Defense of Gwyneth Paltrow's Goop offers case study on how to sell snake oil - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/science/2017/07/defense-of-gwyneth-paltrows-goop-offers-case-study-on-how-to-sell-snake-oil/ <comment><USER3> > peddles pricy products and overuses the word "empower" while dabbling in > many forms of pseudoscience and quackery—everything from homeopathy to magic > crystals and garden-variety dietary-supplement nonsense.

Just like there is an industry advantage of the poor segments of the population - lottery, liquor stores, cash advance places, rent to own, etc. There is a parallel industry geared for the wealthy. It is specifically designed appeal to them, to stroke their ego. It can't sell something that's a necessity so it was brilliant to focus on that just a little extra "feel a bit better", "be empowered".

It really is an art.

> Similarly, Goop has also recommended vaginal steam cleaning, which is

And as if Hollywood and pop culture in general hasn't done enough damage, just couldn't resist preying on the insecurity and tell women their bodies are yucky. Someone evil there went through the use cases and the detailed analysis and decided that no matter how wealthy or successful, that's one thing they could tap into and monetize.

The scheme was probably supposed to includes its own insurance against a lawsuit - embarrassment. Which powerful or wealthy woman is going to launch a lawsuit against them saying they've been hurt by this product?

The homeopathy bit in there is also not random. It is designed to filter through only clients who would think that stuff works. That's a bit like scammers claiming they are all from Nigeria. It's a counter intuitive bit but it's very important.

You gotta wonder how much are these celebrities involved in these scheme. It is hands off just someone managing their wealth or are they all micromanaging. I know someone who worked for one of the well known Hollywood celebrities and you'd be surprised how different they are in private compared to their on screen persona.

<comment><USER4> How does a liquor store take advantage of the poor? Because it sells an addictive product cheaper than a bar does?

<comment><USER5> Because it's major market is disenfranchised poor, alcoholics, etc, not casual drinkers who appreciate the occasional taste of fine liquor.

Take advantage not in the sense that it doesn't provide them with the product, or sells it more expensively to them, but in the sense that it feeds on their problems.

<comment><USER6> But does it create those Alcoholics?

If they raised their prices, they'd be critisised; If they lowered their prices, they'd be critisised.

Is the medical/insurance industry bad too? Don't all industries solve some problem?

<comment><USER7> The easy availability of liquor creates an environment where people are more likely to fall to alcoholism.

That's how I view the selling of a lot of unhealthy products - <USER2> creating a hostile environment, where you are more likely to succumb to your vices, for their profit. E.g. candy and chocolate placed at the checkout line.

<comment><USER6> But any business that refuses to do this, will lose money and fail to compete with those that do. Eventually, they'll get bought out by the company that does.

It's up to government to regulate this stuff - a business is _supposed_ to maximise profit.

<comment><USER5> > _It 's up to government to regulate this stuff - a business is supposed to > maximise profit._

In an amoralistic, profit driven dystopia, yes.

In actual human societies, businesses are also supposed (whether they are or not is another story) to be ethical and improve society.

And most of them pay lip service to that all the time, in their ads, promotional copy, motivational speeches to employees, etc.

<comment><USER6> > In an amoralistic, profit driven dystopia, yes.

Why? As stated, the government is supposed to regulate this stuff - that is partly why government exists.

And this is by design. When regulation is proposed, it can them be publicly debated - rather than leave those decisions to whoever runs a particular business.

> In actual human societies, businesses are also supposed (whether they are or > not is another story) to be ethical and improve society.

Says who?

> And most of them pay lip service to that all the time, in their ads, > promotional copy, motivational speeches to employees, etc.

Which is apparently what the consumer wants..

Notice how politicians tell the public what they want to hear? Well, the public too rarely take them to task. You get what you vote for..

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Over the last decade I've been having increasingly bad hay fever. The doctor said "eat these pills". They worked but they made me fall asleep right at my desk.

This year my girlfriend put me on some decent snake oil indeed. Tens of euros worth of food supplements per month. I also went to see an acupuncturist. My problems aren't reduced, they're _gone_. I can be outside for an entire day and not notice a thing. My problem is, 0% of what I did is evidence-based medicine.

Now, this is the whole issue with snake oil. Anecotes like mine don't further science. But the Ars article puts all of Goop's stuff on a single big pile of "snake oil".

Isn't it possible that there are things that work, even though they have not been scientifically proven yet? Why can't there ever be a middle ground? I mean I also think homeopathy is a fraud. But I also know that either dried extract from Indian moringa trees or needles put into appropriate places in my body's "energy streams", or both combined, fixed all my problems. This is pretty major to me. I can live again.

In fact, I think there's an upside to non-evidence-based things selling more: maybe at some point the sellers will earn enough money to be able to finance decent clinical trials.

Many forms of irritable bowel syndrome (a disease defined by a list of symptoms, for which "there is no cure") can be fixed simply by changing your diet. I know someone who had stomach aches every day for 10 years and went to once a month _simply by eating oatmeal every morning_. Evidence based? No. I have no idea how you could ever design an affordable clinical trial for that, too many factors involed. The cost would be huge and the oatmeal industry doesn't have deep enough pockets.

I think that to dismiss everything that's not evidence based medicine as snake oil, like this article does, is just as bad as dismissing mainstream medicine like Goop appears to do.

<comment><USER9> I had interesting experiences with snake oil. I saw four acupuncturists. Two were useless, two changed my life. I'm talking about lasting, unambiguous, not-up-for-debate physical changes that are still present more than fifteen years later.

I have no explanation, but I'm not going to deny my experience because of that. ("Placebo" doesn't do it. Not for this level of change.)

It's not as if mainstream medicine lacks snake oil. I recently researched anticoagulants after I was put on one and had an incredibly unpleasant, potentially fatal, reaction.

I looked at the original papers and the statistics quantifying side effects _didn 't make sense._ There was no way to estimate the risks accurately, and when I talked to my doctor he said that they'd had quite a few problems - certainly more than you'd expect from the official numbers.

One manufacturer was caught flat-out lying about dosage and efficacy. The BMJ destroyed their claim that their product didn't need the same monitoring that warfarin does.

But the medication is still recommended - which I find rather strange.

And so on.

The problem with these debates is they become very tribal. It's easy for not very interesting people to assume an air of instant scientific authority and credibility by calling out "obvious" nonsense.

Unfortunately it's a very selective form of criticism, and IMO it's selective bullying directed exclusively at certain demographics.

The reality is that _everyone_ believes utter nonsense, and every area of human experience is prone to it. We're not nearly as rational as we think we are.

Goop is an easy target, but there's plenty of snake oil in finance, econ, business, and politics. IMO it's far more dangerous and destructive there - and challenged far less often.

<comment><USER10> '"Placebo" doesn't do it. Not for this level of change.'

Really, why do you say that?

The placebo effect has been confirmed and measured many times, and can be very effective. Any clinical trials of new treatments must be designed account for it. Normally about one third of the control group being given sugar pills for instance will see improvements and some will be cured entirely. Theres even quite a bit of evidence suggesting the placebo effect can cause death. Read a bit about it, its very interesting.

How is actually works is not understood afaik, but sugar pills, acupuncture, homeopathy, or just being told that something will happen by your local witch doctor can all cause the placebo effect. I think that salient fact here is that all the above fit into the same category.

<comment><USER10> ps.. Looks like me and others are really browbeating you over this. Sorry! I guess stuff like this is frustrating for me because there has been loads of good research done into things like the placebo effect and acupuncture, yet people who are otherwise rational seem to completely ignore it. We have the very useful tool that is the scientific method, and great medical researchers, lets not simply cast them off.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> If there's something like a List Of Depressing Things Reminding Us We Are A Bunch Of Monkeys That Would Believe Anything, I'm pretty sure Gwyneth Paltrow is somewhere in the top 10. Goop is really a 'Best-Of' of Western credulity.

</comment><comment><USER12> Goop has this helpful footer in all its pages, to avoid lawsuits I imagine.

> The views expressed in this article intend to highlight alternative studies > and induce conversation. They are the views of the author and do not > necessarily represent the views of goop, and are for informational purposes > only, even if and to the extent that this article features the advice of > physicians and medical practitioners. This article is not, nor is it > intended to be, a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or > treatment, and should never be relied upon for specific medical advice.

</comment><comment><USER13> I'm ashamed to admit I once worked for a nonprofit that pushes heavy doses of pseudoscience, snake oil, and well, tax fraud. The final straw was when I discovered that the entire organization was funded almost entirely by one multimillionaire who was using it to support and prop up companies he invested in.

<comment><USER14> Is this organization still around? Have you blown the whistle on them?

If not, why not? You have information that could stop these thieves from stealing people's livelihoods.

<comment><USER13> Yes the organization is very much still around. Blowing the whistle is not as easy as it sounds. If I were to make a whistleblower claim, I would open myself up to civil suit, and risk jeopardizing my ability to get a job. I emailed a few reporters but the story isn't big enough, or interesting enough I suppose, for anyone to take it on. There are hundreds of these organizations. I just happened to work for the largest. By largest I mean millions of dollars spent, there were only 5 people working there. It's all a front.

<comment><USER15> At the very least the tax fraud should be interesting to IRS?

[https://www.irs.gov/individuals/how-do-you-report- suspected-...](https://www.irs.gov/individuals/how-do-you-report-suspected- tax-fraud-activity)

<comment><USER13> It absolutely should! A multimillionaire is using a nonprofit as a tax write off but also for other, completely unrelated tasks. I wish I could report them to the IRS, but I fear the nonprofit might sue me, or it may harm my ability to get a job later. I would be grateful for any advice by someone who has been down this path.

<comment><USER15> You could just contact the IRS and discuss your options with them (before filing the report), or report it anonymously.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> There's a strange kind of irony going on when you read three screenfuls of snake oil denunciation, then get to a link that says "Incredible discovery places humans in California 130,000 years ago!"... [1]

[1] [https://arstechnica.com/science/2017/04/unknown-humans- were-...](https://arstechnica.com/science/2017/04/unknown-humans-were-in- california-130000-years-ago-say-scientists/)

<comment><USER17> What point are you making? That article cites a paper in _Nature_ , and there are a number of response papers calling for more study. I'm not following the irony.

<comment><USER16> Their headline makes it sound like it's a done deal, but it's so absolutely unlikely to be true I'd sooner believe in the Baghdad Batteries or that the Olmecs were Africans.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Dr Jen Gunter's blog is pretty entertaining:

[https://drjengunter.wordpress.com/2017/05/22/dear-gwyneth- pa...](https://drjengunter.wordpress.com/2017/05/22/dear-gwyneth-paltrow-were- not-fcking-with-you/)

[https://drjengunter.wordpress.com/2017/07/14/goops- misogynis...](https://drjengunter.wordpress.com/2017/07/14/goops-misogynistic- mansplaining-hit-job/)

> The editors at GOOP find me "strangely confident" in my "assertion that > putting a crystal in your vagina for pelvic-floor strengthening exercises > would put you in danger of getting Toxic Shock Syndrome—even though there is > no study/case/report which links the two." I am not strangely confident > about vaginal health, I am appropriately confident because I am the expert. > I did 4 years of medical school, a 5 year OB/GYN residency, a 1 year > fellowship in infectious diseases, I am board certified in OB/GYN in 2 > countries, I am board certified by the American Board of Pain Medicine and > the American Board of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation in Pain Medicine > and I am appropriately styled Dr. Jen Gunter MD, FRCS(C), FACOG, DABPM, ABPM > (pain). A woman with no medical training who tells women to walk around with > a jade egg in their vaginas all day, a jade egg that they can recharge with > the energy of the moon no less, is the strangely confident one.

> What astounds me the most is that GOOP and Gundry have targeted me. After > all Stephen Colbert has mocked GOOP mercilessly several times. Gizmodo > blasted GOOP over the fake NASA band aids. Tim Caulfield wrote an entire > book Is Gwyneth Paltrow Wrong About Everything. Jezebel has taken GOOP to > task. The Atlantic put up a blistering piece about Dr. Gundry's lectin > hypothesis and supplement selling. Vox coined the phrase GOOPshit. Quartz > said GOOP is simply bespoke Infowars. A study took Paltrow to task for > recipes involving unsafe food preparation. Why do I get under GOOPs dry > brushed skin? I am not anymore right than anyone else who has taken on GOOP > and Paltrow, although a reporter from the New York Times once called me a > gift from the quote Gods so it is possible that I have a unique way of > quickly summing up what is wrong with GOOP in a relatable way. It is also > possible that they think I am an easy target because I am just a chick with > a blog as opposed to a man with a blog or a reporter with a national or even > international reach or a talk show host who can leverage writers, a PR team > and an audience of millions. In short, is it because they think they can > bully me?

edit: i should give give her a bit more credit than that. Dr Gunter is providing a valuable public service while exposing herself to online abuse + possible legal action from the snake-oil-vendors.

<comment><USER19> I read Dr Gunter's blog recently - initially the response to the attacks made about her by various players on the goop site, and then back-tracking.

She's up there with Ben Goldacre in terms of profoundly informed, yet still humorous, debunking capabilities.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> You're really missing out if you don't click through and read Steven Gundry's response on the Goop post. Trust me. It's amazing how those supplement/TV doctors all sound the same (and talk about each other!) when challenged.

<comment><USER12> A small taste:

> First, Dr. Gunter, I have been in academic medicine for forty years and up > until your posting, have never seen a medical discussion start or end with > the "F-bomb," yet yours did. A very wise Professor of Surgery at the > University of Michigan once instructed me to never write anything that my > mother or child wouldn't be proud to read.

Someone so prude that gets outraged by "F-bombs" is probably too squeamish to look at vaginas all day.

But my favourite is an appeal to authority of Dr. Oz.

> Now, it's fine to get into a reasonable discussion about the pros and cons > of lectins without throwing F-bombs. Dr. Oz and I just had a friendly > discussion on this topic

<comment><USER19> Yeah, you need to read Dr Gunter's response.

Gwyneth used the F-bomb (are we not allowed to say fuck?) when challenging anyone that may 'come at her' online, prior to this piece.

As to 'Dr Oz' \-- talking about grasping at debunked fraudsters.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Why lump vitamins together with vaginal jade eggs? Vitamins are most definitely effective, for people that need them - something the author concedes. What more could you ask from a remedy?

Question: so it's actually not illegal to make specific health claims like this in the US?

<comment><USER21> I've seen quite a bit of publication in the last 2 years about vitamins and their widespread overuse. Daily vitamins can actually make you less healthy and in some cases are quite damaging, even if following the instructions on the bottle. In cases of a medical need, such as a true vitamin deficiency, they are important, but that is not the reason the vast majority of people buy and use them.

<comment><USER15> If you do your homework and dose properly, you will most likely be closer to the FDA recommended intakes than someone who just "follows a balanced diet" (what the hell does that even mean).

<comment><USER21> Unfortunately most vitamins contain well over the recommended intakes. Here is one article I remember:

[https://www.theguardian.com/society/2015/apr/21/vitamin- supp...](https://www.theguardian.com/society/2015/apr/21/vitamin-supplements- increase-risk-cancer-heart-disease-research)

There were several others too.

<comment><USER15> Many vitamins have quite low absorption rates though, so it's quite hard to overdose. But yeah, people who don't know what they are doing can screw it up.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Part I dislike most is that all this publicity just increases their exposure and probably their profits too.

I don't see how you could stop people like this and can't help but wonder how much good the backlash is actually doing.

</comment><comment><USER23> all the negative publicity for Goop probably helps them by getting the name out. 'Any publicity is good publicity'.

</comment><comment><USER24> Anybody that supports homeopathy is not only ignorant but actively hostile to the people they pretend to support. This shill they have touting their goods is either dangerously ignorant, or more likely in it for the money, no matter how many people she hurts.

The relevant xkcd: [https://xkcd.com/765/](https://xkcd.com/765/)

and [https://www.xkcd.com/971/](https://www.xkcd.com/971/)

<comment><USER25> You are wrong, like most homeopathy critics.

Have you ever observed typical homeopathy users—middle to upper-middle class mothers of young children—in their natural habitat?

I have. They're all "true believers" in that they really think homeopathic remedies are useful, for themselves and their kids. And yet, despite that, they also exhibit a well developed instinct on when _not_ to rely on homeopathy and send themselves or the child off to a "real" medical practitioner. Strange, isn't it?

It ceases to be inexplicably strange if you think about their shared belief in homeopathy as a _socially evolved strategy_ about how to keep themselves and (more crucially) their children _away from doctors_ in those plentiful cases of minor sniffies where a doctor is overkill and actually more likely to do harm than do any better than "doing nothing".

The sad thing is that society doesn't allow a mother to just "do nothing". Where there's no accepted alternative, she "must" visit a doctor, lest she be accused of neglecting her duty to care for her children.

That's why it seems that some parts of society—and not the stereotypically "stupid" ones at all—have _evolved_ mechanisms that afford them social license to avoid the doctor when the doctor is more likely to do harm than good.

<comment><USER24> SO, as a placebo it's performing a useful function? Alternatively, develop a backbone and do what you think is right regardless of criticism.

No, homeopathy is the art of selling water to people who need medicine, and telling them its medicine. Its actually evil, in the sense that its lying to make money, and hurting somebody who trusts you. As mentioned, at best there's no harm because there was no need. But nowhere in the process is there any reason to believe instinct will magically kick in when real medicine is needed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> > (Condé Nast also owns Ars, by the way.)

What purpose do you think the mobilization of your contempt at this time serves?

<comment><USER27> Probably attempting to prove ARS journalism isnt slanted nor impaired on account of their new ownership

They were recently acquired by new management as a result of peter thiel and hulk hogan successfully suing and shutting down gawker, their prior owners. Any time a news sit changes ownership theres likely some skepticism in the air over if journalistic integrity is preserved or not especially when it creates conflict of interest with an owner.

<comment><USER28> Wait... what? When was Ars Technica owned by Gawker? I thought it was Conde Nast for a long time.

If true, though, wow, it definitely never affected them before.

<comment><USER26> Sounded odd to me, too, so I checked. Conde Nast since 2008, privately owned until then, per Wikipedia.

I think it's optimistic to suggest that Ars Technica, a site with no qualms publishing e.g. a great big steaming pile of baseless AI scaremongering under a banner photo of a movie Terminator, is concerned that being under the same umbrella as a snake oil peddler might damage its brand.

What other purpose might the mobilization of your contempt at this time serve?

<comment><USER10> I think ars technica writes bad articles, but on a very wide range of subjects. Very few of the writers seem to be have specialized insight into a particular area rather than a general engineer / nerd bent. For me as a game developer, I find their game reviews to be the worst. Every now and again they will have one and they are always massively unbalanced. Just a regular guys unfiltered opinion, may as well go on any random message board and get hundreds of equally or more valid 'reviews'. They'll often pan a good game because they thought it was hard, you can hear their 'frustrated cus bad at vidya games' coming through in the article. I think its obvious that one of the writers was playing the game anyway and decided 'hey I can milk an article out of this' .</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Who is hiring.. Sysadmins? (February '11 edition) - <AUTHOR>

I've noticed an occasional job posting for Operations roles in the who's-hiring threads, but it's very easy for them to get lost in the sheer volume. Who are the startups specifically looking for System Administrators, Network Engineers, DBAs, or any other kind of Ops-focused people?<p>Previous thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1984473 <comment><USER2> Thanks for keeping us operations folk in mind. I would love to see more Ops- focused hiring threads, posts, articles, commentary, etc. around HN.

</comment><comment><USER3> [http://www.simplyhired.com/job-id/6sgp7rljfw/sr-systems- jobs...](http://www.simplyhired.com/job-id/6sgp7rljfw/sr-systems-jobs/)

<http://sfbay.craigslist.org/pen/sad/2218415377.html>

</comment><comment><USER4> <http://www.freshbooks.com/careers/sys-admin.php>

<http://www.freshbooks.com/careers/database-developer.php>

</comment><comment><USER5> WiredTree in Chicago, IL <http://chicago.craigslist.org/chc/sad/2179868255.html></comment>


TDD is hard when you don't know why you're using it - <AUTHOR> http://dextermiguel.com/2015/12/18/tdd-is-hard-when-you-dont-know-why-youre-using-it/ <comment><USER2> Brilliant post. This sums up exactly how I feel about TDD.

TDD done right teaches you how to write decoupled and reusable code. The problem is that the majority of people who attempt TDD have been told it's a good thing but can't explain why.

What's even worse is when a team pushes TDD because "we've always done TDD".</comment>


Designing Chat for Commerce: UX Research in Invisible UI - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@kipsearch/designing-chat-for-commerce-9faf1e36c040#.jhw1qe18z <comment><USER2> Thanks for posting, our startup in Berlin is moving into the conversation-as- commerce space and this will help us with some design hurdles around user engagement.</comment>


The iPhone Is Bigger Than Donald Trump - <AUTHOR> https://backchannel.com/the-iphone-is-bigger-than-donald-trump-4be61d9f3ce0#.ila5kmbr1 <comment><USER2> It's hard to read this when one of the points they use to distinguish themselves from provincial Americans is that they prove their cosmopolitanality by stressing they fly often, including just having been to Lisbon, and one on the way to SF.

Way to set yourself apart by highlighting carbon footprint and disposable income and consumerism. I think I spotted a disconnect.

<comment><USER3> Yeah, that bit seemed slightly out of touch... but that wasn't really the point of the article, and if you look beyond that and just consider the big picture idea, I think the author is absolutely right.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It's not that the iPhone is bigger than Donald Trump, but that political leaders are only remembered if they're apocalyptically bad (Hitler, Pol Pot, Stalin) or put in exceedingly difficult situations (FDR, Churchill).

The others get forgotten almost as quickly as they leave office. Who was George W. Bush again?

Political leaders often have little impact on the timeline of history, though there are exceptions. Kennedy (space race, being assassinated) and Reagan (cold war) stand out as two notable examples in recent times where their actions had a measurable effect on the world.

Most of politics is far more mundane. An effective leader might not have any pyramid-scale achievements and yet still have done a great job. Sadly they're often forgotten, not unlike some IT worker who is never given credit for the things that _didn 't_ happen because of their hard work.

</comment><comment><USER5> look. an article filled to the brim with value signaling, with a clickbait title to match.</comment>


Apple will Not buy Tesla for $75b in 18 months - <AUTHOR> http://brunozzi.com/2015/02/16/apple-will-not-buy-tesla-for-75-billion-dollars-in-18-months/ <comment><USER2> > Well, that battery might cost more than the entire house. And for what > purpose? So I can disconnect from the electric grid for a week, and then > reconnect again when the battery has run out? Or to power it with expensive > solar panels?

I can't figure out if he's being willfully obtuse here.

It's to allow you to get off the grid entirely. If you generate enough solar to cover 100% of your usage, right now you're still slapped with a grid connection fee. The battery covers you overnight and makes grid connection totally unnecessary.

Oh but what about charging your car? Battery swap stations.

<comment><USER3> He actually makes two assumptions both of which hurt his point, the first is that cost of the battery is that of a house (given that an 85kW Tesla costs $90K and you don't need the car with it, we'll guess the battery is less than $90K) so lets call it $75K. And the second is that stabilizing energy costs doesn't change anything else.

If your house is nominally electric (using gas for things which gas is really good at, making heat) and your gasoline bill is non-existent because your vehicle is electric. It means you can cost out power with a depreciation/replacement cost model which gives you much better forecasting ability. One of the reasons given for taking 'energy costs' out of the whole inflation/cpi metric was due to its volatility.

I tend to agree with his thesis that Apple will not buy Tesla but I don't think he makes a good argument against the battery claim.

<comment><AUTHOR> Author here: to run a house for a week, one of Tesla's battery would not be enough; you would need a few. I guess I wasn't much clear on the post.

<comment><USER4> Average household consumption is around 30-ish kWh / day, so an 85 kWh Tesla battery would give you almost 3 days. The question I have is why you would need to store more than a day's energy for your home, assuming you charge it with solar?

I suspect you need much less than this, and a 10-20 kWh home battery would be just fine to do the job.

<comment><USER5> Rain?

<comment><USER6> Rain is going to lower the solar output, but a properly sized installation will marginalize that.

If a person is going to make the "off grid" investment, managing a balance between the solar and battery investments is going to be necessary.

Batteries have cycle time and capacity limits, and their cost is high, but slowly improving. One probably should not assume a battery core will last 20 years, though some likely can.

The solar installation probably will go 20 years, and solar can deliver savings in both the generation of electricity, as well as light and heat. A properly sized installation is going to be designed to work, in lower grade weather conditions, and after it's lost some of it's efficiency, for a very long time.

Of the two, it makes the most sense to be lean on the battery investment. New tech, cost reductions, etc... will likely play out a few times during the life of the solar installation.

And that installation can be added to / upgraded somewhat more incrementally without having to give up earlier investments in many cases.

The battery, unless it is very modular, won't share these same advantages to the same degree.

And the house can be improved as well. Smart devices to manage power use, like the Nest thermostat, can be upgraded or trained, or just will deliver battery aware use profiles.

People can adapt a little. Just choosing to wear some clothes in the winter rather than maintain that comfort zone heat level saves quite a bit. LED lighting, thermal assist for warm water, use of more energy efficient materials, and the list goes on and on...

A couple lifestyle changes could very well see that battery last longer than expected.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The bigger missed point I would say is that Tesla is worth $X billion now only selling 33,000 vehicles. They can and will ramp up their factory to produce the ~500,000 annual capacity (1 per minute) once they are able to release the ~$30k model to the masses.

This is when the charging station network will really take off as well.

500k is more than 10x current annual production, and though profit per vehicle may be less than their current models, we could still assume that they're preparing to ramp up 10x their size within a very short period of time. There will likely be enough profit or credit available to build more factories then - or perhaps take on partners that they build vehicles for. Could this lead their valuation being 10x what it currently is? Even 5x at what it currently is would put Tesla at nearly double the value of the suggested $75B purchase pricetag Apple might pay. It just doesn't make sense.

Also, it seems they're planning to supply houses, not just vehicles, with battery packs - so they could easily sell tens of millions of home and business packs every year within the next 5 years, at a much higher purchase price than an iPhone and with greater long-term savings.

<comment><USER8> Tesla has to accomplish _all_ of that just to meet market expectations and stay at it's current valuation.

For comparison, Tesla sells 33,000 cars and is valued at $25B GM sells 10,000,000 cars and is valued at $60B. The market has already priced phenomenal growth into Tesla's valuation which is why it's one of the most short sold stock in the world.

<comment><USER9> It's the same argument used on Amazon of course. Pumpers that proclaim: why just imagine how much Amazon will be worth once they start generating a meaningful profit!

Back in reality, were Amazon generating $8 billion per year in net income, their market cap probably wouldn't move at all unless their forward profit growth projections were dramatic.

It's maybe most common mistake I see inexperienced, or delusional, investors make - failing to understand the concept of future returns being pulled forward.

There's a Chinese stock I always think of when it comes to this, China Life Insurance (LFC). Back during China's market bubble of 2006/07, the stock was pumped to the moon, projections were for perpetually high growth for decades. It was trading at something like 80 to 100 times earnings in 2007 at the peak... eight years later it hasn't moved higher than that (predictably the growth collapsed and the PE compressed).

<comment><USER8> Isn't that an argument that the market priced LFC exactly correctly and that exactly what they expected to happen did happen?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I think an Apple Tesla partnership is more likely than Apple directly competing with or buying Tesla. Sometime last year, Musk spent some time at Apple, Tesla has the patents and Apple seems like the right company to license the technology. They're also a great partner for the gigafactory because they can get laptop batteries for cheap + batteries for their electric vehicle.

Also, if you're Apple and you're interested in getting into the car game, why build a minivan? A minivan is hard to design beautifully and doesn't have mass-market appeal unless you're not trying to compete with Tesla. If you're truly interested in disrupting the automobile industry, you're creating a premium luxury sedan - the 3 series of electric cars.

<comment><AUTHOR> Gigafactory's output will be 500,000 batteries per year, and it will be optimized for a specific cell which will be put into Tesla's car.

Apple sells hundreds of millions of devices. I don't think they would ever plan to use part of that capacity for their own battery needs. Gigafactory's output is much more valuable if used to sell batteries to other car manufacturers, for their electric cars.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> > If you think this is a novel idea, you're wrong. Praise Elon's great PR > strategy, but there are already Petafactories (orders of magnitude greater > than Elon's Gigafactory, in terms of output) in Japan, China and Korea to > produce batteries.

There is a disconnect between what the author is suggesting and what Elon has said multiple times regarding the output of the Gigafactory. For example, from [http://youtu.be/ZHeR2-ifbg4?t=15m40s](http://youtu.be/ZHeR2-ifbg4?t=15m40s), "[the Gigafactory is] not just going to be the biggest lithium ion battery factory in the world, but it will actually be bigger than the sum of all lithium ion factories in the world."

</comment><comment><USER12> In a couple of years, there will be no need to own a car for most people. Lots of car-manufacturers have already started to build out the infrastructure for "cars on demand" (e.g. drive now, car2go). In Berlin, there is already always a car within a 5 min walk from my apartment.

Once driverless cars are here, people will just request a car Uber-style and it'll be wherever they are within a minute in any metro area.

It'll be cheaper to not own a car, and it'll be a lot less hassle than owning one (as it probably is today if you're taking Uber instead of having a car).

One will of course use mobile devices inside the car, as we do now as passengers... and Apple makes enough money with that.

<comment><USER13> I see this scenario happening in cities. But, even sticking to Germany, I don't see this happening in areas like rural Saxony, the Oberpfalz, etc. Too rural. This scenario gets even more difficult when you talk about the US or even the UK and Ireland, large chunks of rural land w/o the density to support something like this -- same problem rail has had in the US.

<comment><USER14> Over 50% of the world's population lives in cities (and rising). Sure it won't be for everyone but the trend in certainly going in that direction. On the other hand if you have the money and will I'm sure you will still be able to buy your own car.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> The most obvious reason why Apple won't buy Tesla for $75 billion is that it's an absurd valuation in excess on a stock that's incredibly overvalued.

<comment><USER16> I disagree. If WhatsApp is worth $19 billion, Tesla's easily worth $75. Think about it: WhatsApp was valuable only because of network effects and the future potential it had to grow. Tesla actually has revolutionary technology and massive growth potential- $75 billion is, if anything, low. No reason Tesla can't grow to the size of other major car companies. Toyota, for instance, has a market cap of $200 billion. If you think there's a 1/3rd probability that Tesla will get that big, it's a steal of a deal.

<comment><USER17> Toyota may have a market cap of $200B, but Ford, GM, Honda, Nissan, Hyundai Motor, Subaru, Fiat Chrysler, and Mazda have market caps of $63B, $61B, $59B, $44B, $38B, $26B, $19B, and $12B. You've really picked the outlier in terms of market cap.

If one thinks that Tesla has 1 in 3 chance of becoming as big as one of the mainstream brands, it doesn't mean they'll be worth $200B. I don't think anyone would deny that Honda has been hugely successful and they don't even merit $75B as a wonderfully profitable company (rather than a company that just has potential). Mazda is a mass-market manufacturer with some of the most appealing models out there and they're worth a measly $12B.

Tesla might grow to the size of other major car companies, but that doesn't mean they'll grow to the size of Toyota. It will be hard for Tesla to grow to the size of Mazda given the challenges of launching any new car company. Growing to the size of Mazda would mean increasing from 33,000 vehicles to 1.3M vehicles (growth of 3,900%). And even at that level of sales, we see a company worth only $12B and I don't think anyone in the auto industry looks at Mazda as a company with worthless cars. In fact, Car and Driver ranks the Mazda 3, Mazda 6, MX-5, and Mazda CX-5 as the best in their categories.

I know that it's tempting to look at WhatsApp and compare. Facebook's purchases may be more about defending its control over social than anything else.

If you're thinking about buying an automotive firm (even if you think the future is electric), would Tesla be what you want to buy at $75B? It's unprofitable now with low volume and an unproven capability to scale to millions of vehicles per year. Musk is daring and willing to tackle hard problems like electric charging stations. But for $75B, you could buy Mazda, Subaru, and Fiat Chrysler (all three for $57B, granted buyouts usually involve paying a premium of 20% or so, but a 30% premium would be $74B). Does Tesla have a durable head-start advantage in electric vehicles that vastly outweighs all the things Mazda has going for it including profitability, vehicles that the auto press love, volume manufacturing around the world, sales and service to support millions of customers per year, etc.? Or are long-range electric vehicles a matter of commitment and willingness to lose money for a while?

Comparing Tesla to Toyota would be like comparing a new entrant to mobile phones to Apple. It's a poor comparison. Comparing a new entrant to mobile phones to HTC might make more sense. Similarly, even if Tesla is quite successful, becoming a Mazda, a Hyundai, a Subaru, or a Honda would be an amazing accomplishment. I think it's much more likely that GM would be worth $200B in the future than Tesla. That isn't to knock Tesla, but merely to acknowledge the reality that GM is already selling nearly 10M vehicles per year while Tesla would be experiencing phenomenal growth if they sold 100k (or 1%) of the number of vehicles. It seems much more likely that GM will increase the appeal of its vehicles, increase its margins, and gain the profits needed to match Toyota's valuation. It's hard to grow that much. I mean, Mazda has some amazing cars, but I don't think that's anywhere near enough to unseat Honda nevermind Toyota.

If you think that electric vehicles are the future and that the major manufacturers won't be able to compete with Tesla in electric vehicles, maybe Tesla sells 40M vehicles per year while they all end up selling tiny scraps. That seems unlikely to me. Tesla's patent trove is open for others to use which means there isn't much of a barrier for others to come along.

Again, none of this is meant to disparage Tesla. It's merely to note that Tesla would have to have phenomenal growth to become even Mazda's size in sales, something that is simply hard to accomplish. Even if Tesla ends up selling 10M vehicles per year (303x their current sales), GM does that and doesn't have anywhere near Toyota's valuation. That doesn't mean that Tesla isn't pushing the industry forward, it doesn't mean that Tesla isn't showing us that electric vehicles can be practical. It's simply to point out that it's very hard to scale up that much, I think there are genuine questions as to whether Tesla has any durable advantage long-term, and the reality that most auto manufacturers that are profitable and way larger than Tesla are worth a lot less than $75B.

<comment><USER16> Whoops, you're right. That's embarrassing. I naively assumed Toyota was representative of the industry as a whole.

You make a good point. I could see Tesla being worth somewhere in the magnitude of $10-50 billion, but not $75.

[1] [http://finance.yahoo.com/q/ks?s=goog+Key+Statistics](http://finance.yahoo.com/q/ks?s=goog+Key+Statistics)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I think this article's statements about battery factories are misleading re: "Petafactories."

Factories elsewhere in the world may produce large _numbers_ of batteries, but from Elon's descriptions the Gigafactory will far, far outproduce them in total energy capacity output given how much LARGER their batteries are.

Moreover, none of the other factories are in a position to simply "convert" over to producing such large batteries.

The article would have one believe that the Gigafactory is less important or unique than it actually will be. Other carmakers will have to buy through Tesla or build their own factories-- there's simply nowhere else to get them right now, and creating a place to get them will take significant time and investment, as the Gigafactory has shown.

<comment><AUTHOR> Author here; I don't think it's misleading. There are factories in Japan which already produce several times Gigafactory's projected output.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> The gas station issues is contrived. When driving an electric car around one of the things you notice is that power sockets are WAY more common that gas stations.

<comment><USER20> And they need to be. You can turn around ten people at a pump in the time it takes to charge an electric car from a supercharger.

The part I don't understand is how these vehicles are supposed to be run by people who don't have a garage. The usual idea is that you can recharge your commuting vehicle overnight in the garage - but what happens for the many people who park on the street?

<comment><USER21> good question. some interesting discussions and solutions from current owners who park on street.

[http://my.teslamotors.com/forum/forums/charging-tesla- street...](http://my.teslamotors.com/forum/forums/charging-tesla-street- homeowner-without-garage)

<comment><USER22> There are lots of apartments that don't offer parking as well. Cities will need to offer some way to charge cars on the street, this will certainly be an interesting challenge specifically to figure out who pays for the installation and the power.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I have no idea whether anyone will buy Tesla. If Jason or someone he likes a lot has invested in Tesla, it could be a teaser he put out to try to get someone else interested (Google). Or it could be his sincere opinion.

I'm going to go off topic from the will-they-be-bought-or-not question because that seems a bit beyond conclusive at the moment. Even for a random internet commenter like me.

Instead I'm interested in the author's dismissive attitude toward the household battery idea.

The author tries to refute Jason. This paragraph is where he lost me:

> And for what purpose? So I can disconnect from the electric grid for a week, > and then reconnect again when the battery has run out? Or to power it with > expensive solar panels? I don't think so.

Just because you can come up with a question, and you can't yourself come up with an intelligent answer to the question, doesn't mean that the question has no good answer.

In this case, with just a few moment's thinking I can easily come up with a better answer to "for what purpose": The answer is, this leads to all sorts of savings and efficiencies, namely:

\- A good household battery makes the grid more flexible, and gives the owners of batteries access to cheaper off-peak power.

\- The grid can be less stressed, meaning it doesn't have to be overbuilt as much. Some of the current maintenance costs can be eliminated or allocated to more constructive uses.

\- Loads become more balanced, eliminating the cause of some brownouts and blackouts.

\- Centralized solar becomes more practical.

\- Decentralized solar becomes more practical and useful 24/7\. (And by the way it is now competitive with grid rates, and getting cheaper every year).

\- Other widely variable energy sources (such as wind) become more practical.

\- New businesses facilitating alternative energies will become viable. Including possibly some businesses represented today only by twinkles in Elon's eyes.

\- Over time, not only do battery owners, but other consumers as well, may end up paying less for power than they would have otherwise, because of the efficiencies introduced to the system.

There are so many benefits, the kicker being the direct cost savings to the consumer which will give them a reason to invest in these things. And while talking about cost to consumer, I consider it likely there will be subsidies as well, possibly government, possibly corporate, possibly both, because the other dividends (see above list) are so compelling.

<comment><AUTHOR> Author here.

The problem is that Jason's argument was very weak to start with. If you really want to install batteries in houses, that's going to be very expensive, AND you are not going to use the same type of batteries that you use for a car.

Plus, there is no reason why Tesla can think of it, and other companies can't.

<comment><USER23> Asserting the argument is weak doesn't make it weak. You have to prove your case. Your response lacked any awareness of the compelling benefits of the batteries.

And thinking of the idea is one thing. Being able to manufacture, sell, and service the batteries at scale is something entirely different.</comment></comment></comment>


British cave diver sues Elon Musk for defamation over "pedo guy" tweets - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/09/british-cave-diver-sues-elon-musk-for-defamation-over-pedo-guy-tweets/ <comment><USER2> "Vernon Unsworth, the British cave diver who played a key role in rescuing a dozen teenagers and their coach from a flooded cave in Thailand."

I've got the same reaction when I criticized the design of a coleague. Devs are just big childs.

</comment><comment><USER3> Why Elon Musk even bothers with a twitter is a complete mystery. And fucking up like this is baffling.

Social media is a toxic cesspool and if I was famous and rich enough to require a social media presence, I would pay someone else to do it for me.

<comment><USER4> I understand why he does it, but the guy needs to relinquish direct control of his Twitter account to some trusted lieutenant who can serve as a sanity check before tweets go out.

In fact this might be a good idea for any people on Twitter with large numbers of followers, especially those with significant responsibilities.</comment></comment>


How Java's Floating-Point Hurts Everyone Everywhere (1998) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~wkahan/JAVAhurt.pdf

<comment><USER2> This is a rant we came across in the early design of Rust and eventually decided was pretty misguided. Very few languages actually address these complaints.

The biggest complaint here is that, in Java, when you perform arithmetic on 32-bit floats you perform 32-bit arithmetic with 32-bit intermediate results. Java's behavior is, in other words, what you'd expect. In C, though, if you perform arithmetic on 32-bit floats you're actually performing 64-bit arithmetic on 64-bit intermediate results (at least most of the time; it's been a while since I consulted the rules). Java's behavior (which basically amounts to doing what you asked to do) infuriated the author, so he gave a bunch of examples of scientific calculations that need 64 bits of precision. But that's totally unconvincing to me: if you want 64-bit floating point precision, use doubles. C's implicit conversions in general have caused more harm than good and what the author is complaining about is having to tell the compiler to do 64-bit arithmetic on 32-bit values instead of having it follow complex promotion rules that few programmers even know about.

<comment><USER3> Note that this "rant" is by Velvel Kahan [1], who won the Turing Award for designing the IEEE 754 floating point standard [2] (among other things), which is used for specifying floating point computations on almost all computers today. So perhaps he has a little more context on this than yourself.

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Kahan](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Kahan) [2] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_754-2008](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_754-2008)

<comment><USER2> I'm not questioning the author's credentials, nor do I even think he's wrong about what's most useful in his field (scientific computing). I just think that programming language design considerations (not wanting to admit implicit conversions) outweigh his objections.

<comment><USER4> If you claim that Java was right to implement that so and the next language who ignores his complaints is also, then just accept that both Java and the next language have weaknesses expressing the computational tasks, from the point of view of the people who do have to write that kind of code.

Note that for a very long time Windows didn't use FPU at all. They also "didn't need it." And I think they started to think differently once they looked enough what Apple does. A lot can be programmed without FPU, but the edge in the industry is gained by using the hardware fully. Not doing what's easiest.

And the FPU hardware doesn't introduce penalties when reading 32-bit values and doing 64-bit computations.

<comment><USER2> That example is not comparable. The issue is not whether something is _expressible_. All 32-bit and 64-bit arithmetic operations are expressible in both C and Java (although I'd argue that Java makes it easier to know which you're getting). The issue is just what the default should be, and whether introducing temporaries should change the value of an expression. This is impossible to measure objectively, because we're talking formally about the exact same set of operations, just about which default is more intuitive/convenient/leading to fewer bugs/etc.

<comment><USER4> I don't agree that it's "impossible to measure objectively." The practice to store floating values with less bits but calculate with more is very old, specifically, older than C. It's not accidental, it survived because it's _needed._ As long as we don't have infinite memory and want to have huge inputs and outputs we'll need 32-bit floats.

And as long we want to calculate with less error, and we need it, we'll need doubles as intermediate calculations.

<comment><USER2> None of this is relevant to my point. You can use doubles for intermediate calculations in C, Java, and Rust. The only difference is what the defaults are.

<comment><USER5> Is the group using your choice as default sizeable? it's hard to imagine it's comparable to all the people who do numerical computations assuming standard behavior. Now all the algorithms will produce different results and the onea in Rust will be less accurate. I don't think you can reasonably expect to avoid a lot of pain with this choice. it would be nice to at least have compiler flag or something instead requirement to write explicit casts everywhere.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This was just tweeted by John Carmack ([https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/392298557631254528](https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/392298557631254528)) which is probably why it was submitted.

It's pretty old, it should have a [1998] tag in the title in my opinion.

It's also pretty funny. :)

<comment><USER7> *2004

<comment><USER8>
      Originally presented 1 March 1998
          at the invitation of the
        ACM 1998 Workshop on Java for
      High–Performance Network Computing
         held at Stanford University

Those exact slides might be from 2004 but the content is from 1998.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> If 95% of programmers have misconceptions about floating point arithmetic, _we should stop using it as the default rational / real number type_. Floating point is a great optimization, but in a lot of situations it would be a lot better to have arbitrary-precision rational number types, continued fractions representations, or something else that better approximates what programmers expect.

<comment><USER10> These alternatives would all have their own pitfalls.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I dunno, given what Javascript foisted on a generation of programmers, we should be thankful Java is only as bad as it is.

Go Kahan!

</comment><comment><USER12> I browsed to page 10, but didn't learn what the big problem was, and then gave up.

<comment><USER13> There are five points on page 3:

1\. Linguistically legislated exact reproducibility is at best mere wishful thinking.

2\. Of two traditional policies for mixed precision evaluation, Java chose the worse.

3\. Infinities and NaNs unleashed without the protection of floating-point traps and flags mandated by IEEE Standards 754/854 belie Java's claim to robustness.

4\. Every programmer's prospects for success are diminished by Java's refusal to grant access to capabilities built into over 95% of today's floating-point hardware.

5\. Java has rejected even mildly disciplined infix operator overloading, without which extensions to arithmetic with everyday mathematical types like complex numbers, intervals, matrices, geometrical objects and arbitrarily high precision become extremely inconvenient.

<comment><USER14> #1-#4 don't give much information about the real problem.

#5 is just a matter of convenience. I'm sure the Java team gave a long thought to adding operator overloading, and I can see why they choose not to include it (Java is meant to be straightforward, with as little magic as possible).

The first 20 pages or so are too much "blahblah" about Java, not much about how it's hurting everyone.

<comment><USER15> #5 isn't a matter of convenience if you're trying to do heavy mathematical operations in Java. Deviation between conventional notation and programming notation is a real problem, because it's a place where bugs can hide.

However, I would be very sympathetic to the argument that the solution is "Don't do that". In 1998 and today, for what may be different reasons but still comes to the same outcome, Java is not a language intended for highly mathematical computations. It's probably better just to not pretend that it is one, than to try to force it in. Nor would I even consider this a criticism of Java (though I personally dislike it); compared to its focus area, trying to support heavy-duty math would be a tiny little niche to it that would take wildly disproportionate amounts of effort to support. Let people who care about that niche operate in it.

My only point of agreement is that it is true that you ought to be able to get easy feedback about NaN and other failures, indeed precisely _because_ in Java you are unlikely to be doing the sorts of calculations in which those are expected possibilities. $NaN or "infinity hours billed" is something you generally want an exception for, ASAP. It would have been better to write that in as a requirement for the VM and slowly emulate it on the few platforms that didn't natively support it than leave it out. (A brief google search suggests Java still doesn't support this, even today. If I got that wrong... great! I'm glad it has come on board, but I stand by the idea that it should have been in there from day 1, which is the real point I have here.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> What I found most interesting about the article was some of the mathematical techniques presented. See page 44 for an accurate formula for angular distances and page 48 ff. for an alternative formalism for the vector cross product.

</comment><comment><USER17> Cyrix. That's a word i didn't hear in at least a decade.

</comment><comment><USER18> Fully agree on the operator overloading complaint. It really is a LOT easier when working with matrices, vectors and scalars to be able to type their math expressions naturally rather than with functions like add(multiply(.....))

<comment><USER19> What operator do you use for vector dot product? What about cross product (as opposed to vector scaling)? What about the different precedence between primitive operators and overloaded operators ('+' and '*' have the same precedence in vector maths, no so in basic arithmetic).

Does adding mathematical notation to programming languages make the code easier for non-mathematicians? Does having two different coding standards make the language easier to use and maintain? What do you do when your set of operator glyphs is less than the number of mathematical operations you need to perform? What happens with your code when the operator overloads you use clash with the operator overloads from a new library?

I don't see any language that does operator overloading well and a lot of issues with making a good implementation. I like the idea I just see a lot of problems with the reality. And unless you can solve the problem well, I think it's the right thing to do the simplest thing that might possibly work.

<comment><USER18> None for dot product.

The regular matrix and vector multiplication as * operator makes things a lot more readable.

Dot and cross product are less common for 3D rendering (one or none per line of code) so having that as a function doesn't hurt readibility.

<comment><USER19> I like writing ray tracers, so I use dot product and cross product quite a lot.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Many of the problems they point out aren't just Java problems, they're FORTRAN problems too.

</comment><comment><USER19> Another "everything Java does is evil" rant. No wonder HN is all over it. This is tiresome.

If you want 64 bit precision - use doubles. That's not hard, is it?</comment>


The surprising truth about the dollar - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/travel/story/20200107-welcome-to-jchymov-the-czech-town-that-invented-the-dollar <comment><USER2> The actual title is "Welcome to Jáchymov: the Czech town that invented the dollar".</comment>


Ask HN: what would you do with Javascript.xxx - <AUTHOR>

javascript.xxx was available, so I bought it on a whim. I do a lot of JavaScript development and thought it would be good branding for a blog / article site on JavaScript based web app development. But I would like to hear other ideas as to what it could be used for, or what other HN readers would use it for. <comment><USER2> I would have geeky chicks send in naked photos where they have "I love Javascript" painted on their bodies. Just pointing out the obvious here. ;) (xxx = naked chicks or you are badly failing the expectations of the user.)

</comment><comment><USER3> Snippets of sexy JavaScript, of course.

<comment><AUTHOR> Right I think there is a branding opportunity there like Dirty JavaScript or JavaScript Porn. There are not a lot of good aggregate sites pulling together references on JavaScript development, internet.com owns JavaScript.com and is just siting on it. I know, that it runs the risk of taking a hit in search due to the .xxx, but having a Javascript.* seemed like something to grab and then figure out if I want to do something with it. I can always flip it, if I don't figure something out, but I like the domain and would like to find a good use for it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Create a really hardcore javascript site.</comment>


Maze generation code, inspired by working through Mazes for Programmers - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/defndaines/meiro <comment><USER2> Pretty cool, tried to do the same thing, but in Rust: [https://github.com/Ragnaroek/libmaze](https://github.com/Ragnaroek/libmaze)

But didn't even got close to how far you got</comment>


Disaster Recovery in a Virtualized World - <AUTHOR> In today's always-on, information-driven organizations, business continuity depends completely on IT infrastructures that are up and running 24/7. The costs of downtime are huge and data loss can put a company out of business. Data loss is not only caused by natural disasters, power outages, hardware failure and user errors, but more and more by software problems and cyber security related disasters. Therefore thorough security and business continuity strategies are crucial for modern businesses, minimizing data loss and downtime.
Especially now, as data centers become more and more softwaredefined, these private, hybrid and public clouds become more vulnerable to these kinds of threats. In a software-defined, virtualized environment, applications run on virtual machines (VMs), independent from the hardware. Though this brings a lot of efficiency benefits to the business, these benefits are not extended into the realm of disaster recovery (DR) and business continuity (BC).
Most DR/BC solutions are still based on physical entities, arrays and appliances, and lack the ability to scale with the amount of data modern organizations produce. Many of the benefits achieved through virtualization, therefore, can be lost because of the management overhead and the complexity of aligning a virtualization strategy with disaster recovery tools designed for physical environments. Virtualization-aware BC/DR solutions are needed to overcome this. <comment><AUTHOR> for more information visit the link :-[http://tinyurl.com/dm-in- virtualization](http://tinyurl.com/dm-in-virtualization)</comment>


Ask HN: How was Vimeo built? - <AUTHOR>

I really like the look/feel and light-weight design of vimeo.
Would anyone mind giving their 2 cents on what languages it was built using, or how it was built?
Thanks :) <comment><USER2> it uses mootools for a lot of the pretty UI stuff, and it's ruby on rails.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks a lot, pclark. I really appreciate the input :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> pclark got the core of it. As for look/feel: part of it is a really concerted effort on the part of the guys that designed it to keep things as streamlines as possible; part of it is that they went over-the-top to add fun cartoony art everywhere.</comment>


How could I become Pro in Front-End developement? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> I'd like to interject a question here. I'm not a front-end dev, but when I hear other front-end devs talk about stuff... several notables folks have talked about _not_ chasing all the frameworks, because they're like fads, and you can get burned if $COMPANY or $TEAM stops maintaining them.

Is following the newest shiny framework really the best path to being a pro, or is it having a mastery of fundamentals?

<comment><USER3> That's a good point, the plethora of frameworks is actually a burden for front-end dev. Moreover the building process of moderns web-app is also a jungle (webpack, rollup, browserify, npm...).

Getting started as a front-end dev can easily lead to choice paralysis about framework as well as tutorial hell about building process.

On the other hand, mastering the fundamentals of JS isn't very fun in itself. It requires lot of dry reading with few practical examples, if you have few experience these examples are difficult to contextualize.

It may be more effective to pick one of the big three (Vue, Angular, React) and get your hands into it by building some fun stuff. Once you'll have practical knowledge, you'll have a better idea on what aspect of the fundamentals are worth digging.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Learning APIs for different frameworks and tools is a good start. A good place to start is TodoMVC.com.

I won't say this will get you to "Pro" status but you need at least a familiarity with the tools of the trade to get headed that direction.

</comment><comment><USER3> Have lot of side Front-End projects using various frameworks. Most importantly, your side projects should be fun and engaging to you.

</comment><comment><USER5> Listen to the users and the designers, work on a great team, and read the source code of the frameworks you use as you learn them.

<comment><USER6> > work on a great team

This is number one. Working on a great team, regardless of work function, will make you better than anything else.

Sucks how difficult a good team is to find.</comment></comment>


WorkFlowy – A simpler way to organize your work - <AUTHOR> https://workflowy.com <comment><USER2> If you're considering outliner software, like Workflowy, you should also take a look at DynaList:

[https://dynalist.io/](https://dynalist.io/)

</comment><comment><USER3> Parts of the ui look very much like roam research's, though I'm assuming WorkFlowy predates it...</comment>


Police want an Echo's data to prove a murder case - <AUTHOR> http://www.theverge.com/2016/12/27/14089836/amazon-echo-privacy-criminal-investigation-data <comment><USER2> This is a dupe. This story was posted like 20 times in the last few days. Here are the most popular discussions...

* Police seek Amazon Echo data in murder case | Hacker News || [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13263894](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13263894)

* Amazon refuses to let police access US murder suspect's Echo recordings | Hacker News || [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13269930](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13269930)</comment>


Ask HN: Good Books or Resources for Web Design - <AUTHOR> I have a friend with very solid design skills, but all in the print world...posters, flyers, etc.  Very literate with the entire Adobe toolset, but again, with printed output.
He's been offered a job that will pull him into the web world.   He was upfront about his lack of web experience, but they were impressed enough to hire him anyway.
What books and/or online resources should he be looking at to help him make the transition? <comment><USER2> My favorite resources are now all slightly dated; I haven't really kept up with the cutting edge as I've moved away from design and towards development.

\---

Web:

A List Apart, especially the articles section - [https://alistapart.com/articles](https://alistapart.com/articles)

CSS Zen Garden - [http://www.csszengarden.com/](http://www.csszengarden.com/)

Magic Ink - Information Software and the Graphical Interface, by Bret Victor - [http://worrydream.com/#!2/MagicInk](http://worrydream.com/#!2/MagicInk)

\---

Print:

Flexible Web Design: Creating Liquid and Elastic Layouts with CSS, by Zoe Mickley Gillenwater

The Zen of CSS Design: Visual Enlightenment for the Web, by Dave Shea and Molly E. Holzschlag

Transcending CSS: The Fine Art of Web Design, by Andy Clarke

</comment><comment><USER3> The two most important things to keep in mind for friends from the printed world:

1) Digital has its own aesthetic.

2) Forget everything about the canvas, the web is a fluid medium.

There are tons of pratical resources about digital design. For a more theoretical perspective, take a look at Frank Chimero's writings, they are both inspiring and enlightening:

1) What screens want: [https://frankchimero.com/writing/what-screens- want/](https://frankchimero.com/writing/what-screens-want/)

2) The Web's Grain: [https://frankchimero.com/writing/the-webs- grain/](https://frankchimero.com/writing/the-webs-grain/)

<comment><USER4> 1,2 are very solid advice.

It would be good to know more about in what capacity your friend is going to be work as. Interaction designer? What kind of product will he be designing? Will there be other coworkers to fill digital knowledge gap?

<comment><AUTHOR> _" what capacity your friend is going to be work as. Interaction designer"_

It sounds like he will be brought in as a junior contributor with plenty of more experienced team members around him. I don't know the specifics of what the exact job duties are. It seemed to be recognition of the raw graphic talent and willingness to learn. He's a recent grad.

The firm creates sites and apps for 3rd party clients.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Sketch, Figma, and Adobe XD are modern tools for web user interaction design. And Smashing's website is a good place to start:

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

I also love Google's Design site. Thinking about a single design language. That can be transmuted across Chrome, Android, VR and AR. Is a really powerful way to think about interfaces that can be used by billions of users. Good Luck :)

Designing SPAN 2017: An inside look at how we design and evolve the branding of our annual design and technology conference.By Google Design

[https://design.google/library/designing- span-2017/](https://design.google/library/designing-span-2017/)

</comment><comment><USER6> Web design doesn't have much in common with print, it's more about user experience, usability, psychology, etc. For those things Steve Krug's book is nice, I would also suggest Jakob Nielsen, you may know his quote that users spend most of their time on other web sites. Tools are different too, like Balsamiq. Approaches are different. The only thing in common is graphic design part of the web design, but with different constraints of course, not much new to learn here after print.

</comment><comment><USER7> A bit dated, still useful:

Seth Godin: The Big Red Fez

[https://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0743227905/permissio...](https://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0743227905/permissionmarket)

</comment><comment><USER8> Don't Make Me Think - Steve Krug

</comment><comment><USER9> Check this out: [http://www.allitebooks.com/?s=web+dev](http://www.allitebooks.com/?s=web+dev)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Just an update to say thanks for the answers. HN is truly unique in the quality of the feedback.

</comment><comment><USER10> Microinteractions by Dan Saffer</comment>


Google Finds That Successful Teams Are About Norms Not Just Smarts - <AUTHOR> https://hunterwalk.com/2016/09/03/google-finds-that-successful-teams-are-about-norms-not-just-smarts/ <comment><USER2> > Second, the good teams all had high 'average social sensitivity' — a fancy > way of saying they were skilled at intuiting how others felt based on their > tone of voice, their expressions and other nonverbal cues.

Why remote teams are never going to be as good.</comment>


SQL Layer launches, bringing Google F1 like capabilities to FoundationDB - <AUTHOR> http://blog.foundationdb.com/sql-layer-launches-bringing-google-f1-like-capabilities-to-foundationdb <comment><USER2> If you (like me) wondered about those small displays: [https://www.doublesight.com/product/detail/55.html](https://www.doublesight.com/product/detail/55.html)

</comment><comment><USER2> I expect this to be forked soon to support other key-value stores.</comment>


Dinosaur at the Gate - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/15/opinion/15dowd.html

<comment><USER2> The bias is obvious in how this article is dripping with resentful tone and constant privacy paranoia. However, it was worth the read, if only for the closing line:

"I feel better for a minute, until I realize that the only reason he knew that [journalists weren't] so easily [replaced] is that Google had been looking into how to replace [journalists]."

<comment><USER3> It's an opinion piece by a professional polemicist.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Beneath these articles is the assumption that Google is making lots of money off of newspaper articles posted online. I don't think this is right. If anyone should be cutting the newspapers a check it should be Slashdot, Digg, Reddit, Hacker News etc. But just like every blog and pony show on the internet the newspapers run ads alongside their stories and they release their content freely to get views. It is hard to have any sympathy.</comment>


Elon Musk is tech Covidiot No. 1 during coronavirus pandemic - <AUTHOR> https://nypost.com/2020/04/18/elon-musk-is-tech-covidiot-no-1-during-coronavirus-pandemic/ <comment><USER2> This is not only a hit piece (for Musk-haters) but it's wrong on at least this count:

"what he actually sent was five-year-old BiPAP sleep apnea machines that can't be used to treat coronavirus victims in the ICU."

Both CPAP and BiPAP are being adopted by some doctors who've found them useful over ventilators.</comment>


Show HN: Budding new file format - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@gifs/gifs-com-has-created-a-budding-new-file-format-6a59b677cac8#.koimc0fhy <comment><AUTHOR> When you make a gif from a video, check out the .potato if you're so inclined.

[http://imgur.com/AB7oIsp](http://imgur.com/AB7oIsp)

<comment><USER2> [http://imgur.com/AB7oIsp.potato](http://imgur.com/AB7oIsp.potato)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> holy spud</comment>


I Turned Off JavaScript for a Week - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/2015/11/i-turned-off-javascript-for-a-whole-week-and-it-was-glorious/ <comment><USER2> > _and I could browse the web with fewer distractions—all without the sense of > guilt that comes with using an ad blocker_

Never felt the slightest skerrick of guilt for using an ad blocker.

Instead I feel mildly virtuous in doing my own small part in helping the idea of an ad-supported internet die.

<comment><USER3> If not ads what do you want? Paywalls? Native content? Personally I want a robust and diverse web ecosystem, not just pay walls and people forced to alternative revenue sources.

<comment><USER4> > Personally I want a robust and diverse web ecosystem

Well, _everything paid for by ads_ is the opposite of diverse. Pretending paywalls are the only alternative is disingenuous too. There's plenty of options, like donations, or Blende's "pay per article, get your money back if it sucks" model, which seems to work well

<comment><USER3> They don't work well in most cases. You can point to some very specific niche markets where donations and pay per articles work. Just look at Patreon, its a great service and I use it to support a few things. But its not going to support most businesses.

For most business its going to be either a paywall or ads and ads allow for content to be access by people without means to pay for it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I have been using NoScript (a browser extension to black list all JS by default) for quite a while now, and I don't see myself turning back anytime soon.

Everything feels much faster, and sober without Javascript, especially news site (looking at you, lemonde.fr)

I still allow some JavaScript sometimes, most of the time to unbreak site, but if you start you using it you will realise that most of the JS running on each site is at best useless from a user point of view.

<comment><USER6> News sites are the worst, some of them have twenty! libs and trackers on them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> wired.com, please learn from your own article and don't try to load 22 3rd party javascripts.

[http://picpaste.com/wired_com-yt7ooXyu.png](http://picpaste.com/wired_com- yt7ooXyu.png)

<comment><USER8> I read it with javascript disabled with no problems at all.

<comment><USER9> Could you read the comments?

<comment><USER8> Why would I want to?

EDIT Honest question. Since I've been disabling javascript I've not read many comments sections and I've wasted a lot less time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> We need a declarative hypertext web back desperately. (I am running NoScript, but I have to enable it for too many sites)

<comment><USER11> That's why I didn't believe parts of the article. Yes the web loads faster, nothing can load faster than a blank page from blogger.com.

I now browse the web with curl | less

<comment><USER12> There are a lot of cases where turning off JS is impractical, and I don't do it myself.

But, to me, Blogger is a great example of a site that is poisoned by its reliance on JS. Blogger is so bad at showing a page of text that it needs a _splash screen_.

<comment><USER11> Only because Google neglected it. When blogger redesign landed it was exactly what was trendy, heavy js, dynamic layouting. It was slow but at least I thought it was worth the wait / the cost / the latency. A tech demo. Not anymore, I want to read something more than be amazed and don't want to shop for a core i5 to do so and now blogger looks dumb. Google could totally fix it but they had other horses to ride. Maybe one day.

<comment><USER13> Neglected? It takes a special amount of skill and a lot of work to screw it up so badly in the first place. The Web is designed to display text by default, and Blogger fails at that.

<comment><USER11> Yes, neglected. They put resources for the js revamp. It was cute at the time, not anymore, Google surely knows it but doesn't want to invest anything here (for now). They just pushed a huge redesign of G+, supposed to be their flagship, vastly simpler and faster (to the point of making it even less relevant). Blogger gets the remains if anything ever drops.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Sadly JavaScript or "the language of the web" is going towards binary rather then openness. The big sites like Google already obfuscate their code so it's hard to see what it does.

I learned JavaScript by viewing other peoples source code, witch was as easy as right clicking and selecting view source.

Unless we want more people to disable JavaScript, we need to keep it open source and transparent!

<comment><USER15> While I understand the intent of your post, don't most people minify (obfuscate) their JS code to reduce bandwidth costs (on both ends, user and company)? Even in todays high bandwidth availability age we still use CDNs and the like to reduce such a cost.

That said, it would definitely be nice to see non-minified versions of code we run in our browsers available as open source by the company serving it. It's not like it's a secret, just a pain to actually try to decipher.

<comment><USER14> You only save bandwidth the first time the resource is accessed. After that it's loaded from the browser cache! So over time, the band-witch saving by minification is insignificant.

<comment><USER16> So, the answer to bojo's question is "Yes.".

> After that it's loaded from the browser cache!

Unless the resource changes, the UA's cache is cleared, the file is served with incorrect caching headers, the cache expiry time specified in the resource header is reached, the resource is loaded by a UA that doesn't cache...

<comment><USER14> Lets say your .js files takes up 5% of your total app size after gzip compression, and minification saves you around 20%. Then you have saved around 1% bandwidth at the cost of obfuscation and more difficult debugging. And If it's cached, witch all main-steam browsers does, you've saved around 0.01% at best. So if you pay $10,000 in bandwidth costs each month, that's $1 saved :P

<comment><USER16> 1) I can play the "let's make numbers up" game, too.

2) There are _many_ , _many_ people in the world _today_ who access the internet through what is effectively a 2G connection.

3) "...at the cost of obfuscation and more difficult debugging."

3a) Sometimes obfuscation is a desirable side-effect.

3b) Javascript source maps exist for a reason.

4) "And If it's cached, witch all main-steam browsers does..."

4a) It's almost as if you ignored the majority of the last sentence in my previous comment. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Disabling JavaScript makes the headline font on Wired.com much, much more legible. I'm completely serious.

</comment><comment><USER18> Tried turning off javascript completely for a time once, but then a lot(Edit: Don't actually keep count, maybe I should begin doing that) of pages are blank/white emptiness because they do all the html in the browser....

<comment><USER19> Sure, "a lot" as an absolute number because, hey, Internet. But I bet, relatively, the number of sites doing that is tiny. I've seen it myself, but it's terrible practise, and I'm sure it's easy to avoid those sites or, if you must, whitelist them. Teach the site owners something, vote with your HTTP requests!

<comment><USER18> I have stopped using a number(Don't actually keep a total count, maybe I should begin doing it) of sites, simply because of the fact they do it

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Try [https://addons.mozilla.org/en- US/firefox/addon/policeman/](https://addons.mozilla.org/en- US/firefox/addon/policeman/), that will make it even more interesting and show you that _everyone_ is including jquery from Google.

<comment><USER20> Didn't know about policeman and looks really, really, nice. Will definitely give it a try! I love the idea of writing my own rules.

As for including jquery from google, of course and for good reasons, even from the user's perspective. The main one, of course is that chances are that your browser already has it cached (from other site that uses it), so retrieving it and loading it is (almost) instant.

<comment><USER21> Keep in mind Google is blocked in China, so if you include jQuery from Google, it's not going to work for over a billion people.

<comment><USER22> Is it really fair to include the total population of China in this statement?

<comment><USER13> As someone who currently lives and works in China, fuck yes. If you must, cut it down to the 1% that speaks English and thus has a reason to visit foreign sites, and you're still pissing off over 10 million people. Not to mention poor foreigners like me who try to get some work done here.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Whoa, this guy managed to uncheck "enable javascript" somehow? Glad to read such a cutting edge article.

In seriousness, disabling javascript (and enabling it selectively when things inevitably break when I was using NoScript) grew too tedious for me after a while.

There are simply too many sites that require JS to function properly. Others may disagree and enjoy clicking constantly to enable select javascripts to get pages to work properly (or maybe don't visit JS intensive sites), but in my experience it isn't worth it.

<comment><USER24> > _In seriousness, disabling javascript (and enabling it selectively when > things inevitably break when I was using NoScript) grew too tedious for me > after a while._

I'm sort of inclined to agree. I really want to like NoScript, but every now and then when I use NoScript for a couple of weeks I get frustrated with it and disable it. Sure, having it disabled is also frustrating, but it's a different kind of frustration and at least I can sort of use the site without having to put active effort into it. Now I just use uBlock Origin, it just works more or less.

<comment><USER8> I guess I have less diverse browsing habits than you guys. I use noscript very happily. I whitelisted what I need for sites that I use years ago and most things I do now "just work" (most is ~95% the other things I temporarily allow). When e.g. a job application needs a javascript heavy online test I open up another profile with no addons and use that profile for that that thing. Based on experiences using browsers without noscript I think that the "faff time" (for me) from doing what I do is less than the "waiting for excessive javascript" and "figuring out that this site has overriden scrolling/back button".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> On old iPhone 4 I'm using, Wired site is very slow. But with JS disabled, it runs and looks great.

</comment><comment><USER26> Switched to surf+tabbed and default no JS years ago. Can't imagine going back. CTRL-ALT-s enables it for the tab if it's necessary; usually not.

<comment><USER27> I currently am using Midori, but maybe I should give surf a shot.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Sure. If you believe that the browser should only be a document reader and not an application platform then go ahead. It's kinda like buying a smartphone and then using it exclusively as a phone though....

I think the real point of irritation here is all the 3rd party junk that gets loaded in that has nothing to do with the main functionality of the site that you are on.

<comment><USER29> I think that simple content such as blogs, news and the equivalent should not be implemented in js-dependent web apps.

Web browsers are a platform for sure, but the simple content should stay simple.

<comment><USER30> It have thought for a while now that the web and correspondingly the browser should be bifurcated into a content platform with no client side code and an application platform without the burden of the older technologies. The browser would provide all the interactivity and logic for the content platform through implementations of standard html tags. For the application platform, the browser could provide a more convenient set of apis sort of like plugins did before.

<comment><USER31> In practice:

Developer: "Well, we can either build our website in document mode or in application mode."

Management: "What's the difference?"

Developer: "If we build it in document mode, it loads quickly and cleanly and..."

Management: "Does document mode let us put the modal popover window that got 5% of our visitors to join our newsletter last month?"

Developer: "Well, nope."

Management: "And the third party tracker?"

Developer: "Again, no."

Management: "So we can't monetize or track how many sticky eyeballs are consuming our content?"

Developer: "Nope."

Management: "App mode it is."

Developer: "But it isn't an app. It's just static pages."

Management: "APP APP APP APP APP APP. I hear you can go on a course to build apps in less than a week."

Developer: _starts checking his LinkedIn for an employer who doesn 't make him want to take a pickaxe to his own face_

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Two things that caught my eye in this article were "Many people have turned to ad blockers" and "A small but growing number of people, however, are taking ad-blocking a step further and just disabling JavaScript altogether". For the first quote, I know many people in tech who use ad blockers (but maybe still not a majority?), but I'm pretty sure they aren't all that prevalent outside of it (or why would advertisers bother?). As for the second quote, is this actually true or supported by any real evidence?

<comment><USER33> I found a study [0] from Q2 2015 -- before iOS 9 -- that reports ad blockers on 16% of _devices_ in the US, and on 36.7% of devices, the highest value, in Greece.

I have Javascript turned off by default and sometimes enable it if pages don't work otherwise. Sometimes I just leave the page. I don't see it as ad blocking, but as a means of reducing attack surface, tracking, and improving page load times.

[0] [http://downloads.pagefair.com/reports/2015_report- the_cost_o...](http://downloads.pagefair.com/reports/2015_report- the_cost_of_ad_blocking.pdf)

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> I've been doing this for a while now after becoming tuned into the tracking and particularly fingerprinting being done. The web is surprisingly usable with it off. I use SafeScript in Chrome which generally works ok. I use multiple profiles in Chrome, one with just Adblock the other with Adblock, noscript, httpseverywhere, privacy badger, etc. I use the normal one where I absolutely must and that doesn't keep cookies.

I'm not paranoid and I don't have anything to hide but I object to being tracked to have stuff sold to me.

</comment><comment><USER35> I use uMatrix, uBlock0, and privacy badger, and am very happy about it. 1st party scripts are turned on by default by uMatrix, and for those that break, I selectively turn them on. Privacy Badger takes care of blocking cookies (first or third party) that try to track you.

</comment><comment><USER36> In Firefox, the "disable javascript" checkbox is now gone from the settings --why would they do that?

But it can still be disabled in `about:config` > `javascript.enabled`

I used and loved Firefox since more than 10 years so far, but can't truly understand some decisions they took.

<comment><USER34> I read about this a while back if I remember correctly it's because people kept turning it off accidentally and breaking the Internet and blaming Firefox.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> I've disabled anything 3rd party and all scripting via uBlock. When I really need some site to work 100%, I'll just selectively enable the parts that are required for that site. The little button makes it easy to whitelist stuff case by case.

<comment><USER23> uBlock doesn't disable all scripting at all, though.

<comment><USER38> You certainly can block all scripts with uBlock Origin's "advanced" mode. There, you can block first and/or third party scripts as desired.

It's a common misconception that uBlock Origin is "just" an adblock plus replacement, but it's a _lot_ more than that.

The one caveat is that there's no fine-grained GUI for white/blacklisting _specific_ scripts. You can however white/blacklist scripts from _domains_ using the GUI, and you can block / unblock individual scripts by writing rules.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Disclaimer: I own an ipad 1 (and love it!)

On an iPad1, your best choice is indeed to disable JavaScript. (Note that the ipad1 has 256 MB of RAM. That sounds enough, but it is not! May be because of a poor optimization of Safari on iOS5)

</comment><comment><USER40> I wouldn't mind some JS on this page to hide the conversations that don't interest me. Also, why make a request for 5x more data, reflow, and redraw everything whenever I click something?

</comment><comment><USER41> I doubt if there is some alternate for the wonder full things that we can do with JS. But Its true that at sometimes things are missused and in case of JS its a top business now a days

</comment><comment><USER30> In addition to disabling js, another thing I do is disable styles. The web is really quite beautiful and often more usable with the default styles.

</comment><comment><USER42> Why not disable images too? I'd suspect they add most weight to the average site and are likely just as superfluous as all the javascript.

</comment><comment><USER43> Spoiler: Author found that because the experience was so great, they turned JavaScript back on immediately after the experiment ended.

<comment><USER8> He ended up wanting more control but acknowledged that some elements of the modern web require a scripting language. I don't know why he didn't just install noscript.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What is the best tool to benchmark a 10 GbE connection? - <AUTHOR> I've been testing with a point to point connection and iperf, and only getting below 3Gbps connections.<p>What alternate tools do you suggest? <comment><USER2> I have had really good luck with nuttcp . [http://nuttcp.net/Welcome%20Page.html](http://nuttcp.net/Welcome%20Page.html)

</comment><comment><USER3> It is possible to get 9.3 Gbps with iperf/netperf, so the measurement tool isn't necessarily your problem. Try testing multiple connections (e.g. iperf -P) since a single connection usually isn't representative of what people do with 10G.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, we don't need to simulate real use, once we are close to 10 Gbps we will benchmark different approaches for packet capturing in Windows like our own driver, WinPcap, NDIS, and WFP.</comment></comment>


Show HN: OmSave – Safari Extension for OmniFocus on macOS - <AUTHOR> https://apps.apple.com/us/app/omsave/id1514795049 <comment><USER2> I'm a long time user of OmniFocus but I'm not sure I understand the use case: do you often save web pages as tasks?

<comment><AUTHOR> It's a matter of personal workflow, but I do it all the time. I try to add tasks for things that I want or need to read, including work-related stuff, like Basecamp posts that require my response, so that I actually get to them.

The goal, for me, is to not get distracted by _reading_ things when I should be _doing_ things, so I try to postpone the reading until a more appropriate moment. However, to do that without stress, I need to be able to trust the system enough to know that I'm definitely going to get to that reading later – during a review, or earlier.

I noticed that if I don't have a task for links to read, I end up either reading them right away (damn FOMO) or they disappear into a black hole, because there's just too much stuff in my head to remember everything.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> What you built is fine. I'm curious where the customers will come from. Tried search ads on Mac App Store? At $3.99 you should at least break even

<comment><AUTHOR> Right now I'm not thinking that far ahead. I scratched my own itch and I'm glad someone else found it useful. I'll see about those ads though, thanks for the tip!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Do you plan on creating a firefox extension?

<comment><AUTHOR> Unfortunately, I don't. I'm not using Firefox right now and I don't have enough time to work on it. There's also no marketplace for the extensions. Sorry!

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I didn't actually know about OmniFocus. It looks amazing. Might buy it tonight.

</comment><comment><USER6> This isn't for me, but I am curious how you integrate things into OmniFocus

<comment><AUTHOR> They have a pretty powerful omnifocus:// URL-based API.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> What does this do that the provided clipping feature does not?

<comment><AUTHOR> Pre-fills the page title, meta description, attach a screenshot, or headline image, and allows you to preselect tags/project to attach the clipping to automatically.</comment></comment>


Why BugMuncher doesn't require a credit card for its trial (and never will) - <AUTHOR> http://bugmuncher.com/2013/12/11/why-bugmuncher-doesnt-require-a-credit-card-for-its-free-trial-and-never-will.html

<comment><USER2> The whole tricking people into forgetting to cancel thing has always felt extremely dirty to me. Glad to see someone else feels the same way.</comment>