodologies backed by math and empirical data. At the other extreme you have politicians designing the process of running a country, and their methodologies are almost never based on math or empirical evidence.

One way I've heard it described is kind of midway between an industrial engineer and a politician--When designing a large scale software system, you should be like an urban planner. You decide what kind of zoning you need-- residential over here, commercial over there. Then you build the roads and other infrastructure that connects the various districts.

<comment><USER38> I agree with your analogies, but I think that there are at least a few intermediate levels between high-level process description and code that benefit from some sort of spec. Good specs fill the gaps between the zoning and the pavement.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> _He argues for overturning the deeply held—and, in his view, irrational—proscription against two-foot driving. If drivers used one foot for the accelerator and the other foot for the brake, he says, they would be far less likely to mistake one pedal for the other._

...? I've always driven that way, except when I was practicing on a stick shift (which I _did not like_ , because it had more pedals than I have feet).

Do people seriously not like doing this for some reason?

<comment><USER40> Historically people who drive with one foot on each pedal go through brake pads faster as a function of overlap between the application of throttle and brake.

When I was taking Drivers Education (way back when) my teach asserted that from a neurological perspective it was faster for the brain to use one foot than two, because using two introduced an additional step in the process of deciding which part of the body to active. His claim (and I don't recall him providing direct evidence of this) that having go/stop be a choice of two movements of a single limb, allowed you to react faster than picking which of two limbs to activate for the desired behavior.

<comment><USER41> I would think that this would be true as you are learning, but once you have been performing the two-foot motion for several thousand miles I would think the action would be so ingrained in your muscle-memory as to remove entirely that cognitive decision. At some point you stop thinking about which foot and just automatically _know_ brake=left foot.

<comment><USER42> As a lifelong manual card driver with a left-foot clutch, it takes about, oh, ten seconds of sitting in a go-kart with left foot brake and right foot accelerator to get used to it and adapt. There seems to be no real difficulty in switching which leg does what.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> What i find most worrying about this article is the change in thinking once one has been with a organization for some time.

That in turn brings to mind the Challanger debacle, and the claim that it happened because the CEO of the company making the o-rings shifted his thinking from engineer to management during the go/no-go conference call. And subsequently changed his stance from a initial no-go (engineering) to a go (management)...

</comment><comment><USER44> Absolutely fascinating and very insightful into the differences in perspective between engineering and other disciplines.

</comment><comment><USER16> Toyota's problem was real, and the author hot it wrong: [http://embeddedgurus.com/barr-code/2013/10/an-update-on- toyo...](http://embeddedgurus.com/barr-code/2013/10/an-update-on-toyota-and- unintended-acceleration/)

<comment><USER32> Gladwell doesn't say there was no problem. He says "[in the Pinto case] two dozen of their occupants were killed by fires from rear collisions. The number of deaths linked to the Toyota sudden-acceleration complaints was about the same." And then points out that number is small compared the number of lives that could be saved many other ways.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> > Only the engineer tries to solve the problem.

Wrong! The Ophthalmologist, and Priest were also trying to solve the problem. That joke, which is old because it is so good, has a deeper message.

<comment><USER46> In fact, the three of them don't even agree on what the problem is.

Priest: We're frustrated.

Ophthalmologist: The firefighters are blind.

Engineer: The golf course is running inefficiently.

<comment><USER47> Which is exactly why the first rule of good problem solving is to re-state the problem. :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> Every Engineer's Solemn Duty

[http://www.warplife.com/ethics/duty.html](http://www.warplife.com/ethics/duty.html)

<comment><USER49> I think this is like a lot of things; the theory is sound, but the hard part is figuring out when it applies. It can be misapplied at both the low and high ends, and there's a vast murky middle.

<comment><USER48> "vast murky middle".

I eagerly enrolled in Ethics my first term at UCSC, in hopes of learning The Answers To All Of Life's Great Questions.

Instead I learned how to make tedious, hair-splitting arguments. While I readily agreed that the philosophy prof who taught the class had valid arguments, they were so complex that I didn't think they would do anyone any real good.

The one thing I took away from the class was the concept of "The Minimally- Sufficient Samaritan". A Good Samaritan will risk their life for that of another; a bad Samaritan won't. A Minimally-Sufficient Samaritan will only do enough that they are regarded as ethical.

<comment><USER25> I took a class called "Contemporary Moral Problems" from a professor who suspiciously resembled Captain Kangaroo. In it, I found my favorite statement from philosophy:

"I find it plausible to believe that I have a moral duty not to wantonly slaughter my neighbors."

(How many wishy-washy terms can _you_ find in it?)

The Minimally-Sufficient Samaritan is entering my lexicon. Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> It's a little annoying to see the author retell the story of Toyota's prius acceleration problem as if it were a defect with the peddle.

We know now that it was a problem with spaghetti code firmware, lack of testing, & poor system design.

See here [http://www.edn.com/design/automotive/4423428/Toyota-s- killer...](http://www.edn.com/design/automotive/4423428/Toyota-s-killer- firmware--Bad-design-and-its-consequences)

</comment><comment><USER51> I'm actually shocked at this article's underlying message, which seems to be implying that since engineering perfection is unobtainable, good enough within the given time and material constraints is acceptable and these recall issues were more of a PR problem.

Ford and Toyota are companies that generates _billions_ of dollars in profit. Think about that. It in no way realistically ran into any constraints that were not arbitrary. You can hire more engineers. You can hire better engineers. This is not a question of a scrappy start up needing to release something or go bust.

I'm not anti-capitalism. I understand companies run into actual, real constraints that prevent perfection. But do we care that the defects and safety issues are dwarfed by poor driving? How are these self imposed 'constraints' on engineering anything but maximizing shareholder value at the expense of public safety?

<comment><USER52> > which seems to be implying that since engineering perfection is unobtainable

It is unobtainable. Full stop. The end.

No amount of money thrown at a problem can absolutely, positively, 100% guarantee safety. Even if you had a car that cost $1b it still wouldn't be perfect. It might have a perfect safety record but that's because there would only be 500 drivers on the road worldwide and at that kind of a very, very sparse distribution cars might only pass one another a few times per day. It might take years or decades for enough car-to-car interactions to take place to find the remaining weak spots in the billion dollar car to ensure that it didn't accidentally kill someone.

But in the mean time you'd make millions if not billions of people poorer for not having the ability to drive cars which exist in the realm of affordability. Nearly everything is always about time and material (and monetary) constraints. If it wasn't we'd all own skyscrapers and have private yachts and vacation all the time and etc, etc, etc.

> Ford and Toyota are companies that generates billions of dollars in profit.

And? Ford has $53b of "property, plant and equipment" and on that $53b it made a profit of $5b in 2012, $7b in 2013 and $3b in 2014. That averages out to $5b or a little under 10% annualized yield. Since automobile design and manufacturing is a little more complicated than real estate, so it shouldn't be surprising that the yield is higher.

[http://finance.yahoo.com/q/bs?s=F+Balance+Sheet&annual](http://finance.yahoo.com/q/bs?s=F+Balance+Sheet&annual)

[http://finance.yahoo.com/q/is?s=F+Income+Statement&annual](http://finance.yahoo.com/q/is?s=F+Income+Statement&annual)

<comment><USER53> That's a cop out argument.

Gas pedals and ignition switches are things that have existed for decades. Why are they screwing around with materials that don't perform well for a part as universal as a gas or brake pedal? Why not leave the damn thing alone?

<comment><USER15> In part because throttle and ignition control are increasingly eschewing mechanical linkages in favor of electronics. IIRC, the Camry in question had an electronic throttle, and the pedal part that experienced accelerated wear was an acetal bearing surface that was supposed to mimic the feel of a traditional throttle control. I don't know the details of this case, but acetal isn't uncommon for bearing applications.

As to why move to electronic throttle, it's mostly due to regulatory compliance.

<comment><USER52> > In part because throttle and ignition control are increasingly eschewing > mechanical linkages in favor of electronics.

I would go further than this. I would guess that at least 50% of the cars on the road today have electronic-only throttles and that fully 99% of cars sold in the last year have had electronic-only throttles.

Drive-by-wire is basically the standard these days, even on very inexpensive cars. Emissions standards have basically forced it.

<comment><USER53> So you have a safety critical component that was redesigned (with a floor mat recall) in the last decade, and modified after a series of incidents.

Sounds like an engineering failure to me.

<comment><USER15> Parts are changed all the time over the production run of a car. How does that constitutes an "engineering failure"?

<comment><USER53> The materials degrade and fail, and the design of the physical environment around the pedals makes it easy for OEM or aftermarket floor mats to create fatal conditions.

The physical properties of pedals are well-known. Material failure of a pedal in the 21st century is a complete fuckup. Floor mats are known quantities as well. Perhaps design elements beyond weakly anchored plastic hooks embedded in the rug would make it more difficult for a sliding piece of rug or rubber to kill the occupants of the car.

Well engineered products should work in the environment that they operate in. These cars didn't perform in a variety of typical conditions, putting human life at risk. The "obvious" workarounds presented by the engineers aren't things that drivers are trained to do and aren't obvious to drivers in emergency situations.

That pretty much defines failure in my mind.

<comment><USER15> > aftermarket floor mats

How is it reasonable to hold a car manufacturer responsible for what could happen with aftermarket parts, unless those parts are designed to be an exact duplicate of an OEM part?

> Well engineered products should work in the environment that they operate > in.

Completely agree. Toyota has produced a lot of cars, and only a minuscule subset seems to have actually been affected.

> These cars didn't perform in a variety of typical conditions, putting human > life at risk.

Human life is at risk whenever a person is driving in a car, regardless of manufacturer. I think the proper question is do the Toyota designed cars present an _unacceptable risk_?

> The "obvious" workarounds presented by the engineers aren't things that > drivers are trained to do and aren't obvious to drivers in emergency > situations.

Stomping on the brakes seems like a reasonable response to an unintended acceleration event for an untrained person, and was experimentally shown in Toyotas to be sufficient to stop the car with an open throttle in a reasonable distance. If Toyota has a proper risk management plan in place (and I don't know of any evidence that they lack one), it would incorporate risk mitigation for an unintended acceleration. How an untrained driver would react, or a driver who didn't read the instruction manual, would be considered in the risk management plan.

As to driver training, I personally was taught that applying full brakes, handbrake, placing the transmission into neutral, and killing the engine are all options, in addition to the downsides of all of these. I am certain that many drivers don't know this, but to say that all drivers aren't trained on remedies is not wholly accurate.

As I see it, a true engineering failure is if there isn't a corrective process in place to replace affected parts and if there isn't a process to incorporate design process changes to prevent these problems from occurring in the future; clearly, there is a quality system in place. If Toyota produced new cars that had floor mats or pedals that had the previous problems that would be a clear engineering failure. What actually happened was that the cars were produced under the constraints of a realistic budget and acceptable defect rate.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Lessons from Running a Small-Scale Electronics Factory in My Guest Bedroom - <AUTHOR> https://spun.io/2018/12/15/lessons-from-running-a-small-scale-electronics-factory-in-my-guest-bedroom-part-1-design/ <comment><USER2> If you're going to produce a reasonable-sized batch of anything electronic, I'd strongly recommend:

a) doing some reading on design for manufacturing

b) getting some quotes for PCB assembly services and

c) considering factory-programmed microcontrollers

At quantity 200, you could have simple boards like these assembled for about a buck a piece. Microchip will program 200 PIC or Atmel microcontrollers from the factory for about 20 cents each with a $29 setup fee. Unless you're willing to work for a very low hourly rate, you should probably take advantage of someone else's economies of scale.

[https://pcbshopper.com/#assembly](https://pcbshopper.com/#assembly)

[https://www.microchipdirect.com/programming/Tutorial.aspx?mi...](https://www.microchipdirect.com/programming/Tutorial.aspx?mid=2)

<comment><AUTHOR> I didn't realize assembly/programming services were that cheap and I'll definitely consider them for final runs of things in the future if it's a decent quantity like this. I'm just a hobbyist and I enjoy putting these things together, and most of the time it's just a handful of boards at once anyways so it's not a big deal.

The real issue was that I had ended up cutting a lot of corners to try and get things done in time, particularly with regards to testing. Definitely a major lesson learned.

The MCUs didn't take long to program with a ZIF socket, but once they were baked onto boards and I was finding bugs that needed to be fixed, that's where it really turned into a pain doing it over SPI.

After all of that, I still ended up having to bodge 2 connections on all of the final boards after all was said and done (which was the 5th or 6th board revision after I did small test runs to play with things and fix issues)

<comment><USER2> >The real issue was that I had ended up cutting a lot of corners to try and get things done in time, particularly with regards to testing. Definitely a major lesson learned.

Haste makes waste, measure twice and cut once. It's one of the hardest lessons to properly internalise - bodges and firmware changes can be hugely time- consuming, so it nearly always makes sense to absolutely nail your prototype before moving to production.

Congrats on a cool project.

<comment><USER3> i.e., waterfall really does make sense when you're dealing with hardware.

<comment><USER4> I want to push back on this notion a little bit. I think non-waterfall is plenty fine for hardware development. If you structure your product development cycle as a series of (design, build, test, feedback) steps, you get that valuable feedback much earlier than later.

One/one-hundred-off prototypes are expensive but nothing beats the information gained from soldering a board, plugging in connectors, and programming chips directly. You'll do these steps at the end of a waterfall process anyways, and I'd say they're more expensive to alter then. When a problem is found, deciding to bodge wire two pads is the high-cost, low-risk solution to problems found late in the game. Discovering the problem early, fixing it in the schematic, and testing during your next prototype cycle is cheaper during production and risk is mitigated because you're still going to be testing before you ship.

Of course, this is all very much propaganda, and not all shops would follow this idealistic scenario, but I don't think hardware is any more waterfall than anything else.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I highly recommend that people try to have a board made before they go about trying to build the entire thing by hand in a home pcb factory. The cost has come down a ton over the years on using actual Quick turn fabs.

Depending upon your turn time you can get boards made for say $20-50 for say a 4-6 layer board. For assembly —- that is really the expensive part. Basically can be hundreds of dollars per board for complex boards. But there is zero way you are going to build a complex board on your own at home. Toaster oven style? I mean honestly unless the board is pretty simple it's basically close to just hitting the button on a slot machine. Burn some money and maybe you win maybe you don't. Best bet is to start small — like one micro plus some passives and solder all the components onto the board yourself. Once you determine your board is good then build up from that. Lots of SW folks are not used to spending money to prototype something — they still click the "still evaluating" button on winrar for like 10 years solid. So yea hw takes a bit of guts to click the buy button and wait and hope for the best.. my advice just do it! Definitely my personal phrase there..

<comment><USER6> > click the buy button and wait and hope for the best.. my advice just do it!

Speaking from experience as a sw guy, the "hit buy and pray" approach should be preceded by as many desk-checks as are humanly possible. For example: Use the design verification features in your CAD program. Print the PCB onto paper, place all the components on it to check for component clearances and orientations (no-one would lay out a connector upside down, would they?)

I think I got that last idea from one of Robert Feranec's DFM tips, lots of good ideas there: [https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLXvLToQzgzddPKq_txEXN...](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLXvLToQzgzddPKq_txEXNe0pxaSHqPtMO)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> > The first step was to forcibly disable 1) the display, 2) the radio, and 3) > the flash chip from using the SPI bus by adding three jumper wires to tie > their CE pins to VCC.

A couple of things I found helpful.

Use a standard connector for in circuit programming. It just makes developing and debugging so much easier. Being able to easily swap parts of a development setup to see if the problem follows a piece of hardware will save your hair.

For AVR's where the programming interface is shared with the SPI Bus, always put pull ups on the chip selects for SPI's bus parts. As you learned those parts can fight the programmer if you reset the processor while they are holding the bus.

Also for AVR's I've seen mis-programming set the fuses to a clock setting that isn't supported by the hardware. Like programming an very low speed clock or an external clock when there is none. On our test jigs we resorted to injecting a 1MHZ clock on the xtal input pin when programming. Providing for this will be it easy to recover bricked board.

Having a command line interface for running tests is really really helpful. Use one of those USB to serial adaptors by FDDI. I found USB kind of sucks because plugging and unplugging USB ports a lot seems to often confuse OS. I've seen the US just give up on a USB port that it thinks is hosed. Either that or the drive gets messed. And you need to reboot. Using serial solves that problem.

And for small runs of boards try designing a simple loopback teststand. Just loop IO back through the test stand and use the host uP to run the tests.

C#/.net gets a lot of hate, but works really well to drive a single device under test. That allows you to slap together a simple GUI based test that you can offload onto someone else. You don't need anything but the programmer and a USB to serial adapter. You can shell out to run AVRDude.

Consider barcodes and barcode readers to keep track of boards. Failing that invest in QC tags.

</comment><comment><USER8> Making test points for all your testable functions and aligning them to a stripboard really simplified making a testing jig. You can solder some pogo pins to the strip board and just press each board to your jig to program/test it.

Also, I've found renumbering passives to keep the same values in contiguous groups to simplify hand prototyping. You end up having dozens of 0.1uF for example and it's nice to knock them all out instead of switching between different components

<comment><AUTHOR> For hand assembly I usually break out all of the components into little iFixIt project trays and print out labels that correspond to the board, but when there are a bunch of components with the same value, I just put the value on the label instead, and use highlighters on to point them out on printouts so I don't spend forever hunting where to place them. Then, I just go one by one down each spot in each tray until I've populated a board, then I throw it in the oven and start on the next.

[https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DvIU0gSXQAE883Y.jpg:large](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DvIU0gSXQAE883Y.jpg:large)

[https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Dv2KXBuW0AAQY5c.jpg:large](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Dv2KXBuW0AAQY5c.jpg:large)

<comment><USER9> That is a nice idea, thank you!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Just two weeks ago Bunnie also posted a good article on test jigs for electronic equipment: [https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=5450](https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=5450)

Echos many of the important lessons learned in this piece.

<comment><USER11> I worked with foxconn on one of those type of test jig for a tablet type of product before. They are custom make for the PCB, but very nice to have. You can reprogram the PCB in about 1 minute, the PCB is is perfectly align to the Jig and the test pins line up with the JTAG and you can program EEPROM, or EMMC it from the JTAG software.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> This was actually a surprisingly actionable list of suggestions... thanks!

<comment><USER13> Also in this commentary are good pointers. Hope someone can come out to talk about how to make their 100-200 boards and the mistakes or good things to lean.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Oh shit I got one of these! Awesome to see what work went into it, I've been thinking of making my own badge next year!

</comment><comment><USER15> As far as numbering components goes, we typically will number all the components on page 1 in the 100 series, page 2 the 200 series, etc. So the first resistor on page 1 will be R100, the 2nd R101, and so on. And it is good to have the components numbered such that related ones are in the same range.

On a large design, this makes it much easier to find the right section.

<comment><USER16> When not too constrained by size and particularly for prototyping, I tend to use short descriptive names that are not too hard to decode. For example you could use Cby* for bypass capacitors, or maybe if you have a series of LEDs, then you could have Dr _, Dg_ , Db* depending on their color, and similarly Rr _, Rg_ , Rb* for their respective resistors, or Rpi* for I2C pull-up resistors, etc.

Sure you could have a look a the traces to find those out, but it's not always straightforward.

This makes a big difference when debugging boards IMO. For example now if you see that your blue LED is too bright again (as is usually the case ;)), you can just look for Rb* and fix it without the schematic.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> In mature markets, such as the EU and US, there are extensive requirements behind the FCC and CE marks. While no third party approvals are necessary, the requirements are still there. Especially the radio noise requirements can be difficult. How do you go about solving and documenting these?

<comment><USER18> The three viable solutions are:

\- sell it as a "kit" or "component", something that doesn't stand on its own; these don't need approval

\- stick the CE mark on there and rely on nobody checking it. This does leave you open to future legal action, but it's quite rare.

\- stay out of the market entirely and abandon the field to Chinese postal vendors who will never be held accountable

(same goes for WEEE registration in the EU)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Lining up the 0.1in grid is a great lesson I wish had been learned by the Arduino inventor. I'd like to name them but it's unclear to me who to credit for an otherwise very useful board.

</comment><comment><USER20> Has anyone had experience with Fritzing.org or something like BotFactory for low rate production like this?

BotFactory: [https://www.botfactory.co](https://www.botfactory.co)

<comment><USER21> Friends Don't Let Friends Use Fritzing.*

KiCAD offers a free open-source EDA package that won't limit you after you learn how to draw your first electrical schematics or layout a PCB.

(Disclaimer: Fritzing is a perfectly fine project for someone's first introduction to electronics. Eg. Blinking an LED with an arduino. It quickly runs into limitations because of it's use of point to point wiring on pictographic components)

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> The infamous rucas. ~~

</comment><comment><USER23> Basically TDD</comment>


Piping into and out of the cloud with skypipe - <AUTHOR> http://progrium.com/blog/2012/09/30/piping-into-and-out-of-the-cloud-with-skypipe/

<comment><USER2> Interesting! Wondering if there's something in the space of MapReduce/BashReduce (<https://github.com/erikfrey/bashreduce>) where you could take this...</comment>


CloudFlare Supports the Passage of the USA Freedom Act - <AUTHOR> https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-supports-the-passage-of-the-usa-freedom-act/

<comment><USER2> I'm pleased, I really am.

However, my concern with CloudFlare is with analytics. I can defeat the typical analytics server with hosts file entries:

       127.0.0.1 www.google-analytics.com
       127.0.0.1 ssl.google-analytics.com

... but if CloudFlare is proxying an entire domain, many domains, then it really isn't possible for me to prevent CloudFlare from correllating my visits to multiple websites.

Consider the problem faced by evangelical christian politicians, who are trying to keep a lid on their closet homosexuality.

<comment><USER3> Aaaand I think there you've got an excellent product and sales pitch for them to advertisers and agencies!

<comment><USER4> Yes it's a no-brainer that CloudFlare is in a prime spot to collect a lot of data on the traffic that passes through.

However are they going to turn this into an ad-tracking software, or just sell that data ? That seems quite unlikely. At this point CloudFlare has a proven business model, and becoming sleazy could only hurt them.

They wrote an article a little while ago on the matter : [https://blog.cloudflare.com/what-cloudflare- logs/](https://blog.cloudflare.com/what-cloudflare-logs/) I doubt that has changed much.

ps. full disclosure, former employee here.

<comment><USER2> I know that you're a _former_ employee, but maybe you could pass this on:

It would be helpful if I didn't have to keep solving CloudFlare captchas when I use Tor.

I well understand CloudFlare's need for them, however I like to use Tor even when cryptography would not be used for most others, say when logged in with my real name at HN. This because my use of cryptography provides some cover for those who really do need it, such as those working for legitimate regime change.

The main reason I don't use tor a whole lot anymore, is those CloudFlare captchas.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> [https://www.usafreedom.fail/](https://www.usafreedom.fail/)

This might be something I leave CloudFlare for.</comment>


Killed by Google - <AUTHOR> https://killedbygoogle.com/ <comment><USER2> All businesses have to focus on the bottom line. The lesson is to not depend on services that have no obvious way to make money for the company offering it. There are free lunches but baseing your operations on free services is foolish. Eventually it has to be closed down to protect the offering company's solvency.

</comment><comment><USER3> Tez (2017-18) isn't dead but just rebranded and still going strong in India. If this page includes rebranding how about including other re-branding like Keep, etc.

<comment><USER4> Yeah, including rebrandings seems like a way to pad the list. Equating rebrand with kill is a bit much.</comment></comment>


TDD Changed My Life - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/javascript-scene/tdd-changed-my-life-5af0ce099f80 <comment><USER2> Great story! My favorite class in uni was a class called "Software Testing and QA" where it was primarily focused on TDD. We went from simple unit tests to a full deployment pipeline.</comment>


Why is no one Talking about the VR Debate? - <AUTHOR> http://edgylabs.com/2016/10/04/no-one-talking-vr-debate/ <comment><USER2> _While most of us tuned in to watch last Monday's presidential debate on a tv or computer screen, a select few tuned in with the latest technology: Virtual Reality. With VR's enormous potential to directly connect brands with audiences, why is no one talking about this?_

As if the two phenomena: a debate between potential leaders of the world's most powerful nation; and yet another technology for spamming ads at people -- were of even remotely comparable significance?</comment>


Stocks Halt; Oil and Bonds Drop in Sync - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-futures-fall-asian-markets-mixed-11584498324 <comment><USER2> It'll be interesting to know how will WeWork fare, because this is exactly their nightmare scenario. They are leveraged to the hilt. Their clients can now bail out of contracts on very short notice, which I'm sure they are doing already en mass. WeWork however is on the hook for the long term and they have to pay rental on any property they do not own. Meanwhile, the price of property they do own will be going down, depending on how long the crisis lasts. This can very quickly run into issues on servicing anything they bought on debt and spiral into a liquidity crisis.

<comment><USER3> > Meanwhile, the price of property they do own will be going down, depending > on how long the crisis lasts.

Could you explain why you think this will happen?

<comment><USER4> With lots of companies struggling or going under, the demand for commercial real estate should be lower. Supply roughly constant, demand significantly down.

<comment><USER5> Companies might also realize that now that they've figured out how to work remote, they should keep doing that and save ten grand or so a month. I believe the smallest offices in the WeWork we're housed in are $6k/mo. Those are generally used by teams of 3-6 people.

<comment><USER6> Employees are not universally going to just eat the costs of working from home (or from shared spaces) on behalf of their employers, though. If this becomes a more regular situation, employer subsidies for remote essentials will be expected features of jobs even more than they are now, i.e., not just perks.

The monthly bills for 100 remote workers is easily 10K -- their internet connections alone would probably hit that. A single person renting a desk at a co-working space is going to spend a few hundred a year.

<comment><USER7> I see employers just requiring you to have a workspace at home.

> Your crappy internet keeps cutting out? Not our problem. Poor work > performance. You're fired.

<comment><USER6> Would an employer with that kind of attitude even be trusting enough to let people to work from home in the first place?

<comment> blaser-waffle Absolutely. Easy way to shift blame and then trim the fat.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> If you assume the US is a few weeks behind Europe, there's more and more bad news to come. It's always hard to know how much is priced in, or even how to price in something so alien to financial people.

Also keep in mind there's a number of mechanisms that pushed the market up that will now push it the other way:

Credit cycle makes collateral worth more, giving more capacity to extend credit.

Momentum funds buy when things have gone up.

Risk parity funds add when risk is low. And risk as measured by realised volatility gets lower as we creep up.

Retail sees the market is going up, much like momentum funds.

Selling options makes sense when there's barely ever a move in the market.

Now try these in reverse.

<comment><USER9> The only lesson from Europe so far is that no matter how much money you throw at the problem, the market is going to respond with another steep sell-off –— because that's what the US is already doing; without success.

<comment><USER10> At some point we'll have to adopt a combination of what Boris first said and only a partial lockdown, and I say that as a guy who has voluntarily self- isolated for almost a week now. There's no way for the whole Western economy to function on made-up money for more than a month, let's say a month and a half. Yes, that will most probably mean triaging people in hospitals, which will probably force elderly people to remain isolated in their homes a little more than the rest of the population, but to be honest I do not see any other solution at this moment.

<comment><USER11> The workforce is largely made up of heathy people under 60, so it's at minimal risk. My suspicion is gatherings like movie theaters will shut down until a vaccine is available, restaurants are going to swap to carry out, and the sick or elderly are going to be expected to self isolate. That's still a huge economic hit, but far from the end times.

Looking at Wuhan, a total shutdown can dramatically reduce the number of new cases. We can't really afford that for long, but it buys time to prepare and may be required if things start to fall apart.

<comment> at-fates-hands >> We can't really afford that for long, but it buys time to prepare and may be required if things start to fall apart.

AFAIK Wuhan and South Korea are both at the tail end of their their infection trajectory and they are still not back to normal working situations/environments. I'm still not sure if this will be a short, blunted infection with all the quarantines taking place, or something we have yet to see the top side of.

Either way, this is going to crater a ton of small/medium sized businesses. All of the gains the market made in the last few years has been completely erased by this virus.

<comment><USER11> Two and a half month of draconian quarantine may work, but unless all travel is also shutdown reinfection is a huge risk.

A middle ground between doubling every 3 days and total shutdown looks really appealing in that context.

<comment><USER12> > Two and a half month of draconian quarantine may work

That will probably be insufficient in duration:

"We [...] show that policy strategies which aim to mitigate the epidemic might halve deaths and reduce peak healthcare demand by two-thirds, but that this will not be enough to prevent health systems being overwhelmed. More intensive, and socially disruptive interventions will therefore be required to suppress transmission to low levels. It is likely such measures – most notably, large scale social distancing – will need to be in place for many months, perhaps until a vaccine becomes available."

[https://www.imperial.ac.uk/news/196234/covid19-imperial- rese...](https://www.imperial.ac.uk/news/196234/covid19-imperial-researchers- model-likely-impact/)

> A middle ground between doubling every 3 days and total shutdown looks > really appealing in that context.

A middle ground between "do nothing" and "don't do enough to stop the healthcare system from collapsing" sounds really appealing?

<comment><USER11> Wuhan is on track for zero new cases by the end of this month after starting the quarantine on January 23. So, in no way is the collapse of their heath system part of a total quarantine. But, I am saying what happens after that? Do you shut everything down on the next case, when infections it 100 or 10,000 etc.

Basically the quarantine option has a known outcome in the short term, and doing nothing as millions die is another option. But, they have such high costs and are so far apart a middle ground seems desirable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Oil is the crazy part to me, I read an article that said oil could technically even go -negative- because the cost to store it would become more expensive than to give it away. With Saudi Arabia pumping, and the economy in a standstill, there is a massive glut. Bonds are selling off, and I don't if it's because people are re-balancing with stocks down so much or if the market is reacting to the likely future of massive bond issuance from the US government.

<comment><USER14> I'm just confused at today's drop in long-term government bonds (and thus increase in interest rates) -- normally they go in the opposite direction of the stock market, which is what it's done this year. Vanguard's long-term govt bond ETF (VGLT) is up 13% so far this year:

[https://www.ytdreturn.com/vglt/](https://www.ytdreturn.com/vglt/)

Edit: rephrase to clarify what I'm confused about

<comment><USER15> Here's a potential explanation quoted by Matt Levine in his March 13 newsletter:

"The risk in the current environment is that sustained illiquidity of the UST market … could cause leveraged UST investors to reduce their Treasury positions on a large scale. This would essentially result in a Treasury 'supply shock' as these funds reduce their positions & force dealers to sell those positions in a very illiquid market. Significant position reduction from one large leveraged UST investor would likely lead to a cascading effect whereby U.S. Treasury yields rise sharply and force liquidations from other similar investors. This would worsen conditions for dealers to intermediate risk in the U.S. Treasury market, exacerbate the rise in U.S. Treasury yields, and further cheapen Treasuries."

<comment><USER14> But haven't the Fed's constant injections (like the recent $0.5/1.5 trillion one) indicated it's going to keep the Treasury market liquid by buying them all up at par?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> [https://archive.md/y9Mxy](https://archive.md/y9Mxy)

<comment><USER17> you da real mvp

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Supposedly, some of the large hedge funds are being liquidated...

[https://twitter.com/MarkYusko/status/1238672312699887622](https://twitter.com/MarkYusko/status/1238672312699887622)

<comment><USER19> Yikes.

Which funds is he referring to? Do we have any references more solid than a tweet?

<comment><USER18> That tweet is by someone who would know. I've also verified this with some people I know in the industry.

<comment><USER20> Are you at liberty to say which hedge funds these were?

<comment><USER20> Rumor has it that it's Bridgewater for anyone reading this later

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Dang it seems like the circuit breaker gets hit every other day now.

<comment><USER22> Now its probably in control of machines. And they don't know if its corona (which might pass as it did in china), they are probably thinking something like 2008 has happened.

<comment><USER23> The virus did not "pass" in China. China managed to get the spread to slow down to a crawl, by implementing a severe total shutdown of everything and keeping that up for some weeks. They are still in the process of removing those brakes again, and as far as I know, they are still at a pretty early point in that process, meaning lots of brake power is still applied.

There is absolutely nothing preventing the virus from resuming to spread as soon as economic and social activity continues to return towards normal level. In fact, most experts expect exactly that to happen, albeit maybe at a bit of a slower speed than before (due to some people being immune and people generally being a bit more cautious in their daily lives now).

Oh, and due to the incubation time, you'll not see any negative effect in testing results from removing the brakes for about 10-12 days. It's the same thing as when they were applied. So what's described above will happen, even though for 10 days you might wonder "What's the deal? The infection numbers still look good!".

This is far from over, in China and anywhere else.

<comment><USER24> Chinas new cases per day rate is effectively zero at this point. They beat it, plain and simple. And only 3,000 people died from coronavirus. Compared with literally any other cause of death, it's a tiny blip, even negligible. Around 11 million people died in china last year. How does such a contagious virus simply stop spreading? after infecting a just tiny percentage of the population. Their economy is coming back up and life is pretty much back to normal over there, while the rest of the world is just headed into it.

<comment><USER25> Occam 's Razor: china is lying.

<comment><USER24> about which part is the question. Or our media was lying to us.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Is now the time to opt for the "higher risk" option in your retirement portfolio?

<comment><USER27> They call this "trying to catch a falling knife". Good luck.

<comment><USER28> You don't buy all at once, though - you can "dollar cost average" into the market by buying index funds in small chunks when there are big dips, and stop buying when it stops falling.

You won't predict the bottom, and you might not get all of your money in in time, but you'll still wind up ahead when the markets recover.

And they will recover, unless we somehow get to a point where the entire monetary system collapses. The only question is whether it will take a few weeks, months, years, or decades.

Pick your starting point depending on how long you can wait. Buying early makes you less likely to miss the dip, but it might take longer to start seeing green numbers. Buying late means that you stand to gain more in the short term, but you might not get all of your money in in time.

Personally, I think we're still straddling the "early" line around now, but your guess is as good as mine. This is what they call a 'roller coaster' :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Can someone explain why bond yields are going up? Normally you'd expect people to be investing in safer assets (eg. bonds) during times of crises, especially with the Fed slashing interest rates and embarking on QE.

<comment><USER30> A natural explanation is that the government is considered less creditworthy.

There's also been news this morning that the government will bail out commercial paper and corporate bonds, and that this has caused investors to move from treasuries to corporates.

It strikes me that both explanations may be true.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> If equities, bonds, and commodities all drop, where is the money going? Certainly not as unsecured deposits at banks. The money has to cycle somewhere and I don't see any asset classes jumping by enough to account for all the sales of the remaining asset classes.

<comment><USER32> Doesn't work that way. "Market value" isn't a count of funny-looking pieces of paper, or the total weight of various commodities. It's a popular consensus of the power to command future use of resources. It's a general I.O.U. If the market says I'm worth $100, then everyone is agreeing that sometime in the future I'll probably be able to request a certain amount of resources in exchange for passing on control of the I.O.U. So the market may say I can get ten hamburgers, or get four suits dry-cleaned. Changes in total market value happen when that consensus changes. If everyone realizes I'm only going to be able to get five hamburgers, or two suits, then I've lost 50% of my worth. If the market decides _everyone_ is in the same boat, then the market has lost 50%.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> The market hasn't yet priced in an important reality: we have no way to stop the spread at the moment.

Best that can be done are quarantines, but they're crushing the economy. Many outlets are reporting that a vaccine is at least a year out. So all we can do is slow this down and stagger cases. The Harvard epidemiologist who projected 40-70% of the world's adult population ultimately contracting covid was probably right.

At some point, governments will likely realize that they need to send younger segments of the population back to work (a la the UK), respecting the medical system's capacity, or risk triggering a depression. The economy was already systemically vulnerable for a number of reasons and this situation threatens to push it over the edge.

It's possible the market has not yet fully priced in extended quarantines or the likelihood of much of China and most other important economies experiencing a significant disease burden. The paradox is that the quarantines have slowed down the progression but are not an economically sustainable tool to fight this, so the numbers being reported are artificially deflated. On the other side, you have the medical system's limited capacity. One way or the other, we'll have to face the music on this.

<comment><USER34> > they need to send younger segments of the population back to work

This is the only sensible approach moving forward.

We need to quarantine the very old and very ill and provide them with financial assistance. Quarantining _everyone_ is an overreaction and unsustainable.

When the not-very-old and healthy have built up antibodies and resistance, we'll have heard immunity and the very old or ill can return to normalcy.

<comment><USER35> Mortality rates for young people are not negligible, and we don't know either the long term health impacts of a severe episode of the virus or even whether catching the virus gives immunity.

<comment><USER36> for young people, it's less deadly than the flu.

<comment><USER37> Citation needed. Everything I've read says that it's significantly more deadly than the flu for all ages and that more importantly the error bars on any mortality number are absolutely huge.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Wow, and I thought 2008 was pretty bad.

<comment><USER39> Pretty bad? It was a complete economic shit storm, and as of this moment, it was a whole lot worse.

<comment><USER37> 2008 was a whole lot worse? The market is already down 35% from its peak barely a month ago and we're clearly at the beginning of the crisis. It took the market more than a year to drop ~50% from its peak in late 2007. The bond markets are also kind of in a weird place right now. IMO 2008 doesn't look a whole lot worse _right now_ , and might end up looking a whole lot better by the time we hit the next peek after the current crisis is over.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> There's a lot of other news providers that aren't WSJ that report(ed) on this. Perhaps we should use them over the pay-walled site?

<comment><USER41> It seemed like a few years ago 80 percent of sites were accessible... Maybe we should have a block in hn submissions system that just blocks these.

<comment><USER42> There is typically an option to bypass the paywall posted with the articles, that's why HN allows them.

In this case: [http://archive.is/y9Mxy](http://archive.is/y9Mxy)

<comment><USER43> This isn't an option, it's piracy.

<comment><USER44> I'm pretty sure WSJ would be suing Internet Archive right now if that link actually constituted piracy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> Like 2008 all over again. Except you could also die.

<comment><USER46> This is far worse than 2008. The market is crashing 1-2 times more rapidly (points/day) than it did during the great depression.

There have been rumors floating around that the economy was basically running on fumes. The yield curve was heavily inverted and the 7 year cyclical recession cycle was skipped.

Life is about to get really hard in the US and will likely continue to be so after the virus - and even that will probably drag on for 2-6 months. Get ready for Soviet Union style living. Bank runs are probably coming soon. This is unprecedented - both the virus and the rate at which the market is crashing.

Edit: even CNN is warning about triggering bank runs!

[https://www.cnn.com/2020/03/18/economy/banks-cash- coronaviru...](https://www.cnn.com/2020/03/18/economy/banks-cash- coronavirus/index.html)

<comment><USER47> will our broker accounts suddenly disappear?

<comment><USER46> How will you access your money if the internet goes down? How will you buy food if your credit card isn't accepted, either because their connection or power is out or worse?

A society built on top of perpetual growth is about to grind to a halt for 2-6 months, after already showing signs of poor economic health. This doesn't even get into the potential political mess that awaits us.

<comment><USER48> This a biological virus, not a computer virus. Electricity will be fine. The water will still run.

Why would we bother continuing to quarantine if people are dying in the streets from (presumably) the roving band of cannibals you'll predict next?

Stop scaring people. It has real impacts. The world has survived pandemics before. It will again. Our 401(k)s will be fine

<comment><USER46> Your thinking is myopic. The virus is a geopolitical trigger. Among the fallout is the US economy.

The world is rapidly changing. It will not return to normal once the virus is eliminated. The signs are everywhere. Governments in flux.

We just had two $1.5T federal stimuli effectively fall on their faces. Treasury Secretary is predicting 20% unemployment. That's great depression level and I suspect they were being conservative to avoid even worse panic. This is going to continue for many months if not years after the virus troubles are over.

<comment><USER37> That still doesn't mean the power is going out or the water is going to stop running. Another depression is in no way a good thing, but it's not the apocalypse. Zombies are not going to take over the water treatment plants. No one is going to nuke the power stations.

Yes, life will get hard. Yes, this really sucks if you were planning on retiring soon. But life will go on. Calm the fuck down.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> They are going to start a war in ME to turn this around...

<comment><USER50> They?</comment></comment>