If you're an Android developer and looking for ideas, start here - <AUTHOR> http://androidforums.com/application-requests/

<comment><USER2> Why do all of the Android websites look like crap on an Android phone? If there were a website you would think would have a good mobile layout, it would be one ostensibly dedicated to a mobile platform.

<comment><USER3> I can't say that I disagree with you. If you notice, these sites use ready to go platforms or forums without much attention to mobile users. Shame.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Henry Ford is reputed to have said, "If I had asked my customers what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse."

Looking at this forum is fine, but you still have to go through the effort to integrate all of these disparate and narrow desires into something larger that you can build a business on. That's hard! Staying motivated while working on a problem that you don't have yourself is even harder.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think the idea is to look for inspiration, not specifications. (At least, that's how I hope people would go about it)

<comment><USER5> Or in more concrete terms, customer problems that need solving.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I don't really think crowdsourcing app ideas is the best idea. Mostly you'll end up hearing from a loud minority. For example, there is a request for an Illinois Compiled Statute app....I don't really think that would have huge market appeal.

Developers are better off looking at small problems or annoyances in their day-to-day that they can solve using the Android (or any phone in fact).

<comment><USER7> A single developer looking at their day-to-day needs is going to consider maybe at most 5% of the total market need for Android apps. All developers together doing the same might consider only 40% of that possible market. ... and that piece of the market will be crowded.

A better approach is to consider how ubiquitous tablet/mobile almost-always- networked touch/voice-based computing is going to allow better HCI in what general spaces, cross-reference with a comprehensive list of industrial practices, see how those can improve, and team up with domain experts to identify common needs and start building libraries, back ends, and apps.

There are already too many to-do lists, casual games, and social apps. It's time to make industry more efficient.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> and maybe look here for UI inspiration: <http://wellplacedpixels.com/>

</comment><comment><USER9> Awesome. On page 2 is a request for the app I'm already building! I think I just found a few beta testers :)

</comment><comment><USER10> Thanks for this! Now my only problem is being able to sell my apps. I'm from a country where we can't create Google Checkout merchant accounts so I can't sell apps in the Android Market. I hope this changes soon.

</comment><comment><USER11> If you wrote an app that funneled ambient sound via the microphone to your headphones (handy for in-canal earphones as they block out so much external sound you can't hear people talking to you) would Android's flexibility allow this to be triggered in some simple manner? By simple manner I mean e.g. binding to a physical key or gesture, or adding to the built in audio app.

</comment><comment><USER12> If you're looking for an idea to monetize, go into the iPhone app store, sort by most popular, rinse and repeat.

EDIT: Or NewGrounds or Download.com / games

</comment><comment><USER13> If you're an Android developer and looking for work, please e-mail me. aarong /at/ thinkcomputer.com

</comment><comment><USER14> An email client with copy and paste would be great, and zoom.

<comment><USER15> For Android phones with a physical keyboard, the Gmail app allows you to select/copy text by holding the shift key and dragging over the text on the screen.

<comment><USER16> Also, you can long-press on a text field, which brings up a select/copy/paste menu. This seems to work across all Android apps, and presumably works on non- keyboard phones.

<comment><USER14> Great, but how does that allow me to copy text from someone else's email? Like a call in pin or something? If I click reply the quoted text does not show up in the text field.

<comment><USER16> Oh man, that's really bad. I rarely use the GMail app, so I hadn't run across this particular limitation yet.

I found a forum thread where someone found a sequence of interactions that work around the problem, but select/copy/paste really should be in the app's menu, like they are for the browser:

[http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Google%20Mobile/thread...](http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Google%20Mobile/thread?tid=4d89ebb8945b19fa&hl=en)

Summary: You can use Shift-S to activate select mode, then use the scroll ball to select. (On a keyboardless phone, hold "menu" until the soft keyboard comes up, then press Shift-S to activate select mode.)

<comment><USER14> Wow thanks. Yeah that needs to get improved. :O</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Hot/Crazy Solid State Drive Scale - <AUTHOR> http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2011/05/the-hot-crazy-solid-state-drive-scale.html

<comment><USER2> A couple of additional points about my abysmal 8/8 failure rate:

      - These were in 8 different machines in 8 different locations.
      - 7 were in desktops, 1 was a laptop
      - All were running Windows
      - All purchased from NewEgg
      - Most of these were gifts for other people.

(I may be slightly crazy, but I don't have 8 computers.)

After this saga, I've concluded that there are probably two root causes leading to high failure rates:

(1) _Something_ about installing an after-market SSD in a desktop, probably related to power fluctuations, increases the likelihood of failure.

(2) NewEgg only offers a 30-day warranty on their SSDs. You can't even purchase a third-party extended warranty. So I suspect that you'll see a higher failure rate from NewEgg purchases than from a merchant who offers a 2- or 3-year warranty. (But NewEgg's prices are so damn good!)

I should also say that the SSDs that I have purchased with laptops - 2 from Dell (2008, 2009) and 1 from IBM (2009) have _not_ failed.

<comment> Tuna-Fish As for (1), unless you specifically go purchase a quality PSU, the PSU you get in a pre-built machine is usually utter trash as far as output quality is considered. (This is probably a fault of the ATX standard, which frankly allows too much leeway. Many parts that could otherwise use the voltages provided by the PSU have to include their own power regulation circuitry simply because the direct PSU output is too noisy) It's a good idea to build your own computer from newegg or similar just to know the PSU you'll get.

Other than that, there's no difference if the SSD is plugged in by "a trained professional" or yourself.

<comment><USER3> Agreed. Never, ever skimp on the PSU, even for a budget build. It's a false economy (which, in the worst case scenario, could result in you replacing the PSU and every other piece of hardware too).

If you're not sure if your PSU is good or not, pick it up and see how heavy it is. If it has a fair bit of heft, it's probably good. If it feels light, it's definitely bad.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This post has some pretty decent hard stats. Not scientific, but less anecdotal than the linked article.

[http://forums.storagereview.com/index.php/topic/29329-ssd- fa...](http://forums.storagereview.com/index.php/topic/29329-ssd-failure- rates-compared-to-hard-drives/)

 _To be recorded the VAS had to be made directly through the merchant, which is not always the case since it is possible to return directly from the manufacturer: however, this represents a minority in the first year.

\- Maxtor 1.04% (against 1.73%) \- Western Digital 1.45% (against 0.99%) \- Seagate 2.13% (against 2.58%) \- Samsung 2.47% (against 1.93%) \- Hitachi 3.39% (against 0.92%)

Hitachi is plummeting, which was first in the previous ranking! Western Digital retained its second place despite a failure rate increasing, while Maxtor is occupying the first place.

More specifically the failure rate for 1TB drives:

\- 5.76% Hitachi Deskstar 7K1000.B \- 5.20% Hitachi Deskstar 7K1000.C \- 3.68% Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 \- 3.37%: Samsung SpinPoint F1 \- 2.51% Seagate Barracuda 7200.12 \- 2.37%: WD Caviar Green WD10EARS \- 2.10% Seagate Barracuda LP \- 1.57%: Samsung SpinPoint F3 \- 1.55%: WD Caviar Green WD10EADS \- 1.35%: WD Caviar Black WD1001FALS \- 1.24%: Maxtor DiamondMax 23

Hitachi is logically the less well placed, what with two separate lines! What about the 2 TB version?

\- 9.71%: WD Caviar Black WD2001FASS \- 6.87% Hitachi Deskstar 7K2000 \- 4.83%: WD Caviar Green WD20EARS \- 4.35% Seagate Barracuda LP \- 4.17%: Samsung EcoGreen F3 \- 2.90%: WD Caviar Green WD20EADS

Overall, failure rates recorded are bad. That does not really want to entrust to 2TB of data to these discs alone: a mirroring will not be too much for securing data. Logically 7200 rpm disks are less reliable than the 5400/5900 rpm, with almost 10% for the Western model!

For the first time, we also integrate SSDs in this article type. The rates of failure recorded by manufacturer:

\- Intel 0.59% \- Corsair 2.17% \- Crucial 2.25% \- Kingston 2.39% \- OCZ 2.93%

Intel stands here with a failure rate of the most flattering. Among the few models sold over 100 copies, displays a rate of no more than 5% VAS._

<comment><USER5> Here are comparable numbers for SSD from another source [1] (this site is affiliated with an online computers shopping site).

Intel 0,3%, Kinston 1,2%, Crucial 1,9%, Corsair 2,7%, OCZ 3,5%.

[1] [http://www.hardware.fr/articles/831-7/taux-pannes- composants...](http://www.hardware.fr/articles/831-7/taux-pannes- composants.html)

Edit: and on last page of the previous link there is a list of the current models sold between 10/01/2010 and 04/01/2011 with the worst fiability track record:

6,7%: OCZ Agility 2 120 Go. 3,7%: OCZ Agility 2 60 Go. 3,6%: OCZ Agility 2 40 Go. 3,5%: OCZ Agility 2 90 Go. 3,5%: OCZ Vertex 2 240 Go

<comment><USER6> Simplistically assuming a very high failure rate of 7%, Jeff's friend anecdote of 8 out of 8 failures has a probability of about 0.07^8 or about 1 in 2 billion. That's quite a lottery to win.

What this tells me is that there are probably some differences in the environment that you use your SSD in that can have disproportionate effects on its lifetime.

<comment><USER7> You assume that only 8 of Jeff's acquaintances bought SSDs. It might actually have been 8 failures out of 100 purchases, for example.

<comment><USER6> Did you read the article? I'm referring to this: "Portman Wills, [...] he went all in. He purchased eight SSDs over the last two years ... and all of them failed".

<comment><USER7> I stand corrected.

I admit that I tend to skim Jeff Atwood because his occasional tasty flakes of insight are thickly coated with delicious but useless fluff.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Read this if you are concerned about TRIM and want to restore a SSD drive on OS X to a "new" state.

If you have an SSD on OS X, I discovered that in many cases you can "reset" the drive and regain performance. Basically, if your drive implements the "security erase" command, you can use the following procedure by taking the cover off the back of your Macbook, removing the hard drive, leaving the SATA cable in reach, and booting with the GParted Live CD.

[http://www.ocztechnologyforum.com/forum/showthread.php?76612...](http://www.ocztechnologyforum.com/forum/showthread.php?76612-Secure- Erase-From-Within-Linux-For-Windows-Users)

The tricky part: You have to plug in the SSD drive _> after<_ your machine boots, so it's not in "frozen" state. The other tricky part, is that you first have to set a security password to do the erase. Then doing the secure erase also erases the password.

I know first-hand that this works on Crucial C300 RealSSD and I've seen lots of reports that this works with OCZ drives. This is also useful for doing new installs on an SSD if you've gotten a new machine. (My situation)

WARNING: DO NOT try to use a Crucial C300 SSD with an i5 or i7 2011 13" Macbook Pro. The problem is in the hardware, namely electromagnetic interference in the SATA cable when trying to use 6GB/s SATA. Wrapping it with aluminum foil doesn't always work. Buying an upgraded SATA cable doesn't always work either. Buying a 2010 Macbook Pro instead always works. You have been warned.

<comment><USER9> Or you could just enable TRIM [1] on your 3rd Party SSD under Snow Leopard [2].

[1] <http://www.groths.org/?page_id=322>

[2] <http://imgur.com/gKtL6>

<comment><USER8> I've seen this, but I've also seen some reservations about whether this is safe. I think secure erase plus garbage collection will hold me until I get TRIM in OS X Lion.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Personally, I think he's crazy.

I don't care how fast a computer is if I have to reinstall it from scratch every few months.

Sure, all my working files are safely on Dropbox (documents) or GitHub (code), but that doesn't help when I have to reinstall my operating system and software every three months!

<comment><USER10> 1\. You can backup entire partition

2\. Restoring of Windows machine with lot of software very annoying and takes a lot of time (clicking dumb "I agree", and reboot the computer now, entering serials etc...) but with ubuntu or os x it's less annoying experience. Good package manager calculate dependencies for software. The only exception is when you need to install some proprietary software (less frequently than on windows) or you need edge version.

<comment><USER11> I have a shell script that installs all the packages I need on a fresh Ubuntu install, but

1\. I only tend to update it after running it and finding that something I was expecting to be installed wasn't (really I should switch to using puppet/cdist/similar for this)

2\. I have to set up Firefox manually (downloading extensions etc)

<comment> mike-cardwell Put your Firefox profile in a Dropbox directory?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Other comments are assuming this is flash wearing out, but is this actually the flash wearing out or is it something else (buggy firmware, cheap memory cells, what have you)? The time-to-failure seems way too low for it to be excessive writes (15 days for an 80GB IBM!).

Actually, come to think of it, what is the failure mode for a drive when it's all worn out? Is it catastrophic data loss or is it just an unwritable drive?

<comment><USER13> Theoretically it should just be an unwritable drive since flash tends to only fail on erase. If the firmware is badly programmed or something other than the flash fails who knows what could happen though.

<comment><USER14> There is a "read disturbance effect" on MLC flash that causes wear on reads. MLC flash gets multiple bits per cell using several voltage levels.

MLC flash is also around 5K erase cycles (and about the same number of reads until you need to do an erase-and-rewrite). Multiplied out and properly wear- leveled this is not a big deal.

We might be seeing crappy wear leveling, or badly written firmware, or the need for more ECC bits (yes, MLC has these, and they are /not/ optional) than the EE types think they can get away with.

I've been writing flash file systems since 1991. They're fun as hell to work with.

<comment><USER15> > I've been writing flash file systems since 1991. They're fun as hell to work > with.

Could you recommend any good resources for someone new to file system technology that is interested in their inner-workings? Thanks!

<comment><USER14> Practical File System Design: <http://www.letterp.com/~dbg/practical-file- system-design.pdf>

NT File System Design (Rajeev Nagar) -- you can find this used. I believe his web site had a PDF copy for a while, sans pictures.

My favorite book on transactions is Bernstein's Principles of Transaction Processing (may also be available as a PDF somewhere, from the author).

Read the v6 Unix file system code. That will date me, but it's /simple/ and it works. You can move up from there.

btrfs is neat. I haven't looked at the code.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I wonder how well the SMART stats would predict that failure -- or whether they were sudden unexplained failures.

If you run smartctl -A on your SDD device then for e.g. Intel you can see attribute 0xE9 or 233 -- media wear indicator, starting at 100% (mine's at 98% after 14 months, so this should hopefully indicate 2% of the wear out from writes). You can also see how many of the reserved blocks it's used (when it fails to reflash a cell when rewriting).

</comment><comment><USER17> I've been following Jeff's SSD stories for a while now, and I came here today thinking maybe it was time for me to take the plunge and get one myself. But this latest post just frightens me.

Even if you can avoid catastrophe with regular, automated backups (I use two Time Machine drives myself), what about bitrot? If the SSD you've been diligently backing up over months has been slowly rotting, can you have any faith at all in the backups?

<comment><USER18> The general assumption with SSD is you have both a SSD and a traditional HDD. As long as you only have program and temp files on a SSD it's loss can have fairly minimal impact. Especially, if you schedule a full disk backup of your SSD weekly. Worst, case you lose a few OS/browser patches ship back the SSD for a replacement drive and move on.

PS: If you want to get fancy you can set up a bootable partition on your HDD and then backup the SSD to that partition.

<comment><USER19> What makes you say that's the general assumption? As far as I know the vast majority of machines shipping with SSDs are shipping with ONLY an SSD, not two drives. Are you saying Apple's (for example) assumption is you're going to cary around an external HDD with your MacBook to store your files on?

<comment><USER20> The general assumption (or rather disclaimer) is: make backups.

An earlier failure may even be an advantage here because that way you have less time to accumulate important data before learning your lesson...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> And people wonder why women have trouble getting into this industry.

<comment><USER22> Because... they like their disks to not fail?

<comment><USER23> did you not notice the article's comparison between SSD drives and "hot/crazy women?" it was highly offensive.

<comment><USER22> That was from a show, and I imagine the same goes for guys. I didn't find it sexist at all.

<comment><USER24> No, I'm with the OP on this. In the show, this kind of thing works because part of the schtick of the Barney character is that he's a sexist jerk. Everyone knows it, so you can riff off that to say things you can't in isolation.

Here, there's none of that context. Drives, like women, are irreparably either hot or crazy and the only question left to users (or men) is whether they're "worth it". That's just sexist, sorry. The only people who have an excuse for thinking its not are the ones who get the sitcom reference.

<comment><USER25> I'm not saying I disagree with you, but I think there is an impulse to label things sexist without addressing it, so I'm gonna ask a few questions.

If a woman wrote this about men, would it be sexist? (I expect you'll say yes.)

If a lesbian woman wrote this about other women, would it be sexist? (I feel like you're forced to say yes since you are committing to the idea being sexist independent of the sex of the speaker.)

Is it possible for a man like Barney to be honestly and accurately analyzing trends of the women in his life, given that he only ranks women shallowly?

Careful now. It's not necessarily sexist for Barney to _only care about looks,_ or at least: since we all care about looks to some degree, it is dangerous to imply that caring about looks is sexist. And if his analysis of his desires is based on his decision to only try for attractiveness, how is that analysis sexist instead of revealing the frailty of being so shallow?

So the comparison is basically that there are two orthogonal traits, one negative and one positive. It is not "Drives, like women"; it is "Drives have orthogonal traits, and evaluation of them therefore proceeds along the Barney Analysis."

<comment><USER24> I understand the argument, but this isn't about logic. Context matters. Sexism directed by men against women (well, "heteronormative" to use the jargon) is "worse" than the reverse because it exacerbates an existing situation.

It's easy for a typical man in our society to shrug off a comment equating his looks with his worth. It's much harder for a woman. "Should" it be? Of course not, but that's sort of the point: let's try laying off things for a while before demanding logical equality, OK?

<comment><USER25> A well put argument to establish a local subjectivity for practical effect.

The problem I have with it is that it is then used to marginalize _other_ local subjectivities like r/mensrights (which admittedly has its share of ludicrous opinions, do _not_ admit you don't care you were circumcised) for the purpose of serving the "most important" 'ism.

In reality there are a whole bunch of inequalities in a whole bunch of different directions, and it doesn't make sense just to target the one that _some_ people have decided is the most important. (In all honesty, for instance, I think racial inequality is a much bigger problem than sexism in our society now that women are becoming much better educated, whereas we still have a lot of 'bad part[s] of town.')

In other words, we are not escaping heteronormative forms until we can actually work with logical equality, and the quickest way through the forest is the straightest. Why not just admit the problem is with beauty and our valuation of it--and yes, men might be guilty of this more by percentage, but that's not the source of the problem--instead of with gender?

<comment><USER22> I'd be grateful if you could explain the issue, because I really don't see what the problem here is. I guess I don't understand what sexism is.

The way I see it, Barney only judges women by how hot/crazy they are (or he judges them by more than that, but those are the two primary factors in his judgement). Given that everyone judges everyone based on some traits, and these traits have different weights attached to them, why is it sexist for Barney to do that? He's just a shallow person, but not qualitatively different than anyone else (only quantitatively).

Also, he is not saying "this is how you should judge women", only "this is how I judge women". I would be fine with a woman saying that about a guy, or a woman about a woman. It wouldn't be a woman I'd like to date, but I don't consider it an attack on my gender as a whole.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I also thought that about SSDs.

Then I stumbled upon this on the Apple store when configuring your disk options: "Your MacBook Pro comes standard with a 5400-rpm Serial ATA hard drive. Or you can choose a solid-state drive that offers enhanced durability."

So, why do they say that? What SSD do they built in? Is that a particular special SSD with enhanced durability? Even more enhanced than regular harddisks (like they are claiming)?

<comment><USER27> There is indeed no such thing. What they can always say is that since there are no moving parts in an SSD drive, you don't have to fear screwing up your data by moving your laptop around while working. In _that_ sense and in the hands of a careless laptop user, it would indeed be more reliable.

What I describe above is just an excuse they can (and probably) use. The reality is that it's just marketing text to up-sell you something. I bet it works in many cases.

<comment><USER28> Surprising, though, that they use "enhanced durability" to upsell the hard disk and not "increased performance".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I had an SSD from SuperTalent last year. It didn't even last 2 months before massive filesystem corruptions started. Two weeks later it wasn't even recognized anymore by the SATA controller.

<comment><USER30> ...And I have an SSD that came installed with my Macbook Pro almost a year and is still working without any hickups. Single data points aren't all that valuable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> I've often wondered about this stuff. MLC SSDs are good for 10000 writes per 250k (iirc?) block. When you think about using an SSD for virtual memory, even with wear levelling, that's really not very much at all. Add in programs that do lots of small file writes to logs and so on, and I can imagine losing a lot of blocks fairly quickly - particularly because wear levelling will cause you to lose all of the blocks in a relatively small time space, as opposed to gradual failure.

I wonder if, as flash memory gets cheaper, we'll see SLC SSDs getting more popular.

<comment><USER13> Its actually good for 10,000 erases per block, so depending on how your file system works you could erase a block, then write to some of it, then rite to another part of it, then write to it again filling it up. Write amplification does occur for this reason and because the drive has to keep track of what it has on itself, but its usually not more than a factor of 2.

<comment><USER32> In reality, every erase is followed by exactly one (amortized) program, so it doesn't matter which one you track.

<comment><USER13> Really? That seems to inefficient though... I not a huge expert on commercial SSDs, but when I've written my own flash drivers for embedded sensors I would always make use of multiple writes per erase.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> I have been using an enterprise-class Intel SSD (X25-E I think) for about one year now in my workstation so help speeding up the build/linking process of a large C++ project. This has made all the difference in development speed for me. The disk gets punished a lot, lots of file copies and read/write operations. To date I haven't had any problems (nor have I heard of any from colleagues who are using them in the same way). I wouldn't care much about data loss though since only temporary files are on there.

<comment><USER34> I have the same Intel SSD (32 GB only, though) and so far it works amazingly well as a startup/system volume (Windows 7). I hope they'll offer the 128GB version they promised as I'd definitely like to get one of those for a Linux- box.

My experience with regular consumer-grade hard disks indicates that regular backups of any data I want to keep is always a good idea. The X25-M mentioned in the article are using MLCs and so might some of the other SSDs he has used up. Another potential factor could be heat, malfunctioning hardware, etc. - there is not enough data given to even guess what the problem could be.

If excessive writes are a problem, an idea have had is to protect a large MLC- disk by using union fs to write only to a smaller SLC. No idea how much overhead using union fs introduces by itself but to me it appears to be a good way to use SLC/MLC drives, keep down costs, and don't rely too much on "magic" MLC-firmware.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> I must be remarkable lucky. I have seven SSDs, four of them are installed in computers I use often, and some more in datacenter servers. I have never had a failure. And the SSD that's in my home unix server is already doing its job for almost two years now.

I do make regular (image) backups from all my SSDs, so when one fails I can quickly replace it and restore the image. Apart from that I keep all my sourcecode and work-related stuff in a source code versioning control system hosted in a datacenter.

<comment><USER26> What SSDs are those?

<comment><USER35> Intel X25M, in my MacMini this one:

      Capacity:	80.03 GB (80,026,361,856 bytes)
      Model:	INTEL SSDSA2M080G2GC
      Revision:	2CV102HA
      Serial Number: CVPO0042012S080BGN

In my home unix server:

      smartctl 5.40 2010-10-16 r3189 [FreeBSD 8.1-RELEASE i386]

      Model Family:     Intel X18-M/X25-M/X25-V G2 SSDs
      Device Model:     INTEL SSDSA2M080G2GC
      Serial Number:    CVPO0054037B080BGN
      Firmware Version: 2CV102HD
      User Capacity:    80,026,361,856 bytes

In my datacenter server:

      Device Model:     INTEL SSDSA2M080G2GC
      Serial Number:    CVPO951000ZJ080BGN
      Firmware Version: 2CV102HA
      User Capacity:    80,026,361,856 bytes

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> One of the cool things about SSDs will be the huge amount of random I/O we can throw at them without noticeable responsiveness slowdown. SSDs will probably increase peoples' desire to backup because it will no longer be such a drain on I/O responsiveness.

</comment><comment><USER37> My experience on SSDs, having used multiple drives myself and sold 100s of drives to tech savvy customers:

\- Brand does matter - the failure rate on Intel drives is a lot lower than other brands.

\- The system you put it in also makes a difference. For example, certain generations of Macbook Pros are just not happy with certain SSDs. We've had customer that had two or three failures with a certain brand / model / chipset, and then changing to a different SSD they haven't had problems.

\- The failure rate for SSDs overall is higher than that for HDDs, but lower than the failure rate for some other products (such as Graphics cards).

\- Every SSD we have sold went into a custom built system or was installed afterwards into a laptop, so I don't buy the argument that problems are caused because it's installed by an end user and not at the factory.

\- They are _blindingly_ fast. In my opinion, it's better for 90% of users to put a new Intel SSD into their existing system, than it is to buy a new system.

</comment><comment><USER11> Do we know what's killing them? Writes? Heat? Random loss of magic smoke?

<comment><USER27> Short answer: writes, yes.

Long answer is long and I'm most certainly not an expert. It's just a consequence of how NAND memory works. You can read more about this in the links below (one is to a review of a particular ssd drive, but a couple of sections explain how SSD works in great detail):

(1) <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flash_memory#Memory_wear> (2) <http://www.anandtech.com/show/2614/3>

<comment><USER38> Someone else pointed out that other flash devices just become unwritable when they "fail" due to writes, rather than suddenly becoming bricks. I'm skeptical that this is the same thing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> I've had an Intel X-25M for over a year now and it's been amazing performance wise. In that same time span my 1TB data drive did die. The only problem I've had with the SSD is that it about twice a month it will randomly freeze. The hard drive light is solid on, and I have to just reset my machine. Not a big deal though because the SSD starts up so fast.

<comment><USER40> I have a similar anecdote; my 2TB western digital green drive died after a few weeks, whereas my Intel X25-M G2 is still running fine after a year and a half

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> For people who need reliability, SSDs are clearly not the wise choice. For performance, they are, IF you are willing to replace them frequently (at GREAT expense) and have downtime. Not to mention solid backups. The cons far outweigh the pros for me. I like stable measured performance. My computer isn't a hot rod, it's meant to be efficient.

<comment><USER42> Using a rotational HD does not excuse you from having solid backups. I've had rotational HDs fail in just months, it's not the norm but it does happen.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> No amount of hot is going to convince me to date someone with an STD. That would be...well, crazy. I want my SSD to be at least as reliable as my system memory (if not more). The article makes it sound like they are inherently diseased. If that's the case, no thanks.

<comment><USER44> It seems like it depends on the manufacturer. In this thread, somebody posted a comparison: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2505883>

Also note that mechanical hard drives fail a lot, too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> Does it depend on manufacturer / generation? My Intel at least lives for a bit longer already.

</comment><comment><USER45> I use 2.5" laptop hard drives not older than 2 years. They last about 6 years.

And if a hard drive starts to go, sometimes you hear it failing. I actually backed up a 30gb hard drive where I had to wobble it up and down while being backed up.

</comment><comment><USER46> 2 x Intel SSDs here. No issues.

While the speed of these things can vary a lot, so does reliability - and that won't show up in a benchmark. I noticed that a lot of the mentioned SSDs are GSkill. Apparently those are cheap and unreliable.

</comment><comment><USER47> Hmm this is bad. I was hoping SSDs would give us more speed in RAID0 setups for film/video editing where we need sustained speeds of over 1.2GB/s regularly (for one track 4k dpx only)... but if they fail a lot, it's too cost prohibitive.

<comment><USER20> "A lot" is a very relative term. Many people (including myself) have SSDs running for over a year and they're ticking on just fine.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> I've had good luck with SSD drives (Intel and Kingston) for the last two years. No failures. I use them in servers and laptops. I do rysnc them to spindle based drives hourly, so if they do fail, I've got backup. Just my experience.

<comment><USER49> If they did fail, would you failover to the spindles (and would they keep up with the workload?), or use them to recover to new SSDs?

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> I have 3 different SSDs since early 2009 (64 & 128GB Supertalent Ultradrive ME + Intel X25-M 80GB) and the latter two are in heavy use everyday. They all work fine until today, but this article worries me a bit ;)

</comment><comment><USER51> I'd like some slightly less anecdotal evidence before I conclude that all SSDs are doomed to an early death; we could be seeing some confirmation bias here. Maybe Jeff and his friends just had a run of bad luck.

<comment><USER52> Created a poll: <http://news.ycombinator.org/item?id=2506138>

(probably still won't be very useful, but at least it will be another data point)

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> Seems like the entire post was a lead in to the affiliate link at the bottom.

</comment><comment><USER54> My first SSD died in three days. It is entertaining when an SSD dies, as you simply get a "no OS found" type error from your bios. Checked the drive and it appeared to be working, only was completely empty.

Swapped it out, been fine since (about a year and a half now). Also no problems in my mac.

But both machines run regular backups so that should an SSD fail, it's just a matter of imaging the new drive and replacing it.

</comment><comment><USER55> This is really rather shocking to me. I always figured SSDs were as reliable as SD cards or other Flash based items like MP3 players or phones. Where you practically never see a failure due to the memory going bad.

</comment><comment><USER56> The alternative to SSD's are the conventional harddisk. But they also fail so you need a full backup anyway. (Maybe not so often, but i had also several harddisk which failed without much warning.)

</comment><comment><USER57> 5 SSDs here, got the oldest 2.5 years ago. No failures so far. I've run them as system drives, DB storage and so on.

I'd think a reason for quick wear out may be swap memory. I've never put a swap file/partition on mine.

<comment><USER2> >> may be swap memory

That's very interesting. I've had a swap file on all of my SSD systems. What makes you think that could be a culprit?

<comment><USER58> Continuous writing to the same area on the drive can probably exhaust the spare cells and degrade performance. I don't know how the firmwares deal with 0 spare cells and further failures, though.

I have a swap partition on my SSD but I also have swappiness=0, so that it only writes to disk if there's actual memory pressure.

<comment><USER59> Modern SSDs use wear leveling to prevent this from happening. If you write to the same logical location a thousand times, the SSD's wear-leveling algorithm will write to a thousand different locations.

More info: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wear_leveling>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER60> Having a personal infrastructure chaos monkey is maybe not a bad thing (apart from the expense etc).

</comment><comment><USER61> This has to be advertisement :)

went to the vertex 3 page on newegg. there was at least 5 reviews on the very first page about it dying from 0 to 24h.

my cheap SSD on my 3yr old eeepc1000 is still kicking. it's now serving games to my wii via a $5 enclosure that does NOT need external power. and the eeepc has a bigger and faster one that's also working for 1yr+

...too bad asus used a mini e-pci interface that is as odd as records you listened when you were 15.

</comment><comment><USER62> Shocker - Cutting edge new technology has high failure rate! But +1 for mentioning Boob Job in a article about SSD drives.</comment>


Fixing JavaScript's Date (2017) - <AUTHOR> https://maggiepint.com/2017/04/09/fixing-javascript-date-getting-started/ <comment><USER2> This one isn't mentioned:

      > d
      Thu Feb 27 2020 17:05:28 GMT-0600 (Central Standard Time)
      > d.getMonth()
      1

I'm as fond of zero-indexing as anyone, but this is ridiculous.

<comment><USER3> Even worse, it's not even internally consistent: while the month of the year starts at 0, the day of the month starts at 1. This is one of the worst API design mistakes of Java, and Javascript blindly copied it. At least the newer Java APIs (the java.time ones) fixed that: the month starts at 1 with the newer APIs (when not using the enum). But I don't have much hope of Javascript copying the new and better API.

<comment><USER4> The reason there's an "exception" for days is that the numbers are the widely- used _names_ for the day of the month. Months arguably don't have widely-used numeric names, although it's pretty reasonably to argue that because numeric month-and-day formatting is so ubiquitous it would have been okay to 1-index the months.

It occurs to me that "9/11" is the one date I can think of where the month is commonly verbally referred to by its number.

<comment><USER5> That's... a terrible argument.

1970-01-01T00:00:00 is the start of the Unix Epoch, it is definitely not 1970-00-01T00:00:00.

This is consistent across all the warty and various ways to represent the Gregorian calendar, the fifth month is _always_ May, no exceptions.

<comment><USER6> I think parent means that we often say:

> I get my check on the first of the month

But never really say

> I'm going on vacation for the sixth (month) of the year

Seems like they are just trying to explain the bad decision, not justify it.

<comment><USER4> Yes, I'm not trying to justify it. And it's not just that we say "the fifth day of May," because it's also true that we can say "the third month." My point is that the fifth day of May is actually named "5" and there's no other name for dates (other than specially=named days, of course).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> JS Dates are terrible, but not just the native stuff...there isn't a single good library either. [1]

A good library instants (1582852000000 ms since epoch), durations (5000 ms), periods (2 months), offsets (-0700), timezones (America/Denver), date (4/3/2019), and time (4:45 PM).

Instead I am stuck with good treatment of like two or three of these in any JS library I pick up -- usually instant and duration -- and I have to hammer things to fit.

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21669829](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21669829)

<comment><USER8> I've found js-joda is a good JS datetime library: [https://github.com/js- joda/js-joda](https://github.com/js-joda/js-joda)

<comment><USER7> Interesting, thanks!

I've used Joda and java.time a lot, and I have a very high opinion of both.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> In case it wasn't immediately obvious, there's a Stage 2 tc39 proposal that was spawned from this blog post called Temporal:

[https://github.com/tc39/proposal-temporal](https://github.com/tc39/proposal- temporal)

At a glance, it does follow the same ideas as the great Joda Time library (now a part of the Java standard library), and there's currently a port of this library for JS which is quite nice:

[https://github.com/js-joda/js-joda](https://github.com/js-joda/js-joda)

</comment><comment><USER9> Another oddity of JS's Date is that "Date()" returns a string whereas "new Date()" returns an object.

This makes it hard to do "class MyDate extends Date" when targeting ES5 from TS. In fact, if anyone knows an easy solution for that I'd love to hear it.

<comment> why-oh-why Your request is too broad, I suggest asking a question on StackOverflow explaining what the issue is exactly.

<comment><USER9> I didn't make a request. My post consists of two observations and an aside.

Thanks for your wonderful feedback though.

<comment><USER2> That is the wrong way to fish for that "easy solution" on HN. The proper way is to confidently state that there is no easy solution, which may inspire the HN hive mind to contradict you. That probably won't work ITT however since I spoiled it by pointing this out.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Dealing with dates is such a clusterfuck. Avoid it at all costs. Dates are a mix of political whims, astronomy theories, and historic artifacts, and works differently depending on what country you are in. With leap years and leap seconds, holidays, and summer/winter time adjustments.

</comment><comment><USER11> The fix for any date/time issues in any language is replicate NodaTime ([https://nodatime.org/](https://nodatime.org/))

<comment><USER12> NodaTime is great, as is the project it's based on JodaTime, which has since been deprecated in favor of the standard library java.time. [https://www.joda.org/joda-time/](https://www.joda.org/joda-time/)

Hopefully other languages and platforms, including .NET, move to including a sane DateTime library in the standard library too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> > Now we can see that lots of issues with date are fixable. However, we are > left with two things on our list that aren't: mutability and parsing. The > reasons that these things can't be fixed relates to two concepts that TC39 > has to deal with a lot – web compatibility and web reality.

Same with Java.

It was still able to introduce a new date API.

</comment><comment><USER13> We all know it's broken. More importantly, who's job is it to fix it?</comment>


Testing Dataflow Analyses for Precision and Soundness - <AUTHOR> https://blog.regehr.org/archives/1709 <comment><USER2> John Regehr's blogs are always a great read. It is topical for me at the moment, as I realized I was doing the data flow analysis all wrong for ownership/borrowing and am going to rewrite it today.

</comment><comment><USER3> Really interesting post, but oh my how terrible that font looked on my PC (Win10, 1080p plain DPI, ClearType enabled).

Caused me eye strain to try to read it. Fortunately Firefox reader mode saved the day.</comment>


Ask HN: How does HN maintain quality vs. Reddit and the media at large? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> HN quality has certainly declined and honestly some areas of Reddit (even /r/programming) are quite comparable now.

But strong moderation and a culture that abhors the typical meme crap that fills other forums is certainly helpful in keeping HN reasonable.

</comment><comment><USER3> Less cross pollination. I think of HN as a very specific subreddit, without the worry of having users from other subreddits 'brigading' as the cost to do so requires registration.

At reddit you can come across a post and easily make a pun, incorrect statement, or troll much easier.

</comment><comment><USER4> In essence, I think what makes HN work is having had a very good "seed" of users and high quality contributions at the very start. Every new user is then peer pressured to only submit/post content of equal quality and will be punished if they don't (by being ignored/downvoted). But also good moderation. I am yet to come across a web community that works and doesn't have good moderation.

</comment><comment><USER5> Somewhat by peer pressure. When that fails, moderation.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> It seems to me like the model should be able to scale beyond just HN to improve the quality of discourse elsewhere on the web...right?

</comment><comment><USER6> That depends on your idea of quality. Is the repetitiveness of humorless demands for peer-reviewed studies to back every word you write, and culturally enforced cynicism and contrariness, quality? 8 years ago, HN was 99% bright entrepreneurs having genuinely intelligent and polite conversations. Now it's an echo chamber of self-styled 'scientists' that reminds me of Less Wrong meets RationalWiki.

<comment><USER7> You joined less than a year ago.

<comment><USER6> _Dwight Schrute voice_ False! I joined under my real name in 2009.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Posts/comments that are pure images aren't tolerated.</comment>


Ask HN: what is a business with no revenue stream call? - <AUTHOR>

Freemium is free with paid advanced features... what do you call companies offering free products. Foursquare (until recently) for example <comment><USER2> It is still a business, it just has no profit's to submit to the country it resides in's Company House.

Remember it still has operating costs, asset's and liabilities and they all have to be declared. The only way it isn't is if it is a charity or if it is dormant, but that is only if it does 0 trade.

</comment><comment><USER3> The next big thing? ;) Remember, Google once had no revenue stream.

</comment><comment><USER4> Ad supported service providers.

</comment><comment><USER5> Social?

VC bait?

Not economically viable?</comment>


Books Recommendation: Breaking down a problem into sub-problems (in general) - <AUTHOR> Whenever I have a problem (in general) to solve which I have not seen before or solved before, I find it difficult to approach and break down into small subproblems and then I start procrastinating and avoiding the problem.
I would love to know your approaches/experiences. It would be great if you could share how you learned the art and can also recommend related books.
Thanks! <comment><USER2> Problem Solving 101 by Ken Watanabe provides a toolbox of problem solving techniques. One method I've been using to decompose problems us to use a "logic tree". Start here: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Issue_tree](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Issue_tree). Another technique is to first explain the problem and solution at a high level (pretend you're explaining it to a friend or coworkers), then write pseudocode for how you would solve it, and then convert that pseudocode to actual code.

<comment><AUTHOR> Logic tree is a good direction to look into. I asked the question in a broader sense, not just coding.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I think it depends on context, assuming you are not talking specifically about competitive-programming. I'm actually also very interested in this question as I found myself, as a self-taught programmer, has difficulty transforming a real-life problem into a computational problem, and then breaking it down to smaller ones.

</comment><comment><USER4> It may help to search for "problem decomposition", that's the more technical term that I'm aware of. You'll probably get better results googling for that.

</comment><comment><USER5> I never had that problem..but can recommend Polya's unique _How To Solve It_ , which deserves its high reputation, and might be helpful.

But which particular domain(s) are you talking about?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the book recommendation.

Not any specific domain but I was mainly looking for ideas/perspectives on how people think about and approach problems in general. This would be useful for me when I am on to something new (at least for me) and test out different approaches when I hit the wall or feel stuck.</comment></comment>


Why do private military contractors stay in politically-unstable places? - <AUTHOR> http://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/30944/why-would-pmcs-be-in-politically-unstable-places-as-opposed-to-waiting-in-comfo <comment><USER2> Read "Manual of the Mercenary Soldier" (1988), by Paul Baylor. Serious book for real-world mercs. It covers this issue. One well-known player had written something like "xxx happened. I was there" (and could thus get in on the war). Baylor writes "He didn't spend a lot of time hanging around Vancouver or Helsinki."

(Baylor was writing pre-9/11\. The rules are different now for US citizens.)

<comment><USER3> You should post this as an answer to that question -- summarize the relevant parts, maybe throw in a few quotes, and add a citation at the bottom. It'd be a great contribution. At the very least, you should post a comment on the question with the book's title and author, so interested people can see it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Soldiers of fortune do go home afterwards and wait around for another job these days (unfortunately a short wait) [https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/apr/14/south- africas-...](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/apr/14/south-africas- ageing-white-mercenaries-who-helped-turn-tide-on-boko-haram)

</comment><comment><USER5> One thing I think people ought to know is that there is also a community of mercenaries that don't have anywhere near the professionalism expressed in this post.

See "The Road To Raqqa" ([http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=MzPiuwzEtuY](http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=MzPiuwzEtuY)) for examples of bikers, homemakers & software dev mercenary outfits organized just on Facebook, operating in combat zones currently.

<comment><USER3> You should add this as a comment on the actual post, so people like me who frequent WB.SE but not HN can benefit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Accepted answer.

[http://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/30952](http://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/30952)

> Why do programmers looking for easy cash from VCs they can blindside with a > storm of buzzwords migrate to San Francisco? Its one of the absolute worse > places to run a company, but its one of the best for starting a company > simply because the community is there.

Makes sense. I always considered myself a tech mercenary.

<comment><USER7> Wow. Not only an interesting perspective from experience so far removed from my own, but also just really well written.

My favorite quote:

"Why do gravitate to the eye of the storm? Because in a world with no job security you have to make your own luck."

Really resonates and seems like good advice to apply to many endeavors.

<comment><USER8> Don't miss the blog post he linked either, it's also a great read: [http://zxq9.com/archives/911](http://zxq9.com/archives/911)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Why do techies hang around in SF? Why do aspiring actors hang around in LA?

<comment><USER10> Why do lawyers hang around ambulances?

<comment><USER11> Q. Why do you rob banks?

A. Because that's where the money is.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sutton%27s_law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sutton%27s_law)

<comment><USER12> better off starting one and raiding peoples pensions

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Suppose an American contracting for the Angolan government shoots a Canadian in Angola. Would the latter have civil or criminal claims on the former in a Western court? How do mercenaries manage this legal risk?

<comment><USER14> In most of the places where operators are required, the law is so fluid that there is little recourse save a select few. It is almost guaranteed It is not going to be some random Canadian on holiday and if they are out on contract themselves well then those are the risks. Contractors and operators outside of diplomatic channels have little protection or recourse for when stuff goes bad. Many times the laws of a particular town change when the next local gang takes power and short of major genocide once the peace is restored no one is really interested in digging up a missing person her and there. Unless you carry a charter or are flagged, you are pretty much on your own in most of these zones.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> > _Why do private military contractors stay in politically-unstable places?_

Because that's where they make the most money....

</comment><comment><USER16> Tax reasons? English rock stars have been reported to spend no more than 30 days per year in the UK to avoid paying any income tax there.

</comment><comment><USER17> Cities will continue to be power clusters regardless of your telecommunication fantasies

</comment><comment><USER18> Because that's where the money is -- and congressional oversight, at its thinnest.

</comment><comment><USER19> they bring the shooty things where the people need shooting.

</comment><comment><USER20> I would have thought they enjoy the feeling of power and control as they engage in violence and there is more chance for it

</comment><comment><USER21> Because those are the areas they want to destabilize to drum up work.

<comment><USER22> I feel like any area that is already so unstable that a handful of ex-Marines have a real shot at knocking it over is probably about to fall over on its own regardless, so why would they bother hurrying the inevitable?

<comment><USER23> They want to be home for Christmas?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> This is a bizarre post to see here, and an even more odd comment thread. No one else is curious to understand the context on that subreddit and why at a meta-level this whole discussion is interesting to this particular community on hackernews?

<comment><AUTHOR> It's not a subreddit - it's the world building stack exchange, for people creating worlds for novels and games. I was surprised to see an answer by an actual mercenary, and thought it might be of general interest. It's a part of the world I know very little about.

That guys blog is also worth a read (the link is in his profile).

<comment><USER24> Thanks and good point about it not being a subreddit. I certainly didn't mean to say this was inappropriate here, only that I found it interest it was posted; and was surprised no one was having the meta-discussion around how interesting it is that this community exists!</comment></comment></comment>


Fans don't think Netflix's Space Force as bad as reviews say - <AUTHOR> https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-06-10/is-space-force-really-as-bad-as-reviews-say/12320984 <comment><USER2> I watched the first six episodes, the show is fine, not great and borderline not entertaining.

The cast is great, some of the jokes are great. But, Steve Carrell is by far the worst part of the entire show while everyone else is great. If the show didn't revolve around him and his character the show may be decent.

</comment><comment><USER3> I watched the first 15 minutes, basically back to back cheap gags at an unpopular political party. I don't care either way, it's just not funny.

Not in the least surprised their ABC is backing it.

Really enjoying the entire oeuvre of Blakes 7 on Youtube.

</comment><comment><USER4> Would they be fans if they thought it was bad?</comment>


The five universal laws of human stupidity - <AUTHOR> https://qz.com/967554/the-five-universal-laws-of-human-stupidity/ <comment><USER2> [http://harmful.cat-v.org/people/basic-laws-of-human- stupidit...](http://harmful.cat-v.org/people/basic-laws-of-human-stupidity/)

The article doesn't have much substance besides long quotes from the original, and the original reads better.

<comment><USER3> Actually even the given article is not really-really the "original" (the illustrations by Donnelly were added for the publication in Whole Earth Review (Spring 1987), and the article misses a few paragraphs, the small preface by "Mad Millers" and the tiny, but useful "Appendix") the actual book, "The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity", written in the early '70's was originally published in 1976 in a very limited number of copies (for friends and colleagues only) and it was only published (in Italian as "Allegro ma non troppo" in 1988) and the original English one in 2011 (the Author M.Cipola died in 2000).

The 2011 "original" version is on archive.org: [https://archive.org/details/The_Basic_Laws_of_Human_Stupidit...](https://archive.org/details/The_Basic_Laws_of_Human_Stupidity_by_Carlo_M._Cipolla)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Law 2 is specially right. Stupid appears in every segment of society. And stupid never knows they are stupid.

I would say one can be a genius in one part but totally clueless in another. IQ doesn't guarantee you a free ride.

<comment><USER5> >I would say one can be a genius in one part but totally clueless in another. IQ doesn't guarantee you a free ride.

This is the cause behind so many quacks and pseudoscientists.

For example, most of the 'scientists' that creationists like to say agree with their ideas just coincidentally happen to have their degrees in subjects other than biology:

[http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Lists_of_creationist_scientists...](http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Lists_of_creationist_scientists#List)

Also, a lot of others that end up going from a non medicine related field to peddling questionable cancer 'cures' and homeopathy.

<comment><USER6> You can add meteorologist to the list of scientists that think they understand Global climate change.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> On a related topic, competence, I have come to realise over time that I and many people I know have a bias towards people in professions they don't know much about, believing that most of them are good at their jobs. Reality is that as the case with general population, majority are incompetent, careless, and well, downright stupid. Be it doctors with a decade long training/education, plumbers, lawyers, programmers, etc.

<comment><USER8> Surgeon's law[0] applies to people too.

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon's_law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon's_law)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> "We can do nothing about the stupid." Sure we can -- [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VX_(nerve_agent)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VX_\(nerve_agent\))</comment>


How Windmills as Wide as Jumbo Jets Are Making Clean Energy Mainstream - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/04/23/business/energy-environment/big-windmills.html <comment><USER2> Selling solar back to the grid has one major problem that, fortunately, doesn't plague windmill installations: The Duck Curve [1].

The problem is that peak energy usage now occurs _after sunset_. So no matter how many solar panels you stack on your home, around 6-7 PM the coal, oil, and gas power plants all have to spin up to their max capacity. Your solar panels are new less likely to _replace_ a coal power plant, although they do change how many hours a day it runs.

Unfortunately for the power companies, running a coal power plant for 3 hours a day costs just about as much as running it for 8 hours a day. This leads to the power companies naturally feeling rather sour about being forced to credit residents for the power they supply to the grid during low-demand hours. Their costs are staying about the same, but now their revenue stream goes down.

In some regions (Utah/Idaho/Colorado is the one I'm aware of) these power companies are now negotiating with governments for lower and lower solar credits for these kinds of residents and they're winning because the abundance of solar power at mid-day is legitimately creating an oversupply, thus making that energy worth less and less.

I see this causing problems for many of my neighbors, who had solar sales reps factoring in energy buy-back rates from 2016 into 10-year loans models to pay for the solar panels. Soon the energy the power companies pay my neighbors is going to offset their panel loans less and less, which may result in a reversal of the economics that led to them buying the panels in the first place.

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

<comment><USER3> When power gets more expensive in the evenings, a lot of heating/cooling/charging loads may shift in time. Also, hvdc grids let you transmit over a couple of timezones.

(And wind does not have the problem the first place, obviously)

<comment><USER4> If possible, but it may only get worse. If EVs become more prevalent, it will only increase the evening demand as most people will charge when they get home from work. Sure, maybe with timers you can shift that to midnight or something, but it's still happening at a time when Solar adds nothing.

You can't just toss out something like HVDC grids as a quick solution. That kind of infrastructure takes decades to build out.

<comment><USER3> I'm not sure why you discount charging during the day. Most EVs don't empty their battery by 6pm and require a full charge at 8am.

<comment><USER5> I'm guessing because there is less availability for charging during the day when you are at work, rather than at night when you are home.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The interesting question is what effect clean energy has to the usage of hydrocarbons. Will it bring reduce global demand or just reduce the price of energy.

The good news is: CO2 emission intensity is going down globally and emissions per capita in US, China and EU28 are going down.

The bad news are: Emissions per capita are still going up globally, and hydrocarbon usage and CO2 emissions are breaking records year after year. [http://folk.uio.no/roberan/img/GCP2017/PNG/s09_FossilFuel_an...](http://folk.uio.no/roberan/img/GCP2017/PNG/s09_FossilFuel_and_Cement_emissions_1990.png) Economic downturn was the only thing causing temporary decline.

It looks like clean energy reduces the demand in developed countries, thus reducing the prices of hydrocarbons. It will not reduce the CO2 emissions globally, it just moves them from the developed world to the developing world. Maybe it slows down CO2 emission growth rate?

[http://folk.uio.no/roberan/learnmore/more_warning_signs.shtm...](http://folk.uio.no/roberan/learnmore/more_warning_signs.shtml)

\---

EDIT: Just to point out how complex the dynamics between clean energy, hydrocarbons and policy are, here is nice recent research paper from Acemoglu and Rafey:

Mirage on the Horizon: Geoengineering and Carbon Taxation Without Commitment [https://economics.mit.edu/files/14855](https://economics.mit.edu/files/14855)

>Abstract: We show that, in a model without commitment to future policies, geoengineering breakthroughs can have adverse environmental and welfare effects because they change the (equilibrium) carbon taxes. In our model, energy producers emit carbon, which creates a negative environmental externality, and may decide to switch to cleaner technology. A benevolent social planner sets carbon taxes without commitment. Higher future carbon taxes both reduce emissions given technology and encourage energy producers to switch to cleaner technology. Geoengineering advances, which reduce the negative environmental effects of the existing stock of carbon, decrease future carbon taxes and thus discourage private investments in conventional clean technology. We characterize the conditions under which these advances diminish—rather than improve—environmental quality and welfare.

<comment><USER7> As a new farmer, this is good news. My target range for CO2 is 1200ppm. This means our future will be greener! [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XkDgYLxp8Sg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XkDgYLxp8Sg)

<comment><USER8> You posted a link to a rabbithole of fascist-cheering, bone-stupid argumentation, and conspiracy theory. Setting aside their fairly obvious attempts at _political_ astroturfing, the depths to which those people are lying with regards to AGW to people who lack the scientific literacy to evaluate the arguments being made is appalling. So are their race-baiting shithead politics, but this more bluntly--I mean, this is _math_.

I make this post assuming you're not in on it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> As the production costs with windpower decrease due to the technological progress, the question of grid storage and grid interconnection becomes more pressing.

E.g. in Germany, they frequently have days of negative energy prices, where producers need to pay to feed energy into the greed because of overproduction of energy on windy/sunny days [0](in German). Without storage and grid interconnection, there is only so much renewable energy from intermittent sources like wind and solar you can handle.

[0]: [https://blog.energybrainpool.com/bereits-103-mal- in-2017-neg...](https://blog.energybrainpool.com/bereits-103-mal- in-2017-negative-preise-am-stromspotmarkt/)

<comment><USER10> Isn't this where pumped storage and other forms of storage come into play? Here in Scotland we routinely pump water back up into our lochs in order to store it for future use.

There's also various news articles reporting on German mines beginning to be used as pumped storage sites, with a reservoir on the surface, and water dropping into the mines below when there's sudden demand.

This is a good problem to have, though.

<comment><USER11> According to Wikipedia we have 15 GWh of pumped storage capacity in Scotland. Per annum we use 27,000 GWh. So by my calculations we have a pumped storage battery that lasts about 5 hours.

(NB: I didn't check whether the power output of this battery is enough to actually meet demand, but wikipedia says it can run at full capacity for 22 hours, so no)

<comment><USER12> It can be reused more than once a year. You could use it every day, charge at night when there's no demand, discharge it during the peak. Really depends on how fast it can charge and discharge.

<comment><USER13> Depends more on how variable your supply is. If you have to meet a two week window with below average wind it isn't enough. If you have to just meet day to day variation in wind it is probably enough.

Unfortunately two weeks without much wind are common in general weather patterns. Thus my gut reaction is it isn't enough. However we are now talking weather where local patterns are the important thing which means each situation needs to be considered separately.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> The title is wrong. One _blade_ is the length of the _wingspan_ of the A380, 80 meters. The _rotor diameter_ is 154 meters.

</comment><comment><USER15> I like this article. I like that is has nice big pictures and videos, but they _dont_ do that stupid big 'screenspace' image thing that seems to be popular in these sorts of articles now.

Also their control centre looks horrible. Wheres all the crap on their desks? I hope they only just had to tidy it away for the sake of a press photo.

<comment><USER16> The guy on the left appears hard at work looking at an empty Windows desktop.

<comment><USER17> Well... at least on one of his 3 screens.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I'm sorry, stupid question, but exacly how much power do those big ones generate? 20 times more than what? This actually most crucial tidbit isn't even covered in that article, or am I blind?

<comment><USER19> The biggest ones produce over 5 megawatts at peak capacity, I think someone has built over 10 megawatts but I'm not sure.

5 megawatts is a pretty useless figure for most people to imagine, and I think imagining it in units of homes-powered isn't great either because we don't have a sense of the heat or kinetic energy equivalent because our homes are quiet machines. A 260 horsepower car (think new minivan) at full throttle is producing about .2 megawatts, so the worlds largest turbines are generating the same power as 10/.2=20 minivans at full power.

Another way to think of it is in terms of heat. A big stovetop burner will generate about 3000 watts of heat, so a minivan is like 65 burners at full blast, and a 10 megawatt turbine is like 3300 burners.

<comment><USER20> But perhaps the most useful might be power-plant-equivalents.

The Stockton Cogeneration Facility near San Fran had a nominal output of 60MW. Thus, around twelve of these mega-windmills would roughly equal the output of that coal plant.

<comment><USER21> A large size nuke plant does about 1300 MW nominally (it is initially about 3000 MW thermally but only 35% or so is successfully converted to power for the grid).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Related story on Bloomberg this morning:

How to Buy a Wind Farm

[https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-04-23/the- puert...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-04-23/the-puerto-rico- family-office-that-bought-a-wind-farm)

</comment><comment><USER23> Anyone familiar with these "bladeless" wind turbines as an alternative to large blades?

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

Based on their marketing (far quieter, 40% more energy) it seems like an interesting option. I know one of the biggest complaints that farmers have is the noise they cause, so they have to be placed far from houses.

I'm curious to see if it's mostly fluff or has any potential... but I'm not expert on the subject.

<comment><USER24> Fluff... dominant factor in potential energy production is area swept out...

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> > Lower costs, though, have also made wind power more appealing elsewhere. > Once mostly concentrated in northern Europe, Mr. Nauen is optimistic that > new markets will emerge in Asia and the United States.

South America too. In just the last 12 months, installed capacity in Brazil went from 10.4 GW to 12.5 GW (source: Boletim Mensal de Geração Eólica - ONS).

<comment><USER26> What kind of cost per kwh is Brazil seeing? When the US finally got consistently below ~$0.10 in the late 1990s, it began to ramp.

[https://i.imgur.com/ehK8jQS.png](https://i.imgur.com/ehK8jQS.png)

<comment><USER25> According to [http://www1.folha.uol.com.br/mercado/2017/12/1944853-energia...](http://www1.folha.uol.com.br/mercado/2017/12/1944853-energia- eolica-e-solar-atingem-patamar-mais-baixo-de-precos-no-brasil.shtml) in the auctions at the end of 2017 (for new generators to be built) it was around R$ 145/MWh for solar and R$ 98/MWh for wind. I don't know where to find the cost for all currently operating generators.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER2> The engaging cinematography on this article really drew me in. Somebody could write an article about brick laying and if it had the same Nutella-smooth video I would read the entire thing.

</comment><comment><USER27> I happened to be driving through Indiana this week and saw the biggest wind farm I'd ever seen. It just went on for ages as we drove. I think it is this 600MW farm: [http://meadowlakewindfarm.com/](http://meadowlakewindfarm.com/)

<comment><USER26> I was pretty amazed to recently read that Iowa is getting ~35-40% of its electricity from wind energy. They're up over 7,000 MW of capacity (4,000 turbines) now for just three million people.

Someone can correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe that Iowa may have among the highest wind energy capacity per capita on earth, at 2.2 MW per thousand people. Denmark, which is perhaps the highest for a nation, is at half that rate (5,476 MW capacity for 5.7m people).

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> The future of energy is mostly wind, solar, hydro, and nuclear with grid scale energy storage and long distance HVDC transmission lines. IMHO :)

<comment><USER29> I've always been told that transmission of electricity is hard or inefficient. What is HVDC and why is it better?

<comment><USER30> High voltage DC. High voltage means it's more efficient (power dissipation depends on current, not voltage, so for the same power, higher voltage means much less dissipation). DC (direct current instead of alternating) makes it easier to connect disparate grids as you don't have to worry about phasing.

<comment><USER31> Also, I recall reading that if you run undersea cables with AC, the sea water sucks out energy from them.

<comment><USER32> Can't tell if trolling or not.

The cables have water barriers so the conductors + insulation remain quite dry.

<comment><USER33> I believe the parent meant that the alternating current creates an electric field which is then absorbed by the water, leading to energy loss. This happens to some extent to all AC transmission, but I don't know enough to say if seawater+AC is a particularly bad combination. It would make sense though, because it's more conductive.

EDIT: brandmeyer's comment explains it well: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16903431](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16903431)

<comment><USER31> Yes, that's precisely the thing I was referring to. Wasn't sure about the correct terminology (not an EE) so I didn't try to make the comment sciency- souding :).

<comment><USER32> I work installing these cables and never heard this discussed, maybe at the voltages / transmission subsea cables work at (220kV, 1000s of amps) makes this effect negligible?

<comment><USER34> Are they AC? My impression was that practically all vaguely modern undersea cables are high voltage DC.

<comment><USER32> It depends, when talking about interconnecting cables between countries, yes the majority are DC, both to minimise transmission losses and also to tie together grids working at different frequencies....

In terms of km installed I think it will be HVAC just from the sheer number of offshore windfarms built over the last 10yrs in Europe. These things can be huge - 60km in length, 220kV ~1500A....

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> I live here in Jutland, and it is indeed heartening to see those giant wind mills spread out across the fields. Surprisingly so many can be found inland.

I wish they focus as much on micro grids as much on energy generation.

</comment><comment><USER36> Wow glad I have great internet the footage was great/visual is more direct.

Those turbines appeared to have an upward inclination, curious why that is. Also interesting that the trailing edge near the hub isn't as sharp as the tips probably due to slowest rotation.

Good stuff, those things are seriously massive.

I also like that giant wall monitor with all the 'stats'?

</comment><comment><USER37> Autonomous utility boats will have a significant role to play in monitoring and supplying the offshore wind industry.

[https://www.asvglobal.com/](https://www.asvglobal.com/)

These little boats can continuously monitor the foundations of offshore wind turbines for scour, and their larger brethren can quickly deliver supplies in a wide range of weather conditions -- without putting human engineers at risk.

</comment><comment><USER38> As an aside, one of them burned last year: [http://www.powerengineeringint.com/articles/2017/08/new- vest...](http://www.powerengineeringint.com/articles/2017/08/new-vestas- turbine-destroyed-by-fire.html)

By the way, you can walk right up to them. They are very impressive up close.

<comment><USER39> That's a 9.5MW unit that burned up. I don't like Vestas, they still use a gearbox which is a huge amount of extra complexity.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> Wind turbines, they are not milling anything. One would have hoped that a paper like NYT would something as basic as that right.

<comment><USER41> Windmill is a defacto synonym for wind turbines in most english speaking countries

<comment><USER40> Not in the industry.

<comment><USER42> I worked in the industry for three summers, and they were interchangeable there.

Additionally, they could be 'tur-bans' or 'tur-bines' as well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> I think storage should be decentralized with towns/cities working to store locally and forward as required.

</comment><comment><USER44> regarding superfluous wind energy: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power-to- gas#Efficiency](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power-to-gas#Efficiency)

</comment><comment><USER45> Does anyone have a datasheet so we can calculate the Energy ROI?

<comment><USER46> Here you go: [https://www.vestas.com/~/media/vestas/about/sustainability/p...](https://www.vestas.com/~/media/vestas/about/sustainability/pdfs/lcav11020mw181215.pdf)

Money-shot on p66. About 8 months for EROEI (Energy returned on energy invested). I worked on some of these Life Cycle Analyses and can attest that they were quite rigorous.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> The future of mankind lies with nuclear power. I'm distressed by it not receiving as much attention as windmills.

<comment><USER48> The cost of nuclear power seems to go up while every other zero-emissions energy source goes down. Even ignoring the fears about accidents and waste, it seems like nuclear may end up a transitional source.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> Also killing birds and bats though....

<comment><USER50> How much wildlife (or human life...) is killed or otherwise threatened by fossil fuels? I suspect a single oil tanker spill kills more animals than any wind farm.

<comment><USER51> Citation?

<comment><USER17> No claim was made. No need for a citation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> Problem is that these are political markets not market markets. Denmark spent a lot of money on getting their windmill industry up and running and windmills still aren't solving the base problem as they aren't reliable for all sorts of weather.

Furthermore, windmilss don't really scale well, Nuclear on the other hand which is both safer and more scalable and greener would change that but right now only the Chinese seems to have realized that.

<comment><USER53> You know Europe is developing a fusion reactor.

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

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

<comment><USER54> Countries have been "developing" fusion power for decades. It'll arrive shortly after quantum powered personal computers.

<comment><USER55> Good that you put "developing" into air quotes.

If I pay one single developer for 50 years to build me all technology Google has, I still won't get anywhere.

If you want to actually develop nuclear, you need to increase investment. By a factor of ten or more.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> I wouldn't call wind turbines exactly clean energy, between the need to have thermic power plant on stand-by to pick up the slack, since wind is highly irregular, the metric cube of concrete poured in the ground in the middle of nowhere to built them, the kilometers of copper to link them back to the network and the batteries to keep the excess electricity. And it's even worse when you see a field of turbines where half of them are not turning.

<comment><USER57> Except, in the grand scheme of things thats very clean. Compared to Gas or Coal power plants that are much more difficult to build and are also often located in relatively remote locations. We need some kind of power to pick up the slack but not necessarily fossil fuel based. There are all sorts of ways to store energy created at times of high wind for later use, from simple batteries to things like Dinorwig in Wales. The reason half of them aren't turning is often because it takes so long to stop a fossil fuel based power station and the wind turbines would only be generating excess power and affecting the grid, so they have to stop them. With more investment in storing energy they can keep them running far longer and decrease the use of fossil fuels even further.

I'm not saying they are 100% clean, just that realistically nothing ever will be. We can offset that, and we can work to minimise it. For the moment Wind turbines are one of the cleanest ways we have.

<comment><USER56> Thank you for Dinorwig. I did not know about this.</comment></comment></comment>


Why mobile is way bigger than you realize - <AUTHOR> http://go.danielodio.com/waybigger

<comment><USER2> What part of "Never Show Again" do you not understand?

<comment><AUTHOR> What browser & OS are you using? When you say "never show", a cookie should be placed in your browser called "swoopshow" (like this one <http://drod.io/272U3B1v200k2z1a1v0u> ). Could you check to see if you have the cookie? I'm wondering if the cookie's not being placed correctly, or if it's being placed but not read correctly. FYI it _does_ work for me on Firefox & Mac OS 10.6.

<comment><USER3> Broken on chrome, osx.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Someone have a tl;dw version? 45 minutes is too expensive for me right now.

<comment><AUTHOR> Here's what I wrote in the comments section of the blog post:

I embedded the slides in addition to the video, so you could just scroll through them, but so you have it in text here are the 7 points I go through in the video. These are the things I'm arguing we'll see largely integrated by 2015, and will have a massive impact on the way we interact as a species:

1\. Data Mashups = Magic 2\. Location Layer Grows Up 3\. Peripherals Get Smart & Connected 4\. Software Rules the Cutting Edge 5\. Information: Pull to Push 6\. Android + Commoditized Tablets 7\. Social + Mobile = Killer Combo

<comment><AUTHOR> If you want to play the video faster, say at 1.5x speed, you can download it from the vimeo site, <http://vimeo.com/21495452> . Here's where you download it from: <http://drod.io/1k3e1n470M1g3O013L2S>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Daniel,

Which of the several mobile HN apps is yours? I'd like to try it and see your social layer in action.

</comment><comment><USER6> Is there a transcript / tl;dw? Watching video != efficient.

<comment><AUTHOR> The slides are embedded; transcript is coming.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Hey, can we get a transcript mr. Odio?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yep, transcript will be posted on the URL early next week.

<comment><USER8> Now there's a problem. By next week i'll have forgotten about this. try Speechpad or something.

May all who who post videos also transcribe for peoples like me(no time to watch, or just can't).</comment></comment></comment>


Browsing the web on an iPad stinks–and Apple likes it that way - <AUTHOR> http://gigaom.com/2013/03/03/browsing-the-web-on-an-ipad-stinks-and-apple-likes-it-that-way/ <comment><USER2> Almost all the times I have trouble with a website on iPad it is due to idiotic things on the part of the website, such as forbidding resizing, implementing their own scrolling instead of letting the browser handle it, and other such atrocities.

</comment><comment><USER3> TL;DR: There is no reasoning or logic in this article, only a rationalisation that because a site works on a desktop browser on a 1900x1080 screen, it should work just as well on a 1024 x 768 screen, and if the site doesn't work the same it must be the browser at fault.

</comment><comment><USER4> This article is an embarassing conflict of interest.</comment>