There is Little to No Relationship Between Financial Runway and Startup Success - <AUTHOR> http://www.cbinsights.com/blog/trends/startup-runway-success-fred-wilson

<comment><USER2> The author is claiming a one independent variable regression explains something. Starting with ommitted-variable bias [1], I don't think this shows much. The author only looks at

       high-tech companies which had raised a Seed or Series A round AND which had
       exited and where an exit valuation was available

a bad analysis does not create meaningful information. At bare minimum, to gain any real insights, you need to include startups that failed.

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omitted- variable_bias](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omitted-variable_bias)

<comment><AUTHOR> The analysis is only looking at whether there's a strong negative correlation between initial funding and startup success, using exit valuation as a measure, as this was Fred Wilson's assertion.

Of course, this is not meant to be predictive but rather meant to dispel the notion that a strong negative correlation exists between these two variables.

<comment><USER3> I don't see where Fred says that exit valuation is a metric. His blog post on the subject never includes the phrase "exit valuation".

[http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2013/09/maximizing-runway-can- minimi...](http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2013/09/maximizing-runway-can-minimize- success.html)

<comment><AUTHOR> He is a VC, and a good one, so success = exit valuation by definition. This is implicit when a VC is talking about success.

Fred talks about he defines success here - [http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2010/06/how-we-measure- success.html](http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2010/06/how-we-measure-success.html)

"We are financial investors and we do want to see our portfolio companies become valuable."

<comment><USER4> No, it really doesn't imply that...

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry, but I don't understand this comment. If exit size is not one of the primary metrics VCs look at and how they define success, I'm at a loss for what would be.

More specifically, how do you think USV and Fred define success? Fred says that financial returns (hence exits) are important on his own btw [1]

[1] [http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2010/06/how-we-measure- success.html](http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2010/06/how-we-measure-success.html)

<comment><USER4> Exit size doesn't matter on its own - you have to take into account how much equity you own. 40% of $100 million exit is better than 10% of $300 million - as an example. I would describe the first scenario as more successful than the second.

<comment><USER5> If you paid $50 million for the 40% and $5 million for the 10%, I think you would be hard-pressed to describe the 40% investment as more successful.

<comment><USER4> I am taking this from the founder's point of view, where no money is paid to buy the equity. You highlight the good point that it depends on the context and point of view - who's success is being talked about.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Interesting. As a nitpick, this:

      Specifically, we looked at high-tech companies which had raised a Seed or
      Series A round AND which had exited and where an exit valuation was available.

skews things, because startups that exit for less than the amount of funding received are less likely to have their acquisition price reported publicly. It eliminates points from the bottom right of the graph, which could be responsible for the apparent positive correlation. Perhaps Fred would be right if those data points weren't excluded (and he does have access to those data points for his own companies).

<comment><USER4> Good catch ... this is eliminating an adequate amount of the relevant data.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> You have to understand first the context and that is the biased view that Fred has based on the companies he / Union Square Ventures invests in - and for where he'll see the most data from.

Also, you have to define success - and success for who? If you take a larger Series A, that likely means founders are diluting more - and possibly previous investors. The idea being that if you can take as little as possible and find other means to grow and continue to develop product - other than throwing more money at it - then you'll be more 'successful' \- whatever success means to you.

If how much you sell a company for is your what you care about, and not how much equity you have out of it - then cool - but 40% of something worth $100 million, is better than 10% of something worth $300 million.

</comment><comment><USER7> It is good to look at the data, but Fred Wilson's assertion is not necessarily wrong. Data notwithstanding.

There are a large number of reasons why getting too much money is bad for a company. See the "Don't raise too much" section of [http://www.paulgraham.com/fr.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/fr.html) for some of it. If you want a much more thorough analysis (albeit in a different context), the negative dynamics of too much money are studied in detail in _The Innovator 's Solution_.

That said, investors like Fred Wilson are aware of this risk. Therefore they will attempt to avoid investing too much in companies that can't handle it. Thus the fact that a company received more money means that, in the judgement of investors, it was a company that could absorb more money. If the investors do their job well, you would therefore expect to see little to no correlation between the amount invested in a startup and the subsequent success of said startup.

The right analysis is impossible to do. But it is to compare what a competent investor (eg Fred Wilson) thought a company could handle, compared to what it got, and see if there are correlations there.

</comment><comment><USER8> Let's go to the original post [1]. Fred says "To my mind, maximizing runway is not the game startups should be playing. Getting somewhere fast is the game they should be playing." This is consistent with the VC playbook. They invest in high growth companies and want to fund expansion, not an extension of "As is".

Let's look at a few issues with the OP's analysis:

1) As others mentioned, there is a survivor bias.

2) Runway should be measured in months, not in millions. Size of funding to log size of exit is the wrong metric. Months of runway to IRR of exit is the better comparison.

3) I forgot what #3 was.

Even when the counter-argument isn't great, I still like the discussion.

[1] [http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2013/09/maximizing-runway-can- minimi...](http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2013/09/maximizing-runway-can-minimize- success.html)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the comment.

1) We include asset sales/talent acquisitions but yes, private company data is imperfect. That said, we have the best in the biz (highly biased)

2) Runway in months and millions is semantics. If you have more millions in the bank, you have a longer runway in months almost by definition. IRR of exit - not sure I follow how that is better (and more importantly, an impossible metric to get at scale for private companies)

3) Agree :)

<comment><USER8> Thanks for the reply. On #2 - isn't runway money/burnrate? I always viewed it as measured in months. "We have 12 months of runway" versus "we have 24 months". I mention this because the original Wilson post was encouraging people not to stay too lean purely to increase the runway, implying the runway could be variable for a given amount of money.

IRR data is semi public, no? Isn't it possible to see how much a company gave up in the A round by comparing valuation to money raised? Then back out the IRRvat the IPO?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Very interesting graph. But this is kinda obvious - success of startup is really about team, product and market. The way how company raises money (or not) it should not really matter. If a way how company raises money really matters, then VCs will care less about team, product, and market and more about who is investing with them and how much money is needed. Which is obviously not true...

</comment><comment><USER10> Statistically speaking, the interpretation of the regression is "there is no correlation between the duration of financial runway and a startup's exit valuation."

It could be whether or not you have a runway could impact whether or not you have an exit.

</comment><comment><USER11> In addition to the discussion here, you can also follow the discussion on fred's article here. [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6408318](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6408318)

</comment><comment><USER12> It'd be helpful to see this study normalized for ROI over time, which is arguably a better measure of VC success than exit size.

Doing so might very well make Fred's contention hold up.

</comment><comment><USER13> I'd bet on Fred Wilson being right. As a VC he has access to raw deal data that this author does not.

<comment><USER14> Does he though? Sure, for USV investments it would make sense. But I'd be surprised if other VCs shared data on their failed investments with him or his firm though.

<comment><USER13> I can't imagine a more skewed data set for fundraising and exits than news and PR. I'd much rather look at the raw data for a single firm in the absence of industry-wide data.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> It seems like someone misinterpreted here. This plot specifically excludes startups that went bankrupt or were otherwise terminated, which is what _I_ would consider "failure".

As best I can tell, this plot is "runway vs. degree of success" rather than "runway vs. rate of total failure", which I think would be the more interesting plot.

</comment><comment><USER16> Survival bias much?</comment>


Baggage Handling System – Schiphol Airport [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rv-Y0-ruzi8&feature=youtu.be <comment><USER2> This reminds me of one of my first programming jobs as external consultant for the Baggage Handling System at Schiphol in 2000/2001, I was 17 years old.

My employer at that time was using MS Excel to parse the log files of all sensors of the predecessor/older part of the system that is shown in this video. I told her that I could probably do it 10,000 times faster by creating a simple program in Visual Basic.

Visual Basic was way too slow on our "high-end" Pentium laptop to parse that many 1MB log files, so I rewrote it in C++ (learned it on the job)[1]. The managers got insight in the performance of the various components of the system which they never dreamed of having (they were hardly aware that the system was creating this detailed log messages).

By the way, the system is developed (at least partly) by Vanderlande [2].

[1] Took me a couple of days, probably even weeks back then. I would write the code in 1 or 2 hours now.

[2] [https://www.vanderlande.com/](https://www.vanderlande.com/)

</comment><comment> david-given Is there a version without the edits? Because I found this practically unwatchable; it kept cutting away just as things started to get interesting.

<comment><USER3> This video of the T5 system at Heathrow is better and shows equipment just as cool (though no robot at the end)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wn8qogHH9bM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wn8qogHH9bM)

Oh and if you want a REALLY crazy version of the Schipol video, this one is actually a 360 degree live draggable version of it - no kidding!

[http://www.schiphol.nl/Reizigers/OpSchiphol/Bagage/BagageVid...](http://www.schiphol.nl/Reizigers/OpSchiphol/Bagage/BagageVideo.htm)

<comment> david-given The first one isn't an FPV... and the second one is _also_ full of edits!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Was looking for some backgrojnd and found an overview presentation [pdf]: [http://netlipse.eu/media/77918/11nwm-bratislava-lex- pepping-...](http://netlipse.eu/media/77918/11nwm-bratislava-lex-pepping- baggage-handling-at-amsterdam-airport-schiphol-implementing-new- technologies.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER5> Wow. It's actually a miracle that this works most of the time. That suitcase is pretty standard, I could imagine a million ways how some backpack or other unusually formed piece of baggage would jam that thing.

And how on earth do they route individual packages through the system with that speed? Is there some pattern recognition system that identifies them on the fly and then routes left, right, left right, etc?

This reminds me of a funny part of a book I read about automation (and its impact on human labour), which described how modern corn mills identify bad grain: they shoot every single grain through a high speed tunnel and identify malformed (bad, moldy) grain with pattern recognition and then filter them out.

<comment><USER3> They have sets of barcode scanners dotted around routing points. With enough of them and the big barcodes on the baggage tags, they can scan most automatically. Any that fail scanning are diverted to a side belt where a human scans them with a handheld unit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> That was incredible. Remove the "flip aside" parts and it's much better than your average rollercoaster! :D

</comment><comment><USER7> This is unbelievable. How can they possibly justify the cost of this system?

<comment><USER3> Same as for any automated system: reliability and throughput.

Some of these airports are enormous, Schipol especially so. They're handling 150,000 bags per day at peak times. If you generously assume a 1% error rate ([http://panko.shidler.hawaii.edu/HumanErr/Basic.htm](http://panko.shidler.hawaii.edu/HumanErr/Basic.htm)) and that each bag is touched by only one human, then you'd be misrouting or losing 1500 bags per day, which is huge. But of course bags aren't going to be handled by just one human, there would be many making complex routing decisions, over and over again. So the true loss rate would be much worse.

Bear in mind that if the airline doesn't get the bag to the right place then the bag has to be sent onwards later, and then the airline has to pay for home delivery of the baggage. So the cost of mistakes adds up fast. Then you have the sheer amount of manpower needed to move all the bags around by hand. And not just any manpower, it often has to be _literally_ manpower because you need strong men to do this as the bags are so heavy, and they can't work long shifts because they get tired.

It's pretty easy to see how such things can be justified. You wouldn't be able to scale air travel to the current levels it sees without such systems.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> not sure if this is a new system but I flew through Schiphol a lot around 2010-2012 and the baggage was very slow. Typically half an hour wait. Whenever possible I flew with carry on as I found it frustrating to have an hour flight then half an hour wait.</comment>


Phil Hagelberg on Emacs new package manager. - <AUTHOR> http://technomancy.us/144

<comment><USER2> package.el is slick stuff. Those guys convinced me to make some of my packages ELPA-compatible when it was first starting out. It's super easy to use as a user, super easy to use as a developer, and makes it really nice to install and use dependencies for extensions.

It's totally awesome that it's in the main codebase now.

</comment><comment><USER3> Now we just need to make a tool for automating the release process. I'm imagining a minor-mode that integrates with vc to take a given tag/branch/what-have-you and upload it to Marmalade.

</dream>

<comment><USER4> I'm working on one. I'll upload it once I have the chance to finish it up.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> The idea is sound and it seemed slick when I tried to use it. Unfortunately, I got several errors when trying to install packages like Slime, Paredit and Clojure-mode. I've since manually setup those packages for myself and they work fine, so I wonder what the problem was that I encountered.

<comment><USER6> I had an enormous amount of trouble setting that stuff up, partly because I also wanted to use Common Lisp. I also was unable to uninstall any package.

Everything about package.el and ELPA has always given me the feeling that it's a bit rough. My hope is that Emacs 24 will straighten it all out.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> This requires a bit more work but is also more flexible:

<https://github.com/dimitri/el-get>

It helps you manage emacs packages and elisp that are not packaged.

</comment><comment><USER8> After hours customizing vim with pathogen and git submodules and recompiling a bunch of timed I really wish vim had something like this

</comment><comment><USER9> Last time I looked at this, they punted on interoperability with the system package manager. Are they likely to ever care about this, or is it just for people who aren't appalled at the thought of polluting individual machines with random libraries whose interdependencies are invisible in the dpkg or rpm database?

<comment><USER10> This sort of "integration" is enormously difficult. In fact, it's even ill- defined.

I challenge you to design a useful system that works, but is general enough to integrate both dpkg and rpm.

<comment><USER11> Puppet. I'm increasingly convinced that a multilevel system is required to solve this type of problem.

<comment><USER12> I agree. I think we need a protocol which is both package manager (dpkg, rpm) and environment (emacs, python, ruby) agnostic, with plugins to handle the specific cases.

I think the starting point should be an RVM/perlbrew-alike for each environment; that'll keep the environment developers and those who like to be on the bleeding-edge happy. Then plugins to handle {gem,elpa,pip,...} -> (sufficiently general intermediate format) -> {deb,rpm,msi,...}, and we're done.

Seemples.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


An Alternative to Required API Keys - <AUTHOR> http://www.jamesward.com/2013/07/29/an-alternative-to-required-api-keys <comment><USER2> One good bit of advice I have seen for people who are just starting out with publishing an API: require a "developer email" parameter in the request instead of API key.

Yes, it could be spoofed or faked. But:

* You can detect honest, accidental excessive usage and follow up by email,

* You can block new email addresses but keep the API up for existing users if hit by a randomised bot,

* You can follow up with developers, and interview them to see what they are using the API for,

* There is an obvious way to get in touch with developers to tell them about API changes,

* And you can start out with this by just logging requests to a database/file/cache, without building a full "developer portal".

<comment><USER3> Good idea, but it does have one failing.

When an API key has been compromised (e.g. a developer leaves the company on bad terms), it is much easier to change a randomly generated API key without impacting anything else. Changing an email address is a hassle for the developer, should you need to revoke the 'key' due to misuse by a third party.

Also, this should be obvious, but many people forget to use a secure transport for their APIs, which then leaks private information, such as API keys and other HTTP headers parameters whilst being sent over the wire. SSL is a _must_ for APIs.

<comment><USER2> Once the API gets to the stage where you need authentication, access controls, blocking access, proper rate-limiting or billing, you have outgrown the "email address in request" method. After all, the abuser might not be a former developer, but anyone in the world who knows your email address.

But for a first experimental API, it's much better than having _no_ info on who your users are besides an IP address pointing to AWS. And logging API requests to a text file and doing analytics manually with grep is much faster than setting up developer accounts.

<comment><USER3> Indeed, for experimental early stage APIs this is a good idea, where some info is better than none.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> > Rate limiting is one approach but it is easily gamed.

Is it? Simple IP-based rate limiting seems quite effective to all but the most determined abuser.

<comment><USER5> > _Simple IP-based rate limiting seems quite effective to all but the most > determined abuser._

Most (noticeable) abusers are quite determined. They will try Tor, then various anonymizer proxies (forcing you to block all of them or give up), then sometimes Amazon EC2 instances or other VPS, or large public proxies / ISP proxies that you cannot block. In Germany, they can also use cheap DSL where they can switch to new IP addresses almost instantaneously (T-Online is a godsend for abusers/scrapers).

<comment><USER6> What's to stop them from creating a bit that creates API keys every 5 minutes?

<comment><USER7> A delay on the API key generation or approval?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> martin-adams To me it seems like hanging would be more of a deterrent than failing requests as developers could simply retry a request on a simulated failure.

Some developers could even try to fire multiple requests and use the fastest one, effectively reducing the failure rate to the app.

It an interesting problem to solve. The one that I would like to see a solution on is allowing end users interact directly with a third party service without exposing the API key or requiring the to do any authentication.

<comment><USER8> Another approach to discourage use in production would be to randomly return incorrect or garbled data. It's still easy to use for learning, but would lead to embarrassing errors or omissions if used for something real.

<comment> martin-adams Maybe, but that would just result in less trust in quality of the service. Which errors and hangs would do also.

I'd rather see simulated data if it's purely for development purposes. You would have far more control over the conditions you need to test.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> If you're trying to put people off abusing it, wouldn't randomly failing make the situation worse? People will just code apps to try the request again until it doesn't. It'd be like inviting people to DDoS your API. So long as the display bit is asynchronous then the user will just see a spinner until it's worked and the results are sent across.

</comment><comment><USER10> _Required keys make it much harder for developers to learn new things._

Really? You fill out a form, click submit, get your key via email soon after. Or at worst, the following Monday. IMO, that's not a lot of friction.

<comment><USER11> > Or at worst, the following Monday.

For someone just starting out, having to wait the entire weekend that you planned to use for studying is pretty much a dead end.

<comment><USER12> Tell that to the Google Cast team. Saturday morning: "Hmm, how does this stuff work? Oh, I've got to get a key..." Monday night, 11PM: "Here's your key!"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> how hard is it to run a second, smaller server for "learning" that doesn't get rate limited but also doesn't have full access? Maybe it even only has access to a fake data set, no real data.</comment>


House Republicans Move To Increase H1B Visa Quota - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/04/21/house-republicans-move-to-increase-h1b-visa-quota/ <comment><USER2> I just wish they'd clear a path to faster H1B->GC conversions for would-be startup geeks!</comment>


How much difference is there between MP3, CD and 24-bit audio? - <AUTHOR> http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/aug/21/mp3-cd-24-bit-audio-music-hi-res

<comment><USER2> _But that difference wasn't always a good thing. It was disappointing to hear a recording of Pavarotti's Nessun Dorma sound worse in studio master, as it exposed the fact that the orchestra and the tenor's tracks were recorded separately in different environments. They sounded disconnected – something that is masked in the CD version._

That's similar to what happens with digital cameras and HDTV...you see a lot of detail that you couldn't with standard definition, and somehow a bit of the warmth and magic is lost. I remember reading an article by a television makeup artist about how HDTV changed their approach. On HD, you can now see small details like stubble, acne, and pores, so they end up putting on thicker foundation to smooth it out and make it more like standard definition. I wonder if HD audio will take a similar path, by "smoothing" out the audio to make it more like standard definition.</comment>


Functional Programming with Bananas, Lenses, Envelopes and Barbed Wire (1991) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://eprints.eemcs.utwente.nl/7281/01/db-utwente-40501F46.pdf

<comment><USER2> By Meijer, E ; Fokkinga, M ; Paterson, R // Abstract:

> We develop a calculus for lazy functional programming based on recursion > operators associated with data type definitions.

> For these algebraic operators we derive various algebraic laws that are > useful in deriving and manipulating programs.

> We shall show that all example functions in Bill & Wadler's "Introduction to > Functional Programming" can be expressed in these operators.

Is this the beginning of Haskell?

<comment><USER3> Haskell is particularly amenable to working with these morphisms because can be lazy and can be point-free, but that's really as far as the connection goes. This is something that you would need to build in Haskell.

It's worth saying that this paper isn't really about introducing new concepts. Instead this is about creating a new vocabulary in the form of a calculus for the construction of recursive functions.</comment></comment>


Everything is broken (2014) - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/message/everything-is-broken-81e5f33a24e1 <comment><USER2> One thing not addressed here is: I can make better software. I can fix these problems. I can find them first, and then fix them. I _can't_ do that when I'm under ridiculous time pressure from an "agile coach" who barely knows what an Excel macro is but who, for some reason, is responsible for deciding what gets prioritized and who gets a bonus and who gets downsized. I can't identify and correct complex technical problems when I'm attending a one-hour daily "scrum" explaining that yes, I'm still working on "task" 5398129 and yes, it was a 4 "point" story (because that's the maximum we're allowed), but as it turns out, almost everything interesting and useful is also complex -- in direct opposition to the mindset that drives the oxymoronic atrocity that people now refer to as "agile".

<comment><USER3> Another way I've seen this put: we can already write software that's reliable the way bridges are reliable. The only problem is that people don't want to pay for it, wait for it, or accommodate it.

Cleanroom development supposedly lead to production code with 1 bug per 10k lines back in the 80s, and NASA famously managed Shuttle code with 0 bugs in 500,000 checked lines. Other projects like Ariane 5 were not so lucky, but the general error rate is still incredibly low. To my knowledge, software in general has killed fewer spacecraft than other narrow issues like voltage inconsistencies or launch vibrations. And after the Therac-25 incident, medical device software has followed similar a development track. Even automotive software, subjected to far fewer restrictions and more varied environments, has a better critical-failure track record than well-understood components like brakes and tires.

Producing software like that is orders of magnitude more expensive than producing 'normal' code. It takes far longer, in ways that more money can't neatly displace. It rarely talks to other systems, because doing so requires exhaustive testing at the interface (for every version), or testing both systems as one (with exponential testing requirements). And it's severely limited in range; freeform inputs and best-guess behavior when adjacent systems fail are out of the question.

There are institutional changes that could bring us better software under existing constraints, definitely. But it's also true that the general approach to design is sort of hopeless; the sheer amount of software getting built is inconsistent with what rigorous design looks like in pretty much any field.

<comment><USER4> > Producing software like that is orders of magnitude more expensive than > producing 'normal' code.

Yes. Which I think points out that it's not exactly just a question of _will_ or _desire_, that we don't "want" to pay for it, wait for it, accomodate it.

It would mean anyone producing software would need _an order of magnitude more money_ to do it.

If we're talking about all software... it seems likely that our society literally could not afford it.

I suppose we could produce an order of magnitude _less but good software_ instead.

But we've built a society which is largely based on software, and been able to afford it as a society only because it's largely based on crappy software.

<comment><USER3> > _it 's not exactly just a question of _will_ or _desire_, that we don't > "want" to pay for it... It would mean anyone producing software would need > _an order of magnitude more money_ to do it._

This is a huge point, thank you.

I frequently see these discussions go down the road of personal responsibility, as in "you can't just say that it's ok for you to build things poorly because someone else would have done it if you didn't". Which is narrowly true, but strongly implies that bad code comes from individual programmers choosing to do things the easy way. The reality is that individual programmers _can 't_ choose to code this way, certainly not outside OSS. It's a structural difference that requires resources to enact.

> _it seems likely that our society literally could not afford it... we 've > built a society which is largely based on software, and been able to afford > it as a society only because it's largely based on crappy software._

And so there's the second major issue.

We're producing software at the sort of pace associated with simple consumer goods. If you're designing a new desk organizer, you can do it without much testing, meeting basic standards like "won't fall apart quickly during normal use" and "isn't made of something poisonous to touch". An engineer might well be involved, but they're looking at issues like ease of manufacture and shipment. Someone designing a basic website or app faces the same conditions: the product will fail if it doesn't work right or is unreliable, and they might face legal trouble if it directly causes harm during normal use.

I keep seeing people - including smart, influential programmers - suggest that software development lacks oversight and needs rigorous professional organizations and licenses to practice. Yonatan Zunger, as an example, draws a comparison to bridge collapses and the development of nuclear weapons, then a proposes a licensing regime like those in civil engineering, law, and medicine. ([https://twitter.com/yonatanzunger/status/975545527973462016?...](https://twitter.com/yonatanzunger/status/975545527973462016?s=21))

Frankly, this seems nuts to me. 99.9%+ of software development is lower-stakes than bridge design, and it has enough benefits that constraining it to the pace and price of bridge design has real downsides.

I do see obvious spaces for improvement, like ensuring that there are meaningful costs for companies that lose PII while neglecting basic precautions. But if we're going to keep producing software at even a significant fraction of what we do today, there's probably no way around falling far short of 'best practices' development.

<comment><USER4> Yep. But I'm less sanguine than you about it. While it's true that most software is lower stakes than bridge design, I can't help but thinking basing huge and ever-increasing parts of our economic and social life on software that is _complete crap_ is going to bite us hard eventually.

> But if we're going to keep producing software at even a significant fraction > of what we do today

As a software engineer, I kind of think maybe we _shouldn't be_. Yes, there's little likelyhood of any way out of at this point...

So if nothing else, I'm a lot less dismissive of efforts to promote professional standards than you are, as at least _some_ attempt to respond to the pile of crap we are helping to provide as a foundation for social and economic life. While some software needs more care than others, under capitalism software gets only as much care as required for short-term profits, and we get a giant pile of crap which will at best be a constant annoyance to all of us, and at worst increasingly harm us all.

<comment><USER3> > _While it 's true that most software is lower stakes than bridge design, I > can't help but thinking basing huge and ever-increasing parts of our > economic and social life on software that is _complete crap_ is going to > bite us hard eventually._

Sadly, I think you're right.

I only laid out part of my view: most coding isn't comparable to bridge design and shouldn't be attempted that manner, and attempts to seriously slow down software development are probably hopeless now that we're so immersed.

But I share your fears, because most software falls in the wide gulf between bridge design and desk organizer design. It may not do anything terribly high- stakes, but neither is it a single user per instance and a constrained failure mode. Even simple projects are often public-facing, and running alongside more significant things. Many are open to user input, rely on external dependencies, and gather relatively sensitive info like "who read what".

The standard failure case for software really has no comparison in mass- produced goods: one user employing a flaw in the product to harm another user. It's stuff like Magecart, which unpredictably harms users in settings where no one they knowingly dealt with was malicious or negligent. Worse, software tends to have major exposure to adjacent software and hardware; not only do attacks like XSS turn low-importance software into a threat vector, but major companies (e.g. Lenovo, Sony, Sennheiser) keep shipping _hardware_ that compromises everything running on a machine. Honestly, software seems to fail more like monetary and political systems, where malice converts small mistakes into large, indirect harms.

(And all of that is just how failures happen _now_. Crap like NPM left-pad suggests that we could see serious global outages over trivial errors, and any major threat like Heartbleed or Spectre could become a disaster if the wrong people get there first.)

I'm still pretty dismissive of professional standards, but it's not for lack of concern. There are definitely appealing aspects, especially when I see things like companies using and defending plaintext password storage. I'd like to live in a world where people are at least _told_ why that's bad practice before they do it, and maybe a world where there's some kind of authority to intercede with the idiots who steadfastly defend it after being taught.

I just fundamentally don't think they'll work for most of what ails us, and I except bad faith to become a problem almost immediately. The examples I see cited aren't just fields with high-stakes work, but ones with defined owners producing linear throughput; a few engineers design one bridge, a doctor treats one patient at a time. Indirect failures happen, bolts shear and drugs have side-effects, but even there chain of custody and area of responsibility can be clearly defined. But software seems to function more similarly to fields like banking, politics, or even intelligence, where effects are nonlinear, often extraterritorial, and ownership of output isn't clear. Professional standards bodies in those fields, even ostensibly powerful ones, seem to incessantly come up short or late. And that's before the infighting starts; already it seems like most calls for standards groups slide near- instantly from "banning malpractice" to "banning work I consider immoral".

Perhaps I'm not so much sanguine as fatalistic. There is too much software being produced, but I'm not sure how to fight that without crippling existing dependencies. There are a few legal changes I'd very much like to see, centered around making companies financially responsible for harms from bad practice so that they at least have to worry about profits. But overall, this feels more like a dilemma than a problem; we've already baked in so many major risks that it's not clear we have a way back.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I agree with most of the article. However, what I do disagree with is how they lump "security experts" into a single category:

 _Computer experts like to pretend they use a whole different, more awesome class of software that they understand, that is made of shiny mathematical perfection and whose interfaces happen to have been shat out of the business end of a choleric donkey._

I'm sorry, but there are vastly different grades of security experts. Security experts make Kali Linux. I'm pretty sure everyone runs their user as root despite it being created by security experts.

Now, look at the OpenBSD developers in comparison. Sure, bugs are found as they inevitably are, but they make it very difficult to take advantage of bugs that might be disastrous on other operating systems. They use privilege separation throughout their operating system (and packages if possible), announced recently their way of making ROP-chain exploits basically useless, and relink their kernel any time it's booted so that no two instances are alike (even if it's the same version on another computer). Using defense in depth is key. Unfortunately it's easy to talk yourself up in this field and not walking the walk.

There's a reason OpenSSH is such a highly deployed application and yet isn't constantly having RCE bugs. Sure there are bugs (as all software inevitably has), but there are definitely different degrees of security experts that the article fails to mention and lumps them all in one bucket.

</comment><comment><USER6> Interesting article.

The first 75% I would send to my non-technical friends and family as well as the technical ones, as an awareness builder.

The last 25% are a surprising call for action (surprising as from the tone of article, I expected it to be a fun rant only). It's tricky because a lot of people tend to discount knowledge imparted once they perceive it was with the objective of persuading you to The Cause. It makes the informational portion more suspect of cherry picking or bias. In other words, while I personally agree both with the technical rant, _and_ the call to action, I feel majority of my friends would react negatively to two of them together, just on general principles/reflexes.

Not sure what the solution would be; perhaps two linked articles - first the rant, and then a link to "Proposed solution" article at the bottom? Most people I know would react better if they felt they were in control of asking for solution guidance, rather than part of a seeming bait & switch...

</comment><comment><USER7> Postgres was misusing fsync for 20 years. Yes, everything is broken.

I'm actually thinking it might be worth snapshotting my bank accounts, to make sure super reliable bank software doesn't lose my money. At the end of the day it is written by the same folks as me :)

<comment><USER8> The number of programming fuckups (or bugs - call them what you want) causing me real life stress seems to be increasing exponentially as I'm getting older

<comment><USER9> That's because the amount of software affecting your real world ("meatspace") life is increasing exponentially _without_ a corresponding decline in bugs- per-line.

This is a real problem, we have to adopt exponentially safer code generation methods or reduce the absolute amount of code in use, or both. (Or we can kiss our asses goodbye.)

<comment><USER10> I would say the number of bugs increases, because ASA you push stuff out there is never enough time to refactor and fix. Because well.. too many ppl think it "does not bring money"

<comment><USER11> Not completely sure about that. Grew up in the early industry and it was rife with complete crap software. Really the only thing somewhat protecting the software at that time was the lack of internet access and threats. Attempting to use that same software now would lead it to be exploited in minutes.

I remember messing with Windows 95 with IE 3 installed. It was really easy to create. NetMeeting shortcut that would crash with a buffer overflow error.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Reminds me of Programming Sucks: [https://www.stilldrinking.org/programming- sucks](https://www.stilldrinking.org/programming-sucks)

</comment><comment><USER13> A classic perennial favorite.

Everyone shakes their head knowingly about the problem, but whenever someone here suggests using safer and saner tools, the response is howls of protest.

"Buggy code is the developer's fault. Just try harder!"

"It's BNF/not BNF!"

"It uses/doesn't use types!"

"It doesn't let you achieve the last epsilon of speed!"

"It doesn't allow/does wrong my preferred form of prototypes/mixins/inheritance!"

"Everybody is using something else!"

"This is fine."

</comment><comment><USER14> "Facebook and Google seem very powerful, but they live about a week from total ruin all the time. ... The US government would fall to a general revolt in a matter of days. It wouldn't take a total defection or a general revolt to change everything, because corporations and governments would rather bend to demands than die. These entities do everything they can get away with — but we've forgotten that we're the ones that are letting them get away with things."

Amen, is all I have to say to that</comment>


How to prepare yourself for a good end of life - <AUTHOR> https://www.sfchronicle.com/opinion/openforum/article/How-to-prepare-yourself-for-the-good-end-of-life-13622599.php <comment><USER2> "Hospice nurses often list five emotional tasks for the end of life: thank you, I love you, please forgive me, I forgive you, and goodbye."

That's a pretty good list. Some of us might also add, "See you in Hell", but that's just me.</comment>


Promising new search microservice (Docker/Lucene based) - <AUTHOR> https://hub.docker.com/r/qwazr/search/ <comment><AUTHOR> Guys, feel free to test and give us feedback. 5 minutes quick start using Docker and curl.</comment>


Which smartphone has the best battery life? - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.which.co.uk/technology/smartphones/which-smartphone-has-the-best-battery-life/

<comment><USER2> You mean over all versions, OSes, networks, and locations? I believe someone built a smartphone with a gsm board and E ink that lasted several weeks on one charge. I'll try to find a link if you are interested.</comment>


Self-Hosting Google Web Fonts - <AUTHOR> http://ranf.tl/2014/12/23/self-hosting-google-web-fonts/ <comment><USER2> I self-host fonts for my website, but I only use WOFF. You don't need to use SVG, TTF or EOT unless you want to provide full support for all browsers. If you are happy to provide support for recent, modern browsers only, you can simplify things by just self-hosting WOFF files:

[http://caniuse.com/#feat=woff](http://caniuse.com/#feat=woff)

For browsers that don't support WOFF, just specify a browser-safe font in your CSS. Those browsers will ignore the Woff declaration and use the browser-safe font instead.

EDIT: As far as file size goes, I use two font weights on my site: Source Sans Pro regular and bold. Each font weighs 27kb - so 54kb in total. This is much less than many Javascript libraries and third-party embeds.

Here's my site (hope it's fine to link) - it's admittedly very simple and has no Javascript (although Javascript is needed to load the fonts!). In the end you have to weigh up the balance between page weight and performance for your own site.

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

<comment><USER3> > although Javascript is needed to load the fonts!

Why do you feel the need to use JS for font-loading?

<comment><USER2> Sorry, I worded my original post poorly. You need Javascript _enabled_ to load fonts. For example, in Firefox, the WOFF fonts won't display unless Javascript is enabled (even if you have no Javascript on the page).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> You can get all the fonts here... [https://code.google.com/p/googlefontdirectory/](https://code.google.com/p/googlefontdirectory/)

<comment><AUTHOR> AFAIK there aren't any .woff, .woff2, .svg, .eot in there + no CSS snippets to use them. Also 2.5GB is quite a big download.

<comment><USER4> Yup yup true. Not exactly the same thing. I downloaded them all once to figure out why one of them was dying on Windows 98... just remembered that when I saw the article.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm curious - why would you want to host these yourself? Don't your users then lose the benefit of caching (e.g. if they also visit other sites which use the same fonts).

<comment><USER6> It is especially useful in China. Since google is blocked, we can not use google font apis as well.

<comment><USER7> Woah, interesting. Thanks very much for bringing this up, didn't know!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Doesn't Google do some user-agent sniffing for requests for their webfonts to optimize for the target platform?

I guess you would lose these optimizations by hosting them yourself.

<comment><AUTHOR> Based on your User-Agent, Google's CSS service only responds with a CSS to either a .woff, .woff2 .eot, .svg or .ttf font file. For local hosting you'll need to order these formats in a compatibility sequence, so every browser gets the one it supports (nice writeup here: [http://css- tricks.com/snippets/css/using-font-face/](http://css- tricks.com/snippets/css/using-font-face/)).

As all files are the exact same ones Google is hosting in the wild, I don't feel like you'll lose any optimizations (which might be the case when using font generation services like FontSquirrel).

<comment><USER9> That's not correct. I just downloaded the same google font css using different user agents, one for Windows Google Chrome and one for OS X Google Chrome. CSS were different, both specified .woff2 format but actual font URLs were different. And downloaded .woff2 files were different as well. I used Open Sans font for that test. [http://pastebin.com/edYbfxzU](http://pastebin.com/edYbfxzU) here's log, you can try it yourself.

<comment><AUTHOR> Wow, Thanks you for this paste!

I'll look into that and maybe provide some additional fonts on a per OS/Browser basis to download. The main problem is that it's impossible to have a static CSS snippet AND provide different files per User-Agent (a javascript solution might help). So until I've found a solution to this, you are absolutely right, these optimizations will get lost on local use!

For reference: I'm currently using the following User-Agents for fetching the font file urls from Google's CSS: [http://pastebin.com/5SZ1Q6kj](http://pastebin.com/5SZ1Q6kj)

<comment><USER10> I was going to mention this also. I'm currently working around it with conditional comments (serving /fonts/ie/9+/index.css, etc).

Anyway, thanks for your service, bookmarked... (I've been thinking of doing something similar). Good luck with finding a solution to this problem...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Or you could host versions (of the fonts in Google Web Fonts) that actually look good: [http://brick.im/](http://brick.im/)

<comment><USER12> In what way do Google Web Fonts not "look good"? That page seems to imply that Google has modified the fonts in some way but doesn't give any details.

<comment><USER13> I'm a day late, but I remember Brick from a while back: [https://github.com/alfredxing/brick](https://github.com/alfredxing/brick) discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7406287](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7406287)

There are examples of Brick v GF, Brick does indeed look better (to me), but at the expense of file size. The same fonts in the examples are twice the size of GF.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Are you allowed to do this with fonts you got from Google under their terms of service?

I always figured they reason they didn't make it easy themselves was cause they didn't allow it, but never actually checked. I would kind of like to serve google fonts with cache-forever headers -- google strangely doesn't. I'd also like to package them up in a web project I'd like to make runnable from local file system without internet.

<comment><USER3> All Google fonts are free to use, commercially or otherwise. They even provide a way to download all the fonts.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> One thing I really wish people would "get" is font variants... even font squirrel messes this one up.. you should set up variants to the same family, with the appropriate weight and decoration set...

In general I only specify what I will actually be using, but knowing the difference is helpful... I wish more font packs would do the right thing here.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Attention!

Former downloads only provided fonts with the default Latin subset, this has been resolved (charsets are selectable). I'm sorry if this causes any inconvenience (please keep in mind, it's still a prototype)...

[https://google-webfonts-helper.herokuapp.com](https://google-webfonts- helper.herokuapp.com)

</comment><comment><USER16> Great project! This deserves a high profile.

</comment><comment><USER17> Hm, wonder if this somehow is against their TOS?

<comment><USER18> Google Fonts follows the Google API TOS. As far as I read it: no, as long as there aren't any further restrictions on the font by third parties.

> d. Data Portability

> Google supports data portability. For as long as you use or store any user > data that you obtained through the APIs, you agree to enable your users to > export their equivalent data to other services or applications of their > choice in a way that's substantially as fast and easy as exporting such data > from Google products and services, subject to applicable laws, and you agree > that you will not make that data available to third parties who do not also > abide by this obligation.

but also

> a. Content Accessible Through our APIs

> Our APIs contain some third party content (such as text, images, videos, > audio, or software). This content is the sole responsibility of the person > that makes it available. We may sometimes review content to determine > whether it is illegal or violates our policies or the Terms, and we may > remove or refuse to display content. Finally, content accessible through our > APIs may be subject to intellectual property rights, and, if so, you may not > use it unless you are licensed to do so by the owner of that content or are > otherwise permitted by law. Your access to the content provided by the API > may be restricted, limited, or filtered in accordance with applicable law, > regulation, and policy.

<comment><USER19> "As far as I read it: no, as long as there aren't any further restrictions on the font by third parties."

My reading of 5e says the opposite. That 'unless expressly permitted by content owners' you shouldn't be allowing caching of content provided via Google APIs.

<comment><USER18> I think we are arguing the same thing: It's the content owners decision, not Googles.

Considering that most (all?) fonts on Google Fonts are open (most I checked use SIL or Apache as license), downloading is most likely allowed.

<comment><USER19> Perhaps we are arguing the same thing ultimately, but it's important to understand the distinction Google is attempting to make. They're basically trying to cover themselves by asserting that they are not granting any additional freedom beyond what the designer intended. Relicensing without permission is copyright infringement-- Google doesn't want the headache. Their safest course is to specify that unless you've been given license to do certain things by the content owner, that Google themselves is not licensing you to do those things.

Think of it like an affirmation from an open source project licensed under an MIT or BSD license. Although they might include GPL code from elsewhere, they'll generally state that they're not relicensing someone else's GPL code under the less restrictive license.

<comment><USER18> Yes, we are. Thanks for the writeup.

Probably the biggest issue for the service will be to make sure that licensing is ensured. (see [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8802833](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8802833))

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> You are my hero... Thank you so much!

</comment><comment><USER21> Applause!!!! I hate Google Web Fonts for their horrible interface to OPEN SOURCE FONTS for which they don't offer download links. It should be prosecuted as a crime. What the hell Google?

<comment><USER22> > _they don 't offer download links_

1\. Add fonts to your collection.

2\. Click the download button in the upper right corner.

<comment><USER20> I bet you did not even try that :-) Or you would have known..

that it does not offer all formats in one convenient package.</comment></comment></comment>


Do you want a C++ t-shirt? - <AUTHOR> http://blog.p-jansson.com/2009/12/do-you-want-c-t-shirt.html

<comment><USER2> I don't get it.

At least the ObjC guys came up with a clever one: <http://www.cafepress.com/objc.2130573></comment>


Lego Saturn V - <AUTHOR> https://ideas.lego.com/blogs/1-blog/post/137 <comment><USER3> For those that are surprised that it's "so expensive", LEGO is usually very expensive (and totally worth it.) This is only 119 euros/dollars (same for both) and I know I'll be buying it both for myself and as a gift for my best friend (unless she gets it for herself first.)

LEGO sets have an average price per piece of around 10 cents, which has been pretty stable since the late 70s [0]. With 1969 pieces (which is a fantastic number) you'd expect the set to cost $216.59 at the current average of 11 cents per piece, so this is a fantastic deal.

It's also a meter high (about 3 foot 4 for the Americans) which is really fantastic.

[0] [https://flowingdata.com/2013/02/07/analysis-of-lego-brick- pr...](https://flowingdata.com/2013/02/07/analysis-of-lego-brick-prices-over- the-years/)

<comment><USER4> For anyone curious why the price for a piece of plastic is so high, the molds are built to ridiculous tolerances for the plastic industry. [https://www.wired.com/2013/02/retired-lego-mold- reddit/](https://www.wired.com/2013/02/retired-lego-mold-reddit/)

<comment><USER5> Well, there's also that 32.8% LEGO Group operating margin...

<comment><USER6> Yes, they deliver value for money and profit from it! Great and more power to them! It's a show of how much greater in value their product is to their customers than the sum of its constituent parts/labor (or, put another way, its cost).

Whenever someone goes out of their way to complain about the profit someone makes (as though its dirty somehow) I always wonder... have you ever calculated your own profit margin? Having a job is rarely free and, unless you you're just living off prior earnings/trust fund/etc. this is a figure you can come up with. Most people I've known, including myself over time (I've for worked everything from minimum wage to very healthy salaries), have done pretty well in the profit margin percentage area as compared to the 32.8% markup you cite.

To be fair, you certainly didn't register a complaint per se in your comment, but something to think about before making that complaint.

<comment><USER7> +1 Making money isn't bad.

<comment><USER8> -1 Off-topic.

(I just explained why Lego is expensive. Nothing else.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Can you imagine how large and expensive this would be if it were minifig- scale? The minifigs that come with it are maybe half-size. That just goes to show how incredibly massive Saturn V really was!

Edit: Imagination no longer required.

> Ryan "The Brickman" McNaught, one of only 13 LEGO Certified Professionals, > has built an 18.7 foot (5.7 meter) tall Saturn V with launch umbilical tower > using 120,000 bricks. It took him 250 hours to build.

[http://www.collectspace.com/ubb/Forum16/HTML/000764.html](http://www.collectspace.com/ubb/Forum16/HTML/000764.html)

<comment><USER10> Holy crap, I've seen a Saturn V and but it took this to make the standing size sink in.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> As an adult who has had to deal with a Lego addiction, my suggestion is IF you have an addictive personality and not money to burn - please .. don't start. I sunk 1-2 grand into sets - for me it wasn't worth it. The old legos were a lot better. Reusable pieces that make them an investment. The newer sets often have special purpose pieces and instructions to just build 2-3 models. I thought I was learning about mechanical stuff - differential steering, inside of an engine, etc. Frankly, watching Youtube videos is a much more cost effective way of learning. What is the worst thing of it all - <USER2> scarcity. I'd buy sets I didn't really care for because I was afraid they would go out of stock. This has happened to some of the popular sets where scalpers charge 10x. They even have web sites where people do this full time. Just say no.

<comment><USER12> If you want to learn mechanics with LEGO, you don't want a particular set -- you want a book.

You want the Unofficial LEGO Technic Builder's Guide: [https://www.nostarch.com/technicbuilder](https://www.nostarch.com/technicbuilder)

which is an excellent reference for how to build steering mechanisms, differentials, transmissions, suspensions... and Sariel usually offers two or three different ways of accomplishing any given goal.

Highly recommended.

<comment><USER13> The Mindstorms kits, a few pounds of technic parts are also pretty good for dipping your toe into robotics. The Mindstorms have instructions on building line-following cars and a variety of other things.

I have fond memories of hacking together a 10 dpi photocopier using the light sensor and a few motors.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> There's a bit of an easter egg if you check out the number of pieces in the kit.

<comment><USER15> It's neat to think of the buildmasters coming up with a part count of (say) 1985 and realizing, "Hey, we could..."

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I have an ongoing moratorium about buying Lego, but extraordinary circumstances require extraordinary measures.

I will have this set.

<comment><USER17> This is the first set I've ever heard about pre-release. I imagine it will be pretty popular.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I never understood Lego kits... The whole point of a construction set is to be able to build many different things, possibly unimagined to the producer. But the Legos are usually limited to one or two predefined models.

<comment><USER19> Although that's strictly true, I'd say it's definitely more true (closer to true?) now than 30-40 years ago. The proliferation of specialized pieces has definitely had a negative effect on their reusability IMO.

My concern is that, due to the much greater number of unique pieces, the increased difficulty of organizing a collection, or finding the piece you need in an unorganized pile, or even just being able to visualize what it is you want to build will tend to discourage kids from making their own creations. Hopefully I'm wrong about that.

<comment><USER20> I think you're overestimating the number of specialized pieces out there. This is easy to do when you walk down the toy aisle at Walmart and see thirty big box Star Wars models, each with one or two unique pieces. But Lego actually makes so many models that don't use any specialized pieces. When I started looking at their website I was surprised to see that the boxes you see at the toy store seem to be the exception--probably because they sell so much better if they can pull off that iconic look that one or two cover pieces provide. I've been buying the Creator Expert series for a while now (Really cute rowhouse style models) that iirc don't use any uniques.

<comment><USER19> I can believe that there's less of a difference when mainly comparing models of buildings. My opinion is based on comparing my Lego collection (primarily Expert Builder/Technics, Legoland Space, and general purpose Creator-like sets from ~30 years ago), and my son's collection (not as large, no Technics, mostly vehicles), which is at most a few years old. There is definitely a very big difference between those two collections. Also, my point (which I realize now I didn't convey very well) was not that there are so many _unique_ pieces, it's that the diversity of non-unique pieces has greatly increased.

<comment><USER21> But you can still buy the creator sets, and they use general purpose pieces?

<comment><USER19> Yes, they do, there are just a lot more different kinds of "general purpose pieces" than in the past.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> It has 1969 pieces. Seriously? Who worked that one out? Kudos.

<comment><USER17> I can imagine the builders getting to 1968 pieces and having to find one more to fit in somewhere.

<comment><USER13> The plates for under those minifigs are suspiciously unnecessary....

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I have had zero desire to personally own any Lego set till now.

I MUST HAVE THIS! I am afraid when my birthday comes around it will be sold out.

</comment><comment><USER24> I built one of these as a kid complete with lander and orbiting module. Colours were accurate too.

Around that age I also built a bomber plane with cruise missile. I was inspired by Greenham Common and the news! My parents did not think that was so good.

All the adults were impressed by our creations, plus our child view of the world. So that Saturn rocket would be subtly on show rather than thrown in the box. We had feedback on our creations and played to the crowd.

I am sure brick economics would have me not getting every piece optimal, however there would be few spare bricks. I doubt our version would compare to this fancy kit version though. Therefore the original mega project would not have been attempted had the new kit been available, it would enforce a requirement to have the special bricks rather than be extra resourceful.

Yes I will buy this for my sister in memory of those happy times, to be a familiar object on the shelf for her newborn to eventually play with. It will be there ready.

</comment><comment><USER25> Ok... One - Do want, yes. Two - Might there be an accompanying launch pad gantry set in the future? :)

<comment> 52-6F-62 It would be so much more difficult to display well... but god I hope so.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> I'm definitely buying this.

I've got a yearly pass to Kennedy Space Center, but I don't even live in the US. Still, I've been there more than four times just this year, and even watched a rocket launch from the LC-39 gantry. I've been to the Apollo/Saturn V center a number of times and the sheer size of the rocket gets me every time. I watch rocket launches all the time on the web, and am constantly awed by what engineers can accomplish, not least with SpaceX landing rockets like parking a car these days. I'm a total space nerd.

This package is epic, even down to the number of pieces. I _need_ it.

</comment><comment><USER27> Usually traditional toys experiencing a boom in expensive collector behavior means the crash is coming up. Look at greatest gen / early boomers and baseball cards. So that part is sad, when lego is gone because a generation of kids grew up where its too expensive to play with I'm going to miss it. But time moves on. Hard to predict exactly how much my kids will pay for Minecraft memorabilia when they're in their 40s... bet it will be near $119 inflation adjusted LOL as per this article. Maybe 2040 will have a re-release of the original iphone.

</comment><comment><USER28> [https://www.amazon.com/Bandai-Tamashii-Nations-Vehicle- Chogo...](https://www.amazon.com/Bandai-Tamashii-Nations-Vehicle- Chogokin/dp/B00C4MDDAG/ref=pd_lpo_vtph_21_tr_img_3?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=5CM0CE8F2A2RF779N87F)

I prefer real scale models over Lego

</comment><comment><USER29> Beats the crap out of the Saturn Vue model.

<comment><USER29> [https://thelegocarblog.com/tag/saturn/](https://thelegocarblog.com/tag/saturn/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> I'll probably get ridiculed for saying, but i just don't think Legos look very much like Legos anymore. They don't have that blocky Lego shape/look.

This is a beautiful model. Looks like a model though and not a Lego set.

<comment><USER4> Websites don't have that blocky '90s shape/look now either. There's an eerie parallel where both the Web and LEGO have moved increasingly from a place of "limited aesthetic suggestions so you can build anything you want" to "it's gonna be much easier for you if you play/watch/live within a walled garden with highly scripted interactions from the entertainment/advertising industry." It's interesting that Minecraft has risen as a reaction to this trend.

<comment><USER31> Huh. Everything on the web is just blocks. Simplified, minimal block layouts, that are mobile focused. Even rounded buttons are gone.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Do these go onsale at midnight on 6/1? Are Lego sellouts common?

<comment><USER33> I know the Research Institute sold out several times and was often hard to get.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Dang I'm excited for this. After not being able to get a lego curiosity rover for a reasonable price, I'm hoping these won't sell out instantly...

<comment><USER35> Yeah. I hope I will be able to pick one up for roughly the price they announced here. I could see this getting bumped up to $300+ from people buying just to resell!

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Where can I pre order?

<comment><USER37> The best you can do is set up a bot to buy it as soon as it's available.

<comment><USER7> They also have a few days of early release on some sets via Lego.com VIP program. They don't always announce them. The brickheads were this way for a while.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Fwiw, there is an untrue statement in the article:

"With 1969 LEGO elements the 21309 NASA Apollo Saturn V rockets its way into LEGO Ideas history as the tallest LEGO Ideas set, as well as the one containing most elements."

The last part is incorrect, the Lego set with the most pieces was Taj Mahal with 5922 pieces, way more than this: [http://lego.wikia.com/wiki/10189_Taj_Mahal](http://lego.wikia.com/wiki/10189_Taj_Mahal)

Edit: I misread that, thanks for the clarification.

<comment><USER39> They weren't claiming it had the most pieces of any Lego set, but that it had the most pieces of any Lego Ideas set, Ideas being the program for fans to submit their own designs for sets.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> what's the best way to insure I can get one of these ? without spending hours writing a bot for it ...

<comment><USER41> Go to a lego store after they launch, buy it. Even the rare porsche was widely available. There hasn't been a lego set I "missed" because I didn't order it the second it was available, and I even have the "ultra rare" 4x4 remote control car.

</comment></comment><comment> 52-6F-62 I want that.

</comment><comment><USER42> Costs like a rocket - Kerbal Space Program would be much cheaper and much more interesting present/purchase

<comment><USER43> Compare the size and piece count to something like a large Star Wars model like the Mellenium Falcon ([https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B00WI0PJE2/](https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B00WI0PJE2/)), $120 for ~1300 pieces. I'm surprised this model's MSRP is so low! I would happily pay ~$200 for this.

Kerbal would likely be more expensive due to licensing fees -- the Saturn 5 is public domain.

<comment><USER44> I think Kerbal being cheaper = buying KSP itself is cheaper/more interesting, not a model of a KSP rocket would be cheaper.</comment></comment></comment>


Deloitte Announces Growing Blockchain Initiative and Services - <AUTHOR> http://bitcoinist.net/deloitte-announces-growing-blockchain-initiative/ <comment><USER2> I'm a programmer in Fintech and it feels like a blockchain bubble in it's early stage. There are a bunch of suits running around screaming "we need blockchain!". It's a feeding frenzy. It's a great time to do a blockchain related startup.

</comment><comment><USER3> When you have no need to solve the Byzantine general problem, why get involved with the Blockchain and all its overhead and slow throughput? Why not just use a versioning database?

</comment><comment><USER4> In all these Fintech initiatives, I have not read a single line about what will secure the unforkability of their block chain; Which is Bitcoin's innovation.

How will they do it? Random election? Vote? Majority? Everyone can veto?

I guess that in a network of firms who already work together, and already have reconciliation rules, you need less trust.

So is this just the Fintech industry realizing they need to upgrade from their hand-made batch settling at the end of the day to a real time shared ledger?

<comment><USER5> Hah. Yes, from my overview, that pretty much seems like what's going on. Oh well, as long as they upgrade their laughably antiquated systems, all's well, even if they have to justify with buzzwords and tech hype.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I've spent the last two days at the Hyperledger Project [0] face to face [1], there was a lot of fintech representation. Disclosure: I'm employed by LF, working as staff at this event.

[0] [https://www.hyperledger.org/](https://www.hyperledger.org/) [1] [https://github.com/hyperledger/hyperledger/wiki/Technical- St...](https://github.com/hyperledger/hyperledger/wiki/Technical-Steering- Committee)

</comment><comment><USER7> Consultants have been making a big push for the block chain. SWIFT announced last month it is working with Accenture to develop a distributed ledger with block chain technology[0].

[0] [https://www.swift.com/insights/press-releases/swift-and- acce...](https://www.swift.com/insights/press-releases/swift-and-accenture- outline-path-to-distributed-ledger-technology-adoption-within-financial- services)

</comment><comment><USER8> Why would these companies want a private blockchain instead of using a database and a history table? Or even more simple, timestamp log files? Is this many companies coming together to put clearinghouses out of business and therefor needs this technology to establish better trust among the players? Unless I'm missing something, it appears to just be hype with people saying build it with blockchain?

<comment><USER9> With a blockchain, you don't have to trust some organization to run the database correctly

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Can someone please explain why there are so many banks interested in a private blockchain? Isn't that more expensive than just building on top of something like ethereum?

<comment><USER11> You can use Ethereum as a private blockchain

<comment><USER10> But why do companies need to host their own blockchain? What is the value proposition in doing so?

<comment><AUTHOR> Accessing data with permissions towards access only going to specific, pre- determined parties. Brings blockchain in line with the current data control paradigm by doing so.

<comment><USER12> If you're restricting permission like this, why bother with a blockchain at all? Why not just use a conventional database?

<comment><USER11> With a conventional database, the owner can set any value to anything they like.

With a private blockchain (and smart contracts), the owner can't forge values.

For example lets say you want to fake a transfer from client A to client B. In a traditional database, the owner can do that. With a blockchain, the owner can't.

<comment><USER10> The owner of the blockchain can of course forge values! The computational power of the network of a private blockchain is fairly easily overcome.

<comment><USER11> And every actor will know there's a double spend attack and stop accepting the chain. Unlike a public blockchain, there should never be a fork in a private blockchain. If there is a fork, you know the owner is mounting a double spend attack.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


GMAIL: Send a personalized Phone Call from Santa  - <AUTHOR> http://www.sendacallfromsanta.com/

<comment><USER2> This is very creative, but be aware this isn't a Google product. A couple observations:

1) Making the TOS presented so prominently is a bit surprising and imposing. Their placement makes me wonder whether this is a cute, harmless gift or something worse. I know Google's "Don't Be Evil," but this site is run by someone else...

2) This isn't Google. This is some company that Google's marketing department contracted. If you look at the source page, you see this is running on stock AWS and might even have been an "off-the-shelf" solution Google added their name to.

While I have faith Google set up a reasonable contract to protect my info, I don't know or trust the third party to handle my information properly.

3) Maybe it's the geek in me, but I'd be 100x more excited if some employees put this together during their 20% time. Seeing that it's clearly a marketing bit end-to-end means I almost don't want to share it with friends.

4) It would have been nice to download the MP3 and send it over email myself. A phone call is a nice way to advertise Google Voice, but it sure is hard to share with friends and family after the event.

5) Related to the MP3, it doesn't include any of the advertising or promotional messaging I would expect during the preview. I would like to know the entire experience I'm sending to my loved one, not just the personalized message. If it requires my loved one to submit an email address or listen to 30 second advertising, I may not want my loved one to hear it. This may be undue paranoia, but I feel like I've had to keep my guard up with marketing companies.

Net: A cool, creative idea but overall underwhelmed by the execution and unlikely to use in practice.

</comment><comment><USER3> It should have mentioned in the beginning that it's for US and Canada only. After going through many steps, I'm stuck at delivering it since it's only available for those two countries.

<comment><USER4> This might be a little excessive just to get a call from santa, but it might work if you create a Google Voice account with a U.S. number, but have it linked to your real phone. Then enter the Google Voice number to be called.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I love the idea, but I can't help but thinking this would work _so_ much better if the UI was better designed and aimed more at children...

<comment><USER6> wink wink twilio.com

<comment><USER7> My first thought was along the lines of someone could put together a much better interface for this and integrate it with Twilio. The Twilio part would take no time at all. The only real problem is recording all of the names. It's really too bad that the text to speech voices used by Twilio are so terrible. I'm really surprised they haven't looked at using some third party tech for that like the voices provided by Cepstral (<http://cepstral.com/>) or others.

<comment><USER6> We have, and we're working to make it better. For something like this you could use any engine you want as long as it generates wav or mp3 files.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I have occasionally seen other parents take the Santa thing to the next level with these personalized services. One even paid a Santa to show up on Xmas day. In _all_ cases the questioning and obvious suspicions generated from the kids almost resulted in a backfire. For me it proves Neil De Grasse Tyson's assertion that "children are born scientists". Best not to give them too much evidence to start analyzing.

So if I could offer a piece of unsolicited advice: keep it unreal, magical and mysterious and stick with the whole down-the-chimney thing.

</comment><comment><USER9> Does anyone know if it calls immediately or can a time be scheduled? I'm at the form where you enter the phone numbers and I don't want it to wake anyone up.

Edit: Never mind. I filled out another one to send to my dog (lol) and got the message: "Santa can't call that number right now because Dudley is probably sleeping. Please try again after 8am in their time zone." I guess I'll leave the original tab open for a few hours.

</comment><comment><USER10> I like this idea; it's really cute, but it asks a few too many personal questions just to make a phone call. It made me a bit uncomfortable a few pages in.

</comment><comment><USER11> After I fnish the hole think I get "Oops! Santa can only make calls with valid North American phone numbers."

Now that is incredible poor user experience !

</comment><comment><USER12> Can't find my niece's name, Annie. Not exactly a rare name. Lots of obscure ones. Oddly, it's not there.</comment>


Airplane boarding simulations - <AUTHOR> http://menkes76.com/projects/boarding/boarding.htm <comment><USER2> None of these simulations seem to take into account the usual activities that delay boarding:

* Not all of first class boards early, many flyers stay in the lounge till later and then hold up the aisle getting their bag into the overhead

* Passengers board together regardless of boarding order. Friends flying with an elite member can board early and not with their group.

* When the overhead is full passengers must swim upstream to bring their bag to be checked.

* Although there are plenty of bathrooms near the gate, many passengers insist on using the lav the minute they board. They again end up swimming upstream holding up the queue

* Seat stealing - whether intentional or not, some passengers help themselves to a roomier exit row seat (or on one occasion I've seen them in first class) hoping no one shows up to take that seat. Once the passenger with that seat arrives, the original passenger has to get their belongings, perhaps clear the overhead and again possibly fight their way against people boarding.

Southwest's self serve seating helps in some regards, but this style of boarding will never be used my the major carriers - at least in the U.S.

edit: typos

<comment><USER3> I prefer Southwest's self serve style because it rewards those who check in earliest. Well, that is, if you consider it rewarding to be the first on and first off (as I do when I get to sit in row 1).

On a recent flight using Azul (Brazil's "Jet Blue", same owner), people were boarded via the front and back at the same time. First time I had seen that, though not sure if it was any quicker. Perceptions of quickness are often dependent on where you are sitting.

<comment><USER4> Southwest's procedure used to be better when you had to get to the gate to get your number. That really encouraged people to get to the gate early. Now that you can checkin at home you can waltz to the gate.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Maybe this is completely dumb and impractical, but could there be a way to remove the seats from the plane, individually or in groups, maybe on a track (overhead?) like a roller coaster, so that there could be a large boarding area with plenty of room for people to get situated. Then once everyone is in their seat, the seats would roll and lock into position.

This would also allow you to quickly deplane, but have the next group of passengers already seated, ready to slide into the plane.

The boarding problem is human, and also spacial. And you can't really get rid of the humans, but you could change the space.

Freight transport has been containerized, how can we do it to passenger transport?

<comment><AUTHOR> I discussed this some years ago with an airline engineer. There are many, many practical problems. A pressurized fuselage with a separable section big enough to load passengers on and off is one of the simpler problems. I was left with the impression that it will never[#] happen.

[#] "Never" is a long time. Certainly "not soon"

<comment><USER5> I was thinking weight would be the biggest problem. Maybe with new materials its not a problem.

We have these automated warehouses and factory floors with robotic carts that can precisely navigate, pickup and deliver loads without a lot of infrastructure needed, that's kinda where I'm coming from.

I'm thinking the solution would have to work with the existing sized doorways for it to be adopted.

<comment><AUTHOR> The real alternative is to have a mock seating area with ov erhead bins. Everyone gets settled, the the bins are loaded and locked into place, and the passengers walk on without hand luggage. They then know where to sit, and don't spend time futzing with the bags and bins.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Here's a clever idea I just thought of. The airline could keep the overhead bins locked while everyone boards. So everyone just comes in and sits down, keeping their belongings on their lap. (It seems like that would be a lot faster)

Then once the plane starts taxi-ing the overhead bins unlock and people can put away their belongings (since you have to wait at least ten+ minutes to taxi and take-off it seems like this wouldn't cause a slowdown.) Plus you'd get an extra efficiency because the person in the aisle can load the bags for everyone in his row.

Should I patent this ... :-/

<comment><USER7> I agree that the single biggest improvement in airline boarding should be with the airplane and airport design. The fact that there is only one entrance/exit makes for an automatic bottleneck and limits options. Most planes are equipped with a rear door or on larger planes a mid-door. They should allow those doors to be used during boarding. Seems that this would be the most cost efficient and reasonable gains should ensue.

<comment><USER8> the really big international flights sometimes board 1st (and higher, if we're talking about lines like singapore or virgin that have luxury classes) through separate doors from us proles.

of course, that only helps _them_....

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I was bored on one flight and so I actually wrote a quick and dirty simulation while on the flight: [http://blog.chewxy.com/2012/04/04/a-better-passenger- boardin...](http://blog.chewxy.com/2012/04/04/a-better-passenger-boarding- system/) . My main complaint at the time had been the inefficiencies brought about by loading luggage in the overhead compartment.

I was actually quite surprised by the simulation - that queueing people into odd-even queues make for faster boarding.

Caveat: the code I shared on github is actually quite terrible. Ignore the code, look at the pretty charts

</comment><comment><USER10> These simulations don't account for human choice on when they want to board. There are customers anxious to get to their seats, and so listen carefully for their zone boarding. There are customers who would rather spend time in the terminal than extra time in an upright seat so they wait until the very last minute to board, regardless of zone.

Increases in prices of checked baggage means many flights have more people carrying bags on, due to limited overhead space, there is more incentive to board as early as possible. If you don't have a carry-on that needs to go in the overhead bins, the incentive to board on-time or early is lower.

Southwest airlines, mentioned here quite a bit, incentives customers to board early (if you want a good seat, you need to get on early to choose it) and to check in early (they can better gauge % checked-in because you are rewarded for confirming with the airline 24 hours in advance). Their policy to allow free checked bags is a nice courtesy but it also means more customer check bags, reducing the time to store things in the overhead which leads to less time at the gate. Free bags is a financial play, just not in terms of additional revenue but as cost savings.

</comment><comment><USER11> My experience (in the UK) is that the time is dominated by people being slow to put their bags away, or putting bags away then blocking the aisle while they take off jackets or getting bags back out to extract a book.

Also airlines tend to board from front and back simultaneously, which isn't always an optimization as people join the shortest queue regardless of where their seat is.

</comment><comment><USER12> Surely airlines can just do this empirically rather than rely on simulations. Why not just A/B test a bunch of different boarding methods on different flights and time what works the best?

<comment><USER13> Expense.

Every method of boarding will require training the flight crew, ground crews at the airport. A non-trivial expense to change over from A to B. And then back.

Departure times are measured down to the minute. Miss your time and much activity downstream is affected - pax connections, gate use at destination airport, flights downstream.

And so on. I'm sure that they do use A/B testing or something like that ... but they do a whole lot of simulatin' first.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Stop charging fees to check bags, and start charging fees for carry-ons. Airlines should WANT checked baggage. And so should TSA.

<comment><USER14> Airlines LOVE baggage fees. They're tax free. I wouldn't be surprised to see airlines reduce ticket fees and just boost bag fees for more tax-free revenue.

Reference this Hipmunk visualization: <http://visual.ly/air-travel-baggage- fee-revenue-timeline>

<comment><USER15> Apart from the tax status, it seems that baggage fees are an effective way to achieve market segmentation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I thought the fastest was back to front, but alternating left and right side for each row. In other words, board the _left_ side of last 10 _even_ rows and the _right_ side of last 10 _odd_ rows at the same time, then let right/even, left/odd people in, then move on to the next 10 row, etc.

There was a research paper on that few months ago, and it was on HN. Does anyone remember details?

</comment><comment><USER17> How about this idea:

Much of the congestion is caused by people stowing their bags overhead further down the plane than their seat, then having to reverse against traffic for X rows to sit down. Also there is a large fixed time cost once the overhead bins fill up and X passengers are forced to check their bags; they have to haul them all the way to the front against traffic.

What if a system was installed at the security checkpoint that recorded whether a passenger were boarding with a suitcase, and then assigned them a bin overhead. The bins would have small LED screens that displayed the passenger's name or seat number. An algorithm would match the bins to the nearest seats, and reduce or possibly eliminate downstream luggage-stowing. It would also be able to tell passengers that they were too late, the bins were full, and they would have to check their bags.

Difficulties --

       * some bags are small or irregular, can fit 2 in a bin  (measure bag during X-ray?)

       * initially people won't understand the system leading to chaos

<comment><USER18> Also people buy stuff at duty free, after the security checkpoint.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Most of the fail to understand that people like to board in groups based on association. eg, families like to board together. That mucks it all up.

Also, people are stupid and can't self-sort.

I must admit, Southwest's boarding always feels like the absolute easiest. You just get in line by number and sit wherever you want.

<comment><USER20> Regarding the mental qualities of travelers, I once witnessed this:

announcement: This is NOT a boarding announcement, please remain seated.

people: 80% of the people in the gate area stood up.

announcement: This is NOT a boarding announcement. When we do board, please pick up a sack lunch from the cart near the ramp.

people: 50% started forming a line near the ramp. 30% remained standing.

announcement: Please remain seated. We will start boarding in about 15 minutes. As you board the plane, please take a sack lunch from the cart near the door. Thank you.

people: Most looked around uncertainly and slowly sat down.

Person 1 near me: What was that about a lunch? Person 2: I don't know. I think they may serve you a lunch, depending on where your destination is.

Me: Envisioning a scenario where the attendent gives you a lunch if you are flying to Des Moines, but No Lunch for You! if you are continuing on to Los Angeles...

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Does anyone know why back to front boarding is slower than random? That's doesn't make sense to me.

<comment><USER21> I'm assuming here just based on experience, but...you don't just go to your seat and sit down, you have to put your bag in the overhead bin, which takes some "aisle time".

in back-to-front, a line forms as you are waiting for people to store their bag. one person can take up [block] 3 rows of seats while he is fiddling with putting his bag overhead.

in random seating, people all over the plane are storing bags at the same time, instead of just 1 or 2 people.

<comment><USER3> I wonder what the percentage is of those delaying the line due to their slowness vs. the need to search out space.

The most aisle time I've taken on any flight might be 10 seconds, though most of the time it's zero since I prefer to store my carry-on below the seat when I can.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I wonder how much plane size impacts the efficiency of system, particularly in the case of the random boarding process? I flew on Southwest and American Eagle last week and thought about this for a while. On Southwest people were able to choose their seat based on their position in line, but that choice was harder for some people than others. On American Eagle (pre-assigned seats) the plane was so small (16 rows of 3) that they didn't bother with boarding order outside of priority status. People randomly tried to get to their seat on the plane, but it seemed like that was faster on a per-person basis than Southwest. Perhaps choice slows the system down?

</comment><comment><USER23> Conceptually back-to-front seems to make the most sense, but as the simulations show it's still not efficient. So instead of plainly loading back- to-front, load back-to-front but skip rows.

That is, if there are 25 rows on the plane, load rows 25, 20, 15, 10, and 5 at once in that order, and in the second wave load 24, 19, 14, 9, 4, etc. That way, the people sitting in row 25 will have a 4 row buffer between them and the next passengers to wait while they get seated and aren't blocking the next group (in row 20) from being seated.

Does that seem reasonable?

</comment><comment><USER24> When I board planes I wait until the last possible second - I like to hear 'last call' before I join the queues. I don't take stupidly big carry on luggage, so why would I care whether I get on first or last?

I'd rather wait as long as possible and avoid being sat on the plane.

This probably ruins carefully planned boarding procedures. C'est la vie. But as it stands, the trouble with boarding is that there are plenty of people like me.

</comment><comment><USER25> I would like to see real boarding times, also It would be nice to see the effect that all the bigger baggage (due to the baggage fares) that it is carried aboard. This is one of the biggest drags when boarding, even more with a full airplane as the last 20 pax are not going to find enough space for their hand luggage anywhere.

</comment><comment><USER26> Beeing sorted into groups and numbers actually make's me feel like cattle instead of an airline passenger. I like the random boarding of Southwest and most European low-fare carriers.

</comment><comment><USER27> It does not help that a lot of American companies do not use any of these methods, they use front to back in sections.

<comment><USER28> I can never understand the planes that board front to back. It makes absolutely no sense at all.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Easy. Next time you buy a fleet, ask Boeing for planes with 10ft wide corridors instead of 2ft.</comment>


Farmers Abandon Kerosene for Solar Microgrids in India, Africa - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-04-11/farmers-foil-utilities-using-cell-phones-to-access-solar.html <comment><USER2> I saw this myself sometime before. Solar panels are bringing light to remote areas in the country.

Another activity is related to biogas plants that are now spreading in rural India.

The NGOs (Non governmental organizations) has a good role in spreading these technologies and ANERT (A govt organization) is providing heavy subsidies for the poor to buy these.</comment>


The Craziest Terraform For_each I've Ever Written - <AUTHOR> http://janders223.com/posts/terraform-for-each/ <comment><USER2> Looks like it needs a better configuration language.</comment>