Data science interview questions with answers - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/alexeygrigorev/data-science-interviews <comment><USER2> I've worked in the field for 7 years now so not that long but long enough to build some heuristics. The best data scientists are just people who try to understand the ins and outs of business processes and look at problems with healthy suspicion and curiosity. The ability to explain the nuances of manifolds in SVMs is not something that comes into it outside these contrived interviews. I prefer to ask candidates how they would approach solving a problem I'm facing at that moment rather than these cookie cutter tests which are easy to game and tell me nothing

<comment><USER3> >> I prefer to ask candidates how they would approach solving a problem

Word. Totally off topic, but: I work in the field of information technology since more than 20 years now, more or less. Not always the same focus, not always full time, but always IT related. I consider myself a good problem solver because of my self learning and analytical skills.

I recently applied for a job as a BI developer. The interview consisted of 10 questions about SQL. I more or less answered them, just 1 or 2 wrong. Not wrong as in "not correct" but rather "Not what we exactly expected" or "you did not see the little traps".

Comes out they didn't take me because of my lack of SQL skills. I do not understand how this kind of recruiting process will help anyone getting skilled people and how this is still common practice. It's frustrating for people like me, who do not have the complete SQL syntax in mind, but are flexible in choosing their problem solving approaches. A couple of years ago I started in a big data company, never heard of MongoDB before, little skills in Bash. If they would just asked me questions about that, hiring me would be a total no-go. They did hire me. I improved process, like measurable, and mastered MongoDB. Nothing, that one could expect from a questionaire.

A second interview, same outcome. They not even asked me detailled questions, just wanted to know what my SQL skills are. I answered: Immediate, but I'm good in learning. The did not take me, too.

Although, I understand that it's hard to evaluate this kind of skill, I'm really frustrated, when I face those "hiring techniques". Or maybe I'm just not good in SQL, and they anticipated it.. ;)

<comment><USER4> There's another possibility but only because you mentioned SQL specifically. People often use SQL as shorthand for "understand how to manipulate data," and if a new hire doesn't have this skill it can really set a data team back, so interviewers are touchy about SQL. It would be helpful if they clarified if it was the SQL syntax skills or the data manipulation skills they had a problem with. But generally I agree with you that companies should prioritize problem solving skills over technical minutiae.

<comment><USER5> > _But generally I agree with you that companies should prioritize problem > solving skills over technical minutiae._

Unless, the company's goal is to hire someone with technical minutiae that they can pay the lowest wage possible :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The quality and depth of answers here is pretty inconsistent. But this in particular is a pet peeve of mine:

 _> Plot a histogram out of the sampled data. If you can fit the bell-shaped "normal" curve to the histogram, then the hypothesis that the underlying random variable follows the normal distribution can not be rejected._

This is commonly taught in undergrad stats, but you shouldn't do this. I'm of the opinion that normality testing in general is usually a red herring, but this is specifically not a productive way of doing it. Use the other methods. A visual test that relies on how much the histogram approximates a bell curve is very prone to error, because a sample from a variety of other distributions can look visually normal even though it isn't.

More broadly speaking, the reason I don't like this is because it's an example of the kind of formulaic, cargo-culted recipes that are often used in statistics without critical thinking. You should strive to obtain a deep understanding of your data and its distribution, and you should be deeply skeptical if the sample you happen to have looks normal. Nature abhors normality, and the central limit theorem can only promise a _tendency_ towards normality as _n_ approaches infinity. It says nothing about what size sample you'll practically need for your specific data to be able to treat it as normal.

<comment><USER7> > You should strive to obtain a deep understanding of your data and its > distribution, and you should be deeply skeptical if the sample you happen to > have looks normal.

Although normality testing is useless in many situations, the parent comment somewhat overstates the degree of caution required. In many contexts the exact distribution doesn't matter; sort-of-normal is good enough. For example, the t-test is used ubiquitously. It assumes normality, so we would expect possible non-normality to be a major problem, right? Not so. The t-test is extremely robust to departures from normality given equal sample sizes [1,2,3]. Or you can use a so-called non-parametric test. Rather than investing great effort in specifying exactly what distribution you're dealing with, it's more productive to simply use a test that is robust against your unknowns and move on to pursuing your actual objectives.

It's true that if you are interested in predicting events in the tails of the distribution, you really do need to study the distribution in detail. Predicting rare events is very difficult. But if you're just interested in differences between group means, don't overthink it.

[1] [http://www.jerrydallal.com/LHSP/student3.htm](http://www.jerrydallal.com/LHSP/student3.htm) [2] Posten, H.O., Yeh, H.C., and Owen, D.B. (1977). Robustness of the two- sample t-test under violations of the homogeneity of variance assumption. Communications in Statistics - Theory and Methods 11, 109–126. [3] Posten, H.O. (1992). Robustness of the two-sample t-test under violations of the homogeneity of variance assumption, part ii. Communications in Statistics - Theory and Methods 21, 2169–2184.

<comment><USER8> > The t-test is extremely robust to departures from normality given equal > sample sizes

That's over selling it. Its very sensitive to fat tails and skew. That's the reason robust testing and estimation is a thing. Wilcox's research would be a good near contemporary place to start [0][1].

[0] Wilcox, Robustness of Standard Tests [https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/978111844511...](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/9781118445112.stat06350) (paywalled)

        Abstract: Conventional hypothesis‐testing methods such as
        student's t, the ANOVA F test, and methods based on the
        ordinary least squares regression estimator, are not
        robust to violations of assumptions. In fact, there are
        general conditions under which these methods can provide
        poor control over the probability of a type I error and
        inaccurate confidence intervals, no matter how large the
        sample sizes might be. Relatively poor power is yet another
        concern.

[1] Fundamentals of Modern Statistical Methods: Substantially Improving Power and Accuracy [https://books.google.co.in/books?id=uUNGzhdxk0kC](https://books.google.co.in/books?id=uUNGzhdxk0kC)

       Conventional statistical methods have a very serious
       flaw. They routinely miss differences among groups or
       associations among variables that are detected by more
       modern techniques - even under very small departures from
       normality. Hundreds of journal articles have described
       the reasons standard techniques can be unsatisfactory,
       but simple, intuitive explanations are generally
       unavailable. Improved methods have been derived, but they
       are far from obvious or intuitive based on the training
       most researchers receive. Situations arise where even
       highly nonsignificant results become significant when
       analyzed with more modern methods. Without assuming any
       prior training in statistics, Part I of this book
       describes basic statistical principles from a point of
       view that makes their shortcomings intuitive and easy to
       understand.

<comment><USER7> > Its very sensitive to fat tails and skew. That's the reason robust testing > and estimation is a thing.

Yeah, I shouldn't have said "extremely". Its much more robust than is commonly perceived, but that does not make it "extremely" robust. Thank you for the correction. But please note that I specified _equal sample sizes_ , so the fact that "there are general conditions under which these methods can provide poor control over the probability of a type I error" is not really a refutation—I already implied that the t-test is not generally (= in all cases) robust. I also mentioned non-parametric tests as a potential alternative. I do not wish to imply that the t-test is always the right choice. But I stand by the assertion that approximate knowledge of the distribution, such as obtained by inspecting a histogram, is perfectly adequate to choose a test. The main point remains — list what you know about your data, and pick a test that tells you what you want to know with a tolerable error level for your application.

You can spend an awful lot of time picking the "correct" statistical test (if there is such a thing; tradeoffs exist) with little gain. Worse, making a lot of decisions about what test to use after looking at the data leads to p-hacking, potentially leaving you with more bias than if you naively used a slightly-wrong test from the start.

To elaborate on the t-test discussion:

From your ref [1], "If sampling is from nonnormal distributions that are absolutely identical, so in particular the variances are equal, the probability of a Type I error will not exceed 0.05 by very much, assuming the method is applied with the desired probability of a Type I error set at α = 0.05. These two results have been known for some time and have been verified in various studies conducted in more recent years" (page 79). I think Wilcox makes this statement under the equal sample size caveat, but the text is unclear on this point. This does not guarantee robustness under nonnormality, but it does refute the idea that nonnormality is always fatal to the t-test.

Yes, a t-test can be affected by skew even with equal sample sizes. Whether this is a problem depends on the application. The example in [1] uses a lognormal distribution and ends up with actual α = 0.15 for n = 20, desired α = 0.05. Which isn't great, but is somewhat tolerable. Also, a lognormal distribution is strongly skew right and left-truncated, and this is easily noticeable on a plot and can be transformed to a normal distribution. So this does not refute the idea that a sort-of-normal distribution is fatal to the t-test.

You can look up the potential α level and β level errors from violating the assumptions of a particular test—they're tabulated. E.g., applying the t-test to a Pearson distribution produces a typical α level error of 0.005 at desired α = 0.05 [2]. That's definitely tolerable. This is why I stated that sort-of- normal is good enough for a t-test. It's also fairly straightforward to calculate the expected errors yourself for a particular situation, if reassurance is needed. If your statistics are intended to support a high- stakes decision this may be a good use of time. Working to validate your finding by other means is better, though.

I'm not sure what your ref [0] (the "Robustness of Standard Tests" book chapter) is arguing for or against from the abstract alone. I don't have a copy of that book. The abstract mentions most flavors of maximum likelihood ratio tests, which is too broad a set of topics to discuss effectively. The implication seems to be that null hypothesis statistical tests are bad and something else (Bayesian analysis? visual inspection?) is better, which I don't necessarily disagree with. If you could please clarify its contents and if it is worth tracking down, I would appreciate it.

[0] Wilcox, Robustness of Standard Tests

[1] Fundamentals of Modern Statistical Methods: Substantially Improving Power and Accuracy

[2] Posten, H.O. (1984). Robustness of the Two-Sample T-Test. In Robustness of Statistical Methods and Nonparametric Statistics, D. Rasch, and M.L. Tiku, eds. (Springer, Dordrecht), pp. 92–99.

<comment><USER8> No worries and I totally agree that t-test are surprisingly robust to some benign deviations from Gaussianity, a lot more than one would have thought. In my line of work I have had to watch out for fat tails (ridiculously common) and skew -- they can be potent t-test killers.

In the book Wilcox champions robust estimators and tests (a la Huber, Tukey) because efficiency of MLE is very brittle.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The weirdest thing about data science interviews (when I was actively interviewing) is SQL gotcha questions. Especially with window functions. Here's a long HN thread a few months ago about an annoying situation with an interviewer asserting uncommon syntax is common: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23053981](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23053981)

Another related SQL gotcha I saw _multiple_ times is finding the top _n_ records of each group in a table. Which is a know-it-or-you-don't implementation, and the interviewer can still be a jerk if they want by slamming the interviewee if they include ties, or not (RANK vs. ROW_NUMBER).

It's telling that there aren't any SQL window function examples in this repo.

Another fun aspect of SQL interviews is dialect-specific questions, particularly with how date/times are handled. Years ago, a company famous/infamous for primarily using mySQL explicitly noted in a take-home assignment problem definition that the database was PostgreSQL, which allowed them to ask the aforementioned window question problem, the AT TIME ZONE syntax for filter, and allow a specific definition for "beginning of week" which required me to download the database and test it manually.

<comment><USER10> These kinds of stories seem insane to me. I currently have to do some data science-y stuff in the more generalist consulting dev role I have. I used to do a lot of SQL stuff years ago, but have forgotten most of the syntax beyond the basics. That being said, all it took is some minor googling and reading of a few blog posts to solve some middling hard problems for my client.

What kind of companies make people jump through these nerd hoops? Do they actually have real work that needs doing or is this all just posturing by interviewers?

<comment><USER11> I think an element of it is that you can have unambiguous questions with SQL, which taken to the extreme do fall into gotcha territory.

I was an interviewer for a business analyst & data science team recently and we needed to hire several analysts & data-scientists who had strong SQL skills because 90% of the data manipulation/processing used SQL. I was definitely aware that this limits who we hire, but we were very short-staffed and needed people so it was easiest for us to hire people who had a good understanding of SQL. That said, we did not care about syntax subtleties, just more if could you generally answer questions using SQL.

And for the data-scientist role there was a lot more than just SQL but it was a useful check.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Linear regression does not require errors to be iid, normal, and homoscedastic for it to "work". One of the ways to separate candidates is to push on what (and how) assumptions can be weakened, what the consequences are for estimation and inference, and what sort of corrections can be incorporated for maintaining consistency, improving efficiency, correcting biases, etc. An entry level candidate may not have (nor need to have) a complete understanding of asymptotic theory, but they should know what the purpose of robust standard errors are and how to use them.

<comment><USER13> Interesting and perhaps shows the cultural differences between ML and stats people. I took a machine learning course in my bachelor's and two more ML courses in my master's (CS). These weren't some "deep learning lite", mess- around-in-Keras courses, because DL wasn't even big back then. We covered lots of stuff, Bayesian linear regression, Gaussian processes, Gibbs sampling, Metropolis-Hastings, hierarchical Dirichlet processes, SVMs, multi-class SVM, PCA, kernel PCA, perceptrons, CMAC neural nets, Hebbian learning, AdaBoost, Fisher vectors, EM algorithms for various distributions, fuzzy logic, optimization methods like conjugate gradients etc etc.

But not once were the "Gauss-Markov conditions" mentioned. Frequentist theory was only marginally addressed. I taught myself some of that stuff from the Internet, such as hypothesis testing theory, p-values, t statistic, ANOVA, etc.

Also, I'd say I'm good with data structures and algorithms, complexity theory, graph theory etc.

I thought these skills would be a good fit for data science jobs, but I guess it's really such a wide umbrella term, that probably you're more looking for people trained in the frequentist, statistical side of it. What application field are you in, if it's no secret?

<comment><USER8> By tribe I am firmly in the machine learning camp but I have serious doubts that one can be a good hands-on data-science practitioner if one does not have a good foundation in statistics.

<comment><USER13> Statistics is not really in focus in most CS programs. Indeed I'm not sure where it is. Perhaps in applied math programs. Stats is kinda too dirty and realworld for pure math types, and in science programs and medicine it's usually just taught as a bunch of magic formulas to memorize and rules of thumb passed down from generation to generation without understanding. Perhaps physics departments do have both the necessary math skills and the need for stats so they may provide a good education in this.

But having studied in 3 universities in different countries, CS just doesn't care about stats. Probability theory yes, but frequentist topics like statistical tests not really.

<comment><USER14> This was my experience at a high ranking engineering public state school in the US. Stats is delegated to the applied math program usually (in fact, my degree was titled "Applied Mathematics & Statistics"). You can choose to concentrate in subjects like algorithms, operations research, fin stuff, statistics, etc. CS as well as other sciences had one required intro to prob & stats, but that's it outside electives.

Further, despite having a fantastic reputation, my program only discussed frequentist ideas with near 0 mention of Bayesian reasoning/methods (outside the same Bayes rule questions asked in the first weeks of every stats class). Overall the education felt too traditional, I would have liked to seen mention of more modern methods like the bootstrap and certainly mention of Bayesian.

<comment><USER8> > Stats is delegated to the applied math program usually

Which is not unsreasonable considering that these things arent really related to computers (although they happen to involve computation). I think its just an artifact of history and how things happened that ML is associated with CS and EE departments, but really its applied math, not a core CS topic like say compilers, formal languages and complexity.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I only read the first question in theory.md and think the answer is quite weak.

> What is regression? Which models can you use to solve a regression problem?

The current answer only list some names that have "regression" in it, and the description of what a regression is doesn't say anything that distinguishes it from classification.

It fails to mention that regression (in ML terminology) is prediction of a continuous variable. And that almost any method can be used to do regression: knn, neural network, random forest, svm.

If other answers are of similar nature you might fail the interview.

<comment><USER16> From the README:

> The answers are given by the community

> If you know how to answer a question — please create a PR with the answer

> If there's already an answer, but you can improve it — please create a PR > with improvement suggestion

> If you see a mistake — please create a PR with a fix

<comment><USER17> I don't like this response.

It's completely reasonable to assess the quality of informational content without assuming a duty to proofread and revise that content.

Especially when the issue that might be corrected isn't a typo or malapropism but 'this whole thing isn't that great.'

<comment><USER16> Sure, I'm not saying that you have to correct it. Just that the project doesn't assume that they have correct answers for everything and expect some participation of "the community" at large.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Do people realize that, these interview question collection do not help? I think there is 2 things to address here:

\- Interviewers will know "what is known" by every candidate (with the help of these pages) and harder questions will be asked

\- If these questions are asked at >junior levels, then RUN! the work will not satisfy you. The interview should be fun, and show the creativity of the candidate. These ones could be answered by anyone who read it a few times. I would not like to work with somebody who only know the answers to these questions and not more

<comment><USER19> I think it's a bit far fetched to assume that recruiters tailor interview questions based on these Github repo's. For me as a junior data scientist it really useful to test my own knowledge and highlight areas which I need to study more.

<comment><USER6> Lots of tech and finance companies (particularly those with standardized interview processes) will blacklist questions if they're found online. Those companies will constantly check GitHub, GeeksForGeeks and Leetcode to see if their questions are listed there with solutions.

This probably won't be the case for a question as basic as, "what is regression?" But for any intermediate to advanced interview question _involving_ regression, I would expect companies to jealously guard it.

If you're earnestly interested in building and testing your knowledge, I would recommend you read _The Elements of Statistical Learning_ and _Data Analysis Using Regression and Multilevel /Hierarchical Models_. Also a good upper undergrad textbook in probability, like _A First Course in Probability_.

<comment><USER20> A couple recommendations piggybacking off of yours:

 _A First Course in Probability_ has a lot of problems (with solutions) and worked examples, but it's light on intuition and pedagogy. It's not an easy book to learn from, on its own. I highly recommend listening to Joe Blitzstein's STAT 110 lectures and reviewing the wealth of problems/notes. The greater mastery of probability theory that you have, the easier studying ML and stats is. [https://projects.iq.harvard.edu/stat110/home](https://projects.iq.harvard.edu/stat110/home)

 _Elements of Statistical Learning_ is a true textbook—a comprehensive bible that could occupy you for many thousands of hours. ISLR is the better book for a crash course: [http://faculty.marshall.usc.edu/gareth- james/ISL/](http://faculty.marshall.usc.edu/gareth-james/ISL/)

There are also lectures and slides from the authors: [https://www.dataschool.io/15-hours-of-expert-machine- learnin...](https://www.dataschool.io/15-hours-of-expert-machine-learning- videos/)

<comment><USER21> Also, Regression and Other Stories is the new edition of the Regression with Multilevel models book, and it's much, much better (especially for n00bs).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Very interesting. I wonder in what type of interviews would these answers be considered ideal? Do people at OpenAI ask these sorts of questions, or is this more targeted toward other industries that require data scientists but are not populated by "stats" experts?

For example, consider "What is regression?". The answer given is one way to go, but if the job posting would involve causal analysis or more statistical know-how, for example, it would probably be insufficient. I would want the candidate to speak about linear projections, about sampling assumptions, about probability models underlying the process and so on.

On the other hand, I could imagine that it would not be a good strategy to start to lecture about minute details of regression analysis when applying for a standard data scientist position when sitting on front of "applied data scientists" or even HR folks.

Anyone has any insights?

<comment><USER23> My experience is that interviews like these are for supporting role data science jobs. E.g. company x has a product (tech or not), they have some data, and they want to hire someone to make that data useful in improving their product or selling more of it.

The general data science process is that when faced with a problem, you 1) select the appropriate algorithmic tool(s) for the problem and 2) apply the tool(s) to the data. One of the challenges in data science generally is that the tools can get pretty fucking complicated.

The point of theory interview questions in general is to assess the first point, whether or not a candidate has the capacity to pick the right tool for a given problem. They want to hear that you understand some of the standard tools and what sorts of problems they are good for. If you "get" the common tools, you'll likely be able to reason about the application of new/different tools for weird problems as you face them, or so the logic goes.

Everything I just said was more or less objective. This is my opinion: bad companies that do not know how to hire data scientists usually do what you're describing. They ask theory questions to assess whether or not the candidate already understands the specific tools they expect them to use. Good companies tend to pay more attention to whether the candidate is capable of understanding the universe of tools in general and are less worried about their specific application area.

I should note that this is less relevant when hiring consultants or "plug and play" senior people. Of course for those roles you want to know that the candidate has done something similar already and is primed for success.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I have to agree that these interview questions function more as a cheatsheet review than actually anything practical that would be seen in an interview. Data science interviews don't function as a biology test where you're just rattling off memorizations to how neural networks or linear models work.

Ultimately these types of questions like "What is feature selection" are more likely to be encapsulated into case studies where the answer to the question itself will be, using feature selection.

For example: "Let's say you have thousands of categorical features for an anonymized dataset involving human traits, how would you figure out which predictors are the most important?"

Source: [https://www.interviewquery.com/](https://www.interviewquery.com/)

<comment><USER25> >I have to agree that these interview questions function more as a cheatsheet review than actually anything practical that would be seen in an interview. Data science interviews don't function as a biology test where you're just rattling off memorizations to how neural networks or linear models work.

Me and my co-workers have been asked exactly that by top companies although it was more for machine learning engineer/applied scientist positions. Many textbook questions asked one after the other. It's not the only interview type they did but it definitely mattered and was often the first filter. So if you didn't answer well enough then you were out.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> These are at best machine learning questions, not data science. ML is definitely a sub-category of data science, but if you see a job posting for data science, you're 100% not going to be doing machine learning. That would have been labeled as a machine learning job posting.

</comment><comment><USER27> For Machine Learning theory related to Data Science I'd highly recommend "The Hundred-Page Machine Learning Book" by Andriy Burkov [1].

According to the author, by reading one hundred pages of the book (plus some extra bonus pages), you will be ready to build complex AI systems, pass an interview or start your own business.

It is a read first book and buy later if you think it is good enough.

[1] [http://themlbook.com/](http://themlbook.com/)

</comment><comment><USER25> I've seen multiple companies ask candidates to write working code for machine learning end-to-end from scratch. As in, write a stochastic gradient descent logistic regression model with training, inference, etc. without any libraries beyond pandas/numpy If you're lucky they'll provide you the equations or let you google them. So something to memorize including the various numpy/pandas gotchas.

<comment><USER28> That's a great question. Because it lets you as a candidate screen out places run by morons.

<comment><USER29> Years back someone asked me an interview question to explain sd and confidence intervals. I just gave the wrong answers and left. Especially in nascent fields such as ML and DS, it's very important to work with people who actually know what they are doing. Otherwise you will have wasted years of your precious twenties doing absolutely nothing productive.</comment></comment></comment>


Want a Healthier City? Prescribe Biking - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlanticcities.com/commute/2014/04/want-healthier-city-prescribe-biking/8795/ <comment><USER2> The hashtag #ReplaceBikeWithCar is currently trending on Twitter. It is statements bicyclists often hear, turned around for cars. I find them funny.

My favorites so far: "Absolutely no more car infrastructure should be built anywhere until every single car driver follows all traffic laws. #ReplaceBikeWithCar"

"Cars who aren't covered in high viz deserve to be crashed into."

"Why don't you lot stick to driving round and round a race track!"

Edit: link [https://twitter.com/search?q=%23ReplaceBikeWithCar&src=tren](https://twitter.com/search?q=%23ReplaceBikeWithCar&src=tren)

<comment><USER3> "Deerfoot Trail gets you close enough to your destination. Why do you expect door to door service?"

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> From the Netherlands where we all (should) cycle; it does take quite of a change to get into it to make it not as dangerous. It's no fun with helmets and when you feel unsafe, so things need to be adjusted to cyclist as 1500-.... kilos of metal are not very forgiving so you cannot assume that will work well. In 40 years the only people I knew who died from cycling were semi- professional cyclists. I have seen horrible accidents ending in mutilation which were all due to the cyclist thinking 'I am right' (in Dutch law, the pedestrian and cyclist are always right) and just crossing without looking. Outside that, nothing happened. But that takes, I believe, a lot of years of motor vehicle drivers to actually really pay attention all the time as a small lap is not a dented bumper but much worse. That is not something most people just pick up although drivers licenses should've taught them that.

<comment><USER5> I love cycling in the Netherlands - where ironically the worst traffic annoyances, for the cyclist, happen to be pedestrians (especially tourists in the central district).

<comment><USER6> Its the attitude that is most annoying.

Most people would not dream of walking over a road without looking for incoming traffic, but they feel perfectly safe walking over a bicycle road without even bother taking a look.

<comment><USER7> It's more than merely annoying, it's f-ing dangerous to the cyclists. You hit a pedestrian on your bike, the pedestrian will may get a few cuts and bruises, but it's the cyclist who get's launched off their bike that usually gets off much worse.

I generally dislike urban tourists that walk around living cities like they're in Disneyland and getting in everybody's way, but in Amsterdam they are a dangerous menace.

<comment><USER8> No, pedestrians hit by a bike at speed may be seriously injured, same as anyone involved not wearing a helmet.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Queue comments from fat drivers about how dangerous cycling is... inconsiderate cyclists and drivers complaining that bicycles and cars are annoying... bicycle evangelists claiming everyone should be cycling... practical people pointing out that infrastructure is the solution to whatever problem... Fastidious people insisting everyone should be following the rules of the road...

I'm sure I'm missing some.

<comment><USER10> You missed mine:

Why don't people just walk more ? It's even more health promoting than cycling and it requires no investment/gear/tech. It's also really meditative and enjoyable.

<comment><USER11> Walking is slow and requires a lot of patience and extra time.

<comment> k-mcgrady Replace 'walking' with 'cycling' and you have a drivers response to cycling.

<comment><USER12> Except they would be wrong. In cities, cycling is almost always provably faster than driving or public transport because traffic becomes a non-issue and you can start immediately when a light turns green instead of waiting for the 5 vehicles in front of you to start moving or turning out of your way.

<comment> k-mcgrady >> "you can start immediately when a light turns green instead of waiting for the 5 vehicles in front of you to start moving or turning out of your way."

It sounds like to do this you would need to be side-by-side in the same lane with a car. Sounds quite reckless and dangerous. I'm all for cycling and walking in cities but that kind of behaviour is why cyclists get injured/killed. I read a few stories recently in the news about cyclists getting killed and one major repeating problem was that they came up the inside of another vehicle (in the same lane) which didn't see them a moved over into them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> In Atlanta, even if you observe all the rules, wear a helmet, use bike lights, wear reflecting clothing, you are more likely to get hit by a car than not; or atleast you might know someone who has been through it. I'm basing my assumptions that Boston is like Atlanta (aka terrible public transit, everything is far away, college campuses are in the middle of the city).

On college campuses (like Georgia Tech) a lot of bikers who are college students ignored traffic stops, rules of the road and signals. So it is likely that people from poor households are also equally or more likely to ignore traffic laws.

Also, lots of roads don't have bike lanes, and riding in the middle of the street is going to get you a lot of honking, stuff thrown at you by rude drivers over-taking you, etc (from personal experience).

On another note, London, a city whose mayor is a vocal proponent of making London bike friendly, has had many fatalities that were bike riders following the rules so this risk for fatality is a very real problem.

<comment><USER14> I think Bostonians would take issue with your assumption:

\- Boston has one of the best public transportation systems in the country (ranked #4 by Us news) [1]

\- Boston and the surrounding area is very densely populated making things generally not far away. In fact, Boston is about 4x as dense as Atlanta and the surrounding cites of Cambridge and Somerville are more dense still. [2,3,4,5]

\- Boston is pretty much covered in college campuses. They're in the middle of the city, edges of the city, and outskirts of the city.

[1] [http://www.usnews.com/news/slideshows/the-10-best-cities- for...](http://www.usnews.com/news/slideshows/the-10-best-cities-for-public- transportation/9)

[2] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boston](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boston)

[3] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambridge,_Massachusetts](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambridge,_Massachusetts)

[4] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somerville,_Massachusetts](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somerville,_Massachusetts)

[5] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlanta](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlanta)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> When Bloomberg ran the show in NYC, he "prescribed biking" [1]. Despite the focus on cyclists, here's one filmmaker's experience: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bzE- IMaegzQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bzE-IMaegzQ)

[1] [http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/27/nyregion/on-eve-of-bike- sh...](http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/27/nyregion/on-eve-of-bike-sharing- debut-watching-for-a-fiasco-or-a-success.html)

</comment><comment><USER16> For the general population, cycling is a reasonable option only for trips of 5 km and under. Mind you that is a good proportion of trips.

<comment><USER17> Actually, if you are healthy, 10km or under is still very reasonable, as travel time will probably be under 30 minutes.

I'm 30, not athletic at all and daily ride my bike uphill 6 km to work in 22 minutes.

<comment><USER18> The ride home must be fun!

<comment><USER19> Not so much when it's cold.

<comment><USER17> I live in Brazil. Where I am, it gets colder in the winter, but never less then 10°C in the morning.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Very good initiative; it will hopefully emulate the benefits reaped by the more active cycling cities (e.g. Amsterdam).

However, it should be noted that the program's widespread nature (large city + seemingly non-stringent requisites) has the potential to lead to a black market for discounted membership based on rent-seeking behaviour.

</comment><comment><USER21> Let's call it "cycling" instead.

<comment><USER22> Why not biking?

<comment><USER23> Google "biker" and click on Images.

Although, to be fair, neither "biking" (Mountain bikes) nor "cycling" (racing bikes) shows appropriate images.

For appropriate images, you want "fietsen" or, better:

      site: bicycledutch.wordpress.com

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> _in the United States and Canada, bicyclists are more at risk for fatality per mile traveled than people in automobiles_

So we have to kill people to make them healthier, I get it.

<comment><USER25> You're committing a fallacy. MORE risk than driving doesn't mean you're in worse health if you cycle. The health benefits may outweigh the increased risk of life loss.

Such risks also aren't set in stone. The Netherlands has much lower risks. Encouraging more cycling here could lower the odds of danger.

Snark is fun, but it doesn't add anything to the discussion.

<comment><USER26> I think the poster understood what you said, but has a moral outlook where even positive expected value interventions can be immoral. I don't really understand that viewpoint, but it is a very common one. Usually it is expressed in terms like "how Would you explain all this stuff about averages to the daughter of the man whose bike got ran over by a truck "

<comment><USER27> > how Would you explain all this stuff about averages to the daughter of the > man whose bike got ran over by a truck

The greatly increased chances of seeing any grandchildren I may end up having is way more important, to me anyway, than the tiny increase in risk that I may not see my children reach adulthood (or even their teenage years).

<comment><USER28> Those are not your only options. You can get exercise, and improve your health, in ways other than commuting by bike. Ways that reduce risk, not increase them, even.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Great AI Paradox - <AUTHOR> https://www.technologyreview.com/s/609318/the-great-ai-paradox/ <comment><USER2> I have said for years that the first truly general-level AI will not be robots or purely digital ghosts but will instead be...US.

Human cognition bolstered by direct, physical integration with increasingly sophisticated computing devices will, I believe, be the next real leap forward toward AI.</comment>


Verisign seizes .com domain registered via foreign Registrar on behalf of US - <AUTHOR> http://blog.easydns.org/2012/02/29/verisign-seizes-com-domain-registered-via-foreign-registrar-on-behalf-of-us-authorities/ <comment><USER2> Maybe ICAAN's strategy of making loads of TLDs is their best attempt at a way around this, maybe they hope that eventually most of the TLDs being used won't be hosted in the jurisdiction of and controlled by any one governmental organization. Simply make the now slightly broken .com irrelevant.</comment>


The reviewer's fallacy: when critics aren't critical enough - <AUTHOR> http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/books/2018/01/the_reviewer_s_fallacy_when_critics_aren_t_critical_enough.html <comment><USER2> Roger Ebert used to call things "a great entertainment". The author of the article uses that term too. When Roger said it I always understood it to mean that there was nothing special about the film.... but it was entertaining.

It felt like he was identifying a separate category of films. It's not really great among film, but it gets its own job done "entertainment", and in that way it is plenty good. It leaves room for praise for what it is, but also space for the few really "great" things.

<comment><USER3> Ebert's reviewing philosophy was to review a film relative to its ambitions, genre and target demographic. If the film accomplished what it apparently set out to do, Ebert viewed it favourably. Many of his highest scores were for pure, disposable entertainment, as opposed to high-brow arthouse film such as Bergman or Antonioni.

<comment><USER4> > review a film relative to its ambitions, genre and target demographic

So long as those assumptions are also stated in the review, that seems a good idea.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I think Ash Williams (Bruce Campbell) said it best in season 2 of Ash Vs. the Evil Dead, something along the lines of, "critics have shitty taste."

I blame mostly the mindset that a job like that can create. A critic/reviewer is often pressured to agree with pop culture in order to have their opinions validated. Movies and music are a good example of this ( _cough_ Star Wars _cough_ ). Actually look at most critics vs audience aggregations on Rotten Tomatoes or the fact that very few outfits even write music reviews anymore beyond Pitchfork.

There are very few outliers in this case and are often viewed as malicious, for example Jim Sterling.

I personally never read reviews before I ingest some entertainment I have interest in. At most I read the closing paragraph of a review which is likely to contain no spoilers and sums up the critics opinion. Scores are irrelevant to me as well, I have my own scale.

<comment><USER6> >very few outfits even write music reviews anymore beyond Pitchfork.

The is probably a pretty natural result of it now being so easy to simply listen to music you're curious about. Reading a review of an album will take as long as just going to YouTube or Spotify and listening to the first song.

<comment><USER7> On the flip side, for most consumers there are probably several million albums/television series/songs/films a few clicks away. Choosing is still hard.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> >"Theodore Sturgeon, who once observed, "It can be argued that 90% of film, literature, consumer goods, etc. is crap." The "It can be argued" part usually isn't quoted, and the figure is very ballpark."

Actually it sounds like the author wasn't critical enough. They believed wikipedia. Strange. But I remembered reading about this recently, that Sturgeon used the word "crud", not crap.

The rest is pasted from wikiquote:

"I repeat Sturgeon's Revelation, which was wrung out of me after twenty years of wearying defense of science fiction against attacks of people who used the worst examples of the field for ammunition, and whose conclusion was that ninety percent of it is crud.

The Revelation: Ninety percent of everything is crud.

Corollary 1: The existence of immense quantities of trash in science fiction is admitted and it is regrettable; but it is no more unnatural than the existence of trash anywhere.

Corollary 2: The best science fiction is as good as the best fiction in any field. - _Venture Science Fiction_ (March 1958)

The original expression of this has often been declared to have been "Sure, ninety percent of science fiction is crud. That's because ninety percent of everything is crud." According to Philip Klass Sturgeon made the remark during a talk at New York University around 1951. It has also commonly appeared in variant forms such as "Ninety percent of everything is crap" and is often referred to as "Sturgeon's Law" — though he himself gave that title to another phrase:

Sturgeon's Law originally was "Nothing is always absolutely so." The other thing was known as "Sturgeon's Revelation".

<comment><USER8> Wish I'd noticed before that about 90% of the sentences I quoted at the top are crap! They got the name right and the number.. apart from that, nothing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Interesting point the article indirectly hits on:

\- _" Chummy logrollers—a perception heightened in the social media age. In a 2012 Slate piece called "Against Enthusiasm," Jacob Silverman wrote, "if you spend time in the literary Twitter- or blogospheres, you'll be positively besieged by amiability, by a relentless enthusiasm that might have you believing that all new books are wonderful and that every writer is every other writer's biggest fan.""_

I've always assumed studios had simply managed to, through some means or another, 'corrupt' most reviewers in a process similar that happened to video games. I wonder how much of the problem might be that people are now just too close to the things, and in particular the people behind the things, that they're reviewing? It's far easier to be "critical" (read: truthful) about things and people you have no connection to. But in today's world of social media, reviewers and the creators of the products they're reviewing are going to be in near direct, if not indeed direct, communication. Knowing full well that speaking honestly about a product could hurt people you've formed relationships with is not something easy to do.

For megafilms like "The Last Jedi" (currently at 90% on rotten tomatoes contrasted against 49% for viewers), how many of the reviewers have at least one direct relationship to somebody involved with the project? It doesn't need to be corruption. Plain old reluctance to be honest to those close to us or do them soft favors with no expectation of direct personal benefit -- that basic aspect of human nature would go a long ways towards explaining the deterioration of honesty in reviews. Or taking it to another level, we often wear rose colored glasses towards those close to us. This entire process might be entirely subconscious.

<comment><USER10> _megafilms like "The Last Jedi" (currently at 90% on rotten tomatoes contrasted against 49% for viewers)_

Be careful, The Last Jedi is definitely part of the "culture wars" effect somebody mentioned elsewhere. I don't think it's a very useful example for the effect this article is talking about (although it's very useful if you're interested in the culture wars).

If you actually read the Rotten Tomatoes reviews, many of the "viewers" are people complaining about gender representation. It's not a representative sample, it's just been flooded by "men's rights" activists.

Personally, I think the 90% is too high (I didn't like it very much) but the 49% is way low (most people I know liked it just fine, no quibbling).

<comment><USER11> _Be careful, The Last Jedi is definitely part of the "culture wars" effect somebody mentioned elsewhere._

I don't buy it. _The Force Awakens_ is at 88% and culture warriors fought over that one, too. Both films have severe problems from a storytelling perspective, but the problems with _The Last Jedi_ are much deeper, are of the sort more likely to turn off fans of the franchise as well as fans of _The Force Awakens_. There are plenty of culture-war-neutral analyses of _The Last Jedi_ that absolutely eviscerate the film. For just one example: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vw7pcCj0ORk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vw7pcCj0ORk)

While I can't speak to the 49% rating, where I'm seeing the major divide is between Star Wars fans who care about world building, character development, and a coherent story (historically important aspects of Star Wars); and fans who are content just to enjoy the emotional ride from one scene to the next while enjoying the nostalgia.

As from the culture wars perspective, it seems hard to deny that _The Last Jedi_ takes an unnecessarily overt stance on the culture war, daring that sort of criticism. TLJ includes: a postmodern deconstruction of Luke Skywalker and the Jedi mythos, a purple-haired female admiral dominating the only talented white male on their side for displays of what they probably imagine to be toxic masculinity, and all the bad guys are white males with overt Nazi references. I mean, seriously, why can't they just make it Star Wars?

Take another Disney movie as a contrast: Moana. Moana is a hero's journey, just like the original Star Wars. Moana is about a girl character, her mentor is her grandmother, the story is set in the South Pacific and features non- European cultures and sources their mythology for the story. The twist at the end might be considered feminist. But nobody but serious cranks are complaining about it, because none of it gets in the way of the story and for the most part actually enhances it. Moana isn't made some kind of wunderkind. There's no artificially forced interaction between an SJW stand-in and a white male stand-in. There's no postmodern deconstruction of the myths or themes. Disney is just doing their usual thing of mining ancient myths and fairy tales and adapting them for entertaining mass consumption by modern audiences.

<comment><USER10> I think you went on a little too long there.

<comment><USER11> I had 3 points to make. Was it too much for you? Frankly I could have written a great deal more.

1\. There's excellent non-culture war criticism of the movie.

2\. TLJ made its own bed with regards to the culture war.

3\. Disney has demonstrated they can make progressive movies that don't piss off culture warriors.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> A simpler and obvious explanation for critical complacency; 90% of critics are also crap/crud.

<comment><USER13> Or at least, the vast majority of published reviews are.

Recently, I was reading a review of Samuel Beckett [Nobel Prize in Literature 1969], from the NYTimes from 1958 [0], and at first I was shocked by how much higher the quality was than what one might read in the Times today.

Turns out that the author was a Stephen Spender, CBE, [1], a poet who was knighted for his contributions. It's not when or where something is written so much as by whom. You are exactly right that it's determined by who the critic is.

[0]: [http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/08/03/reviews/beckett- unnama...](http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/08/03/reviews/beckett- unnamable.html)

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

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> An interesting article, most certainly.

I suppose the immediate response is the critic sphere is heavily self selected for people who _really_ like books / movies / comics / etc. So what to most normal people would seem like flowery platitudes and a cultural aversion to tough talk might actually be a completely genuine love of the medium itself. If you just love to read, it's not vapid pleasantness to call every book fun and a joy - it's just how you genuinely feel.

>I hate to sound like a philistine, but audience-critic discrepancies often occur when a work is less than pleasant to sit through, whether because of The Sorrow and the Pity–like length (a growing problem, pun intended) or grim subject matter. Take last year's Best Picture winner, Moonlight, which has a 98 critics' and 79 audience score on Rotten Tomatoes, and which I haven't seen. The Rotten Tomatoes blurb calls it "The tender, heartbreaking story of a young man's struggle to find himself, told across three defining chapters in his life as he experiences the ecstasy, pain, and beauty of falling in love, while grappling with his own sexuality." I can get that at home.

I think this is another element of the critic sphere being very self selected. For whatever reason it selects for literary realist types who honestly care more about depressing stories featuring puppies with broken legs than any kind of sci-fi, fantasy, etc. genre film that's merely fun and not "meaningful". The critics aren't behaving fallaciously or malevolently, they as a group simply have genuinely different preferences for entertainment.

>Here's the heart of the problem: The set of critics' and audiences' interests do not perfectly overlap but rather form a Venn diagram.

Ultimately, this is the real problem whatever is causing the divergence in interests. It makes it hard to use critics, and harder to identify the genuine diamonds in the rough for you personally.

My personal solution is simply look to the average person directly. The internet is full of forums, and many of them discuss whatever medium you happen to care about, and those forums are invariably going to have plenty of threads along the lines of "What is your favorite lost gem?", "What movie do you think flew under the radar?" "What deserved more credit than it got?".

<comment><USER15> > Ultimately, this is the real problem whatever is causing the divergence in > interests. It makes it hard to use critics, and harder to identify the > genuine diamonds in the rough for you personally.

> My personal solution is simply look to the average person directly.

IMDB is basically a layman's scale vote (from 1 to 10) while mentioning Metacritic's average critic review, whereas Metacritic contains both critic review and user review. You can pick either on Metacritic, but if you _never_ care about critic review then perhaps IMDB is a better solution. I tend to use both since IMDB has more titles. Especially old, obscure, and international titles.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> It might be simpler to say that the interaction between the reviewer's motivation to believe that 50% of everything is crap and the fact that 90% of everything is crap has emergent effects.

The major one is that bad qualities that randomly happened to occur more commonly in products that have previously made the 50% cut become misindicators of quality, distorting the evaluation of a constantly drifting subset of products that have or lack those misindicators. This occurs asymetrically (between misindicators of positive quality and misindicators of negative quality) because there are more products misidentified as being good, therefore it's relatively far more common for particular bad qualities to randomly be more associated with works above the median then the opposite. Works that fall below the median in a world of 90% crap would have very few good qualities at all.

</comment><comment><USER17> This isn't a completely sufficient argument, though. Surely, any person into an artform will at some point be able to recognize the difference between what is good because it is good and what is good because it is different. A good critic would be able to differentiate these two things and give a review with some nuance, but it seems incomplete to say that the critic problem is mostly the fault of seeing way too much junk. Anybody who is actually in to anything has seen a ton of junk, but not everybody has lost their ability to clearly judge things.

</comment><comment><USER18> Barely related: Rotten Tomatoes summaries feel like they've been paid for.

Sure, if a movie is rotten, they'll trash it. But when a movie is barely fresh, they seem to accord it more praise than the critics gave themselves. I don't have a particular instance in mind so I'd be curious if anyone else has noticed this.

<comment><USER19> I dont think its that straight forward, but there have been instances lately where they behaved rather calculated

[http://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/movies/ct- rotten...](http://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/movies/ct-rotten- tomatoes-justice-league-review-20171117-story.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> If there's more than 20 points between critic score and viewer score (in the viewers favor) on Rotten tomatoes, then the movie is usually good. There are exceptions to the rule, and recent inclusions in the culture wars (Justice League, Ghostbusters) can break this, but generally it's a good rule of thumb to follow. Reviewer scores come from people forced to watch hundreds of films, and as a consequence they reward poor quality idosyncrocy over good quality but predictable tropes. People crave variety, and when you review movies for a living, you lose touch of what variety is for normal people.

</comment><comment><USER21> See also: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groupthink](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groupthink)

From the article:

> Groupthink is a psychological phenomenon that occurs within a group of > people in which the desire for harmony or conformity in the group results in > an irrational or dysfunctional decision-making outcome. Group members try to > minimize conflict and reach a consensus decision without critical evaluation > of alternative viewpoints by actively suppressing dissenting viewpoints, and > by isolating themselves from outside influences.

</comment><comment><USER22> You have touched on one of the main reasons we decided to launch www.bad- about.com. In a world full of positive hype from reviewers and sales spin from the companies themselves, we thought it would be helpful to collect and display JUST the criticisms to help balance it all out.

</comment><comment><USER23> Is there a service like this: rate a bunch of media, then filter for critics that largely share your preferences, then subscribe to recommendations from just those critics? If there isn't, there totally should be.

<comment><USER24> There is but it's from a limited selection of media and you can't know the identities of the reviewers and the set of reviewers changes all the time, as well as the set of available media. (I am talking of course, about Netflix.)

<comment><USER25> Also by consuming media preferences could/ should be changed, also new friends, change of life and political context... I don't think that jamming people in a bubble is a good plan

<comment><USER23> everybody's always in a bubble, since there is a finite number of hours in the day and far more media than anyone can consume. The best we could hope for is to personalize the bubble while minimizing the influence of outside interests with divergent goals - e.g. advertisers and spammers.

I imagine the change of preferences can be tracked over time by periodically rating new works I consume and having critics fall in and out of the personal overton window.

<comment><USER24> The best for... what. Some of the best movie experiences I've had was when I saw something someone else picked, something I would never have picked on my own.

<comment><USER23> let me counter your anecdote with mine: I saw something somebody else picked, and it was complete trash. In fact, this is trivially the case every time I see anything awful that has at least one positive review. Judging by, say, RT page for the last jedi, this is a common experience.

It's all about the signal to noise ratio. It is more likely that you'll enjoy a work that was enjoyed by people similar to you. It is also possible that you'll enjoy a work recommended solely by some random pseudonym on the internet, but less likely.

<comment><USER24> ahh.. there are more parameters I didn't consider:

* high median (many good films, low tolerance for trash)

* finding jewels (can wade through lots of trash to find that outstanding film)

* high baseline (a minimum quality is important, no trash please)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


U.S. officials confirm first U.S. case of China coronavirus - <AUTHOR> https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-health-usa/u-s-officials-confirm-first-u-s-case-of-china-coronavirus-idUSKBN1ZK2FF <comment><USER2> Comments moved to [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22110873](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22110873), which is currently on the front page.</comment>


Casting Call For "Nerd Girls" And/Or Aspiring Reality-TV Stars - <AUTHOR> http://jezebel.com/5553636/casting-call-for-nerd-girls-who-also-want-to-be-reality+tv-stars

<comment><USER2> One has to tell these cliche-lovers that the age of pocket protectors are _long_ gone. Not only that, they symbolized (along with slide rulers) properties that are opposite of "nerdy" nowadays. Those 60s people were uniformed engineers with their ties and all. Today's nerds question the system and are misfits.

It's amazing how the nerd stereotype has changed over the years.

<comment><USER3> Surely both pocket protectors, which emphasize practicality over looks, and slide rules, an elegant tool for mathematical operations, ought to count as nerdy.

<comment><USER4> Indeed, pocket protectors were very nerdy. They died out not because nerds stopped being nerdy, but because nerds became so slobby that they no longer wore shirts with pockets.</comment></comment></comment>


'Intelligent' oil droplet navigates chemical maze - <AUTHOR> http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn18391-intelligent-oil-droplet-navigates-chemical-maze.html <comment><USER2> The video is interesting, but the possible application to a cure of cancer is directly ridiculous.</comment>


The capital raising ladder - <AUTHOR> http://www.readwriteweb.com/readwritestart/2009/06/the-capital-raising-ladder.php

<comment><USER2> I'm kind of disappointed, but not particularly surprised, that there is not a "sell stuff to customers for money" rung on the ladder. (Hint: it beats credit cards!)</comment>


Rethinking the Progress Bar - <AUTHOR> http://hamletdarcy.blogspot.com/2008/04/rethinking-progress-bar.html <comment><USER2> There's this one idea I've had for some time for progress bars. Say you have a progress bar for a lengthy operation (duh). For example, the progress bar for loading a certain level in a certain game. On successive loadings of the same level on the same machine, the "signature" of the loading should be the same. So you could cache how much time it takes on the first time you load, and on subsequent loads you hope the loading will have the same behavior and make the progress bar grow smoothly, proportional to the time it takes.

That was the simplest scheme, you can go much further. You could separate the loading in chunks (say, 20 chucks of 5%) and see how much time each chunk takes (you get the ratio displayed progress/actual progress). On the next loading, if a chunk takes more time than the last time then you adjust the rest of the indication of progress appropriately to compensate.

Even better, instead of only considering the last loading you could develop a statistical model over many loadings of what is likely to vary and by how much. Maybe you could even take the system's load average (as provided by the OS) into consideration.

I think this guessing scheme, though failure-prone, would make progress bars much more accurate for common scenarios. It would be better than just accepting that most progress bars will be broken and inaccurate like we do right now...

<comment><USER3> I've always thought applications which need progress bars should ask you if you would be willing to share your progress data in exchange for seeing how your progress compares to that of other users. Not only would this allow you to get much more accurate estimates, it could also tip you off to potential issues. If others are getting past the progress stage a lot faster than you then it could mean it's time for you to investigate what's going on. Perhaps everyone else using that application has a better system than you or perhaps it's time for you to optimize your system a bit.</comment></comment>


Flat assembler: x86 assembler that does multiple passes to optimize machine code - <AUTHOR> http://flatassembler.net/ <comment><USER2> See also: The newer flat assembler g, a generic assembler not tied to a particular architecture. Download [http://flatassembler.net/fasmg.zip](http://flatassembler.net/fasmg.zip) and read docs/manual.txt. There are examples for 8086, 8052, AVR, and Java Virtual Machine. [http://board.flatassembler.net/topic.php?t=17952](http://board.flatassembler.net/topic.php?t=17952)

<comment><USER3> If I understand this right, fasm_g is the macro-language of fasm with some additions and the ability to output bytes.

That's really quite something, is it yet comparable to the current fasm?

<comment><USER2> See the board post in my parent comment for a comparison to fasm 1 by the author.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The most interesting points of flat assembler are elegant syntax, "Same source - same output" philosophy, and a very powerful macro system that consists of preprocessing and assembling stage; the fasm preprocessor has been shown to be turing-complete [0].

In 2008 I've played with it, creating macros that patch a binary file (and used it to extend a closed-source Windows program [1]), made PE format from scratch [2], a simple PE encryptor [3].

[0]: [http://board.flatassembler.net/topic.php?t=6624](http://board.flatassembler.net/topic.php?t=6624)

[1]: [http://board.flatassembler.net/topic.php?t=8876](http://board.flatassembler.net/topic.php?t=8876)

[2]: [http://board.flatassembler.net/topic.php?t=8632](http://board.flatassembler.net/topic.php?t=8632)

[3]: [http://board.flatassembler.net/topic.php?t=8951](http://board.flatassembler.net/topic.php?t=8951)

</comment><comment><USER5> We changed the URL from [http://flatassembler.net/docs.php?article=manual#2.3.3](http://flatassembler.net/docs.php?article=manual#2.3.3) to the root page because it looks like this project hasn't had attention on HN before.

<comment><USER6> A better link might be [http://flatassembler.net/docs.php?article=design](http://flatassembler.net/docs.php?article=design) which helps explain wtf this is and why anyone should care.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> The introduction to SSE is not bad [http://flatassembler.net/docs.php?article=manual#2.1.15](http://flatassembler.net/docs.php?article=manual#2.1.15)

</comment><comment><USER8> What would really get me excited is an assembler that does more intelligent things — automatic register allocation at a minimum. I don't know why in 2015 I still have to manually track which register I'm using for what. This gets particularly problematic with MMX/SSE/AVX registers. I think the x86 assembly world would benefit from learning about features found in DSP assemblers (I'm thinking of TI C6000 tools in particular).

<comment><USER9> Your wish has been granted. It's called C and it's been around since the 70's.

<comment><USER8> I will take an educated guess that none of the responders to my comment (and I'll just post this one reply to all) have written significant amounts of assembly code, especially using MMX/SSE/AVX, and so will respectfully disagree with all of the responses.

Briefly:

* writing assembly in C is an exercise in frustration, just try to see anything past the syntax, same goes for intrinsics, with the added bonus of having to check whether the code you got is actually what you wanted, * no, you do not want to manually keep track of all of your 32 AVX-512 registers, trust me (for x86+SSE I used printed register allocation tables to help me track of what is where at which stage), heck, even on a measly ARM Cortex-M managing your R0-R12 (and not all instructions operate on all of them) can get annoying. The idea that you can keep registers in your head stems from the days when we had AX-DX to work with.

"Assembly" doesn't have to mean doing everything manually (and macros, yay!), really. There is a middle ground, where you get a reasonably intelligent assembler which does a lot of the manual grudge work for you. There are also more intelligent assemblers which, for example, take your linear assembly and convert it into VLIW, allocating processing units. Or reorder instructions around branches.

Assembly language should be thought of as a spectrum of tools.

<comment><USER9> This is a serious question: what's the point of programming in assembly if you don't want to control the registers? And what do you do if the assembler does a poor job of register allocation? If you hand optimize it, you're back in normal assembly; if you ignore it, you might as well not check in the first place.

Once you sacrifice the registers, assembly just becomes a non-portable programming language without any libraries. Unless you build it out with macros and capitalize on it being a programmable programming language, but then why not go with Forth or some kind of Lisp?

What does no-register assembly gain you that higher level languages don't already offer?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I've been looking for something like the FAT12 bootloader from the examples section for some time.

Not really related to the main post, but still a big help!

</comment><comment><USER11> The word "optimize" is overused here. Fasm makes multiple passes because it allows forward references, and rich macro system makes it hard to guess everything in 1-2 passes (it also removes lot of formalism from user). What is actually optimized: jmp width.</comment>


Why are we 'milking' crabs for a coronavirus vaccine? - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/newsbeat-53333096 <comment><USER2> More information on the synthetic stuff not being accepted:

[https://www.reuters.com/article/us-lonza-crabs/drugs- standar...](https://www.reuters.com/article/us-lonza-crabs/drugs-standards- group-nixes-plan-to-kick-pharmas-crab-blood-habit-idUSKBN2360MB)</comment>


Ask HN: How do you book-mark web pages - <AUTHOR>

I use different browsers in different places(Mozilla in office , Chrome in home, Dolphin in Android , safari in ipod touch). Is there any way we can sync all these book marks ? Perhaps there should be an android/iPhone app, and UI through the web. <comment><USER2> Personally I use Firefox Sync. It's encrypted end-to-end and if you don't even trust Mozilla with your encrypted data, you can set up your own sync server. Chrome has something similar too however I'm unsure how open it is.

You can sync your bookmarks using Firefox Sync to your Android, if you were to use Firefox for Android (it's pretty good and there are big improvements on the way - I went to a talk about it at FOSDEM).

For your iPod touch, I have no idea, though it raises the question why you need one when you have an Android phone but anyway.

For your home computer, you could switch to Firefox however I imagine there'll be an addon that syncs bookmarks from Firefox Sync. I'd always recommend using the more open service as it's far more likely to be supported.

</comment><comment><USER3> There's <http://xmarks.com/> that can help you.

</comment><comment><USER4> I use diigo.com; it was recommended by another HN user (j45) some months ago. Prior to that I was using Google Bookmarks, but I've moved all the bookmarks from there into Diigo.

I love Diigo's ability to highlight a snippet of text on a page.

</comment><comment><USER5> I use Instapaper. I know it's not for bookmarking but I already use it for saving articles and can't be bothered to use something else for other types of links.

</comment><comment><USER6> Used Delicious in the past, now i just use Safari and only bookmark really really important stuff.

</comment><comment><USER7> I've found <https://kippt.com/> very handy.

</comment><comment><USER8> I use pinboard. It's really good.

</comment><comment><USER9> I use thinkery.me</comment>


Why we challenge Microsoft's battery test - <AUTHOR> http://www.opera.com/blogs/desktop/2016/06/over-the-edge/ <comment><USER3> Edge platform team employee here. A couple thoughts on methodology, focusing on our scripted test (under "stay productive longer" at [https://blogs.windows.com/windowsexperience/2016/06/20/more-...](https://blogs.windows.com/windowsexperience/2016/06/20/more- battery-with-edge/)), which is most comparable to Opera's test; nobody seems to challenge our Netflix results:

* We did not enable ad blockers, because we were testing the efficiency of the network stack, browser rendering pipeline, etc.; if you cut off ads, you're effectively skipping half the assignment. This is a valid way to improve the user experience, but not a valid way to measure browser efficiency, especially because it will disproportionately impact some sites (like the news sites that Opera's test focused on) and have no impact on other sites (like Netflix, where Edge demolishes the other browsers). It's basically skipping a lap of the race and then bragging that you finished faster.

* It's also worth noting that the ad blockers are often detected by many news sites and will actually prevent the main page content from loading at all. Not sure if Opera's test accounted for this.

* Our test was designed to mimic real-world behavior: Watching YouTube (foreground and background), shopping on Amazon, browsing the Facebook news feed, searching on Google, opening email in Gmail, and reading Wikipedia. To reduce variability, we used WebDriver to instrument the tests (supported by all four browsers tested) and made sure each task was timed rather than just a loop of consecutive tasks (which could disadvantage or advantage browsers depending on other factors like pageload performance or network conditions, in a way that doesn't reflect user experience, which is likely to linger on a page once it's loaded). We then used the Maxim 34407 power instrumentation built into the Surface Book (which is why we chose the Surface Book for this test) to measure actual instantaneous power consumption at the hardware, sampled once per second and then averaged across the duration of the test. We feel strongly that this is a highly scientific and defensible test setup which mimics typical user behavior and, significantly, measures the same markup and the same duration, on the same hardware, in every browser.

<comment><USER4> How did you control for the specific ads the browsers were served? Ads are highly dynamic. Unless you (can) include the differences in your methodology you better eliminate that influence.

<comment><USER5> Ding, ding, ding and to be fair this is the problem in both methodologies. The only way to accurately perform this test is to spider a bunch of sites, save the contents to a locally hosted HTTPD and ensure all third-party JS calls are resolved locally and test both against the exact same sites as they were spidered at a point in time. You can simply not account for changes which may happen to the markup, ad network beacons, ads, metrics code, or even network routing, all of which could influence the test in one way or the other if not run from an identical static cache in a controlled environment. If I were doing this test I'd then skip the whole scripting automation part and simply add a meta-refresh to every page in the cache to sequentially take the browser through the content, giving each page something like 10 seconds to load and render. Simple, simple, and far more accurate.

<comment><USER6> You don't need to go to such complicated lengths. Just perform enough tests (as in, a statistically large enough amount) and a distribution will form. That also captures the variability of real world network effects.

<comment><USER7> What about different ads served to different browsers? Someone running, say, Opera will have a different ad profile than a Chrome user even when completely blank cookie-wise.

<comment><USER8> Maybe have them give the same user agent?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Microsoft didn't just do a battery test, they also release statistics based on Windows 10 telemetry showing that Edge has better battery life than Chrome, Firefox:

"In addition to testing battery life internally, Microsoft also looks at tens of millions of PCs that send telemetry data to the firm, Weber said. And what it sees there is simple: A small advantage over Firefox, but massive gains of about 50 percent additional battery life when compared to Chrome."

[https://www.thurrott.com/windows/windows-10/68176/microsoft-...](https://www.thurrott.com/windows/windows-10/68176/microsoft- touts-battery-life-advantages-edge-browser)

<comment><USER10> > they also release statistics based on Windows 10 telemetry showing that Edge > has better battery life

It's such a pity I don't use _Microsoft Windows 10_ , because I'd be _so_ thrilled to know that through the magic of _telemetry_ , everything I do on a _Microsoft Windows 10_ enabled computer could help Microsoft win some _crucial_ PR battles.

<comment><USER11> As opposed to your _Apple iPhone_ where through the magic of _telemetry_ every app is dumping your every finger motion into services like Mixpanel and Kahuna for later analysis.

For clarity, they captured the extremely detailed telemetry _from their test devices_. Most of the telemetry that Microsoft ships back to the mothership is the exact kind of telemetry that apps from the Apple Store, iOS Store, Android Store and Chrome Web Store submit: app specific telemetry. Many of these include signals that help understand battery life impact, so every major application platform (including the web) is doing this.

That stuff–stuff you agree to in the EULA as it stands– is absolutely essential to improving app experience to the standards of the market. The reason the mobile ecosystem has developed so fast (and that the web ecosystem can develop so fast) is a whole lot of telemetry on user usage patterns, habits, device failures, device selection, etc.

I'm not sure why it's so controversial. Even the Ubuntu store apps can administer telemetry.

If you'd like to complain about the pervasive surveillance state in your national scale, there are more fruitful avenues.

<comment><USER12> > As opposed to your Apple iPhone where through the magic of telemetry every > app is dumping your every finger motion into services like Mixpanel and > Kahuna for later analysis.

This is not true at all. And there is a difference between your smartphone and your laptop, even if you can't see it.

<comment><USER13> Yes, telemetry from my smartphone is even more invasive to my privacy, having my location at all times, as well as being the single location with all my communications.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Opera with an ad blocker vs Edge without it doesn't seem like an ubiased test.

<comment><USER15> Even with the ad blocker being a feature in opera out of the box? They were trying to show that opera can achieve better battery performance based on it's features and optimizations. Does that not include the ad-blocker?

<comment><USER16> In that case you might as well browse different websites because using adblocker makes your browser render different content.

<comment><USER17> Microsoft is welcome to include a native content blocker in their rendering engine

<comment><USER18> While I applaud their work and appreciate that there is an extension framework at _all,_ I seriously doubt this will happen unless they plan to also redesign their home pages to remove the ads.

I just loaded up MSN.com and scrolled down the page. I count 3 ads total: one gigantic banner at the very top of the page before all of the content, and two smaller panners that pop into place as you scroll. These are served by AdChoices. When I turn my ad blocker back on, these all disappear, and the site loads much faster.

I think if Microsoft were to release a default ad-blocker, they would need to re-code their own website to use native advertising rather than a third-party network. I believe this to be an excellent practice, but I just don't see Microsoft going this route. I'd love to be pleasantly surprised though.

<comment><USER19> I assume they would implement a white-list allowing "some non-intrusive adds" similar to Adblock.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> So do the WebKit/safari teams' respective efforts to reduce power consumption not count? It seems odd that they didn't compare against safari given Apple makes a dedicated effort to reduce power consumption.

That it's a "mode" which defaults to off says a lot - the things it does aren't acceptable all of the time apparently, so you choose between features/performance, and battery life.

<comment><USER21> Well you can't really compare Safari with Edge as they are are exclusive to different platforms.

<comment><USER22> It wouldn't be too hard to dual-boot Win10 on Apple hardware and compare them, but it might be a little awkward for Microsoft to do so officially.

<comment><USER23> The OS is a pretty obvious confounding factor, don't you think?

<comment><USER24> I think it would still be interesting. Win10 + Edge vs macOS + Safari.

In the end the user does not care which OS runs in the background, just which platform offers the best experience - in this case the longest battery time.

<comment><USER25> There are plenty of suitable comparisons from which one can make an educated guess. In general, Macs do better than comparable Windows machines in browsing endurance tests, and Safari clobbers every other browser it has been tested in for battery life (I have _not_ seen a comparison of Safari to this new version of Opera, but judging by its performance relative to Chrome it could be competitive with Safari).

Safari, of course, has lots of support for ad blocking short of Apple actually doing the ad blocking itself. I suspect Safari + ad blockers would be the best option across the board (it absolutely rocks on iOS devices).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Obviously this is anecdotal but I've been messing around with my laptop a lot recently trying to get to a full day of work on battery, and the best setup I've found is windows 10 Insider with Edge + adblock.

Opera battery saver is great but they should enable it automatically whenever you're on battery, as it has no performance impact that I've noticed.

<comment><USER27> Edge allows extensions now or are you using an OS-level adblock?

<comment><USER28> Edge allows extensions now.

[https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft- edge/extensi...](https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft- edge/extensions/)

<comment><USER29> I like how RES is one of the first options. I remember when the Windows 10 team did an AMA and a lot of the redditors said they'd try edge as soon as RES was available. Apparently that's now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> It's great to see battery efficiency becoming something browser vendors fight over (even if it does come with a side of the usual benchmark gaming). Hopefully it shames Google into improving Chrome's battery performance.

</comment><comment><USER31> Definitely not a fair test... Edge was rendering a lot more without an ad- blocker.

<comment><USER32> You might argue that not rendering ads is a valid method to save battery.

<comment><USER16> Correct, it is a valid method to save a battery. It makes the comparisons invalid though, since you are not testing with the same input.

<comment><USER33> You are testing more or less the same input just producing different output. This was a common strategy where graphics cards for example would degrade image quality for speed when a driver noticed you where running a benchmark.

Which is one of the reasons benchmarks are so difficult.

PS: A more insidious problem is when you specifically optimize for something because it's a benchmark.

<comment><USER16> Not neccessarily same input - all depends how adblock works. I assumed that with adblock, my browser will not even send a request to fetch the ads, so I save on network traffic, and the browser will not have to render whatever would have been fetched - this to me is a different input (to the browser's rendering engine) than you would have without adblock.

With all this said, "proper-er" benchmark would be to show each of the browser's power consumption with or without adblock, with or without battery saver in Opera's case, all this done on a set of websites which are ad-heavy and ad-light. :)

<comment><USER33> Server sends an HTML and browser fetches what it needs. Not fetching content is simply an advanced form of caching.

More importantly even if you grab the content it's rendering that takes power downloading files is very low energy. Even just disabling auto play sound / video is going to save power.

PS: Assumptions about how browsers interact with websites is basically a failure to understand what's going on IMO. Telnet to port 80, send fetch request on a web-server and you will get HTML unless they require HTTPS.

<comment><USER16> > Server sends an HTML and browser fetches what it needs. Not fetching content > is simply an advanced form of caching.

I didn't understand this part. Caching is basically "not fetching content that you already have", and I don't see how it is relevant here. I assume that when using adblocks the browser will not even issue a request to fetch the data (be it HTML, JavaScript, flash videos, images, etc.) that is ad-related, so it is not the same as caching. And even if it did choose to fetch the data but then skip rendering, it boils down to the same thing: browser engine has different (presumably smaller) input in case when you use adblock.

By telnetting I will get a response, but this is only a first step. HTML will have references to huge amount of other content that also needs to be fetched (unless everything is embedded in the HTML - possible, but unlikely for any bigger website). Open developer tools in any browser and go to network tab and see for yourself how the amount of fetched data (and number of requests / number of fetched files) differs when you use adblock and not. This is the difference in the input for the browser. Opera mentions mlive.com - <USER2> uBlock, FF fetches 2.5MB of data (caching disabled), without uBlock I get 5MB (caching disabled). We can even take the example to the extreme - let's go to the website that has only ads. Of course Opera will be better there - it will have to render nothing, everything will be blocked by adblock.

<comment><USER33> You can also cache intermediate results from calculations, the idea is don't fetch things you don't need. And as you know the result from fetching an add is going to be blank you don't need to fetch it. Much like a screen reader not downloading a JPEG.

As to downloading you can try it you self your talking fractions of a watt savings from not downloading a few Meg's.

In terms of other downloads from a page, most of that is things like tiny images which you can mostly skip. The Amazon homepage sends lots of junk but all you actually care about is the search bar and links to other areas.

<comment><USER16> But how is it all relevant to the discussion? Bottom line is that using adblock in one browser and not using it in other browser makes the comparisons meaningless...

<comment><USER33> People are objecting to add blocking as a perfectly normal browser feature. There is a mindset that as soon as people start wearing augmented reality glasses they are going to want context sensitive advertising in their day to day lives. IMO, most people would much rather block real world adds and overlay them with blank space or even nature scenes.

Browser advertising fits into the same argument as adds on cable television. Subscribe to Hulu and no the adds don't go away.

<comment><USER16> Let me reiterate as you did not address anything from my comment: But how is it all relevant to the discussion? Bottom line is that using adblock in one browser and not using it in other browser makes the comparisons meaningless...

<comment><USER33> Adblock is a browser feature just as much as GPU acceleration.

Suggesting you need to add third party GPU acceleration to make things fair is ridiculous. But, you seem to think Adblock is somehow different.

<comment><USER16> No, I can make things fair by doing another test. Let's test Opera with adblock and Edge without, but only use websites that do not have ads. Sounds good?

Problem with Opera's comparison is that it is not fair because they don't display the same content - they (probably) need to render less. Of course they will be better if they render less (unless they are really bad at what they do). So to make the comparison meaningful, make them display exacly the same thing - then we can talk about who is more power-efficient.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Opera being better than Edge is a claim I might believe but I don't think Edge is almost as bad as Chrome.

I stopped using Chrome when I discovered it took hours off my battery life on a MacBook. Edge can't be almost as bad. Intuitively I would believe the ranking in terms of battery life would be Safari > Edge or Opera > Firefox > Chrome.

<comment><USER35> opera likes to boldly claim it was the first browser to do power management on pages but truth is Microsoft has done this for many years prior and has the operating system integration as an advantage.

[http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/159269-internet- explore...](http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/159269-internet-explorer- javascript-timer-frequency-power-plan-settings.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Now that Opera Software is owned by a Chinese company I've avoided their browser anyways, regardless of potential battery/performance benefits.

<comment><USER37> Isn't that just xenophobia?

<comment><USER36> No, I don't think so. Maybe I'm a bit paranoid but I tend to avoid software from Chinese companies because of all recent stories of a apps stealing/sending data that they don't necessarily need to function. But I suppose software from any country could do the same thing though...

<comment><USER38> And what is your position about hardware?

<comment><USER39> Most hardware we use here, though manufactured in China, is still wholly owned by American companies though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> > Reducing frame rate to 30 frames per second

Many users may not like this.

<comment><USER41> probably depends what you're doing, right? e.g., if i'm just sitting here reading hacker news i can't tell the difference between 60 fps or 30 fps repainting, right?

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> What really surprised me were the run times of that laptop. Man that is crappy battery life for both instances. My thinkpad T220 with extended battery and 13" Macbook pro both decimate that battery life.

<comment><USER43> The Lenovo Yoga (about 550 €) is hardly on the same price level as the ThinkPad or Macbook Pro (1500 €) ... And you even mentioned the extended battery.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> I have found that safari gives best battery time on OSX (like 9 hours of use vs 6-7 when on firefox).

But i generally dont use safari as battery time is not the most important factor in my common use cases.

<comment><USER45> >But i generally dont use safari as battery time is not the most important factor in my common use cases.

I use Safari for almost everything. It's by far the best browser for browsing and just reading & enjoying the web. Reader interface and the speed of it is still unbeatable.

I use Chrome for web development, however.

<comment><USER46> I agree Safari is the best. Every other browser is a clunker IMO. The Safari web inspector keeps getting better. You might want to take another look at it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> I wonder how much battery would be saved if not every site you visited was reported to bing api or opera sitecheck. <g> But most power is is probably used to light the screen, so an extension to make every page use a black theme would probably beat most optimizations.

<comment><USER48> I don't think it would take much of a difference on an LCD display because your backlight is going to be on regardless.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> Opera need to market themselves as the browser that extends your battery life so you can surf without the range anxiety. Testimonials are better than tests plus word of mouth.

<comment><USER50> This is the first time I've heard the term "range anxiety" applied to laptops, as opposed to electric vehicles.

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> Where's firefox in the perf?

<comment><USER52> In the battery-benchmarks that I've seen so far, Firefox was always the leading browser, so granted those benchmarks did not test Opera's battery saving mode, Firefox should still be at least in second place.

And Firefox does also have a native ad-blocker, so if you enable that, too, I could imagine that it maybe even still outperforms Opera's battery saving mode, but yeah, a proper benchmark would be good...

<comment><USER51> > Firefox does also have a native ad-blocker

I don't think it has one natively. Which one do you mean? Or are you referring to tracking protection (private mode only, but available in Fx 49 also in "normal" mode iirc)

<comment><USER52> Yeah, I'm referring to Tracking Protection. It's not supposed to be an ad- blocker, but with almost all ads using tracking code, you rarely encounter ads when it's enabled. It's probably even better for battery life than just an ad- blocker, as a lot of webpages also execute tracking code which isn't bound to ads.

And you could always enable it in normal browsing by setting "privacy.trackingprotection.enabled" in about:config to true...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> n-gauge On a side note: I've been testing edge on a Dell 1012 netbook (atom, 2gb) and it beats Chrome for rendering YouTube videos (480p max!) which I found surprising (video stutters on Chrome). However on my main laptop when running scratch (ok flash based), cloud based games are better sync'd when using Chrome (it's a slither.io clone). Overall battery life is exceptable for both browsers.

</comment><comment><USER53> After I read this I've installed Opera mobile and it's now my default browser. The ad blocker runs pretty well, along with a customized hosts file mapping advertisers' domains to localhost. Too bad DuckDuckGo is only available as a search engine in Opera Mini beta. Looking forward to get rid of Google search.

</comment><comment><USER54> Coming from the embedded world, I have always concern about CPU loading which translates to how much power you are sucking.

I can't not understand why minimal CPU load is not on top of design requirement of many software products, totally ignored if on a desktop system.

<comment><USER55> Because PC Master Race. We only want 300FPS+ and 4k graphics, we don't care about $5 extra to our electricity bill, so why would software developers even bother with this and spend extra time and money for improving power drain?

<comment><USER54> Thanks for the laugh!

Seriously, imagine the world collective savings on energy if everyone reduces their power consumption by small modest 5%.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> Ad-blockers are taking over the internet. It seems that most people here believe that Ad-blockers must be enabled by default in browsers which is quite strange.

</comment><comment><USER57> They should also release control videos which show both machines with battery saver on or both off.</comment>