Salton Sea Notes: Lawrence Ferlinghetti's California Travel Journals (1961) - <AUTHOR> http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2015/09/18/salton-sea-notes/ <comment><USER2> I drove down to Salton City and wandered around the beach of fish bones. It's a surreal place - grids of streets but almost no houses, and electricity poles just about still standing. There are couple of rows of palm trees on what might have been the drive the Salton City Yacht Club, but is now just some boulders. People also live here, but it's about as far from the romantic beach resort of the 50's as one could get.

I drove on to Salvation Mountain and Slab City.

I can't recommend it enough!

<comment><USER3> If anyone is interested in pictures Vice did a nice article on Salton City: [http://www.vice.com/read/i-went-to-californias-post- apocalyp...](http://www.vice.com/read/i-went-to-californias-post-apocalyptic- beach-town-salton-sea)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Does anyone else hate reading stuff like this because it seems like it has something to say but it really doesn't at all? He keeps referencing Miller, maybe it would be better to just read Miller instead.</comment>


Gravity Payments' Revenue and Profits Doubled After $70,000 Minimum Wage Set - <AUTHOR> http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2015/10/23/remember_dan_price_of_gravity_payments_who_gave_his_employees_a_70_000_minimum.html <comment><USER2> it was good marketing</comment>


Comet streaking past Earth, providing spectacular show - <AUTHOR> https://phys.org/news/2020-07-comet-streaking-earth-spectacular.html <comment><USER2> This article has instructions for observing it: [https://skyandtelescope.org/press-releases/new-bright- visito...](https://skyandtelescope.org/press-releases/new-bright-visitor- comet-neowise/)

</comment><comment><USER3> NEOWISE has been lining up with outbreaks of noctilucent clouds [0] as well for fortunate observers! With its position moving to be visible in the evening rather than before the crack of dawn it'll be a lot easier to look for soon for most of us. Seeing Hale-Bopp is one of the two most memorable astronomical phenomenon I've witnessed - It's on par with randomly seeing an exploding fireball while taking out the trash. This one's no Hale-Bopp but I would argue any naked eye comet is stunning and memorable. Don't pass this one up if you can help it.

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

Also, tons of photos:

[https://spaceweathergallery.com/index.php?title=neowise](https://spaceweathergallery.com/index.php?title=neowise)

</comment><comment><USER4> Here's a really nice picture of Comet C/2020 F3 (NEOWISE) from the RDU airport parking deck.

[https://imgur.com/njJvFwc](https://imgur.com/njJvFwc)

Taken at 4:50 am on July 10th by reddit user enlightened_prince (not me).

6 second exposure using a 100mm lens. Not sure of the camera.

[https://old.reddit.com/r/raleigh/comments/hon6ee/comet_neowi...](https://old.reddit.com/r/raleigh/comments/hon6ee/comet_neowise_from_rdu/)

</comment><comment><USER5> > The year after the Great Comet of 1618, for example, Gotthard Arthusius > published a pamphlet stating that it was a sign that the Day of Judgment was > near.[136] He listed ten pages of comet-related disasters, including > "earthquakes, floods, changes in river courses, hail storms, hot and dry > weather, poor harvests, epidemics, war and treason and high prices". ... > Spectroscopic analysis in 1910 found the toxic gas cyanogen in the tail of > Halley's Comet,[137] causing panicked buying of gas masks and quack "anti- > comet pills" and "anti-comet umbrellas" by the public.[138]

</comment><comment><USER6> This online skychart has useful info on when & where to look: [https://theskylive.com/planetarium?objects=c2020f3](https://theskylive.com/planetarium?objects=c2020f3)

</comment><comment><USER7> I know this is completely off topic, but seeing these pictures reminds me of one of my favorite movies Your Name (2016). If anyone has a spare 107 minutes in quarantine, I would highly recommend watching it, or at least adding it to your "queue."

[https://myanimelist.net/anime/32281/Kimi_no_Na_wa](https://myanimelist.net/anime/32281/Kimi_no_Na_wa)

</comment><comment><USER8> No equipment or knowledge is necessary to see this; it's very obvious in the pre-dawn sky and took me about 5 seconds to spot. However, the tail is not that bright, so if you want to see detail then binoculars are recommended.

</comment><comment><USER9> I live in the mountains of Central Arizona. I was able to see the comet a little while ago. It was pure luck: I went out front and with the setting sun the light was just right to see a tiny white point with a tiny line coming out of it. I ran inside and grabbed the good binoculars my son in law gave me for Christmas, and for just about 1 minute it was beautifully visible/good detail with the binoculars. Then the light changed and it was gone from view.

I think I missed seeing the last comet.

</comment><comment><USER10> "Astronomy Picture of the Day" has a picture from the ISS: [https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap200710.html](https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap200710.html)

(There's a beautiful 10-minute video from the ISS apparently based on time- lapse photos from eol.jsc.nasa.gov on July 5th, but I don't want to link it directly.)

</comment><comment><USER11> Woke up early to see if I can spot the comet..but couldn't. I was able to see Venus and Mars tho' ..and our Moon. Earlier last week ..at night, I saw Saturn and Jupiter and three moons.

It's very thrilling! Hope to catch the comet and maybe get some photos. This can be viewed with the naked eye..so fingers crossed for the timing.

</comment><comment><USER12> Sometimes I wish I didn't live in the middle of a large city. Light pollution blocks most celestial objects.

<comment><USER13> I thought so too until a friend showed me his small telescope on his apartment building right downtown. And we could see Saturn's rings clearly! I would never have guessed it could be done in the middle of a major city.

<comment><USER11> It is always a delight to see Saturn with the rings..every single time, it makes me gasp!

A small spotting scope is sufficient to catch saturn and even Jupiter..Altho you can't really see the bands on Jupiter.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Anyone else concerned that a comet this big and this close to earth was only discovered on March 27?

IMO, I think this is evidence we'll most likely never have more than a few months notice of something hurtling towards us regardless even if its going to destroy life on earth.

A few months isn't much time.

<comment><USER15> Close? As in 0.69AU, more than half the distance to the Sun?

However, it's true that these objects that spend most of their long orbits outside of Neptune's orbit are going to be hard to detect until they enter the near solar system.

Luckily, most of these objects are also inclined well away from the ecliptic, and so their probability of an interaction is low. The closest this object could ever get to Earth on its orbit is 0.36AU.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Wow. I hadn't even heard of this comet and I go to the linked story the photo is from the town I live in.

</comment><comment><USER17> Day of the Triffids?

</comment><comment><USER18> >> _It will be about 7,000 years before the comet returns, "so I wouldn't suggest waiting for the next pass," said the telescope's deputy principal investigator Joe Masiero of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California._

Couldn't make it past this pessimistic comment ;)</comment>


You can't manage what you can't measure - <AUTHOR> http://blog.fray.it/post/27834642686/you-cant-manage-what-you-cant-measure

<comment><USER2> Bas, Liked your post, It's true that being a startup you are missing lot of information as you have almost non-existant history and thus can't make informed decision (you have to follow your gutts) or don't know if you're doing well or not (You must talk to other startups).

However here are few things I think worked well for us and might help other people make more informed decisions:

1\. Track everything. It's important as you may never know what kind of information you'll need in the future. As every day pass and you're still alive (congratulation for not being part of the deadpool yet), you are constantly expanding your history. There were several occurence where we needed some kind of data and because we opted to track everything, we had that data available.

2\. Talk to people. It's imperative that you build an entourage of smart people. People who've been in the trenches like you, people who are building something similar or build something completely different but in the same market. There will be time where you'll need to make some decisions based on your gutts and talking to people will give you that extra re-assurance you're doing the right decision (or not).

3\. Research. I usually like to head to quora and search data that are related to my company. Sometimes I find nuggets there regarding some KPIs and then compare them to ours. You can tell when some of that data is bullshit but most of the data is accurate. I also like to ask closed community such as HN, Forrst or the various stackexchange communities sites for advices on certain things I'm working on. (twitter and facebook is good too, in short engage people on the net - and search for questions that have already been answered in the past).

4\. Make assumptions and then challenge them. Some of the time you'll need to just follow your gutts and assume that something needs to be a certain way (that's true to startup who are building innovative products that have no comparison to draw from). You'll need to start from somewhere and do some A/B testing, as long as you go to the right and up (and preferrably in a hockey stick fashion), you're good.

5\. Split your users into Cohorts and stop looking at vanity metrics. That's another subject and most likely one that needs a series of blog posts. But the basic is that you need to split your users based on events or thing they did in a certain period. Put your users into cohorts of month they signed up. See how they behave over time, correlate that data with new features you've introduced and/or promotion you ran. You'll soon find out that while you thought that your product is doing alright, some metrics are going downward and you need to find the root cause.

6\. Go beyond Google analytics. It's somewhat related to my previous point. Basically Google analytics is a great tool (and it's free) but you can only get so far with it, you'll need to tie lot of that data you're tracking to users. That will eventually lead you to split users into different group and engage them differently. (It will also lead you to do a lot of conversion optimization based on the data you'll find).

I can go on and on, but I'll stop there and let other discuss/comment as well.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Feel free to comment,

Bas</comment>


Is the startup community relying too much on fate? Connecting the outliers - <AUTHOR> http://tenzerolab.com/blog/is-the-startup-community-relying-too-much-on-fate-connecting-the-outliers/

<comment><USER2> I've been involved recently in a local incubator YCombinator/Tech-Stars type program (BoomStartup in Salt Lake City). For a while they would have some sort of get together every Friday (mostly to discuss the program and let people meet those involved). I thought it was interesting that the vast majority of people that showed up were "business people". While I'm sure some of them are legitimately worthy of being called a business person, for most of them, that really just meant "want to start a company and can't code". We also had alot of issues with people being too paranoid of having their ideas stolen to feel comfortable talking about their ideas.

I'd love to see someone come up with a good way for the right people with the right mindset to come together and socialize in order to help form teams.

<comment><AUTHOR> Regular socializing is a first good step but it seems like the real filter, the way to get at the people you want, is to get people _doing_. When you're actually working on a project (even a small project) you learn pretty quickly who actually gets things done and who wants to be the "idea guy", occupy volume, and waste precious oxygen.

I think as technology / hacker types we tend to undervalue the business side of the equation though (I know I did). My experience with my first startup was made a lot more difficult by the fact that no one in the company was really business/marketing/sales focused. There are valuable business skills that can help an early stage company but the question is, how do we filter and find the real business "makers".

I think we can come up with ways to move people's various projects forward by small increments. I led a discussion at Boston BarCamp on this topic and someone brought up the "don't want people to steal my idea" thing. I made the person mad by saying that I wasn't interested in people like that. Ideas are ways to _start_ the conversation/process, they're not an end in and of themselves. I find people like that are (usually) not really serious about building something.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I'm working on hacking the startup process. I'm focused on the Boston area but I don't think the point in this essay is specific to Boston.

</comment><comment><USER3> I had my own idea for dealing with this phenomenon. After reading your post I decided to try and make it a reality instead of an idea.

MiniLeap: A pickup game for startups

www.MiniLeap.com

<comment><USER4> I think minileap has some merit in a slightly different arena so to speak. I'm presuming the winners go on to polish off what they started while the "community at large" follows? I think this would be a fun way for hackers who are already friends to kill a weekend--kind of like Apple's insomnia contests for film students but for coders. My two suggestions would be 1) to think about incorporating some sort of money pot where you require users to submit like $10-20 to make things interesting, and 2) I wouldn't rule out there being two programmers per team.

Best of all, developers get to indulge all those little ideas floating around in their heads, so even if they didn't win the pot they still come away with a feeling of release. Basically, the equivalent of the one-night stand for startuppers :)

HN please review minileap!!!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Been working on this project for a while with a friend. Just a prototype I'm making to match people based on their resources. It's really barebones right now (full documentation should be up soon) but thought this was an organic moment to drop a shameless plug. Should be able to match programmers (or anyone) based on the required skills the startup needs.

link: <http://kxs.miceswitch.com/>

Hope the little guy can be of some use to HN.

</comment><comment><USER5> You leave us with a great question at the end of that essay. I'm interested in learning about how you plan to hack the startup process, especially here in Boston.

<comment><AUTHOR> I've got some high level ideas, but most of them revolve around getting people working together, especially in a common space. I think physical proximity is important but another potential key is defining clear agreements that reduce the natural inhibitions we have to working on each others projects (especially across communities, like biz types and hackers). We have talent and passion, I think what we're lacking is trust. You can't build trust over a beer and a 15min conversation at a networking event (IMHO).

<comment><USER6> I thought there was some startup labs and incubator spaces around here?

I keep hearing about something like it at OpenCoffee and Mass Inno.

<comment><AUTHOR> It might have been me :), I've been going to OpenCoffee a lot talking about this idea. I think this fills a gap in the ecosystem between social events and seed accelerators (that are looking for more fully formed startup teams).</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Is it better to run outside or on a treadmill? - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-35399598 <comment><USER2> Can I propose a corollary to Betteridge's Law wherein "A or B?" headlines can be (almost invariably) answered with "It depends."

(You can do workouts on a treadmill that are difficult outdoors and vice versa. Same with bike trainers. Same with those "infinite" swimming pools. You should probably do a bit of both. It's a bloody daft question.)

<comment><USER3> I believe a better corollary is: "Yes".

<comment><USER2> "Is it better to run outside or on a treadmill?" "Yes" makes zero sense.</comment></comment></comment>


Flash proven to ruin Android 2.2 performance - <AUTHOR> http://www.kitguru.net/apple/zardon/adobe-flash-proven-to-ruin-google-android-2-2-performance/

<comment><USER2> You're able to disable Flash on Android by default and only load it on a site when you approve it. It doesn't 'ruin' anything at all, because you'll never be using it unless there's Flash content you want to view.

Having content on the web that's unviewable to a device does more to ruin the experience than a performance hit while doing something CPU-intensive.

Also, from what I've read, this beta of Flash doesn't make use of any hardware acceleration, while the final release will.

<comment><USER3> Not to mention you have to download the flash player from the market if you wish to play flash (at least I did when i updated my nexus one), so it doesn't even come on the device by default as far as I know.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Oh my god.. not that video again!

Sorry, but this is the most unprofessional comparison i have ever seen.

First, out of three mobiles only one supports flash and that one loads a site 1 sec slower?

Second, Ads are served from different servers and it's quite common that ads are served slow.. i have browsed the mainpage with a whopping 3 flash ads and waited like 5 seconds for the flash ads to be displayed after the whole rest of the page was there.. on my desktop!

Third, 3 devices in a speedtest fighting over one wifi connection on the same channel for bandwidth? Really?

Please, for the sake of god, if you do comparisons and benchmarks, do them right! That the whole web is linking this video is awful.

My personal experience with flash: One site gave browser crashes (flashgames). The rest of the world played nicely so far, with good performance, surprisingly good, actually. And for a beta release, i hope this one site will play on release.

Again.. please don't do this.

Worst. Benchmark. EVER.

<comment><USER4> edit: pocketnow.com copied locally, served form local network, one device at a time, stopwatch. It's not that hard... If you ignore the fact that you are comparing browsers without flash to browsers with flash.. that's stupid. He should've added lynx to it.

<comment><USER5> Agree. This is a case of, um, Apples versus Oranges.

One can turn off JPEGs in a browser and have the page load faster than a browser that loads images. But that does not merit writing an article entitled "JPEGs proven to ruin Android 2.2 performance".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Did any of you catch the comment where the guy from Adobe criticized the guy in the video for picking random sites?

Seriously?

So, Flash runs _great_ on the Android as long as you only visit the sites that Adobe hand-picked for the Google IO demo? Maybe I'm reading that wrong... but that's how it sounds.

Yes, it's beta. But don't hold your breath while you wait for it to improve. Flash is a big part of the web, and an expensive one too. Computers need to be fast to run today's Flash content. My netbook (windows) can't run Flash-based sites, neither can my Mac... so I don;t think we can just blame Apple for not letting Adobe optimize Flash.

I don't think we need to blame anyone.

The fact is that Adobe makes software that requires serious hardware to run. I am very skeptical that it will run well on low powered devices. If it does, it may only do so on "approved" sites which really isn't "choice" as far as I'm concerned.

<comment><USER7> Right on all points: Adobe's mistake isn't that they think Flash applications CAN run on these devices, as clearly this is definitely viable, but that they think Flash applications (which are designed for desktops) SHOULD run on these devices. It's a classic case of "just because you CAN, doesn't mean you SHOULD."

<comment><USER8> By your argument people shouldn't even try to enable huge portions of the modern internet to run on mobile devices since most sites weren't designed for phones and it's quite fashionable to see who can load 100s of kilobytes of JavaScript for mundane purposes.

Flash hasn't outlived its purpose yet, nothing has stepped forward as a complete replacement, and working to enable the whole internet is a lot better than settling for some of it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The video only proves that loading additional content takes additional time. Turn off the images, and the loading will be even faster. Turn off javascript and performance will be even better! News?

Being able to play web games on mobile, is really a cool thing. Turn on the 'on-demand' mode and Flash wont load/play content by default.Compared to how poorly iphone handles even basic javascript effects, the flash experience on Android is excellent.

</comment><comment><USER10> So loading all of the website is slower than loading only random parts? Really? I would never have guessed _that_...

</comment><comment><USER11> That's amazing. Beta software that's buggy?

Unheard of.

<comment><USER12> It's something more fundamental. When writing software for mobile devices, you really need to optimize for power consumption. There was a recent talk at Google IO about the new polling vs pushing for web services, and it's alarming. If your Android app polls a web service every 5 minutes, it'll use something like 10% of the battery in one day (just that one app!).

Flash apps are simply not designed for optimal power consumption. Flash is designed for multimedia apps, which are generally power hogs.

I develop Flash professionally, and I'd never run it on my phone.

<comment><USER13> Do you run games on your phone? Aren't those multimedia apps as well? But they're ok and Flash is not? Why is _choice_ a problem here?

<comment><USER12> I'm mostly worried about Flash in the context of network usage. I can't say how the power performance is for graphics and gaming, but I'd guess it's about the same as native phone apps.

It's easy to imagine flash apps with network access patterns that aren't optimized for phones. Take any advertisement or analytics system which continually polls the server for more data. This will kill your battery if left running.

<comment><USER11> "Take any advertisement or analytics system which continually polls the server for more data. This will kill your battery if left running."

How does this compare to some AJAX + a timer? Is it the network call itself that's an issue, or just how that is implemented in Flash?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Flash is useful for video everywhere but Youtube. And it works. But for ads etc., it's best turned off.

Android is better and more useful for having Flash than not. But plugin support in the browser should be made on-demand, or turned on and off as desired.

<comment><USER15> It is. You can select to run plugins only on demand, which naturally is the only sensible way to run flash. This whole "claim" is completely silly.

Even on the desktop (ie OS X) the web becomes unusable with Flash enabled all the time. There are plugins like NoFlash that make it acceptable, and the occasional interesting Flash app makes it worthwhile.

<comment><USER14> I misspoke - I know, I have flash on my Nexus One running Froyo.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Wasn't this expected? Scrolling pages even on my desktop browser got much snappier after enabling FlashBlock or equivalent.

</comment><comment><USER17> They could make it so that it doesn't automatically load all flash on page, and only ones you activate.

<comment><USER15> It already works that way. Therefore the whole claim of ruined performance is complete bullshit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Watched it on my iPad.

What's not mentioned is how extremely well the iPhone and iPad handle embedded HTML5 video; smooth scrolling and zooming, plus hardware decoding. If Google had also decided to only support HTML5 video that would only accelerate what is already rather quick adoption of that standard, and everybody would win. Instead they're relying on Adobe to deliver Android's video, and the results are predicably bad. But it's a bullet point they can add to their new anti- Apple marketing strategy, and I guess that's more important than the actual quality of the software they ship.</comment>


Organizers have unionized 5,000 contract workers at Apple, Facebook, Yahoo - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-09-14/union-power-is-putting-pressure-on-silicon-valley-s-tech-giants <comment><USER2> > Eventually, Facebook says, it OK'd proposed terms of the contract, which > hiked drivers' average pay by half, to $27.50 an hour, and for the first > time provided fully paid family health care.

For those people doing the driving that's pretty great news. I hope they also took care of those working conditions issues too. Split shifts etc...

<comment><USER3> Won't last long. Few more years, and it will be a autonomous fleet anyways.

<comment><USER4> You might have missed this discussion from a few days ago:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15116861](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15116861)

<comment><USER5> That discussion is extremely weird. Posters are claiming that since Speech recognition took decades so must self driving cars. Speech recognition decades ago has nothing to do with speech recognition today.

I understand the skepticism but I hope HN posters can make stronger arguments in the future.

<comment><USER6> I agree. Transformative technology has this effect on people. The other day I was arguing with someone that said we need true Artificial General Intellegence before full autonomy is available.

I'm fine with skepticism, but these types of unfounded claims drive me crazy. If you want to argue the companies aren't really moving the tech as fast as they claim, post actual evidence, not some nonsense about speech recognition in the 90s.

<comment><USER7> Technologists have a bad habit of not taking consideration the political and social sides of innovation. The success of autonomous cars depends less on the tech as much as it would depends more on politics. As tech don't mix well with politics and the interests of the majority, autonomous cars will only happen when the tech is good enough to overcome politics. Some people think that this will take decades if not centuries.

<comment><USER8> Infrastructure support is not there yet either, which is kind of a political issue as well, but also a future need.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is a bit misleading. Union power is putting pressure on service economy companies which in turn service tech companies.

Tech workers are not unionizing -and I can't imagine they would, given their pay compared to other sectors. I could see an AMA type organization perhaps.

On the other hand, unfortunately, companies no longer staff vertically. When they can outsource their non core competencies they do. They don't want to be the IBMs and Xeroxes of yore. They want to remain nimble.

A famous example was MS's front line IT staff managing Windows clients being contractors. So they hired contractors to manage their own core product internally!!

<comment><USER10> I think a tech union would significantly raise the wages of technical people. A past job, I automated away jobs at $0.10 on the dollar and made a healthy salary, but it obviously was 1/10th of what I was worth. I left that company and all those jobs are still automated away and the more the company grows, the more they save.

Also a tech union could push for perks like developer offices, remote work, better work equipment, etc. If nothing else, they could communicate with the business on how to make developers happy and comfortable; something the business might be willing to do, but don't know how to do.

Now is the time to do it too, US businesses are pulling back on offshore labor and bringing work back to the US.

<comment><USER11> > I think a tech union would significantly raise the wages of technical > people.

By what mechanism? Either they engage in collective bargaining, which is filled with problems, or artificially constrict the supply of labor by requiring additional licensing. Considering there is already a shortage of software engineers, constricting it further is unlikely to be net positive.

From where I'm standing, the current system works very well and is about as free as a labor market can be. I just accepted a new job and the process of getting there involved talking to about two dozen companies, narrowing those down to 6 or 7 offers and having each company submit a bid (initial offer). I pruned off the bottom half and had the top 2-3 companies submit revised bids based on competitor info and ultimately chose a company which offered a great mix of compensation and role/culture.

At no point in the process do I think having someone else do negotiation for me would have increased my pay. In fact, I'm convinced that any collective bargaining arrangement would mean a significant reduction in my compensation—for one thing, every "open salary" calculator I've seen proposes a salary about half of what I make. Formulaic salaries help low performers and hurt high performers.

> If nothing else, they could communicate with the business on how to make > developers happy and comfortable; something the business might be willing to > do, but don't know how to do.

I don't need a union to do that. I certainly don't need a union with collective bargaining to do that.

Tech "unions" might make sense to enshrine certain ethical principles, but I would not expect a union to increase my pay—and would vote against any one which promised that.

<comment><USER12> > Considering there is already a shortage of software engineers, constricting > it further is unlikely to be net positive.

"Shortage of software engineers": The myth that just won't die. If this were true, salaries would be skyrocketing, companies wouldn't have the luxury of being as picky as they are, and open reqs wouldn't attract hundreds of applicants.

> I just accepted a new job and the process of getting there involved talking > to about two dozen companies, narrowing those down to 6 or 7 offers and > having each company submit a bid (initial offer). I pruned off the bottom > half and had the top 2-3 companies submit revised bids based on competitor > info and ultimately chose a company which offered a great mix of > compensation and role/culture.

Congratulations. While I don't doubt your story, you must realize your experience is an extreme outlier. Most people I know consider themselves lucky to get one offer after talking to two dozen companies, if that. With no alternatives, you have little power to negotiate: you take it or leave it. And once you're hired, it's no different than any other job--you are employed at the will of your employer. Any day can be your last.

<comment><USER11> > If this were true, salaries would be skyrocketing

In my corner of the world, they definitely are.

I think a lot of these discussions are complicated by the fact that there are essentially two developer job markets: prime and sub-prime. The prime developer market is for top-tier developers who work at top tech companies and startups, primarily in SV & NYC. The sub-prime developer market is all the developers working on companies whose primary product isn't software.

The hiring market for both markets looks very different, especially since people don't really recognize that as such. A hiring manager in the prime market might legitimately perceive there as being a shortage, even when receiving dozens or hundreds of resumes because the vast majority of those resumes are simply not qualified. When I was last hiring, we received plenty of resumes—but many of those resumes were from people who exclusively had Microsoft experience or simply maintained WordPress installations. They didn't meet my standard for a senior developer, and once we found someone who _did_ meet that standard after months of searching we did whatever it took to hire them.

I don't feel like an outlier, since I'm looking at the market from the prime sector where it's normal and expected to have multiple competing offers.

There can be a shortage of senior developers while still having hundreds of applications for every open position because most of those applications won't pass the bar. If you're capable of passing that bar, you have your pick of positions.

<comment><USER12> My guess is that what you describe as the "prime" developer market represents 1% of the tech labor force, surely no more than 10%. Much smaller than you think it is. There are plenty of talented people, even in these "top" tech companies, who do not have 6-7 offers thrown at them regularly and have to slug it out with the rest of us in a brutal labor market. I think what is being argued here is whether collective action would be beneficial to the remaining 90-99%.

<comment><USER11> It's certainly more than 1%. Top tech companies alone employ more than 1% of developers.

> There are plenty of talented people, even in these "top" tech companies, who > do not have 6-7 offers thrown at them

That doesn't match my experience at all. Every Google/Facebook/Amazon employee I know constantly has interview requests and people trying to recruit them.

<comment><USER12> > It's certainly more than 1%. Top tech companies alone employ more than 1% of > developers.

That would be true only if you assumed around a huge number of top tech company hires were those prime developers. I've worked at all kinds of companies, including one you would undoubtedly consider "top." They all employ the full distribution. The mean will be higher in the top companies, but that's it.

> That doesn't match my experience at all. Every Google/Facebook/Amazon > employee I know constantly has interview requests and people trying to > recruit them.

Obviously it doesn't match your personal experience--we've already established that you're one of those "prime" developers. Likely your co- worker/acquaintance bubble is full of them too. Our perception of normal is often clouded by what we encounter every day. You see this all the time here on HN, where commenters tend to be smarter than the average bear. In that respect, I am open to applying that same reasoning to myself: I see talented people underemployed, struggling to get recognized, and at the mercy of their employer; and therefore I am potentially extrapolating this as normal. I think the numbers bear me out, but I admit I have not done more than casual Internet-research.

<comment><USER11> > That would be true only if you assumed around a huge number of top tech > company hires were those prime developers.

I do assume that. Yes, there is a distribution of abilities at top tech companies—but virtually everyone I've worked with at a good company could easily get other offers.

If you actually worked at a top tech company, your bubble should be similar to mine—I have a hard time imaging that many of your FANG colleagues are having trouble getting good employment offers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> > When the crowd reconvened, Andrew Barney, a former Intel cafeteria worker, > drew cheers and applause when he said, "I think Google should pay the > residents of this community for being allowed to squat in our backyard." > "Google's vulnerable right now with all this building and everything they're > doing, and they need a lot of approvals," says the Teamsters' Aloise. "We > may just pick one, one time, to get involved, and see if we can stop it and > have them come to us and say, 'What do you need?' "

This is one of those rare times where "populism" is actually the right word to describe something. The inequalities one can see in the Bay Area are quite flagrant, but this type of mentality is not going to help.

<comment><USER14> Speaking from another metro area, that sounds like what companies do to our municipalities when offering to set up shop. Oh, sure, they'll build an office here... so long as we shovel some free public money down their throat to "incentivize" them to _make a profit off our labor_.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> If there is one thing I've learned from two decades of reading about labor history, it's: Every gain labor has ever made has been taken. Every gain the working class (i.e. the overwhelming majority of people) has achieved has come from organizing their majority of low-power workers and then standing strongly against the empowered minority at the top.

Good for these people. They are essentially moving our society forward.

<comment><USER16> Any wage gains that are derived by unionisation are zero sum. They are economic rent extracted by reducing the competitiveness of labour markets, and advantaging unionized workers working for big employers at the expense of those without such jobs.

In the long run, the reduced profit margins caused by wages that are artificially high (above the rate that would be established by the free market) results in less investment (profits == compensation for investors), which means a slower rate of economic and wage growth.

>>If there is one thing I've learned from two decades of reading about labor history,

I encourage you to read a diverse set of perspectives. I'd argue that unions have more power than employers in being able to shape the historical narrative.

<comment><USER17> Why do you assume that the current wages are the "natural" rate established by the "free market"? Don't we have evidence that employers are already abusing their market power to extract rents? ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High- Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High- Tech_Employee_Antitrust_Litigation) for an example close to home)

In fact, corporate profits are record-high, and wages have been stagnant for decades, suggesting very strongly that the "unnatural" market power that is keeping wages at "artificial" levels is in fact that of employers.

<comment><USER16> >>Don't we have evidence that employers are already abusing their market power to extract rents? ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High- Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High- Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L..). for an example close to home)

Very few firms can engage in such behavior. A pact like this can only be maintained by a small number of very large firms, and only the firms party to the pact will abide by it, leaving the entire rest of the employer market in a competitive state.

Even had the antitrust action not stopped this behavior, it's questionable how much of an impact this behavior had in restraining wage growth in Silicon Valley's tech sector, and how long the pact would have lasted given its informal nature, and the temptation to cheat due to the intense completion between those party to it.

If wages being below the natural, market rate, due to collusion between large firms is your concern, then the right solution is antitrust action. Unionisation in the current legal environment (where unions can affectively hold their firm hostage, and thus reduce labour market freedom) creates numerous unintended consequences that adversely affect industries.

>>In fact, corporate profits are record-high, and wages have been stagnant for decades, suggesting very strongly that the "unnatural" market power

Corporate earning growth is at historically low rates. Wages have stagnated because economic output growth has stagnated. See this comment:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15244901](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15244901)

<comment><USER17> > Very few firms can engage in such behavior. A pact like this can only be > maintained by a small number of very large firms, and only the firms party > to the pact will abide by it, leaving the entire rest of the employer market > in a competitive state.

And the same can't be said about the market power of unions?

> Corporate earning growth is at historically low rates.

Cherry picked statistic. Corporate earnings as a percent of GDP are record high. [https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1Pik](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1Pik) And your linked chart shows exactly my point, wages relative to productivity have been decreasing.

Obviously with anything like this you have a hard time showing a direct causation, which is why I am confused that you are claiming that you can prove a clear causation in the exact opposite direction that the economy has been moving.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Appears to be free and non coercive negotiation until you get to the actual coersion:

"In San Francisco the coalition persuaded the city transit authority to make it easier to deny permits to companies facing labor strife."

If your negotiations rely on the monopoly that the state provides, is it really a negotiation?

<comment><USER19> The tech giants negotiations are relying on the monopoly that the state provides. Just to pick one piece of legislation, the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act, the government disallows various worker/employer agreements that benefit those doing the work. Meaning corporate America generally outlawed certain deals that could happen, when the workers were in a good position, that the corporation was willing to do. That is relying on the monopoly the state provides.

The Taft-Hartley act also bans secondary strikes, so unions are further restricted (this restriction was increased more with the Labor Management Reporting and Disclosure Act in 1959).

The Taft-Hartley act also allowed the president to ban strikes in the case of a "national emergency". Of course, national emergencies were seen all over the place since then, including in 2002 on the west coast docks with the ILWU.

There are the people doing all the work and creating all the wealth, then there are the heirs and such who feed off their expropriation of the surplus labor time of those doing all the work. The idle class relies on the monopoly that the state provides.

In fact, if you look to history and the creation of the first states in Sumeria thousands of years ago, the raison d'etre of those states were to use violence and propaganda so that an idle class could expropriate surplus labor time from their slaves doing all the work.

<comment><USER20> > In fact, if you look to history and the creation of the first states in > Sumeria thousands of years ago, the raison d'etre of those states were to > use violence and propaganda so that an idle class could expropriate surplus > labor time from their slaves doing all the work.

I've not encountered Sumerian revisionist libertarianism before ...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> If the drivers and cafeteria workers at tech companies can organize, so can the developers.

Unlike the developers, the drivers tend to be financially insecure. In this economy, they're eminently replaceable. What they do is outside the core competency of their employers. You'd think they'd have almost no leverage. And yet, in the space of just a few years, they've managed to secure higher wages and health benefits --- in a market where non-technical employees are 1099'd specifically to avoid benefits obligations!

Like a lot of other occupations in the US market, tech workers have been bamboozled into believing that labor organization is something lower-status workers do. But, no: most of the classic professions, from doctors to lawyers, belong to professional associations. They may not call themselves "unions", but that's a distinction without a difference.

Tech workers blow off labor organizing because they feel themselves to be well-compensated. And they're right. So are the doctors and the lawyers. There are things to bargain for besides higher salaries. If you're wondering what they are, look no further than Hacker News, a ranked inventory of tech worker grievances. Can't see organizing a walk-off over pay raises? Well then, how about:

* The right to work from home when the team agrees that doing so has no negative impact on performance.

* The right to hire team members outside of SFBA when the development team decides it's appropriate to do so.

* The right to work on side projects alone and with your own resources without your employer claiming the fruits of your own free time.

* The right to work in an office with walls between you and salespeople on the phone all day.

* The right to hold on to your vested options for 10 years after you leave, rather than being forced to exercise at your own expense within 90 days.

* The right to visibility into the terms of your employer's financing, including the liquidations preferences and perks of investor preferred shares.

I could go on and on and on, but then, so can you, because we share this site.

Here's a thing that a lot of people on Hacker News don't know --- and I think this is a genuine case of something that the ownership class in the American economy doesn't want you to know:

Federal law rigorously protects your rights to organize in the workplace. We talk about "at-will employment" and "protected classes" (race, religion, gender) on HN quite a bit. We rarely talk about the other broad exemption in American law to at-will termination: _labor organization_. Not only can you not be fired for trying to organize a labor union (itself something that surprises a lot of people), but _you can 't be fired for protesting_. You'll want to talk to a labor lawyer before you try this move, but: federal law prohibits the termination of an employee for engaging in "protected concerted action" to improve workplace conditions. You can, if you do it right, walk off your job and refuse to come back, and if you're disciplined for doing so, _sue your employer_.

It is crazy to me that we're not taking better advantage of this situation. The market power of software developers has never been higher. It may very well be at its zenith. For that matter, the labor laws of the US might not stay this way either. _Now_ is the time to put it to use to secure the best, most productive conditions for technology work, not 20 years from now, when it might be just as hard for us as it was for the Facebook shuttle drivers.

<comment><USER22> What conditions or events happened for people in these other "professional" unions to start organizing? I think people only take action en masse when clear incentives exist. I can't see what cultural incentives there are to organize, except within the socialist DSA/Chapo crowds and I'm not sure I can be safely optimistic that everyone is there for the right reasons. I hope to be wrong.

I don't know much about labor organizing but I think the base of tech workers is fractured, with the labor-minded in the minority, and centrists and radical libertarians making up huge swaths of junior developers (For example the user that reflexively brought up union thugs slashing tires, as if no corporation has ever conspired to commit crimes in response to competition). Labor organizing, or however you want to phrase it, has a bad "politics smell" to so many.

<comment><USER21> The tech labor force skews liberal (simply as a result of demographics), but if you see it as being dominated by either political extreme, that's much more likely to be an observer effect than reality. Contrary to the impression you'd get from message boards, there aren't that many "radical libertarians" _or_ that many "democratic socialists" working in a typical company.

The only way organization will happen is if it's done for the benefit of the median tech employee. That employee might not be totally apolitical, but they are more worried about the practical realities of their career than they are about tech's place among the great labor unions of US history.

My point is just, it's pretty clear that there are plenty of industry-wide grievances that not only could be fixed, but could be fixed to the betterment of the entire industry, making companies stronger, more efficient, and more survivable.

Given the opportunity tech workers have now with market power and large employers presenting clear targets to organize against, I'd argue that conditions are pretty good for organizing today.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Question for the HN crowd: do you think tech-workers will begin to unionize? It seems to me that (in general) they've got such a nice position in the economy there's probably a bit of an "if it ain't broke don't fix it" mentality. Is that correct?

<comment><USER24> I would hope not. I see tech-workers as professionals not as laborers. I think the great battle to be fought by tech workers is to stop having them treated as common laborers that perform some kind of rote process. Some times we call software development engineering, and if thats the case I would press anyone to show me an engineering discipline that parallels software engineering in terms of working conditions and relations.

<comment><USER25> Actors and writers are not laborers either and they're also competing against the "crapification" of their industry driven by execs trying to undercut them (e.g. reality TV).

<comment><USER24> The Screen Actors Guild is an interesting model for professionals. They go much farther then most professional organizations in terms of protecting workers right, but they also don't have rules like you have to hire the actor with 20 years experience before you can hire one right out of school, or you have to pay everyone on the same scale. Also I don't think they have requirements like you must have attended 10 years of school and done 4 years of internship before your allowed legally to work in the field.

<comment><USER26> Which is why I, for one, feel they're a far better model for a tech union than an AFL style one.

<comment><USER27> > Which is why I, for one, feel they're a far better model for a tech union > than an AFL style one.

First, SAG-AFTRA _is_ a part of AFL-CIO.

Second, over the years, SAG received a number of special exemptions in law that no other union today has received (and after 2012, that's _very_ unlikely to change). So SAG-AFTRA is not really a realistic model for any hypothetically newly-unionized industry.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> Chiba-City There are no lifetime guaranteed jobs. That is a peculiar idea that might only apply to being "born to farm your patch" in history at all. Institutions and entire job categories go away.

Collective bargaining is OK and not usually conflictual outside down cycles or downsizing legacy industries. The conflict narratives appeal far more to general consumers. Working class hero is huge in American history for both good and ill.

Where many unions go bad is running interference on liability, incompetency or even criminality. That is not unique to unions but suffers embarrassing large scale instances (cops? teachers? auto workers who stole tools).

These are tough things to get right. The battles for enough and fair (predictable is a giant issue for service workers) overlap with battles that should never be waged and mostly lose.

<comment><USER28> You bring up a major downside to industry-wide unions in that a single bad decision by a small group of people can make it so that an entire industry can suffer, rather than many entities battling it out with a variety of decisions, which would give employees choice, and give some opportunity for the best decisions to win out over time.

Perhaps the problem is not unions, but monopolization of an industry's workers by a single union.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> With the costs as they are in SF how can these people even afford to live in that area? Is there like low income housing like NY or rent control?

<comment><USER30> Long ass commutes from Contra Costa County. KQED had an interesting series on the changing demographics of the bay area's exurbs. [1]

[1] [https://ww2.kqed.org/forum/2017/02/07/kqed-looks-inside- the-...](https://ww2.kqed.org/forum/2017/02/07/kqed-looks-inside-the-changing- bay-area-with-american-suburb/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Related: Google started hiring security guards as employee ~3 years ago [https://thinkprogress.org/google-to-hire-security-guards- as-...](https://thinkprogress.org/google-to-hire-security-guards-as-employees- after-wage-protests-a919722e7e71/)

</comment><comment><USER32> Not interested in ever joining a union. Absolutely not interested in being forced to join one...ABSOLUTELY NOT.

</comment><comment><USER33> What do you guys think of software engineers forming a union where we have a guaranteed base pay but each of us can still negotiate higher if we wanted?

<comment><USER34> It's less about base pay, and more about limits to working time, overtime and protection from exploitation.

<comment><USER35> If you don't like your job then switch it, there's plenty of software companies that don't do that. Generally I've seen that the more bleeding edge you're working on then the more overwork you get. If you want to sacrifice working on the bleeding edge for a steady pay and steady working hours you can have that all across the country.

<comment><USER26> There is literally zero reason for that overwork. None.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> No its not. This is a union fluff piece. The reality is these are contractors who will get dropped as soon as it makes sense. Thats why you hire these services as contractors. I think the real test here will be how long till the union pushes facebook too far and they are just dropped. I have never seen a union that could actually compete with non-union shops unless there was a legal force preventing the competition.

<comment><USER36> > The reality is these are contractors who will get dropped as soon as it > makes sense. Thats why you hire these services as contractors. I think the > real test here will be how long till the union pushes facebook too far and > they are just dropped.

That overlooks the whole point of unions, which is to give people power over their work lives and prevent situations like the one you describe. Perhaps the union won't succeed, but they have far more negotiating power when they are organized than when they are not.

> I have never seen a union that could actually compete with non-union shops > unless there was a legal force preventing the competition.

That's a powerful claim, but do you have evidence? Particular expertise?

<comment><USER37> The problem with union negotiations is that members' ability to earn isn't related to the merits of the member's ability. I don't want to make the same exact wage as someone with the same seniority but perhaps less ambition. I am not an interchangeable widget.

Everyone is not equal in value despite being equal in seniority or experience.

A first year teacher might be amazing, but thanks to unions her wage is codified based on her position in the pecking order and not her merits.

<comment><USER38> That's the argument of a boss in version of the prisoners dilemma.

The reality is that you _are_ a widget, you probably make less several people whom you consider a less able and "ambitious" than you, and your salary is only loosely associated with your value, if at all.

<comment><USER16> That's the class warfare paradigm that boils the world down to two monolithic blocs: employers and employees.

He is not a widget. A workforce is made up people with diverse and varying skills.

It's in the interest of society to incentivise individual skills development and promotion of people with more skill into positions of greater authority and responsibility, by allowing employers to base compensation and promotion offers on skills.

<comment><USER38> It's a market. I don't care about society, I care about delivering cash to my shareholders.

All business is about repeatable process. Domain experts build a process. The operations people execute. Lather, rinse, repeat.

People are nurtured/developed/promoted because it is cheaper to do that than to go back to the market. But, every single individual is expendable and replacable. There may be pain or cost associated with someone leaving, but a viable business will survive.

If you think you are essential to your employer, film a little video explaining why, post or save it somewhere and set a calendar entry to visit it again in 5 years. You'll have a good laugh in 5 years.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Constructors Considered Harmful - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@panuviljamaa/constructors-considered-harmful-c3af0d72c2b1 <comment><AUTHOR> Static methods (in JavaScrip/ES6) can do the same thing as user-defined constructors more flexibly since they do not need to call the super- constructor.

Having to call the super-constructor is a form of data-dependency between the super-class and sub-class, which can be avoided by defining static methods instead of custom constructors.</comment>


State of Mobile Networks: USA - <AUTHOR> http://opensignal.com/reports/2016/02/usa/state-of-the-mobile-network/ <comment><USER2> At least in our neighborhood (Menlo Park, CA, on Bay Road just off 101 between Willow and Marsh) they're right about the T-Mobile improvements. We used to have pitiful service from every carrier except AT&T, who has a tower a block from our house with downloads in the 12-15Mbps range. T-Mobile and the mighty Verizon both had extremely marginal connections here - choppy voice, data in the 1Mbps range if you were lucky.

A few months ago that changed. I don't know what tower T-Mobile turned on, but now we get consistent LTE service with 60-80Mbps down, 25-30Mbps up, and 35-40ms ping.

Whatever T-Mobile did here, I hope they keep doing it!

</comment><comment><USER3> I heavily distrust the open signal data. I don'tknow how they get it but i assume the data is very small and/or biased. Does anyone know where it comes from?

<comment><USER4> They have an android app that you can install to run in the background and monitor location & signal stregnth, dropped calls, etc. I ran it on my phone for a while.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Similar project started earlier: [http://www.netradar.org/en](http://www.netradar.org/en)

</comment><comment><USER6> Interesting execution of data</comment>


Tea Party Clones Facebook - <AUTHOR> https://www.teapartycommunity.com/

<comment><AUTHOR> Site now seems to be down, possibly overloaded. Screenshot from archive.org:

[http://web.archive.org/web/20130105055715/https://www.teapar...](http://web.archive.org/web/20130105055715/https://www.teapartycommunity.com/)</comment>


Our Brains See Men as Whole and Women as Parts - <AUTHOR> http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=our-brains-see-men-as-whole-women-as-parts

<comment><USER2> It's an interesting idea. But the European Journal of Social Psychology is currently beset with a number of articles that have had to be retracted,

[http://retractionwatch.wordpress.com/2012/07/20/three- more-r...](http://retractionwatch.wordpress.com/2012/07/20/three-more- retractions-for-diederik-stapel/)

so of all the relevant journals, I especially doubt the acumen of its editors and peer reviewers. Before I would believe a finding like this, I would check it against the full checklist "Warning Signs in Experimental Design and Interpretation"

<http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html>

by Peter Norvig, Google's director of research, and I would definitely want to see replication of the result by other researchers, published in better journals, with lots of critique and refinement of the experimental method before accepting this finding as a fact about the external world of how most people's brains work.

<comment><USER3> In particular, from Norvig's page:

"As another example, many psychology experiments are run on volunteer college students. Often an experimenter gets a result from such an experiment and claims it is valid across all people, but later finds out that the result only holds for (a) people roughly 20 years old or (b) people with the skills and dedication necessary to be a college student or (c) the type of people who like to volunteer for things."

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm not sure why the researchers assume that this is sexual. They even designed one of the tests with only sexualized body parts in play. The experiments are about objectification, but there's no experiment here that could even verify whether it's sexual.

<comment><USER5> Yea, from reading the article it seems like the entire test was bent towards a sexual angle. Perhaps they've already done some more neutral tests and this one came after those, but it feels like they were leading the results with the format of the test.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> There's another very plausible explanation:

Womens' clothing and appearance varies much more.

Men don't have the choice of 15 different kinds of clothing tops and bottoms, whereas women do, plus accessories, much wider variety of hairstyles, makeup, etc. Plus they tend to put a lot more effort into choosing them.

So in recognizing photos of women, there are a lot more unique "local" details to help you remember things.

Making the leap to women being "objectified" more seems to be editorializing this way more than is deserved.

</comment><comment><USER7> Women are shapely. They are easier to dissect into sum of parts. Men, however, are rather square in form, discounting obesity. This is more a reflection of how we memorize shapes rather than a commentary of evolutionary objectification.

</comment><comment><USER3> Link to paper: [http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ejsp.1890/abstrac...](http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ejsp.1890/abstract)

It's gated so I wasn't able to actually read it.

</comment><comment><USER8> There's an aura of Victorian-era sexual guilt around what is described by the research as a natural by-product of evolution.</comment>


Status, Seduction, and Annihilation - <AUTHOR> http://www.jonathanfields.com/status-seduction-and-annihilation/ <comment><USER2> He starts with postulating status and seduction as irrational, but at least status signals are clearly not irrational by any measure, since other people take them into account. Similarly, seduction (looks like he defines it as choosing products based on criteria not directly related to primary functionality) can be called irrational only under a very narrow view of rationality, one that, for example, completely ignores aesthetics.

I am generally reluctant to call common human behaviors like that as irrational, as it postulates that the writer's mental model is superior to the one derived from millenia of evolution -- perhaps in some cases it can be argued that the environments in response to which they evolved no longer apply, but I really don't see that here.

<comment><USER3> > the environments in response to which they evolved no longer apply

People care greatly what strangers think of them, even if those strangers have no impact on their life. Public speaking tends to be a struggle for me, but it's a struggle even if it's in front of people who don't matter. Recently on one of my travels I thought I would go practice since I figured there would be such a small chance of running into any of these people again, and failure wouldn't matter. But that didn't make it feel any easier.. my amygdala doesn't know that distinction. That's definitely irrational. I understand the sound evolutionary basis, but modern reality means I can fly away to another city with another 10k strangers, why should it matter if I embarrass myself?</comment></comment>


EU commission report find that online piracy does not affect sales - <AUTHOR> https://juliareda.eu/2017/09/secret-copyright-infringement-study/ <comment><USER2> existing discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15305476](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15305476) (229 points, 14 hours ago, 50 comments)

</comment><comment><USER3> Citing reddit comments:

> Steam, spotify, and netflix completely ended my torrenting as soon as I got > a job.

> When you're a teenager with no job and you can't afford shit, you just steal > because it's so easy. But $20 a month is completely worth it for Spotify and > Netflix when you're an adult for the convenience and lack of viruses.

> Poor people and kids won't be buying the games anyway so there's no loss of > sale, but if they pirate it they're more likely to buy it later when they > can afford it because they know they like it already!

</comment><comment><USER4> > The study's conclusion: With the exception of recently released > blockbusters, there is no evidence to support the idea that online copyright > infringement displaces sales.

For the owners of the copyright on the blockbuster, that's still going to bite.

Disappointing that this was put in a hole and had to come to light like this instead of being released as normal, but I'm not sure it equates to piracy having no real measurable impact on rights owners.

<comment><USER5> I think it has value in the length of copyright being continuously extended. Far more than a patent, and even the lifetime of the creators of the work.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> The proper headline would be "EU commission goes to great lengths to hide the report that online piracy does not affect sales"

<comment><USER7> Not releasing a study is not "going to great lengths", it's simply not releasing a study.</comment></comment>


Artifit, AI Personal Trainer for home fitness - <AUTHOR> Hi,
Hope everybody is all right.
We just have launched the first version of our app, which can act as a personal fitness trainer when you do your workouts independently at home. It uses computer vision and a neural network trained model to recognise your movements and identify any common mistakes in your exercises.
For now, it's just squats, but we sooner hope to add lunges, plunk, push-up/press-up and other bodyweight exercises. And it's on iOS.
Please, try it here.  Any comments/suggestions are welcome.
App: http://bit.ly/Artifit
Website: https://artifit.app <comment><USER2> We are launching Artifit on Product Hunt. If you like our app please support and upvote!

[https://www.producthunt.com/posts/artifit-ai-personal- traine...](https://www.producthunt.com/posts/artifit-ai-personal-trainer)</comment>


Show HN: Squarecraft.io – Defend your base. Take flags - <AUTHOR> http://squarecraft.io <comment><USER2> Wow, very nice

The quick games are pretty satsifying. I like this better than stuff like agario, slither.io etc where it's a continuous FFA w no start or end

</comment><comment><USER3> Cool, much more engaging than generals.io</comment>


'Radically rewritten' bacterial genome unveiled - <AUTHOR> http://www.nature.com/news/radically-rewritten-bacterial-genome-unveiled-1.20451 <comment><USER2> Buries the caveats a little at the end of the second paragraph: "They have yet to reassemble those pieces into a functioning E. coli."

What they actually did was make copies of the genes in E. Coli, completely remove 7/64 of the codons in those genes, replacing them with synonymous codons, then checked to see that the genes still worked. I imagine they did this by putting them into E. Coli that were missing those genes and seeing if the bacteria could survive using the new gene, but I don't have the full text so I don't know for sure.

In other words if the genome were a book, they replaced all the instances of the letter "y" with "i" and found that the book was still understandable.

It's remarkably hard to do this simple modification, but it's still a ways from completely rewriting a genome. That said, it's a very important first step and hopefully the process of stitching all these things together will be relatively pain free.

<comment><USER3> Yes, definitely a hyped up story.

The science itself is great, no doubt about that, but calling this a "radically rewritten bacterial genome" is over the top. And I get the impression they have a _long_ way to go yet...

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Full PDF: [http://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/353/6301/819.full....](http://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/353/6301/819.full.pdf)

This paper is cool because they've optimized the _E. coli_ genome to entirely eliminate certain codons, which would, for example, prohibit infection by viruses that depend on particular codons. It also frees up codons for other usage, including novel tRNA complexes. The paper mentions the authors have validated 55 recoded segments of 50kb each. At ~$0.10/bp that would cost $577,500 for the DNA alone, though the authors likely paid less or synthesized the fragments in-house.

This is somewhat related to codon optimization, which is typically employed when genes are added to an organism to enhance expression, since codon usage bias[1] varies by host organism. If you modify an inserted gene so its codons match the dominant synonymous tRNA present, you'll see higher expression of the gene product. If you're engineering _E. coli_ to produce insulin, your bioreactor will produce more of it for a given amount of feedstock.

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

<comment><USER5> I've always thought the redundant encoding allowed for variations in stability. Some encodings of a protein can be subjected to more mutations than others without affecting the resulting protein. The different variations may (I haven't looked) allow a higher number of "neighbor" proteins that can be reached through a single mutation if we consider a codon variation not to be a mutation if the resulting protein is identical. These are things that may have effects on evolution, but not the individual.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> > They were able to reduce the number of codons by synthesizing the DNA in 55 > fragments, each of which was 50,000 base pairs long. They have yet to > reassemble those pieces into a functioning E. coli.

So it compiles, but it doesn't run.

<comment><USER7> I think in this analogy, it compiles & runs & passes it's unit tests, but it hasn't been deployed or had integration tests run on it.

<comment><USER8> Its never been executed at all.

<comment><USER7> _> We have validated 63% of recoded genes by individually testing 55 segments of 50 kilobases each. We observed that 91% of tested essential genes retained functionality with limited fitness effect._

Yes it has. [http://science.sciencemag.org/content/353/6301/819](http://science.sciencemag.org/content/353/6301/819) And you sound like a jerk when you reply in the negative with no proof.

<comment><USER8> "They have yet to reassemble those pieces into a functioning E. coli."

Sure sounds like they haven't tested them yet. Maybe unit-tested the individual changes in a test tube?

Speaking of character, I wonder what kind of person throws in random off-topic aspersions ?

<comment><USER7> It's because I've seen your comments before and you have a consistent pattern of curtly disagreeing without adding to the conversation. It's frustrating and I want HN to be better.

Yes, they tested each piece, probably in 55 different variants of E. Coli. The gene has been converted to RNA and then to protein. That counts as "the code has been executed" in my analogy. If you're gonna be a pill at least do some further reading.

<comment><USER8> Ok I'll try. You are right I misread that - I didn't think 'tested' meant in- situ, and that plus the later statement about not trying it complete was where I was coming from.

Its just that curtness in writing is in the eye of the beholder. I strive for a concise style. That clearly isn't taken well by everybody.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Proof-of-concept exploit: Intel CPU cache poisoning - <AUTHOR> http://theinvisiblethings.blogspot.com/2009/03/attacking-smm-memory-via-intel-cpu.html

<comment><USER2> Bug has been reported by Intel's own employees and by researches since 2006, it seems.

Paper here: [http://invisiblethingslab.com/resources/misc09/smm_cache_fun...](http://invisiblethingslab.com/resources/misc09/smm_cache_fun.pdf) Code here: <http://invisiblethingslab.com/resources/misc09/o68-2.tgz>

</comment><comment><USER3> A quick skim of the paper reveals a relatively short and simple attack, but its implications are huge. Code running in SMM mode can literally do anything it wants, and even kernel level code will find it incredibly difficult or possibly even impossible to tell if it has been subverted by malicious SMM code.</comment>


Strange WikiLeaks Report That Russia Destroyed Secret US Base on Moon - sahin-boydas https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/P790011-1247_e.html <comment><AUTHOR> Probably just an overhelmed outworld FOB to check out on aliens, didn't triggered WW III 'cause it was a favor.

Woudn't mind to know which weaponry was used to accomplish it, but I strongly bet on some standard ICBMs modified to follow a similar - slow - orbit like the used for the recent israely probe.

It didn't prevent the Vela Incident tough, but who we are to question the Blue Boys + Guardian strategies.

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

</comment><comment> sahin-boydas Can it be simple moon landing area that destroyed by other landings?</comment>


Why Reed Hastings Should be Applauded for Netflix Split - <AUTHOR> http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com/2011/09/19/why-reed-hastings-should-be-applauded-for-netflix-split/ <comment><USER2> I think 'Anon' owned them in the comments.</comment>


Sentinel system pictures Napa quake - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-29012588

<comment><USER2> I wonder if they intend on placing the rest of the satellites into the same orbit to create another A-Train style satellite constellation. We need more sources of data like this, multi sensor, same point in time, same place of recording. It's a very cool project. A-Train and Sentinel as well.</comment>


Some effects of unchecked company growth - <AUTHOR> http://rachelbythebay.com/w/2018/04/17/company/ <comment><USER2> I had no idea this valet-parking concept existed for offices; yes, it's definitely a 'privilege' (in some ways) that's being complained about, but it's strange to think that some companies actually hire outside firms specifically to deal with car parking. I mean, it makes logical sense, but...

I'm working for a growing start-up, and though we seem to have slowed down from our peak growth period, the cautions about office space ring true with us. As the sysadmin, I'm involved to a degree in office planning (to ensure computers are placed properly) and I am exerting a little pressure to ensure we don't fall into the classic trap of cramming people in. I really hope we can strike the balance of enough people to do the work without too many people in the office requiring desks and management, and the team fragmentation that inevitably follows.

</comment><comment><USER3> This author continues coming off as entitled and self absorbed. It's odd to see this consistently make its way to the first pages.

</comment><comment><USER4> I generally love this blog but complaining about how irresponsible your valets are is just the most tonedeaf privileged nonsense I've ever heard.

I didn't own a car until I was in my 30s, I was ecstacic when I got that junker because it meant I could now sleep in the back of it instead of outside the library. I can't imagine most white people even believing that statement, I guess they got deleted dash cams to upload.

<comment><USER5> > I generally love this blog but complaining about how irresponsible your > valets are is just the most tonedeaf privileged nonsense I've ever heard.

I don't think it's tone-deaf in this case. This person isn't complaining about the valets at the 5-star restaurant where she pays $100 a plate, he's complaining about valets that were _foisted_ on him against his will by an employer that was growing _too fast_ for their office space.</comment></comment>


Acquisitions: Pulling Back the Covers - <AUTHOR> http://blog.500startups.com/2010/10/07/acquisitions-pulling-back-the-covers-part-1/

<comment><USER2> On Acquisitions: Focus on the personal decision of the entrepreneur. +1</comment>


Be wary of robot emotions - <AUTHOR> https://www.apnews.com/99c9ec8ebad242ca88178e22c7642648 <comment><USER2> If I buy or build a robot "pet" that is programmed to act curious and friendly, and I personally derive pleasure from watching it and interacting with it, any sense of companionship I feel is legitimate, whether or not someone else wants to classify it as "love".

When it comes to robotic companions, the real thing to be wary of is whether or not it's actually _your_ robot. An Alexa, for example, is a sales and marketing organ of Amazon, and any attempt at eliciting a sense of personality is in service of that device gathering information about you and using it to sell you stuff.

Twitter accounts for brands are not companions. The chatbot on your travel booking website is not a companion. Irrespective of any technology described as "AI" behind it, Alexa is _structurally_ not a companion.

<comment><USER3> I can't wait until Amazon launches genetically modified pets that try to sell you things.

Dog opens it's mouth and speaks pre-programmed phrase. "Show how much you love your pet and buy Amazon premium++ dog food, now half price!"

<comment><USER4> => one that requires you to buy it dog food, and can auto-order more when it notices the bag getting low

and when he's been a good boy, it auto orders fancier treats

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This idea that machines can only "simulate" things like emotions, while what humans have is "real," is very common.

But it also doesn't make sense unless you embrace some sort of Cartesian dualism.... humans are physical machines with some sort of magical "spirit" added. I would think science oriented people would reject that sort of view in 2019.

<comment><USER6> It's like a flight simulator vs an actual flight. The difference does not involve any 'magical spirit'.

<comment><USER5> I don't see how the analogy applies.

What if we were able to make a an exact copy of a human brain, and the behavior was indistinguishable from a "naturally formed" human? Would that still be like a flight simulator vs actual flight?

I think a better analogy is a natural diamond vs an artificial one. Or for that matter an artificial heart. Is an artificial heart vs a natural heart like a flight simulator compared to actual flight?

<comment><USER6> Making a copy of a brain is equivalent to making a copy of a plane - if you can fly in that copy it's not a simulator, it's a real thing.

At some point while building better and better flight simulators we might end up building an actual plane. Same can happen when simulating emotions or intelligence.

All this makes sense without involving Cartesian dualism.

<comment><USER5> Well, sorry, but I think your analogy is a stretch. A flight simulator is simulated flight. An airplane is artificial flight. A bird is natural flight. Is the airplane closer to the bird or the flight simulator?

And what about the word "flight"? Most people think airplanes fly, even though they are not autonomous entities, and they don't flap their wings like birds or insects or bats. But is it really flight?

Ok, you probably think yes, of course it is. Then what about submarines? Do they swim? If not, why not?

(yes I am referencing Edsger Dijkstra's famous quote that is relevant here: "The question of whether machines can think is about as relevant as the question of whether submarines can swim.")

<comment><USER6> You're the one who's stretching the analogy. Just like there's no need to introduce dualism, there's no need to introduce different kinds of a flight. For the purposes of this discussion, flight is what's being simulated by the flight simulator, just like emotions is what those robots are trying to simulate. I don't see how that's different in principle.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Love is all about perspective.

Sometime people make certain actions out of love, but the recipient doesn't always take it that way. Example: Breaking up a relationship even though they love you due to some context that you know is bad for the other person, or telling somebody the truth even if it hurts because you love them enough to not lie.

Sometimes people make certain actions our of selfishness and the recipient takes it as actions out of love. Example: Telling a partner you love them and other actions just to get in bed with them or take advantage of them in some other manner like gold digging.

Sometimes you may love something that's just a momento, a physical object that's come to represent a thought and emotion for you.

</comment><comment><USER8> Bad news. People simulate love all the time.

When you can't tell the difference, does it matter?

<comment><USER9> Sometimes love is less in the outward expression and more in the intent and shared understanding of the world. There is no companionship with a robot—at least, not without AGI.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> People can love their houses, or cars, or a piece of jewelry, and can feel sad when it's gone. Feeling that about other things doesn't seem very surprising.

<comment><USER9> The love you have for a lover is exactly equal to the love you have for jewelry? I would hope these refer to entirely different concepts.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Given love bears so much cultural freight and that people express love differently, when people express love to each other are they not often performing love or—more to the point—simulating (what they have come to believe are the signs of) love?

This is certainly different than whether the individual _feels_ love, but from the viewpoint of a receiver that might not much matter.

For example, one can know one is loved but yet still want to hear the other person say, "I love you". The feeling in such a case is not as important as the appearance, the simulation, of love.

EDIT: add indefinite article before "case".

<comment><USER12> There's a robust genre of country music involving a husband who loves his wife deeply, and his wife who goes crazy because he doesn't show it overtly enough for her. (Or, more commonly, involving part but not necessarily all of that setup.)

The Bed: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CfTBfa6qZPk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CfTBfa6qZPk)

Me Too: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bwE2XKWtqXw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bwE2XKWtqXw)

Why Didn't I Think of That: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CFrLQGjQyus](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CFrLQGjQyus)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Sufficiently simulated love is just as real as real love.

<comment><USER12> "He'd take care of the boy because he felt he ought to, because he felt a bounden duty, but the boy'd never know the difference -- it'd feel like love to him, and it'd be a whole lot more dependable than love ever was."

<comment><USER14> Good quote. Where is that from?

<comment><USER15> Prentice Alvin, by Orson Scott Card

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> So, uh, what's the issue? I don't see how loving something relates to that thing having an internal life. You can't even prove whether another person (or a robot for that matter) even has an internal life, so I don't think something so vague and immaterial should have any impact on what I do or do not love. Not to mention that having an "internal life" is a spectrum where I'd say a robot falls somewhere in between a rock (which would be odd to love) and a dog (which is obviously loveable).

</comment><comment><USER17> Where's Haddaway when you need him?

<comment><USER18> He probably got a girlfriend (who is a good dancer) and dropped off the map.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> This story made me think of an analogy about robot emotions. I use Alexa and she has a cheerful female voice. I could argue that Alexa has real emotions. Here's my argument. Imagine that a TV show has real emotions even though it is a recording, because real human emotions were involved in creating the show. The actors knew they were faking it, but their feelings are still real human feelings. In the same way, a robot can reflect the emotions of the person who created it. A cheerful person will create a robot that has a cheerful personality, and a helpful person will create a robot that tries to be helpful. So robots display human values and emotions in the same sense as a recorded TV show even though they are only reflecting the original emotions. In this sense, we can describe robot emotions as real.

</comment><comment><USER20> Is simulated hate never hate?

</comment><comment><USER21> Wow, way to be a fleshist. This is going on your record for when the robot apocalypse comes and we choose not to make you into cyborgs against your will. Robots have feelings too you know ...

<comment><USER22> Some of us prefer the term _organicist._ Plants have feelings too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I've spent a lot of time thinking about the philosophical nature of love. My abstraction is that 'love' is a sufficient level of interest at the expense of our own interest. Indeed, it is rationally irrational, and 'sufficient' is dependent on each individual.

One of the best ways I can explain the mechanism is to use a percentage analogy. For a given relationship, say you have 100% interest in yourself, than you have 0% interest in that other person. Things get interesting above the 50% mark because you are willing to take risks for the other person.

Say you are single and meet an attractive and interesting person... are you at a point where the risk of being rejected is less than the reward of a future relationship? If you have an 'interest level' of >50% I'd say yes, you would take that chance. Likewise in dating, heterosexual males tend to have interest levels that start out much higher than heterosexual females. A successful dating strategy for a heterosexual male would be to accurately gauge a heterosexual female's interest level and act as if his interest was no higher than hers, but to continually work at increasing her interest level in him.

I think the magic threshold for what is considered love is a band between 90% to 100% interest level in another person because this leaves you with between 10% to 0% interest in yourself... i.e. you are overwhelmingly putting that other person's interest before your own, up to the point where you would sacrifice your life for theirs (0% interest in yourself).

Where things can go wrong is where this level of interest is not reciprocal or at the very least balanced. 'True love' could be a perfect balance whereby you both have 100% interest level in each other and therefore your needs are met by your partner and you meet their needs.

There are exceptions, say the love of a dedicated parent may be at the 100% threshold and they would willingly sacrifice themselves when it isn't clear if their child can conceptualize that level of love, or be able to return it.

Anyhow, I have a lot more to say on the topic but I'll digress too much.

My point is, to give a framework to think through the mechanics of 'love'... and to back up some of the posters here who have made assertions such as:

* Simulated love is equivalent if you cannot tell the difference (à la Blade Runner)

* Love is a contextual perspective

* You can feel love with no reciprocation (this would cover love towards inanimate objects, and situations where your love interest is not interested)

</comment><comment><USER24> > never

eh, you need to define what love is first if you want that kind of imperative, and there lies the core of the issue.

</comment><comment><USER25> Topical recommendation of the novel "Android Karenina".

</comment><comment><USER26> It's hard to understand (and fully accept) that humans are just meat robots, so we're constantly trying to categorize things into "us" and "them".

<comment><USER9> Well we aren't meat robots, we are linguistic creatures and yet have no luck teaching this trick to actual robots.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Beep-boop. Good enough for me.

</comment><comment><USER28> I wonder if 'human love' is 'real' love, whatever that is. Many such articles surrounding AI/robots skirt constantly around the issue that we have no idea how to define these terms in a consistent manner to make sense of such issues.

For instance, one could extend this to say 'dog love' is never love, or that animals are not 'intelligent' and don't have soul or can feel emotions. Ultimately, these theories are often not the result of careful science, but meant to allow actions which are profitable (such as meat eating, as in Bible etc).

This can't even be defined consistently even within humanity across cultural borders. I distinctly remember being extremely cynical/adversarial about relationships with people from different cultures. It's quite hard to understand women from say the US or Japan for someone not familiar with them.

<comment><USER29> Why stop at love? If you look close enough, there really isn't any such thing as life: [https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/brainwaves/why-life- doe...](https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/brainwaves/why-life-does-not- really-exist/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> How many are stuck in relationships with no love of any kind? At least simulated love exists.</comment>


Mozilla makes me crazy - <AUTHOR> http://grishaev.me/ <comment><USER2> This also shows that we need to retrain organizations on version numbers. Your version has to _mean_ something, and from these examples I can't imagine how "completely rearrange and rename fields in published structure" seemed sensible when moving from a version like 0.13 to 0.14. _Sounds like a minor fix, and isn't. Wrong version scheme._

</comment><comment><USER3> Past 8-9 months I have been feeling the same thing. Don't know if they changed processes or hired more noobs. But that's how it feels. I don't know how much time I have wasted thinking there was something wrong with my code to finally find one breaking change after another in Firefox. From March-April onwards I have stopped using Firefox as my default unit/perf test and regression setup. Which is tragic because it was solid and dependable upto that point.

</comment><comment><USER4> Computing in a nutshell.

One of a very few professions with the _luxury_ of using applied mathematics as a building material, yet the result ends up even more brittle than something made of wood or glue.

</comment><comment><USER5> Yeah, that's pretty egregious.</comment>


IEEE 754 16-bit Floating Point Format - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/ramenhut/half <comment><USER2> When available, it's a good idea to use the F16C/CVT16 instruction set [0] for converting between single (32 bit) and half (16 bit) precision. I think ARM NEON has a comparable instruction set. They operate on SIMD registers, so if you're using SIMD, there might be substantial benefits in using them.

The actual arithmetic is still done in 32 bit precision and the conversions are only done when loading from or storing to memory. Some GPUs actually have 16 bit arithmetic internally, but most use 32 bit ALUs and just convert on load/store.

Alternatively, if you don't care about NaNs and denorms, and whatnot (e.g. the use cases for 3d model data mentioned in the README don't really involve NaNs or denorms), some simple bitshifting can do the conversion.

Here's a snippet of Python code that I've used:

        def float2half(float_val):
            f = unpack('I', pack('f', float_val))[0]
            if f == 0: return 0
            if f == 0x80000000: return 0x8000
            return ((f>>16)&0x8000) | ((((f&0x7f800000)-0x38000000)>>13)&0x7c00) | ((f>>13)&0x03ff)

        def half2float(h):
            if h == 0: return 0
            if h == 0x8000: return 0x80000000
            f = ((h&0x8000)<<16) | (((h&0x7c00)+0x1C000)<<13) | ((h&0x03FF)<<13)
            return unpack('f', pack('I', f))[0]

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F16C](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F16C)</comment>


Shanghai to San Francisco in Under Two Hours? - <AUTHOR> http://www.citylab.com/commute/2014/08/shanghai-to-san-francisco-in-under-two-hours-dont-hold-your-breath/379245/

<comment><USER2> I'm not a nautical or aeronautical engineer, but wouldn't a sub-orbital spaceplane be faster and/or more practical? I'd also be concerned about the likeliness of running into things underwater, and not being able to see well.

</comment><comment><USER3> I think they have it wrong. Super cavitation doesn't have a 'bubble of air' around the vessel. It has a vacuum. And steering is not the unsolved problem they present. Just poke vanes out into the water enclosing the cavity, like the Russian supercavitating torpedoes do.

</comment><comment><USER4> I would not have read the article if the headline had been complete. Perhaps that was intentional?

</comment><comment><USER5> This does not make sense for civilian transportation.

</comment><comment><USER6> No, cavitation does not mean "bubble of air". It means "bubble of vacuum". Well, not really, of course, but rather "a bubble of the vapor of the given liquid, at the liquid's vapor pressure (whatever that is at the given temperature)" which is the closest thing you get to a vacuum when you forcefully move some liquid around so vigorously that it separates from your apparatus.</comment>