Humans Are Slamming into Driverless Cars and Exposing a Key Flaw - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-12-18/humans-are-slamming-into-driverless-cars-and-exposing-a-key-flaw <comment><USER2> Yesterday I was driving past midnight through the city. I'd frequently come to an intersection where 2 arterials crossed at 90 degrees. 3 of the roads had red lights and 2 or more cars backed up. The 4th had a green and no traffic coming at all. And ..... we'd sit there a while, and eventually the light would go yellow, again, for nobody, turn red, pause a second for the non- existent red light runners, then finally turn green for us.

The intersections had cameras mounted pointing all 4 ways, and sensor wires in the roads.

You'd think that if we could build self-driving cars, we could devise a traffic light that would not be monumentally inefficient and incompetent. How hard can it be? And think of all the gas, CO2 and time saved.

There's a heluva lot of low hanging fruit in traffic lights.

<comment><USER3> Hmm, here in Australia, I can't recall a single time this has happened. I've actually tested how well the software for these lights work, for myself at night time when there's no traffic. Usually the lights on the main roads are green by default. In my case, it'd take 1-2 seconds after I approached the red light of the crossing road for the main one to turn yellow. Same when pressing the pedestrian crossing button.

<comment><USER4> You've obviously not tested them on a motorcycle in WA...

Grrr...I'm just waiting for the day I get picked off by some overzealous Judge Dredd cop because I ran a red arrow because I got tired of waiting for it to detect me.

<comment><USER5> law in WA is you wait one full light cycle and you can run the light. So basically 30-45 seconds and if no one is going you go.

<comment><USER3> And how do you prove that you did after the red light camera catches you?

<comment><USER5> Same way they do, you ask for the full tape, which you can get. Or you know just go around the wrong way. Anecdotally red light covered cameras seem to be much better maintained as othewise they lose revenue.

Also this is why you have a dash cam.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I hate that "dilemma" if whether or not driverless cars should kill its passengers in order to avoid a deadlier collision. If a group of people walk onto the road as my car approaches, why should I be the one to die? They made the dangerous action, they should bear the consequences. Even if they didn't intend to, how is my car supposed to determine that? I think asking "who is at fault" is a better question than "how many people will live" when asking who should die. Vehicles should be programmed for preservation of the passengers. It's the only unambiguous rubric that makes sense to everyone. Preserve yourself, and if you are in the wrong, bear the legal consequences.

<comment><USER7> Moreover, why are we asking computers to make decisions we don't ask humans to make? In a split second, a person does not weigh the pros and cons of hitting an old lady vs a schoolbus filled with boy scouts. We just react, and ideally react according to how we were taught in driver's ed. A computer would do just that, only better and more consistently.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> > Ten days later, a Mountain View motorcycle cop noticed traffic stacking up > behind a Google car going 24 miles an hour in a busy 35 mph zone. He zoomed > over and became the first officer to stop a robot car. He didn't issue a > ticket -- who would he give it to? -- but he warned the two engineers on > board about creating a hazard.

> "The right thing would have been for this car to pull over, let the traffic > go and then pull back on the roadway," said Sergeant Saul Jaeger, head of > the police department's traffic-enforcement unit. "I like it when people err > on the side of caution. But can something be too cautious? Yeah."

I believe that this reflects the 25 mph maximum speed that Google has set. I don't know CA law, but in some places it's illegal to go under 25 mph in a 35 mph zone. It's always safest to minimize speed difference with other vehicles. Even if that means exceeding the limit. That won't protect against citations in speed traps, however.

<comment><USER9> By California law, NEVs are vehicles which are incapable of driving faster than 25 mph, and are allowed to drive (unless barred by local ordinance) on any street with posted limit ≤ 35 mph.

[https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/dmv/?1dmy&urile=wcm:path:/dmv_...](https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/dmv/?1dmy&urile=wcm:path:/dmv_content_en/dmv/pubs/brochures/fast_facts/ffvr37)

This traffic stop was caused more by cop ignorance than any problem of Google's. No harm done though.

Human drivers of NEVs go the same top speed on the same roads, it just doesn't make the news if one gets stopped and has a conversation with a cop.

<comment><USER8> Thanks for the cite. According to Wikipedia, 25 mph NEVs can use roads posted at 45 mph in some places. But laws notwithstanding, even 10-15 mph speed differential is hazardous.

<comment><USER9> Yep. It would be great to get urban street speed limits lowered to max out at 25–30 mph everywhere, with strict enforcement against driving above 35–40mph. In collisions between cars and pedestrians or cyclists, everyone mostly walks away alive at 25 mph, whereas at 45+ mph the pedestrian or cyclist dies almost every time.

With smarter road design organized to minimize waits at traffic signals, it wouldn't even necessarily result in slower trips or less road capacity overall.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Possible reasons you might find more slow-speed minor rear-end collisions among self-driving cars than among human-driven cars on a per-mile basis:

1\. There are only a tiny number of self-driving cars on the road, driving a relatively small number of miles, and accidents in general are fairly rare on a per-mile basis, so there might not yet be enough data to get a reliable idea of average crash rate. The linked study is based on analysis of only 11 (!!) crashes, 8 of which were at <5 mph, with only 2 causing "possible injuries". As the study itself says, _"[...] the corresponding 95% confidence intervals overlap. Therefore, we currently cannot rule out, with a reasonable level of confidence, the possibility that the actual rate for self-driving vehicles is lower than for conventional vehicles."_ (Personally I think their confidence intervals for self-driving cars are useless given the data so far, but whatever.)

2\. The Google cars which account for all of the cited crashes are AFAIK doing all of their driving on city streets, where intersections, stops, and thus these types of collisions are more common than on highways.

3\. I suspect most tiny bumper bumps which don't damage either car or injure anyone are never reported to the police when both drivers are people, but self-driving cars record every case.

4\. Self-driving cars have better sensors to detect road hazards, and as a result might stop in cases where a human driver would do something which risked a more serious accident. People tail-gating these cars will end up unable to react in time and bumping them, but even these 11 crashes might have been in situations where the autonomous car stopping prevented more severe car damage or injuries.

5\. Driving cautiously and strictly limiting speed to 25mph might make following human drivers frustrated and more likely to tail closely. This might be exacerbated by the Google cars' goofy appearance. (Would be interesting to see statistics for various skills/styles of human drivers, or for human-driven NEVs.) I'm not sure NEV accidents can be meaningfully compared to standard car accidents.

Overall I think this topic is worthy of study, but the data is not really all that useful yet. Keith Naughton's Bloomberg piece calling this a "key flaw" seems like high-order FUD / clickbait.

</comment><comment><USER10> This is where I think the divergence between "machine learning" and "artificial intelligence" really lays. These vehicles need to be able to generalize and understand motivations, not something that can be intuited via "more data," at least not practically.

Who wants to merge into highway traffic for 500 hours before a machine can do it well? Does it take a human 500 hours?

A tough problem to solve, no doubt.

<comment><USER11> I think the bigger problem is not training the cars to drive more aggressively, but that doing so will probably require them to break traffic rules

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> The nice thing about these cars and all the dash cams we have from regular drives is that we can now tweak the laws to reflect reality. The robot cars should do what they are supposed to and drivers or law makers should adjust.

<comment><USER13> Don't hold your breath. Those laws make a lot of money.

<comment><USER14> Not as much as google

<comment><USER5> Random Calculation and I may be way off:

[http://www.governing.com/topics/public-justice-safety/gov- fe...](http://www.governing.com/topics/public-justice-safety/gov-ferguson- missouri-court-fines-budget.html)

This is all fines and forfeitures but:

St. Ann $3,609,972 $9,115,012 39.6 13,020 St. John $1,126,763 $3,835,573 29.4 6,517 Ferguson $2,571,190 $12,746,894 20.2 21,203 Bellefontaine Neighbors $749,252 $4,918,310 15.2 10,860 City of Florissant $2,966,669 $23,120,332 12.8 52,158 City of Berkeley $1,047,536 $8,680,716 12.1 8,978 Creve Coeur $1,847,864 $16,365,796 11.3 17,833 Maryland Heights $2,077,689 $22,820,884 9.1 27,472 Jennings $679,787 $7,737,693 8.8 14,712 Hazelwood $1,919,022 $23,809,852 8.1 25,703 Overland $582,292 $8,695,835 6.7 16,062 Richmond Heights $763,523 $12,109,281 6.3 8,603 Black Jack $123,355 $2,621,186 4.7 6,929 Clayton $1,027,932 $21,761,741 4.7 15,939 Olivette $283,289 $7,046,302 4.0 7,737 Bridgeton $445,171 $12,887,494 3.5 11,550 St. Louis City $11,022,000 $441,426,000 2.5 319,294 University City $586,281 $26,639,562 2.2 35,371 St. Louis County $4,397,769 $341,291,336 1.3 998,954

This totals up to around $35MM in Fines and Forfeitures in St. Louis (chosen due to Ferguson and all the articles around Mike Brown). Anyway WAG numbers this looks to be about 80% of the neighborhoods on the highways but it's got the 2 major players (city & county) so lets call it good.

St. Louis is 21st ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_metropolitan_areas_of_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_metropolitan_areas_of_the_United_States)) in Metro area size, so that gives us $755MM if everything was actually the size of St. Louis.

However if I just add all the pops from 21 up I get 146MM people, so that means that if scaled linearly for St. Louis (which may or may not be right), we're talking $1.763MM, so around 1.75BN for the 21 biggest cities in the US.

Easy to say that traffic stops in the US are well over a billion.

Way over analysis but it shows scale of traffic income. If you read the first article linked, it points out the share of revenue this. It can be up to 36% of revenue for small municipalities.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I'm skeptical of the "crash rate double that of those with human drivers"

The figures are "17 minor crashes in 2 million miles." That's a crash every 117,000 miles or roughly once a decade for a typical driver. From my experience most drivers average more than one minor crash per decade. It's probably that they just don't bother formally reporting them. (My most recent one was about 6 months ago. Another car reversed into mine while I was stationary - small dent. Didn't bother with reporting, insurance claims etc.)

</comment><comment><USER16> Nice quote from Dmitri!

      "They're a little bit like a cautious student driver or a
      grandma." --- Dmitri Dolgov, principal engineer of the program.

No one likes getting stuck driving behind grandma. I expect as the tech sees more of the light of day, they will go from 'cute curiosity' to 'extremely frustrating to drive near'. They will pin you, in some cases, well below the speed limit, which is often set dangerously low.

When someone dies trying to pass one of these things, of course it won't be the robots fault...

Robots should drive to _minimize their impact on the road_. That would be my guiding philosophy. That means driving appropriate speeds at appropriate times, and not creating a dangerous situation for other drivers. "Slower traffic ahead" is a big danger on the freeway.

A human driver would be expected to speed up and merge with traffic and not create an impedance. There is no question the right thing for the software to do is to exceed the posted limit.

Imagine a government so willing to help spur investment in driver-less cars they set a different statutory limit for the AI to follow (class-by-class)? Sounds like a very cool way to solve two problems at once. Based on the specifics of the road, visibility, and telemetry, weather, etc. the tech gets a huge boost if the robot can travel significantly faster.

</comment><comment><USER17> This might defeat the purpose, but why not have remote controlled cars. A digital taxi driver could alleviate a lot of the problems that we currently have with non-autonomous cars, except bypasses the whole open-research problem of having roads full with autonomous vehicles. What's being done right now with digital assistants is a similar strategy.

<comment><USER18> The latency is a bit of a worry.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> My father was very cautious driver, he never broke speed limit intentionally, and I remember the same argument I had with him when I was in driver's school. I was of opinion that speed limits should be hard enforced, and he told me, you don't want that, sometimes you might need to break the speed limit, for example when you're exiting the crossing a little too late for some reason. I think he was right.

But in the case of self-driving cars software - I would much prefer it to just stick to the law, rather than try to match human nuances (or not!) of breaking it. I think general predictability is of value. I hate to say that but the human drivers that cause these accidents are the ones who have to learn better. And if it is still desirable for the autonomous cars to behave differently in certain place, you can always change the speed limits (or other signs) in that location.

</comment><comment><USER20> The only problem with the article is the speed limit is much more complicated than the number printed on the sign. The actual speed limit depends on the flow of traffic and weather conditions. Merging on to a high way where people are driving 80 then driving 65 is violating the law.

<comment><USER21> In which jurisdictions is it illegal to obey the speed limit if traffic is going faster? I know some jurisdictions have charges for impeding traffic but that's always been for when you're going under the limit. I'm skeptical that to conform to the law you have to exceed the posted limit.

<comment><USER22> [http://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/free-books/beat- ticke...](http://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/free-books/beat-ticket- book/chapter7-6.html)

> There are several circumstances in which drivers may be ticketed for > illegally blocking or impeding traffic by driving too slowly or failing to > yield to a long line of vehicles behind them. ... Driving Too Slowly in Left > Lane ... Impeding Traffic ... Failing to Use "Turnouts"

Regarding the first of these,

> Your state's law will say something like:

> Any vehicle proceeding upon a highway at a speed less than the normal speed > of traffic moving in the same direction at such time shall be driven in the > right-hand lane for traffic or as close as practicable to the right-hand > edge or curb, except when overtaking and passing another vehicle pro ceeding > in the same direction or when preparing for a left turn at an intersection > or into a private road or driveway. If a vehicle is being driven at a speed > less than the normal speed of traffic mov ing in the same direction at such > time, and is not being driven in the right-hand lane for traffic or as close > as practicable to the right-hand edge or curb, it shall constitute evidence > that the driver is operating the vehicle in violation of this section.

Note how this uses "normal speed", not "speed limit".

The NoLo site at [http://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/free-books/beat- ticke...](http://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/free-books/beat-ticket- book/chapter5-1.html) describes how there are three types of speed-limit violations: "Absolute", "Presumed", and "Basic".

In an "absolute" speed limit state, you can defend against a 'Driving Too Slowly in Left Lane' by showing you were were traveling at the posted speed limit. (Quoting NoLo - I have no legal training.)

However, that is not true of all states.

<comment><USER21> Again, that is not saying you have to exceed the limit, it's just saying _if you 're slower_ than the flow of traffic, then you have to move over and let people pass.

<comment><USER22> My interpretation is that in a state has an "absolute" speed limit law then you have a successful defense against a ticket for going at the speed limit in the left-most lane when there is faster traffic.

If you are in a state which does not have an absolute speed limit law, then you do not have that defense, and can be fined for going at the speed limit in that situation.

Here is a breakdown of the state laws (undated, and no promises that it's correct or still true) - [http://www.mit.edu/~jfc/right.html](http://www.mit.edu/~jfc/right.html) . The bottom has the following:

> The Uniform Vehicle Code states:

> Upon all roadways any vehicle proceeding at less than the normal speed of > traffic at the time and place and under the conditions then existing shall > be driven in the right-hand lane then available for traffic ...

> This law refers to the "normal" speed of traffic, not the "legal" speed of > traffic. The 60 MPH driver in a 55 MPH zone where everybody else is going 65 > MPH must move right. Contrast Alaska's rule, 13 AAC 002.50, allowing > vehicles driving at the speed limit to use the left lane, and Colorado rev. > stat. 42-4-1103, prohibiting blocking the "normal and reasonable" movement > of traffic.

> Enforcement is inconsistent. Toledo police used to ticket truck drivers for > driving at the 60 MPH speed limit in the left lane. Police looking for > criminal activity frequently use the "keep right" law as a pretext to stop a > suspicious car. On the other hand, a New York judge announced that he would > not convict drivers for blocking speeding traffic, People v. Ilieveski, 175 > Misc. 2d 943; 670 N.Y.S.2d 1004 (Monroe County N.Y. 1998).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Interesting. Coincidentally (or not?) yesterday Bloomberg posted an article about George Hotz building his own Self Driving AI and he talks about the very problem Google is having with the car following the rules too strictly. Looks like he's right at least about this one thing.

Article here for the curious: [http://www.bloomberg.com/features/2015-george- hotz-self-driv...](http://www.bloomberg.com/features/2015-george-hotz-self- driving-car/)

</comment><comment><USER24> > The Caddy performed perfectly, except when it had to merge onto I-395 South > and swing across three lanes of traffic in 150 yards (137 meters) to head > toward the Pentagon.

This is probably one of the most stressful maneuvers you can make on the Capital beltway. Honestly I feel like once we hit critical mass with driverless cars this action will be much more manageable. I and other drivers have to do some real aggressive things to make this work.

<comment><USER25> That is literally nowhere near the beltway, just FYI.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> The obvious solution is to forbid human drivers but that will take many years. We will learn cool things until it happens. It is, imho, incidentally the reason why all scifi shows and movies are unrealistic though: there will not be drivers and pilots (of spaceships, planes and cars); it will actually be forbidden.

<comment><USER27> It won't be forbidden to drive. People will still watch Nascar even if they can't afford to own cars. The demand for drivers can't be satisfied solving for the demand for rides. Robots are going to have to learn to deal with human drivers, we're not going to be able to define them out of existence.</comment></comment>


The Pronunciation of Django - <AUTHOR> https://thoughtstreams.io/jtauber/the-pronunciation-of-django/ <comment><USER2> This is a pretty ridiculous claim in my mind.

You start with the premise that the "Dj" in Django sounds like the "J" in James or Jason or jangle or nearly every other English word with this pronunciation. Now, based on linguistic history and French pronunciation norms, you claim it is more appropriate to conclude that all of these other words have implied "D's" than to conclude that Django has a silent "D".

You might be right that the pronunciation of James with a phonetic /dʒ/ sound is a historical oddity, but it doesn't make your conclusions any more valid. If the J in James and the J in Japan and the J in jerk and the Dj in Django all sound like /dʒ/ the conclusion should be that the D is silent in English, not that the French are more correct than we are.

<comment><USER3> From a french speaker point of view, it doesn't makes sense indeed.

It's interesting to note that in the french trailer, Django says "Django – Avec un D" (Django, with a D). Also the trailer is much more graphic than the (censored?) U.S. one

<comment><AUTHOR> It just occurs to me: does French even have the affricate /d͡ʒ/ natively? Do some native French speakers pronounce "Django" with an initial /ʒ/? That actually _would_ be a silent D and would explain why the French would say "Django with a D" rather than "the D is silent"

<comment><USER3> Not that I can think of. French people will correctly pronounce foreign words with /d͡ʒ/ if they are adopted in the french language (James, jingle or the arabic word jinn), but no french word beginning with J will be pronounced /d͡ʒ/. And no frenchman will ever pronounce Django as /ʒɑ̃ɡo/.

I think that they had to come up with something to replace "the D is silent" in the trailer, because it wouldn't make sense in french. For example the H is silent in french, wich explain the french accent on english words ("Ello 'Arry").

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> In English, the grapheme "d" very commonly represents the sound /d/. Likewise, the grapheme "j" in English very commonly represents the sound /dʒ/.

Additionally /dʒ/ is a single distinct sound. There is no /d/ sound in /dʒ/. It's an unfortunate issue that IPA notation might make it appear as though /dʒ/ is the concatenation (borrowing a programming term) of /d/ and /ʒ/ when it is most certainly not. The author's assertion might make sense if affricates such as dʒ represented multiple sounds, but I am not aware of any linguists that subscribe to such an idea.

So when we say "the D is silent" in the word Django to other English speakers, we are implying that there is no /d/ sound at the start of the word, and that would be correct. The author's argument does not make any sense here.

<comment><USER5> More careful IPA emphasizes this by _not_ transcribing it as the sequence of characters /dʒ/, though doing so is still common. For a while the solution was to use a ligature, /ʤ/, to emphasize that it was a single consonant, not a sequence of two consonants, but that was typographically to difficult to distinguish from /dʒ/, so now /d͡ʒ/ is preferred, using the generic IPA kludge for "these two characters should be treated as one".

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, I didn't bother with /d͡ʒ/ (incidentally, neither does Wikipedia in their pronunciation of Django Reinhardt's name) because my main point was to explain the origin of the <d> in the name "Django".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This article may be of interest to you; "Democracy, English, and the Wars over Usage" by David Foster Wallace: <http://instruct.westvalley.edu/lafave/DFW_present_tense.html>. The relevant argument is that general consensus and what people actually use constitutes how words should be used/pronounced, as opposed to referencing laws.

<comment><AUTHOR> I wrote a little on this topic many years ago on my blog: <http://jtauber.com/blog/2008/04/30/grammar_rules/>

<comment><USER7> I'm trying to start a movement to kill the mess that are 'participe passé'. My idea is that if everybody ALWAYS accord them, then we won't have to bother whether it's with 'avoir', 'être' or whatever else. We would always put an 's' to plural forms, and forget those evil 'participe passé' rules.

Join me. The more we are, the more Right we become.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> As a linguistics student, I don't like this argument. Orthographic <j> in English represents the affricate /dʒ/, which is unambiguously a phoneme in English. <J> by itself (generally) represents /dʒ/, so the <d> doesn't contribute any additional phonetic content to the word, so you could, in fact, call it a "silent" <d>. French has a phoneme /ʒ/, written <j>, but, lacking the affricate /dʒ/, has to represent that sound as a sequence of a /d/ and a /ʒ/, hence, <dj>. But when we're talking about an Anglicized name written and pronounced by English-speakers why should what French does be of any relevance?

<comment><AUTHOR> We're talking about a web framework named after a Belgian with a Romani nickname whose creator (the web framework's) desires that the web framework be pronounced the same as its namesake. If it were truly Anglicized, you would expect it to be spelled "Jango".

So how can we best analyze _why_ it is spelled <Dj-> and yet pronounced /dʒ-/?

Either it's because:

1\. <d> is silent and <j> is /dʒ/; or 2\. <d> is pronounced /d/ and <j> is pronounced /ʒ/

2 seems by far the more perspicuous analysis to me given the absence of other examples of a silent <d>. And it's certainly the correct analysis in the case of the guitarist.

<comment><USER9> I'd say it was because "dj" in the original language is like how the English say "j" in "james", and "j" in the original language is a much softer "j", like in "j'adore".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The letters "j" in English and "dj" in French represent the same sound†, what Wikipedia calls the "voiced palato-velolar affricate" [0]. That's /dʒ/ in IPA.

In English orthography, yes, the "D" in "Django"is silent, at least in the sense that if you remove it from the French spelling you'll get the phonetic English spelling.

† — as well as "dzh" ["дж"] in Russian, etc.

0\. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiced_palato- alveolar_affricat...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiced_palato- alveolar_affricate)

<comment><AUTHOR> But if you're trying to explain why Django is spelled the way it is, it's far more insightful to explain /d/ -> <d> and /ʒ/ -> <j> than to posit the <d> comes from nowhere and is just silent.

<comment><USER11> It is much easier to explain it the way everybody else in this thread _(such as has pash's sibling comment)_ been explaining it, judging from the confusion and befuddlement people seem to be expressing.

<comment><AUTHOR> I haven't seen anyone else explain why Django is spelled with a D. All I've seen is people reiterate the reason for the pronunciation given the spelling as "the D is silent" rather than the more insightful fact that, far from being silent, the D was necessary for Django Reinhardt to express the pronunciation of his nickname in his native language.

<comment><USER11> I fail to see how pash's comment does not explain that:

 _"the English "j" and the French "dj" represent the same sound"_

<comment><AUTHOR> Well, firstly that comment postdates your initial comment that "everybody else in this thread" explains it better and you added the "(such as has pash's sibling comment)" _after_ I'd responded.

Secondly, I wanted to dive in a bit more and explain the relationship between the "j" in English vs French and hence the role of the "d" in the French spelling (as that's kind of the whole point).

<comment><USER10> Ah, I think you've hit on the major point of confusion.

Phoneticists commonly represent the English "j" sound as the amalgam of two separate sounds:

(a) English "d", a common enough sound; and

(b) the somewhat less common "zh" sound, the second consonant sound in "beige".

In French†, these two sounds are separately written as "d" and "j", and combined (try it—speak quickly) they make the English "j" sound.

This is what everyone has been trying to explain with the unfortunately obscure IPA references.

† – Likewise in other languages, per my examples above. For example, in Russian, the two sounds are separately denoted "д" and "ж" and combine to form the English "j" sound, as in "Джугашвили" (which is Georgian, really: "ჯუღაშვილი").

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm not sure what the confusion is. I agree with what you've said above.

Basically: 1. "d" in French is pronounced "d". 2. "j" in French is pronounced "zh". 3. "dj" in French is pronounced as the same affricate you get by combining "d" and "zh". 4. This is a better explanation for the "dj" in Django rather than saying the "j" is an affricate and the "d" is silent.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This is in reference to Tarantino's recently-released movie "Django Unchained": [http://news.moviefone.com/2012/06/06/django-unchained- traile...](http://news.moviefone.com/2012/06/06/django-unchained-trailer- quentin-tarantino_n_1575805.html)

Only Django devs are likely to care about this, as air-traffic controllers howling at the inanity of the Top Gun fly-by (or, closer to home, every 3D representation of hacking in movies ever).

<comment><USER13> It's not silent in French. In English, it is. It's pronounced the same way as the J in James, which happens to be my name.

To paraphrase Ron Jeffries, the D in my name is silent... and invisible.

<comment><USER14> In French 'j' carries /ʒ/ and the digraph 'dj' carries /d͡ʒ/. In English, 'j' carries /d͡ʒ/ and there's no consistent orthographic convention for just /ʒ/ ('si', 'zh', 'j', and 'z' all do the job in different contexts, and probably others as well). There isn't really a /d/ as such in /d͡ʒ/.

<comment><AUTHOR> Right, but the best explanation for why "Django" is spelled with a <d> is _not_ that the <d> is silent and the <j> represents /d͡ʒ/ but rather that, as you say, the diagraph <dj> represents /d͡ʒ/.

<comment><USER14> Yes, but when somebody says "the d is silent" they're giving directions to spell and pronounce this word in English, not a lesson in French etymology. Your cure is worse than the disease.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Is this a deliberately confusing explanation?

"... this falsehood perpetuated on the big screen in Quentin Tarantino's Django Unchained where the eponymous character spells his name, adding 'the D is silent'."

...

"The D is not silent, it's very much pronounced."

...

"... Tarantino's film teaches the correct pronunciation ... it is incorrect to say 'the D is silent'."

...

"But in French, /dʒ/ can be written 'dj' because the 'j' alone is just /ʒ/."

OK, if the "d" is not silent, don't you mean that /dʒ/ _must_ be written "dj"?

Why not just say that, in English, "j" as in "James" has the tongue touching the roof of the mouth, so it always sounds a little like a "d", but in French it doesn't?

<comment><AUTHOR> /dʒ/ doesn't _have_ to be be written "dj" (it isn't in English, for example). It just is written that way in French because "j" alone is just /ʒ/ (as you quote above).

When you ask "why not just say...", well that _is_ pretty much what I say in the first sentence of the third card.

<comment><USER15> I find this even more confusing.

#1: You preface that sentence with "But in French" so why mention English? Can /dʒ/ actually be written some other way than "dj" in French? From your post, it seems like the answer is no.

#2: The first paragraph of the third card neither mentions nor implies (to the non-linguists among us, at least) anything about English "j" having a hint of "d". This is something I'd never realized before, and only discovered it by saying "James" aloud a few times after this post; and I'm still not 100% sure that it's right, based on the post.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Now that's a confusing explanation! Most Python programmers I've met have pronounced it "duh-jango", and I thought this article was going to defend that pronunciation. But it actually says that pronunciation is wrong, and the D is, from an English speaker's perspective, silent. But because J is pronounced differently in French, saying that the D is silent is, although it leads English speakers to pronounce the name correctly, technically semantically incorrect.

...Did I get that right?

<comment><AUTHOR> The reason "Django" is pronounced /dʒɑ̃ɡo/ or /dʒæŋɡəʊ/ is not because the "D" is silent and the "j" is pronounced /dʒ/ but rather because the "D" is pronounced /d/ and the "j" is pronounced /ʒ/.

Explaining how to pronounce it by saying "the D is silent" might be helpful but it's technically incorrect.

It may seem like pedantry to many but I thought people with an interest in linguistics might find it helpful.

<comment><USER5> That's not a precisely correct explanation either, though, because English 'j', pronounced /d͡ʒ/, is a single consonant sound (a voiced palato-alveolar affricate), not a sequence of two consonants. Though it's true that it's what English speakers would produce if you asked them to pronounce /d/ + /ʒ/ in sequence, because they always collapse into the single consonant. Not sure if that's also true in French.

<comment><AUTHOR> Right, I didn't bother making the distinction between the true affricate /d͡ʒ/ and the sequence /dʒ/ because my main point was that the <d> exists in <Django> because <j> alone would be pronounced /ʒ/ and hence the <d> isn't a silent letter but exists explicitly to contrast /d͡ʒ/ with /ʒ/

<comment><USER5> Ah yeah, that makes sense to me. Even if you treat 'd' as a kind of modifier in French (it turns the 'j' from a sibilant into an affricative) it's clearly still having an effect on the pronunciation. I was somewhat objecting to whether the the 'd' _itself_ is being pronounced, but that does get pretty hair-splitting, especially since /d/ is a stop. The transcription /dʒ/ sure makes it look like it's pronounced, but if IPA used a single character to transcribe the affricative, the 'd' would look like it disappeared in French too. But, granted, rather than having no effect (as in English), in French it'd still modulate the pronunciation of the 'j' even in that analysis.

Incidentally, I wonder if there are any languages where /d͡ʒ/ != /dʒ/ or if it's just impossible to produce that sequence.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm trying to think of other modifier examples. Not a perfect analogy but I don't think you'd say that, in English, the <h> in <sh> is silent.

I wonder about Italian, though. Would it be correct to say the <g> is silent in <gli>?

Seems a much tougher call in Italian. I would say /d͡ʒ/ has a __much __closer relationship to /dʒ/ than /ʎ/ does to /gli/ for example.

<comment><AUTHOR> Also /d/ + /ʒ/ does become /d͡ʒ/ in English (and potentially all languages that have /d/ and /ʒ/) so even if you had a single symbol for /d͡ʒ/ that was unrelated to that for /d/, the relationship between /dʒ/ and /d͡ʒ/ is still close.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> What do you mean "James" doesn't start with "j" sound? James, Justin, Jam, Jerry, Jello, just, joy, jog, jib.... those all sound like the same J to me.

<comment><AUTHOR> Not sure where you think I say that, but to clarify anyway: the sound at the start of all those words in English is _not_ the same as the sound the French write as "j".

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Given all the confusion here, I've added what is hopefully a simpler and more introductory explanation:

Django is pronounced with an initial sound that, in English is often written "j". This might lead one to think of the "D" as silent with the "j" being pronounced the way it is in English.

However, that doesn't explain why the "D" is there in the first place.

A more insightful way to think of it is to remember it's a French spelling. Think of the "j" as being pronounced as in French. Now put a "d" sound in front of it. When the "d" sound and "j" sound merge, you get something called an affricate. This particular affricate is the same sound used in English to pronounce just "j".

So a French "dj" is like an English "j". The "d" isn't silent, though, because the French "j" is not the same as the English "j".

</comment><comment><USER18> OK, but I'm still going to pronounce it duh-jango. Sorry - it's ingrained.

<comment><USER19> That's fine by me. I'm just glad that the Django project doesn't advocate this, like the Gnu project does with "gah-noo". I think that if you use a word that already exists it's better to prescribe nothing. I haven't heard anyone on or close to the Django core team rant about people pronouncing it "duh- jango" and I hope it stays that way.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> After five paragraphs and still no audio of the correct pronunciation?

</comment><comment><USER9> So English "j" not French sounding "j".</comment>


Liu Bolin: Hiding at the Standard - <AUTHOR> http://www.standardculture.com/posts/8992-Why-is-Artist-Liu-Bolin-Hiding-at-The-Standard-

<comment><AUTHOR> This article is also a fascinating glimpse at the future of native advertising.</comment>


DNS servers that offer privacy and filtering - <AUTHOR> https://danielmiessler.com/blog/dns-servers-you-should-have-memorized/ <comment><USER2> The best tip is in the sidebar on that page:

> 188.8.131.52 abbreviates to 1.1, so you can literally test by typing "ping 1.1"

<comment><USER3> You can also ping 16843009 and 16777217 -- perhaps less memorable, but if your dot key is broken…

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I know this is not for everyone, but I strongly prefer to run my own recursive resolver at home. Performance is great, plus I get regular DNS for the machines on my home network. Also, it was a fun little project. :)

<comment><USER5> That's great and all, but you still need to pick an upstream DNS server. The conventional advice is to use one of these public services, or your ISP's resolvers, to avoid hitting the root servers constantly. A lot of services these days have very short TTLs, so running your own recursive resolver still causes a lot of requests to get forwarded.

Also, as counterintuitive as it might seem, when I use namebench ( [https://code.google.com/archive/p/namebench/](https://code.google.com/archive/p/namebench/) ) it still says cloudflare and google are faster than my local resolver. (not by a lot though)

<comment><USER6> > That's great and all, but you still need to pick an upstream DNS server.

No, you don't, that's the whole point of a recursive resolver. I've been running against the root servers and neither query statistics nor observed performance match frequent issues due to short TTLs, or excessive number of external queries.

<comment><USER5> In that case you are using the root servers as your upstream. That's the point I was trying to make, but I guess I didn't explain it well. :/

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I need to point out that Norton DNS has been retired and is not supported anymore (and never offered any privacy).

"On November 15, 2018, Norton ConnectSafe service is being retired or discontinued meaning the service will no longer be available or supported. You may continue to use ConnectSafe until November 15, 2018. However, we do recommend that you take a moment to review important details related to this announcement below."

Some alternatives: [https://email@example.com/norton-connectsafe-dns-is- shut...](https://firstname.lastname@example.com/norton-connectsafe-dns-is-shutting- down-this-is-what-you-need-to-do-3e70432697d9)

I am actually surprised he didn't mention CleanBrowsing in their list, which I would recommend as good alternative to Norton and OpenDNS.

</comment><comment><USER8> I made the jump to CleanBrowsing a few months ago from OpenDNS because OpenDNS caches records really aggressively and was just generally stagnant in terms of feature set. I've been really happy with performance and privacy.

I configured DNScrypt on Tomato and I also use Tomato to redirect all DNS requests so it can't be bypassed by simply re-pointing DNS. VPN obviously bypasses it.

[https://cleanbrowsing.org/how-it-works](https://cleanbrowsing.org/how-it- works)

</comment><comment><USER9> > Logs are kept for 24 hours for debugging purposes, then they are purged

Legalese is very hard to learn language. Do they keep aggregate data, _derived_ from those raw logs? It is not said. Trusting Cloudflare? It is a profit driven company, to start with ...

<comment><USER10> I work at Cloudflare. We don't sell data of any form, and we don't keep anything which could map queries back to the individual who made them.

When we talk about aggregate data it's things like total number of queries made to 126.96.36.199, number made by AS, and geographic region. Its purpose is only to show us if people are using 22.214.171.124 and how that changes over time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> DNS servers should not be used as "internet connectivity tests" by pinging them. They are not maintained as ICMP test servers, and that is not their purpose. While many do not block ICMP packets, there are typically rate limiting systems in place, and other reasons why they would not respond to ping requests.

Pinging DNS servers is a shitty inconclusive test for internet connectivity, or SLA measurements etc etc.

<comment><USER12> So, what should we ping for testing Internet connectivity ?

<comment><USER13> There's ping.sunet.se as maintained by the Swedish University Network (i.e. the network connecting Swedish Universities; there is no single "Swedish University").

<comment><USER14> The advantage of pinging IPs is that you don't have to have a working DNS setup to test your connection. If DNS does work, then your connection probably works, too.

<comment><USER15> In this case one should run "ping -n", otherwise ping will hang trying to resolve the IP into an hostname, if the DNS is misbehaving or not responding.

<comment><USER16> what default(included in OS) ping utility tries to reverse-lookup an address before pinging, and hangs if it can't.

I've never observed this in any version of Windows nor Linux.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Dnsperf.com is worth a look as well, to compare performance of all of these.

Public DNS resolvers: [https://www.dnsperf.com/#!dns- resolvers](https://www.dnsperf.com/#!dns-resolvers)

DNS services for your own domain: [https://www.dnsperf.com/](https://www.dnsperf.com/)

</comment><comment><USER18> > If you care about privacy and speed and maximum memorability, I recommend > CloudFlare

I disagree with the speed part, because cloudflare doesn't support EDNS. This is great for privacy but not for speed.

Here is proof: [https://pastebin.com/raw/QnbWXU1a](https://pastebin.com/raw/QnbWXU1a)

If he meant speed in the DNS resolution context, I somewhat agree with him.

</comment><comment><USER19> Surprised that 4.2.2.x (Level3) is not on the list --- it's also unfiltered DNS, and run by a company that focuses only on networking.

<comment><USER20> At some point a few years back they started to redirect some of the traffic to some dodgy ad sites, that's when I stopped using them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I used OpenDNS long ago, even though it wasn't as easy to remember as the ones that came later. Then I shifted to Google DNS and stayed with it, albeit with some discomfort (even if the policies state it doesn't track, it's still a leap of faith for me). Then last year I switched to Cloudflare DNS and also learned about Quad9 DNS.

I haven't done local benchmarking using a tool like namebench for a long time, and it looks like that tool has not been updated for several years. Any alternatives for it that are cross platform?

<comment><USER22> > _I haven 't done local benchmarking using a tool like namebench for a long > time, and it looks like that tool has not been updated for several years._

In fairness, the DNS protocol that it's testing hasn't really changed in that time either. namebench is still sufficient for general testing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> His blog post pays no mention of users whose DNS queries are being redirected. Isn't that a privacy concern?

Hotels and ISPs sometimes set up captive portals that intercept and redirect port 53 to their own choice of DNS servers.

As such, users might want memorise the addresses of some resolvers that listen on non-standard ports (not port 53).

A user behind one of these captive portals who pings any of the resolvers in this blog post will not be pinging those servers; she will be pinging the hotel/ISP's chosen DNS servers and she may be none the wiser.

<comment><USER24> In a hotel I always first thing direct everything through a VPN server (work or home, depending on what I want to do). Some hotels block UDP, in that case I switch the VPN to go via TCP port 443. But some hotels (really!) block port 443.. fortunately not that many anymore.

<comment><USER23> When you use a home VPN server, is the VPN server running on a computer located at your home and reachable on the open internet? If yes, do you have fixed address or do you use dynamic DNS?

<comment><USER24> I could have set it up at home (the address is stable), but I have a server on a hosting facility which I use as my "home central".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Another option here is DNS servers that block ads. I can't vouch for the company itself, but I have found AdGuard DNS reliable and effective, if not memorable:

126.96.36.199, 188.8.131.52

[https://adguard.com/en/adguard- dns/overview.html](https://adguard.com/en/adguard-dns/overview.html)

<comment><USER26> Run your own: [https://pi-hole.net/](https://pi-hole.net/)

<comment><USER25> Genuine question: what benefits does this have over using a service provided for free by someone else? Privacy?

<comment><USER26> Yes, privacy, plus it's a DNS cache that's running on your local network, so your DNS resolution is faster. Its also customizable (you can add/blacklist/whitelist specific domains from the control panel).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Or setup your own very lightweight filtering and caching DNS at home using Dnsmasq and [https://github.com/notracking/hosts- blocklists/](https://github.com/notracking/hosts-blocklists/)

</comment><comment><USER28> Quality, latency, and uptime are also factors:

[https://www.dnsperf.com/#!dns- resolvers,World,quality](https://www.dnsperf.com/#!dns- resolvers,World,quality)

</comment><comment><USER29> Anybody remember 22.214.171.124?

</comment><comment><USER30> Do I have to?

<comment><USER31> (You are referring to the original title.)

Actually, no. Even if one _does_ accept the premise that one should use these third-party non-contracted services, challenged elsewhere in this very discussion, there's no reason that one need have these things _memorized_. Written in a handy pocketbook, perhaps. But not necessarily _memorized_.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> [https://pi-hole.net/](https://pi-hole.net/) is a project to consider for home and small business networks that you're looking to protect via DNS without sending all your requests to a third party.

<comment><USER14> Your requests are still forwarded to a third party with a Pi-hole. They are sometimes cached and sites you have blocked do not resolve, but choosing a DNS provider is still required.

<comment><USER33> Only non-cached requests go to a third party. And I don't think there's an easy way to prevent this unless you get a hold of all the zone files and copy in bulk.

What's nice about pi-hole is that you get one request to sites like google.com until the record expires in the cache. If you use 220.127.116.11 as your dns you might end up requesting the same domain name a bunch of times depending on how your client caches and the caching is at 18.104.22.168. So dns will see lots of requests to the same domain.

<comment><USER34> In a network of just a few computers, are there really that many cached requests? Local DNS caches will already cache short term and TTL of most domains is probably too short to get much caching beyond that.

<comment><USER14> Looking at my dnsmasq statistics, only 16.3% of 10,776 queries in the last 24 hours have been answered by the cache. Another 21.7% never left the device, since they were in the block lists, but that still leaves 62.0% of queries to be returned by 18.104.22.168 and 126.96.36.199, which is my external DNS provider.

Although this doesn't count on-client caching, it still seems to back up your guess and my original comment.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> So the author is a security expert who recommends two companies that are notorious for their security flaws (Norton, Cisco), two companies that track your DNS queries for profiling (Google, Cloudflare) and IBM...

Yeah, this sounds totally legit...

<comment><USER36> > two companies that track your DNS queries for profiling (Google, Cloudflare)

Can you elaborate? Neither Google nor CloudFlare seem to collect information for profiling.

Google: [https://developers.google.com/speed/public- dns/privacy](https://developers.google.com/speed/public-dns/privacy)

CloudFlare: [https://developers.cloudflare.com/126.96.36.199/commitment-to- priv...](https://developers.cloudflare.com/220.127.116.11/commitment-to- privacy/privacy-policy/privacy-policy/)

<comment><USER35> What? How do you come to that conclusion? Google actually tells you what it is collecting, if you cannot see how, say, city of origin, cannot be used to target you with specific search result, then I really cannot explain it to you.

Cloudflare does not store any information, but they are pretty frank about passing it on to APNIC for "research" as part of the deal where APNIC lend the 22.214.171.124 and 220.127.116.11 address to them. This is pretty well established and actually openly communicated by both entities, so should be easy to DDG. You are of course free to believe that this data is totally anonymized and not used for profiling / targeting at all, but imo that is pretty naive.

<comment><USER10> I work at Cloudflare. APNIC absolutely does not get individual DNS query logs. Their primary interest is in studying the other junk traffic which ends up hitting 188.8.131.52.

For the record, we don't build any sort of profile of DNS queryiers, map them back to any existing profile we have, or even keep the data you would need to have to do that.

<comment><USER35> Well, for me to believe that there still is such a thing as a free lunch, you'll have to be better than that.

If the data sent to APNIC is so safe and non-personal, why not make it transparent? Instead, when contacting APNIC about it, you get a typical one liner stating that

> ... the access to the primary data feed will be strictly limited to the > researchers in APNIC Labs, and we will naturally abide by APNIC's non- > disclosure policies.

Clearly, someone thinks there is something to hide. Maybe not Cloudflare, but then it's someone else.

<comment><USER37> > why not make it transparent?

I'm not with CF or APNIC, but it's likely due to issues with sensitive data.

Say a web service is hitting `[http://internal.example.com:5220`](http://internal.example.com:5220`) with basic authentication, or there's a misconfigured jira trying to access `internal.example.com:3306`, but the DNS admins have retired `internal.example.com` and decided to make it return `220.127.116.11` for some reason. Showing all traffic that hits the service would expose a little too much sensitive information.

<comment><USER35> I have worked in a lot of companies and never have I seen anyone treat a DNS name as security relevant information. If you rely on DNS names not to be known as a measure of privacy and/or security, you clearly are doing it wrong. As a matter of fact, DNS names supposed to be known, it's their one and only purpose.

In addition, if "internal.example.com" is not already resolvable publicly (which would mean that it's known) CF could not guarantee the privacy of that query anyways because their DNS is not part of the root zone, which means they need to forward it to someplace beyond their control, meaning they leak it no matter what.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Jolla phones now available for sale in Europe - <AUTHOR> http://shop.jolla.com <comment><USER2> The Verge's reviewer didn't like it. I have yet to get my hands on one. It is strongly a "global gestures" UI. Some people like that as a way of enforcing consistency. That will have some possibly confusing effects on Android apps running in Myriad's compatibility environment. Also, the last time I looked at Myriad's technology, they were using their own Java VM, which means, at least,some kind of Dalvik to Java bytecode converter for apps as they are installed, or an SDK plugin to produce "Myriad-VM-ready" apps.

It looks pretty clean. It should appeal to the people who were buying Nokia's Harmattan and Meego devices. If Jolla can pick up a majority of the Qt apps that had been developed for those platforms and grow that developer community, they may have a chance.

It will take at least a year, and probably some more hardware to tell where Jolla is going and if it will be successful. There are several dimensions to measure that success: Can Jolla pick up many of the distribution channels, and their customers, in Europe that previously favored Nokia? Can they penetrate the China market, as they appear to be aiming to do?

<comment><USER3> For anyone finding the verge review- [http://mobile.theverge.com/2013/11/29/5156446/jolla- smartpho...](http://mobile.theverge.com/2013/11/29/5156446/jolla-smartphone- hands-on-preview)

<comment><USER4> > _Nonetheless, that group is small whereas the software evolution required is > large._

It's also open source and I'm sure they have a lot of goodwill within the community given their history, so that might alleviate the problem somewhat.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I think that one of the revolutionary things on this is the I2C and power connectors available under the cover. It's the start of things becoming modularized. You want IRDA, get the back cover that adds it. You want what's next after NFC? Add it. You want a hardware slide out keyboard? Add it. You want an eInk back like the Yotta phone? Add it. You want a full USB port? Add it. All of those things can be done over i2c.

Random List of i2c components: [http://forums.parallax.com/showthread.php/99160-List- of-I2C-...](http://forums.parallax.com/showthread.php/99160-List- of-I2C-devices)

Spark Fun: [https://www.sparkfun.com/search/results?term=i2c&what=produc...](https://www.sparkfun.com/search/results?term=i2c&what=products)

</comment><comment><USER6> I'll probably buy a Jolla. I'm just so tired of the mainstream phone manufacturers like Sony and Samsung, it just feels like they don't care about me as a user. I've had way too many annoying problems with my Galaxy S2 because of the pre-installed apps, locked-in OS and design flaws.

<comment><USER7> >Locked-in OS

I'll agree on that point. Have to root your phone using closed-source hacks from questionable sources, just so you can use your phone the way you want to, makes me a little sad. I believe that Samsung and others do this to decrease support costs and perhaps for DRM/piracy reasons. It still is a shitty business decision.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> The marketing and sales copy is horrendous.

> Jolla is powered by Sailfish OS, a truly open and distinct mobile operating > system. Navigate effortlessly with the gesture-based user interface and load > the phone with top Android™ apps.

That's pretty much it. Bland, uncompelling, and unemotional. It's a poorly positioned phone that isn't cool -- but it could be with decent marketing and a great sales pitch. Way back when, if Apple had marketed the iPhone with this pitch, there'd be no iPhone today.

There's a lesson here: prospects don't know or care about you unless you make them. I have no idea who these people are, why I should care about them, or why this product will make me feel good or alleviate some pain in some way.

<comment><USER9> Marketing can be very expensive, but it's useful as well. Jolla probably prioritized development and production vs investing millions in marketing. They have limited resources and had to make choices and the first priority was a functional product. It affected many areas besides marketing (for example lacking community infrastructure, no public bug tracker and so on). Hopefully they'll gradually catch up in these aspects, but so far they seem to have enough of demand for their level of production. Don't compare them to Apple - they aren't huge company which pours millions into marketing from the start and expects some crazy numbers in sales in return right away. They aren't Nokia either - they are a small startup.

<comment><USER8> That's the build-it-and-they-will-come mentality! (It almost never works too!)

Great marketing is as important (possibly moreso) than a great product. It's probably easier to make a mediocre product a success with great marketing than to make a great product a success with ho-hum marketing. There's no point in having a great product that nobody knows about or worse, cares about.

Product development is like eating out: if you can't afford the marketing, you can't afford the product development. Paying for one and not the other is a great way to throw away the investment. It's just such a rookie mistake and completely unavoidable.

<comment><USER9> No, it's make things gradually and don't overstretch mentality. They know their resources and limits and apply them appropriately.

 _> There's no point in having a great product that nobody knows about or worse, cares about._

You didn't read carefully what I wrote above. They already have a lot of people who know and care about the product to buy it. They aren't running to increase that number up to the extreme. They match that number with their current production level. When that will grow, they'll have to boost the effort in marketing too. They do plan to grow, but gradually.

Personally I think they cut the marketing / community side a bit too much, but I understand that they have limited resources, so the product is their priority #1.

<comment><USER8> It's not overstretching to have great marketing from the outset; it's almost mandatory. Tofu marketing from the get-go (especially on launch day) is a great way to nudge the company into the deadpool. If their financial limits proscribe marketing, their company will be gone and forgotten soon enough when their sales are lackluster and insufficient.

Companies, new and established, just can't afford to be conservative when it comes convincing people to give them money. Bad marketing = bad sales.

<comment><USER9> _> It's not overstretching to have great marketing from the outset_

Your general logic seems to circle around expecting massive sales and huge production mindset (where investment has to be compensated with millions of sales). Jolla has modest expectations for the starting stage, so massive marketing would be an overstretch. But it shouldn't be abysmal either, I agree.

<comment><USER8> No, it doesn't. My mindset in this case revolves around one thing: convincing people they should buy. Their sales and marketing, from what I've observed today, is so poor it fails to do the only thing it should: sell.

I never said they should grow unsustainably and run out of cash, but my money is on them running out of cash anyway because their marketing is so poor it'll fail to drive the sales they need to keep the lights on. Frankly, supply shortages would be the best thing that could happen to them because scarcity drives demand and perceived value.

<comment><USER9> _> Their sales and marketing, from what I've observed today, is so poor it fails to do the only thing it should: sell._

How is it exactly, if they were serving all their preorders already? They don't seem to have the lack of demand atm.

<comment><USER4> Exactly, keeping the early adopters happy and getting them to advertise their product for them is much more important. And regarding that: even the otherwise sceptical review by The Verge praised their interaction with the people who bought a Jolla.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'll have to wait until they'll release US networks compatible version.

For those who missed it, there is a community Q&A about Jolla and Sailfish here: [http://piratepad.net/ep/pad/view/JollaFAQ/latest](http://piratepad.net/ep/pad/view/JollaFAQ/latest)

</comment><comment><USER10> I'm intrigued by Jolla, if not enthused by it.

I'm not sure what it gives me that Android doesn't - can anyone enlighten me?

<comment><USER9> It depends on what you are interested in. Distinctive features:

1\. It has strong focus on real multitasking (performance and design wise). Both Android and iOS are weak on that and prefer to avoid multitasking in order to gain battery life advantage.

2\. It has innovative approach to UI, not being stuck in ideas developed a while ago, which hold Android and iOS back from advancing.

3\. It's DRM free and aims to be privacy respecting unlike competition. It gives control over the system to the user and doesn't attempt to lock things up and make it hard to modify.

4\. For those who care (developers probably more than others) - it's real glibc based Linux which gives synergy with the global Linux community. Android while using the Linux kernel is a completley different beast from libc and middleware up to the top of the stack. Mer/Sailfish on the other hand uses glibc, Wayland and other conventional Linux middleware and tools.

5\. They plan to allow better participation of community in the development. Right now things aren't so open though, except the open parts Sailfish is based on (Mer Core and Nemo Mobile which are openly developed open source projects).

6\. It's a startup and not some monstrous stonewalling corp with no face. So you often can communicate with Jolla directly (they even have official presence in Diaspora: [https://joindiaspora.com/u/jolla](https://joindiaspora.com/u/jolla)) and they are interested in the community.

For more details see:

* [https://sailfishos.org/about.html](https://sailfishos.org/about.html)

* [https://sailfishos.org/design.html](https://sailfishos.org/design.html)

* [https://wiki.merproject.org/wiki/Main_Page](https://wiki.merproject.org/wiki/Main_Page)

* [https://wiki.merproject.org/wiki/Nemo](https://wiki.merproject.org/wiki/Nemo)

<comment><USER10> Thank you, that's really useful.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I think I'll wait for a true 'high-end' phone from them in the future. I wouldn't mind paying 800 € for a phone, but I do expect it to run for a few years and really outperform my current N9.

Hopefully by the time they get that to any market, they will also have fixed most of the bugs in Sailfish OS.

</comment><comment><USER12> It says €399.00, but then €414.00 for tax and shipping in Europe.

I changed from "Ah, same as a Nexus 5" to "Wow, that's two Nexus 4!".

<comment><USER13> €399 including tax + €15 shipping = €414 final price</comment></comment>


How Much Loyalty Do We Owe Our Employers? - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/career-pathing/1e5c6ccdb2f1

<comment><USER2> * It's possible that something happened between Jill and the managers/co-founders that the rest of the group is unaware of, and she felt that it was best that she leave. * It's possible that her health issue flared up again and she decided to leave. She may have been quite appreciative of what the group in her previous absence but didn't want to/couldn't go through having you all pick the slack - either her choice or management's. And she didn't know how to gracefully exit, so she abruptly left. * Maybe she got ill again and the goodwill "debt" she incurred had nothing to with it - she just needed to leave again to tend to her health - and was unfortunately, not gracious in her departure. * Maybe she was forced out and has been prohibited from saying anything - or simply chose not to.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, she could have had issues with her direct manager... I don't know that part.

She didn't get sick again, she took another job (I must have accidentally edited that part out)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> The relationship between employer and employee is not one between equals. The latter depends on the former for their livelihood, whereas the former could outsource or automate the latter's position without any affect on themselves at all.

So my answer to this would be - to a person, as much as they deserve. But to a company, as little as necessary.

</comment><comment><USER4> Without knowing why jill left, you can't really answer the question.

I think the article assumes Jill did something that caused her to want to leave (she found a new job, networked and someone offered, etc...) but maybe it was the employer? The employer could have challenged her on time off compensation, insurance coverage, etc...

<comment><AUTHOR> She found another job.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I like the way you put it,

>>Your loyalty should be a reflection of your employer's loyalty.

A company a group of people after all. It's easy to think about our jobs as benefits acquired for services rendered rather than a relationship with a group of people.</comment>


Show HN: CVE-Raptor - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/TheCodeArtist/cve-raptor <comment><AUTHOR> CVE-Raptor - Tool to monitor CVE announcements and automatically notify the user when a binary/package/library/domain is affected by a newly disclosed vulnerability.

Current MVP fetches the public CVRF database, parses it for any newly disclosed CVEs (since the previous run) and reports the results.

Current MVP also supports searching for any newly published/modified CVEs containing a specific keyword.

      - Built with love using Python3.
      - Licensed under CC BY-SA.

Feedback on the current implementation or other modes of usage is most welcome...

<comment><USER2> Interesting alternative to appcanary.com !</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Developing indie 2D strategic game – Go or Unity3D - <AUTHOR>

I was thinking about developing an indie strategic game ( similar to Paradox type games ) for a while ,
I'm a web developer and i was learning Go in my free time, it is useful for me to learn and master Go , but to reach my first goal, which is developing that game, I'm not sure which way to go.
For Unity iv'e heard the best results comes with developing with C# ( which i need to learn from scratch ).
For Go, There is Go-Gl and basically i need to develop everything from scratch , which let me improve my skills in Go and also its bad because it takes much more time to complete.
Basically i want to write kind of economic simulator which doesn't need fancy graphics, tile maps and menus is all what i need. Performance is a key i guess.
I'm not sure if C# has any benefit for me ( as web developer ) in long term, but i know go has.
So , Which road should i take in your opinion guys ? <comment><USER2> Unity3d.

If you use Go to make a game you will also be pioneering using Go to make a game and everything will be harder and slower and essentially without community or commercial support. Unity has a huge community, huge platform compatibility, huge 3rd party assets/sdks/etc support.

<comment><AUTHOR> Any idea on C# learning curve for a PHP guy ? :)

<comment><USER2> It's syntactically similar to javascript, and there's heaps of examples/tutorials/projects to learn from for games or anything else.</comment></comment></comment>


You should follow me on Twitter - <AUTHOR> http://dustincurtis.com/you_should_follow_me_on_twitter.html <comment><USER2> I've read in the past that telling people to do something isn't as effective as telling them that everyone else is doing it. I wonder how a phrase like "most people who like my blog follow me on twitter" would fare?

<comment><USER3> how about "Follow me on twitter here. I have x followers."?

<comment><USER4> Similarly, I wonder how some automated text like "11,399 people follow me on Twitter, you should too" would work.

<comment><USER5> I'd word it like: "Join the 4,615 people following me on twitter _here_."

<comment><USER6> Maybe... "You should join my 4,615 followers on Twitter _here_."

<comment><USER5> Why not just go all out ;).

"You should join my 4,615 followers on Twitter _here_. Everybody uses it. All the interesting people follow me. You really need to follow me now. I can't believe you're reading this when you could already be following me. DO IT DO IT DO IT. Fine. Enjoy your miserable life without me and die alone. Don't you want to be popular and interesting?"

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The experiment is still going on! This guy wants to see what the clickthrough rate is given the elaborate description of the exeperiment above the link.

How Hofstadterian!

</comment><comment><USER8> His blog has appealing typography and layout.

</comment><comment><USER9> Why did you link the word "Twitter?" My impression upon seeing that is that the link would take me to twitter.com, not perform a follow action.

I would wager that the third message would fare better than the fourth (of the examples you gave) if you rephrased:

You should follow me on _Twitter_

to:

You should _follow me_ on Twitter

<comment><USER10> I tried exactly what you describe.

The conversion for "follow me" as the link during my one test was 9.22% compared to the "twitter" link, which was 10.09%.

I'm not sure why it performed (very slightly) worse. It might have to do with the link being in the middle of the sentence (you have to go back and click the link) rather than at the end, where you finish the sentence and click the link.

<comment><USER11> Or perhaps people thought they really were going to get the Twitter home page, but then thought "eh, may as well since I'm already here..."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> In Nielsen's "Designing Web Usability" I remember him frowning on the use of "here" and "click here" as links. Since around 2000, when I first read the book, I heeded his advice.

      For more information: click here
      To sign up, go here

were cardinal no-nos, if I remember correctly.

But it looks like everybody else uses this technique, and the average web surfer is more likely to click give the redundant area to click on.

Maybe people are just more comfortable with "click here" when the links lead to an undefined word, like Twitter. Would it be true to say that most people on the web don't know what Twitter is? Do most of Curtis's visitors know what it is? If most of his visitors don't know, are they clicking on "here" because it's a more comfortable link given Twitter is undefined? While each of his test cases vary in wording, the first 3 are all alike in that twitter is the only word hyperlinked.

My theory is that people are less likely to click on hyperlinks if the hyperlinked text or word is something they don't know about. If you're talking about a brand name, service, or anything not general knowledge than you're better off with "click here."

</comment><comment><USER13> I cannot stop myself from doing a plug for my startup Wingify (<http://www.wingify.com/>) here :)

We have an A/B, split and multivariate testing platform ready to use. With features such as running tests specific to a visitor segment (say organic) and having multiple goals (say CTR and time spent), the platform is quite powerful. So, if any of the fellow HNers wants to setup a similar experiment, I would be really glad to create an account right away.

By the way, it would also be interesting to see how would call to actions rank if you segment traffic into these buckets: regular blog readers, new visitors, visitors from twitter. My hunch is that traffic from twitter would have behaved quite differently from regular blog readers.

</comment><comment><USER14> Ok.

I posted an article with questions about Twitter earlier today.

So now I have ten or twenty followers.

I mean this in a nice way, but -- so what? What do you do when you get followers? Sell them stuff?

Seems like twitter followers are like blog readers. It's great to have them, but you have to act like they're not there and concentrate on content quality. Or maybe I missed something.

<comment><USER15> I don't the link's particular destination here matters too much. His main point pertains to the increase of clickthrough rates of (any) link by changing the language of and around its text.

<comment><USER14> I guess my point would be why, as a reader, would I want to follow anybody? Sorry for changing the point of view to the seller, but I'm wondering what's in it for the buyer? What's the transaction that's taking place here?

Given that piece of information, applying some of the practices of persuasion mentioned in other posts starts to make sense, but without understanding the transaction, I'm not sure what his point is. Just to get people to click a button? Surely there's more to it than that. (Although I _do_ get the A/B kind of discussion, just wanted to move the discussion towards a "what's in it for me" vein if I could)

EDIT: Instead of all this A/B crap, how about just honestly tell the reader why they want to do this? Is that such a crazy idea?

<comment><USER16> Dustin's research has applications in areas where every word makes a difference in your marketing efforts, or in guiding users more effortlessly through a process. That's why it's important.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I wonder if it wasn't, in some way, correlated with the length.

More characters means more like to be seen.

<comment><USER10> I tried other longer but dulled phrases:

"Please follow me on twitter here."

"I have an account on twitter."

"I'm @dcurtis on twitter."

"Follow me at <http://twitter.com/dcurtis>

They performed poorly.

<comment><USER18> You ought to include those in the data set.

<comment><USER19> You _should_ include those in the data set.

<comment><USER18> Is it "should"? I don't like that word. Are there other options?

<comment><USER20> I think the parent comment was a joke -- "ought to" is perfectly fine usage in that situation, I believe.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> One thing this doesn't measure is quality. Only quantity.

Don't quite know how you can measure that though.

<comment><USER22> I'd like to see how many of these visitors who clicked through each link actually converted (as in, signed up as a follower).

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I like his articles, but this one is silly. 4 Messages on 4 blogposts and he's drawing conclusions? That little data doesn't warrant any conclusions: too many uncontrolled variables. Results might as well be random. Audience, and expected clickthrough rate, per post topic may differ, the effect of repeating the implorement several times kicks in and if I bothered to give it some more thought, I could probably come up with ten other reasons that could explain the results. That was even possible after the first set of measurements in my physics graduation experiment; let alone in sociology/psychology.

<comment><USER24> i wasn't under the impression that it was 4 messages on 4 blogposts? i thought it was a universal include? but then it would only additionally account for archived posts..

<comment><USER23> I only count 14 articles on <http://dustincurtis.com/index.html>, of which the first bunch doesn't contain any of these Twitter 'invites'. Neither does his blog. Am I overlooking something?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> He opens with "I spend a lot of time thinking about how to improve user experiences", so where in this are you thinking about the user experience?

Why do I want to be influenced to follow you on Twitter?

<comment><USER10> If I can phrase things to drive people more efficiently through interfaces, it will help them have a better experience.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> This is fantastic.

Just curious - did you run any tests for statistical significance?

<comment><USER27> Assuming a truly random sample of 5000 unique, non-overlapping viewers for each experiment, the standard error for the experiments runs from .3% to .5%.

The true value for any given sample is pretty likely (> 95%) to be within +/-2 standard errors. So in this case, the difference needs to be more than 0.6%~1.0%, depending on the experiments you're comparing. In other words, these look like they're significant differences.

(For reference SE ~ sqrt(p*(1-p)/N) when N is small relative to the population size)

<comment><USER28> Do you exclude traffic and clicks received from HN ?

<comment><USER27> Heh...well, I didn't do the experiment. I'm just the messenger.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I suspect (with no evidence whatsoever) that the increase from linking "here" was because people felt clicking the link would complete the action rather than just take them to twitter.

I wonder what the effect would have been had you used: You should _follow me on twitter_.

</comment><comment><USER30> Anybody else feel like you should get a reason for following someone's twitter? "You should follow me because I'll make you pancakes every morning."

</comment><comment><USER31> Seems to be a bit of a statistic maniac. <http://dustincurtis.com/about.html>

</comment><comment><USER32> Dustin continues to impress me. Wondering had he try more 'counter-intuitive' suggestions like:"You must not follow me at Twitter"?

</comment><comment><USER33> Generally I'm against using the word "here" as link-text, since it doesn't provide any Google-juice to the relevant terms. But in this case the only other possible link texts might be "follow me" or "Twitter", so it's probably okay.

</comment><comment><USER34> Are these numbers correlated with numbers of visitors to your blog? If your visitors went up by 10% during a month and the amount of your followers went up by 10%, it doesn't necessarily mean it was because of wording...

</comment><comment><USER35> It would be interesting to see a table showing each phrase you tested along with its clickthrough rate.

</comment><comment><USER36> I wonder if the wording has a qualitative effect on the people who tend to click on the link though.

</comment><comment><USER37> This is not about this article in particular, but there has been a lot of news about Twitter these days here in HN but really, do they deserve this relevance and attention?

<comment><USER38> I realize you said you weren't talking about this article in particular, but really, the fact that this happens to mention Twitter is entirely peripheral to the point.

</comment></comment><comment> onreact-com How about: "People who follow me on Twitter live longer, happier lives and have three times as much sex as the average citizen! Follow me now!"

</comment><comment><USER39> Pardon me for the blasphemy, but if I wasn't already following your writing and didn't know better, this whole post would strike me as a little "mail order sleezy".

Instead of spending valuable resources tweaking the wording of your links, why not just channel that same energy into providing excellent content, and let the rest take its course.

That's why I follow you in the first place.

<comment><USER40> Tweaking the wording of your links is time well spent. Imagine if the same testing methodology was applied to the Sign Up button on a B2B app. You could drastically increase conversions with just a few small modifications!

<comment><USER41> Precisely. It's so sad some people focus only on getting traffic to their sites and then don't focus on the conversions. If people focused on conversions and experience more than traffic, the Web would be a lot more pleasant.</comment></comment></comment>


Tesla: Why do car buffs dislike it but nerds love it? - <AUTHOR> http://www.slate.com/blogs/quora/2015/10/11/tesla_why_do_car_buffs_dislike_it_but_nerds_love_it.html?wpisrc=obinsite <comment><USER2> To hear a contrarian point of view than this biased writer, Jeremy Clarkson said it best why auto buffs prefer mechanical cars while driving an Astin Martin DB9 through the Great Britain countryside. Definitely less shrill than Slate:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Q0Svvdrx_E](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Q0Svvdrx_E)

</comment><comment><USER3> reads like Musk wrote it himself, essentially dismissing all points that are valid by attacking those with the opinions instead of discussing the merits of the opinion.

Amazed the writer didn't find a way to fit in bigot, racism, or even calling them Nazis</comment>


New 3DS Emulator - <AUTHOR> http://gbatemp.net/threads/new-3ds-emulator.365154/

<comment><USER2> What are the demos that this is running? Is it possible for anyone to write 3DS code, compile it with GCC + friends, and run it on an off-the-shelf 3DS? I was under the impression that Nintendo had got security right this time and the device remained uncracked.

<comment><USER3> > What are the demos that this is running?

Homebrew code.

> Is it possible for anyone to write 3DS code, compile it with GCC + friends, > and run it on an off-the-shelf 3DS?

Yes. You need a flash cart for this. GBA Temp has a nice sub forum for this: [http://gbatemp.net/forums/3ds-hacking- homebrew.201/](http://gbatemp.net/forums/3ds-hacking-homebrew.201/)

<comment><USER4> Any flashcart that works today is likely to be rendered a brick by an upcoming software update. Welcome to modern console gaming: ever changing, ever more crackproof. The exception is Nintendo DS code, for which flashcarts still work because the DS fw is fixed.

<comment><USER5> >> Any flashcart that works today is likely to be rendered a brick by an upcoming software update.

IIRC, some of the flashcarts have an Emunand feature that lets you play games requiring a newer version (i.e, 6.x) on a 3DS without updating your firmware from 4.x (4.x is required to support the current crop of flashcarts)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Since the hardware is an old ARM9, would it be much faster on say the newest ARMv8/Cortex A57 chips, rather than on an x86 chip?

<comment> TD-Linux It would be possible to use hardware virtualization features to emulate the different memory layout and hardware MMIO. I would predict that most of the bottleneck is going to be in GPU emulation and the like, so I don't think it would help that much. The greater control and precision of software emulation for the CPU would make quite a bit of sense.

<comment><USER7> Are GPUs the bottleneck? I thought the modern approach (for anything above an ~SNES) was to simply rewrite graphics calls to run on the native hardware. It's not like Dolphin can emulate 1080p by fully "correctly" emulating a GPU.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Beyond "for the fun of it", what is the purpose of this? So that hackers can run other hackers' games?

Why not spend that effort writing games for an open platform like the web, or for iOS/Android and have the possibility to make money?

I'm not trying to criticize bunnei's work, I'm just generally curious if this is a "because I can" hacker project, or if there is actually a demand in the community to write DS games.

<comment><USER9> In my experience the emulator development community is driven in large part by the "because I can" mentality.

Developers do play games but mostly for debugging. Once an emulator is "done" they move on to a harder console. For example ppsspp was started by the same guy who started Dolphin. When I hung out on the ppsspp irc I found several other developers were present or former Dolphin devs.

The users tend to be very game-playing focused which is part of why the user&developer relationship is so strained.

Users are the pathological worst customers, the ones patio11 keeps mentioning, they are cheap and demand the sky. Meanwhile the developers are managing immense complexity and no one is getting a paycheck.

It makes everything much easier to understand when you hear of developers quiting. That anyone creates anything is amazing.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What are your main criteria when picking up your next employer? - <AUTHOR> Besides the title, project, money and commute, what will be your next requirements when picking up a new job? For me:<p>- recruitement process: no algo/college stuff, an employer that will value my previous projects and contributions<p>- friendly interviewers (= friendly future colleagues)<p>- individual office (no open space or un-productive  environment)<p>- quiet location outside of the office, no downtown type of stuff so I can take a break and walk around the office after lunch <comment><USER2> highly-skilled immediate team members</comment>


TerraPower and Bill Gates Have a Radical Vision For the Reactors of Tomorrow - <AUTHOR> http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704409004576146061231899264.html?mod=WSJ_hp_LEFTTopStories

<comment><USER2> "One country he is certain won't be a customer anytime soon is the U.S., which doesn't yet have a certification process for reactors like TerraPower's. It would likely be a decade or more before the reactor could be tested on U.S. soil. "I don't think the U.S. has the willpower or desire to build new kinds of nuclear reactors," Mr. Myrhvold says. "Right now there's a long, drawn-out process."

This is the most disappointing part of the piece. This is too often the case with many forward looking technologies these days, high-speed rail, etc. Great news for the planet though!

<comment><USER3> Highspeed rail as it's currently proposed - CA, FL doesn't make sense. It only makes sense in the northeast corridor where cities are walkable, and population density can support it. High speed rail requires massive public transit in destination cities, which is why the current proposal in FL (Orlando - Tampa) makes absolutely no sense.

<comment><USER4> Unless the original high speed rail plan has been scrapped, it is far more sophisticated than "just" a link from the east coast to the west coast:

[http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/09/04/16/a-vision-for-high- sp...](http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/09/04/16/a-vision-for-high-speed-rail/)

<comment><USER5> >There's no reason why we can't do this. This is America.

Exactly. It isn't China, France, Spain or Japan. People in this countries are :

1\. used and able to [relatively comfortable] live very close to each other

and

2\. not able to live far apart - not enough cars, land, etc...

In short - they don't have choice.

The 1. and 2. are completely reversed for America. I personally like it this way. I spent enough years doing public transportation to value what i have here (Bay Area).

Add: and don't tell me about global warming - will talk about it once everybody get really serious. Even today there is enough technology do avoid it - nobody [with real political and economical power] just care about it. For example (do you own research) - 20-30KWt/Hr batteries (300-450Kg) can get you 100-200 miles range. Even at today's prices (no economy of scale) $1000-500 per Kwt/hr - lets say $20K (though you can do even with $10K). Minus complicated engine, transmission and other related stuff (around the same weight) - pretty much the same price of the car. Gas station infrastructure - complete saving. Instead of all these underground and transportation gas tanks, safety measures, etc... - each existing gas station _already_ has high- amperage electrical connect to it - the only investment is a plug with card reader attached.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> the best way to move energy development forward is to force real pricing of energy, ie. by pricing in rights to emit carbon dioxide or any other pollutants. That would level the playing field and make profitable development of other sources of energy (and generate political will for it as a result :). It would even be much more cheaper to put Virginia coal-miners on 10x welfare and move forward than the whole economy and technological progress being kept hostages of making the miners happy electorate.

related : <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2266841>

<comment><USER6> I agree. The free market and competition have created more value than any other tool in human history and it's absolutely the best tool for this job. There seems to be a common misconception that free markets will arise naturally and any government involvement will jeopordize them. In reality, government is the method that a capitalist society must use to ensure that no resources are undervalued; that the system is truly generating value, not just moving it from one place to another at a loss. In the case of energy, the role of goverment should be to determine the immediate value and future costs fossil fuel energy production.

In practice of course, goverment is too heavily influenced by those who currently happen to have the most resources. As a result, they are incapable of correctly evaluating the true value of immediate energy output versus future greenhouse gas levels. It makes the question of how to solve the energy problem moot, because there's no way to implement that solution under the current political conditions.

<comment><USER7> > not just moving it from one place to another at a loss.

By definition, unprofitable ventures will run out of capital and stop without government intervention.

> There seems to be a common misconception that free markets will arise > naturally

History is full examples of humans freely trading with humans. International trade is completely co-operative, free of government oversight (there is no world government).

It is not a misconception that people can trade without a central authority figure. And the presence of the black market in all cultures shows us that it is universal that people want to trade freely.

> the role of goverment should be to determine the immediate value and future > costs fossil fuel energy production.

Can you cite an example of when price fixing has improved living standard of the general population?

And is there ever been a time when raising energy costs has improved the human condition?

Do you really propose lowering the standard of living for the poor and middle class because of an unproven theory that the climate is a positive feedback loop and 2 degree change will snowball into catastrophic effects?

<comment><USER5> >"not just moving it from one place to another at a loss."

>By definition, unprofitable ventures will run out of capital and stop without government intervention.

in the context of this discussion it means : "not just moving it from one place to another to generate personal profit at a somebody else's [usually wide public's] loss." The government role is to prevent such profitable ventures which profit at the loss of the general public - free market isn't able to do so on its own.

>Do you really propose lowering the standard of living for the poor and middle class because of an unproven theory that the climate is a positive feedback loop and 2 degree change will snowball into catastrophic effects?

this is just Red Book of Cheyney.

Anyway, technological progress, including development of new sources of energy, has generally benefited poor. Where is limiting market competition by subsidizing ineffective outdated technological processes (which de-facto happens right now with coal and other fossil fuel energy) has always restricted technological progress and thus impacted the whole society, including poor.

>And the presence of the black market in all cultures shows us that it is universal that people want to trade freely.

presence of black market in the Soviet Union was showing universal people desire to smoke Marlboro and wear LEVI's jeans. Desire to trade freely would created the black market in bread as well, yet no such market existed. Such market exist in Zimbabwe though, where it shows universal people desire to eat.

<comment><USER7> Private profit, socialized losses. Now I understand what you meant. I believe the government enables these actors, not prevents them. Finance sector is the recent example. Polluters are protected from being sued (and damages are capped) by the government.

I think there is room for well defined externalities to be captured in transactions, but handing out subsidies to special interest in the name of technology progress is ridiculous. Who picks the winners and losers? How long do you subsidize? Who pays when the costs of the new tech do not come down? Will you raise the cost of transportation so I can develop teleportation technology?

I think Spain is going to provide a painful lesson in what happens when you subsidize green tech, and unfortunately the people who pay for it are already impoverished.

<comment><USER6> The finance sector is a perfect example of how an industry influences the government for profit, to the detriment of the greater goals of a society. I don't think lawsuits are a suitable way to deal with the energy problem, but I could be convinced. Lawsuits as they exist today give too much power to those with more legal resources.

The government already provides incentives to individuals who don't murder people, and businesses who don't hire child workers. There's lots of profit to be made in building an army and stealing from others, but we discourage it as a society because it doesn't result in a net benefit. There are plenty of fines for fraud and other transactions that are deemed to be not in the best interest of society, no matter how much profit they generate for the actor. Where is the break-even point on this spectrum as far as you are concerned?

The winners are still picked by market forces. The losers are picked by the scientific evidence and the decision making processes of our democracy. The market is set up to penalize actors who take from the common good. "Subsidy" is a misnomer, think of it as a sumptuary tax or a fine. These taxes can be left in place indefinitely, since the goal is to discourage use.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> How does that compare to thorium based reactors? The Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor: What Fusion Wanted To Be <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AHs2Ugxo7-8>

<comment><USER5> thorium based cycle provides no viable weaponisation path - thus nobody really cares about its development. After overcoming all the technological and political hurdles you'll be left with energy producing device only. Compare with regular nuclear development - energy plus the other stuff, even for the reactors which supposedly aren't that usable for the other stuff :)

<comment><USER9> There are loads of countries that already have weapons, and want power reactors -- but the technology for working with uranium is already in place, and fuel costs are so small, so there hasn't been much incentive to work on thorium reactors unless you're going for something dramatically better, like LFTRs. Which China recently announced that they were doing, by the way.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The general attitude over at the Energy from Thorium forum is not enthusiastic:

[http://energyfromthorium.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=57&t=...](http://energyfromthorium.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=57&t=2144)

It doesn't seem to offer much (if any) advantage over other liquid metal fast breeder reactors.

<comment><USER10> Except that we got ten times more thorium than uranium in the crust.

<comment><USER9> Just so we're clear on what everybody's saying, that's a benefit of thorium reactors, not this traveling wave reactor. And it's mostly irrelevant, anyway; we have enough U-238 to run a huge number of TWRs for a very long time, so why worry about the relative uranium and thorium supplies?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> A pool of liquid Sodium, Plutonium and depleted Uranium buried into the ground, running unattended for a hundred years...

What could possibly go wrong?

</comment><comment><USER12> Anyone trusts this guy wiht any kind of technology where a small bug can mean the death of millions ? Am I the only one who is missing something ?

<comment><USER9> This isn't a one-man project, and nuclear engineers are not idiots. The worst- case scenario here is that the sodium coolant gets out somehow and reacts with water, causing a chemical explosion and breaching containment. Sodium-cooled reactors are not a new technology, and there are well-developed methods of making such disaster scenarios vanishingly unlikely, as well as ensuring that the side-effects if they do happen would be minimal.

So yes, you are missing something.

<comment><USER12> Microsoft was not a one man company either. And the only thing that could go wrong was...errrrr...StuxNet ?

<comment><USER9> Software people do not have anything like the track record of safety that modern nuclear engineers do. The two are not directly comparable.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


450,000 Women Missed Breast Cancer Screenings Due to "Algorithm Failure" - <AUTHOR> https://spectrum.ieee.org/riskfactor/computing/it/450000-woman-missed-breast-cancer-screening-exams-in-uk-due-to-algorithm-failure <comment><USER2> As this article says, some doctors are doubtful of the benefits of breast cancer screening.

[https://www.bmj.com/content/361/bmj.k2055](https://www.bmj.com/content/361/bmj.k2055)

That references this (quite old, 2012 Cochrane review): [http://cochranelibrary- wiley.com/doi/10.1002/14651858.CD0018...](http://cochranelibrary- wiley.com/doi/10.1002/14651858.CD001877.pub5/abstract)</comment>


[CVE-2016-2098] Possible remote code execution vulnerability in Action Pack - <AUTHOR> https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/rubyonrails-security/ly-IH-fxr_Q <comment><USER2> Wrote a simple proof of concept to illustrate the vulnerability in action: [https://github.com/hderms/dh-CVE_2016_2098](https://github.com/hderms/dh- CVE_2016_2098)</comment>