Why some smart people are reluctant to share? - <AUTHOR> http://www.lifebeyondcode.com/2009/12/26/why-some-smart-people-are-reluctant-to-share/

<comment><USER2> Without making any claims on my level of "smartness", I will say that I tend to shut down pretty quickly when it becomes apparent that the person I'm "sharing" with is really just more interested in me doing his job for him.

<comment><USER3> Yes, when I was young and just starting out, the older DBAs and SAs often seemed reluctant to help out the developers or the users with ad-hoc requests. The DBAs in particular would just run a script they were given and send the dev the output, even if that output was just an error. I thought this was a bit poor, aren't we all on the same team? But, when I started to help people I soon found the truth. Either you were like that, or you spent the whole time debugging other people's stuff, doing work they couldn't be bothered to do, you'd spend ages working on a report or a feature and then the person who wanted it would say, oh, sorry, I don't need that anymore.

It's human nature. Something that is given freely has no value. Now I only trade time and knowledge with equals.

<comment><USER4> I've found that how you ask makes a big difference in how likely you are to get an answer. For example:

1.) On a mailing list, listing things you've already tried and other resources you've already read makes people more inclined to answer you. It shows that you're serious about solving the problem and just need a little help to get there, and keeps them from having to play 20 questions with what you already know.

2.) If you're asking a coworker to do something, ask if you can watch. They'll figure that you'll be able to do it yourself next time.

3.) In all cases, fundamental questions seem to be more useful than specific questions. "Where's that log data kept? How do I get access to it? What format is it in?" is more useful than "Can you look up who was scraping our server at 10:40 PM yesterday for me?", because the former lets you solve a whole class of problems by yourself, while the latter just takes care of the immediate need.

<comment><USER5> nostrademons suggestions are a great way to mark yourself as someone trying both to improve and not waste another's time.

I had blogged about how to ask an expert for help in [http://www.skmurphy.com/blog/2007/12/12/how-to-ask-an- expert...](http://www.skmurphy.com/blog/2007/12/12/how-to-ask-an-expert-for- help/) and suggested a couple more depending upon context. Robert Kelley in "How to Be a Star at Work" had these broader for novices in a new environment:

o Build your network before you need it, if possible.

o Be very mindful of people's time and don't waste it.

o Give careful thought to how you phrase your request or question.

o Summarize your attempts to solve the problem or find the information you as asking for help with.

o Verbally thank and follow up in writing, publicly credit.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is an interesting theory. But I tend to be of the school that thinks that there are two kinds of smart people: people that think they are smart and aren't, and people who are smart (but tend to not think so).

The former are usually a result of the Dunning–Kruger effect. In my experience these people think that being smart (competent) makes them special and gives them a kind of power. Thus they don't want to diminish their own power by yielding some of it to other people. The funny thing is that they usually don't actually know anything anyways.

The later are usually a result of what I like to think of as the Socrates effect "I am the wisest man alive, for I know one thing, and that is that I know nothing." They believe that what they know isn't worth much because they realize that what they know is a single drop in the ocean of knowledge. They tend not to want to share because they might be embarrassed by the pittance of their knowledge -- even if it's worth quite a bit.

I've found ultimately that sharers of knowledge have overcome their own egos and have dealt with the fear that drives both motivations. In either case they usually expect some kind of reciprocity and openness (but it's not required).

<comment><USER7> The second kind of reasoning is inline with PG's statement about hackers:

 _I've found that people who are great at something are not so much convinced of their own greatness as mystified at why everyone else seems so incompetent._

From: Great Hackers, <http://www.paulgraham.com/gh.html>

<comment><USER8> 'If I have seen further than others, it's because I am surrounded by dwarfs.' -- attributed to Murray Gell-Mann

(I generally prefer Newton's version, and I'll aspire to be so humble until my achievements better his.)

<comment><USER9> Did you know that Newton's version was written to a dwarf (Robert Hooke) who had accused Newton of taking his ideas?

It is ironic that this pointed insult has become seen as a sign of his intellectual generosity.

<comment><USER10> Interesting. That prompted me to look at the online references

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Hooke>

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Newton#Fame>

and learn about the personality disputes among scientists of that era.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I think this observation is very true with respect to sharing with the internet at large. It's easy to dismiss some new (personal) discovery as unremarkable or obvious -- but, there are probably people out there who would find a write-up of that discovery interesting. This is probably especially true about more domain-specific bits of knowledge.

In that case, I don't think _not_ sharing is an intentional choice to withhold or hoard information. The individual simply didn't realize there was any demand for that information. Or, perhaps there wasn't enough value in that information because anyone with an interest would make the same discovery on their own easily enough.

It doesn't mean that the same individual wouldn't share that info with someone who asked _directly_ about the subject.

<comment><USER12> I find this true not on the Internet more often. For example, one of my friends asked me to describe what I was working on and how it worked. I was perfectly willing to get him up to speed -- until I realized what I was stepping into. My current project was designing and implementing a hardware virtualization support layer. One of the reasons why I was so reluctant to help him was I realized exactly what kind of "background information" (as the article says) I was using in the project.

First, I would have to teach him how virtualization and virtual machine monitors work. But before that, I would have to teach him how modern operating systems work. Well, before that I would have to teach how modern hardware works. Even if we get through all that I'd still have to teach him IA32e assembler and POSIX standard C (he only knew C++). After realizing that, I told him I'd help if he took a couple more courses and later decided he still wanted to know. In this case I would have to say that I _did_ intentionally withhold information, but only because I didn't want to give an incomplete picture.

P.S. You stole my username ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I've also found that once a person has attained a certain amount of knowledge, sharing it with others becomes an awful lot like telling them that _they're wrong_. People don't like to hear that they are wrong about things. Sometimes people just don't _want_ to know what they don't know. Its just easier that way.

Sharing can be hard, socially risky work. It often requires a great deal of tact, even when the knowledge is asked for.

</comment><comment><USER14> There was this one guy, he had a gun and he'd hunt with it. One day, another guy came along and they started hunting together. Eventually, the guy with the gun shared the gun with the other guy who then shot the gun owner and took all the food.

<comment><USER15> I don't think that your parable of the gun is quite analogous to sharing knowledge. Most knowledge is not zero-sum, and sharing the `background' thinking helps the sharer and the sharee both. At best, your analogy would have to be modified such that the gun was somehow replicated, giving them the ability to have a duel at least.

<comment><USER16> I saw a quote somewhere that read, "A knowledge economy is a secret society." Ideally knowledge isn't zero-sum. In practice, knowledge is power, and power is zero-sum.

<comment><USER17> There are two types of power: ability to do things and control over people. The latter is zero-sum, but the former is not. Knowledge always increases the ability to do things, but (depending on who has it) may increase or decrease control over others.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> _Why some smart people are reluctant to share? [...] Note: This is about smart people who are not sharing enough. So please don't generalize this about all smart people._

Easy! Smart people who do not share are not sharing enough by definition.

</comment><comment><USER19> Asking this question is a good place to start, but the answer goes way beyond mere reluctance. I would say that many people are very intelligent in ways that outstrip their ability to communicate this knowledge effectively. Natural written languages are very blunt instruments in contrast to the highly- involved abstract concepts that our brains are capable of 'discovering'. Some things are very difficult to explain effectively and take much patience, forethought, style, and lengthy prose. Fewer are talented in this area, or you might say that certain skill sets intersect less frequently. (Talented writers and talented mathmeticians/scientists). Even great professors often struggle with explaining things in layman's terms.

Take the English laguage, for example. Very flexible, but still feeble at tranferring highly abstract concepts. It wasn't designed/evolved for this purpose, so this is not surprising. Talented writers can get quite far on the abstraction scale, before text becomes a verbose and confusing mess, but there must exist a potential space for a future spoken/written language to be created, better suited for explaining abstractions, somewhere between the current common natural languages and terse mathematical notation (which itself requires much textual explanation).

<comment><USER20> I see your point and I'll add to it. Along with difficulty in producing an explanation, there is difficulty in allowing the other person time to understand. -> This requires patience, and a lot of people I consider smart have very little patience, which makes it hard for them to explain things and often times I will see them stop explaining something to someone, or simple not starting the explanation because they view it is a lost cause.

<comment><USER19> Yes, imagine being so intelligent that after 5 seconds of interaction with someone, you will mentally accurately predict a 6.8 percent chance (+/- 2) that they will eventually pick up on what you are explaining at all. So, now after 10 times with a 5 percenter, you one day realize there was less than half a chance all along, and get into a severe lonely depression and eventually end up writing highly obscure technical books that the sensationalistic bloggers will never read, leading them to blog about 'all those selfish and silent smart people.'

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I think the author is confused between knowledge and wisdom. I dont make any claims that i am smart but say if it takes me certain degree of effort and time to attain level-4 expertise. Imparting this level-4 expertice to a person who is at level-0 makes no sense to me.

The level-0 person should go through all the intermidiate levels to make the things that appear obvious to me, also appear seemless to him/her. Gaining level-4 expertise will lead them to a mechanical process of understanding. This is where we cross the line between wisdom and knowledge.

Also, the expert person more often than not is left with a feeling of being used by someone who attained somthing without any hard work. Things get complicated from here. My approach is to let the level-0 person give clues about reaching level-1 and make ways for the person to progress without complete reliance on me. Some kind of mentoring.

</comment><comment><USER22> Many smart people are too busy doing other things to spend time cultivating a blog or writing articles. Sharing with your coworkers when the job calls for it is of immediate utility, and a very different beast than putting your thoughts onto the internet at large.

</comment><comment><USER23> I don't share my knowledge by answering to questions.

I use my knowledge to support the other guy to find the same answers if he is willing to do work. I just give him more momentum -- provided he already has some -- and guide gently to the right direction.

</comment><comment><USER24> It's my experience that smart people are eager to share whenever the situation isn't detrimental to them. They know the difference between zero sum and non- zero sum outcomes and behave accordingly. They are happy to share when they have reason to believe it is to their advantage and they're just as quick to avoid fools and scammers.

Perhaps when Mr. Setty encounters smart people unwilling to share with him, he should take the opportunity to work on his own packaging skills. I think he may learn that it's rarely easy to make things easy (even for a smart person).

</comment><comment><USER25> There are also limits to what anyone can describe of their expertise.

See the very important essay on describing expertise :: [http://ist- socrates.berkeley.edu/~hdreyfus/html/paper_socrat...](http://ist- socrates.berkeley.edu/~hdreyfus/html/paper_socrates.html)

At competent level ::

"There are just too many situations differing from each other in subtle, nuanced ways. More, in fact, than can be named or precisely defined, so no one can prepare for the learner a list of what to do in each possible situation."

</comment><comment><USER26> Though the two points are reasons for someone to not share, the other reason could very well be that a person is an introvert by nature.

Another article linked by Rajesh (Marshall Goldsmith on Empowering Others) raises another possible reason: "one of the problems with smart people is their need to add a 'lot of value' to the other party." So, someone may think of sharing something but might think it is not ready yet and keep trying to increase the value of.

<comment><USER27> To me, that's not a problem. I truly believe you should be the signal, not the noise, so if you're not adding value, what are you doing? Obviously you can take it too far, but I really don't think this happens all that often, compared to the plethora of people sharing far too early.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> I wonder whether really good startup advice is advice that can only be used a few times. For example, a publicity stunt to market a product will probably only work a few times.

If this is the case, one can understand why people are reluctant to share in this context.

</comment><comment><USER29> This is somewhat similar to "curse of knowledge" principle described in the idea stickiness theory book "Made to stick".

Although it's probably one of the symptoms, it's not the most important one.

They don't share because of their EGOS.

<comment><USER30> Maybe. Or maybe it's because of this:

"Smart people want to give their best and as they learn more, they learn that they need to learn a lot more before they start sharing."

I'd be reluctant to share what I know about, say, website security, because I have this dim awareness that there are probably lots of things I'm missing, and anything I post would be flamed to death.

Maybe that's because this is "the knowledge at my current level" that I'm not ready to share yet.

Or maybe it's because, although I seem to be effective, I secretly fear that I'm incompetent.

"Better to stay silent and be thought a fool than to speak and remove all doubt."

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> One reason to share: all that juicy knowledge in your brain will otherwise be gone when you die.

</comment><comment><USER32> Knowledge is not a token which can be given away at a whim. It is impossible to communicate anything profound. If you would like to be smarter, read philosophy and drop acid.

</comment><comment><USER33> I'm a self-interested creature. I tend to stop sharing _with the Internet_ when my expertise gets far enough to the right of the mean that the information flow becomes unidirectional, or near unidirectional.

I doubt I'm alone in that.

<comment><USER26> In my experience sharing helps me understand whether I am going in the right direction and avoid tunnel vision.

<comment><USER33> If you're able to get such feedback, then the communication is not yet unidirectional.</comment></comment></comment>


Mark Zuckerberg was the highest-paid CEO in America last year at $2.28 billion - <AUTHOR> http://www.techspot.com/news/54441-mark-zuckerberg-was-the-highest-paid-ceo-in-north-america-last-year-at-228-billion.html <comment><AUTHOR> Against FB profit of $32m: [http://www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/news/2013/01/30/face...](http://www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/news/2013/01/30/facebook- profit-plunges-to-32-million.html)

</comment><comment><USER2> Not very surprising once you actually read the article:

> The social network boss received $2.28 billion in compensation last year > with nearly all of his yearly earnings coming as a result of exercising > share options when the company went public.</comment>


Show HN: A Hand-Drawn QR Code Alternative - <AUTHOR> http://www.meshtag.com <comment><USER2> Unfortunately, and unlike a QR code, the data is not encoded in the drawing itself, which means an Internet connection is always needed. For URL sharing the Internet connection requirement is not so much of a problem (you'd always need that connection for browsing to the URL, unless it's a local or data URL), for everything else it may be.

Also, once the Meshtag service goes down or closes for good, all tags become impossible to read, which pretty much puts me off of using this for any permanent purposes. I suppose it will also have to deal with copyright infringement issues (and there would need to be a mechanism for submitting DMCA notices), but don't take my word for it. Related: it's easier to censor.

Whether these disadvantages are enough to make up for the fact that the codes can be drawn by hand, and can expire, only time can tell.

By the way, if this could be made to use squares instead of triangles, I guess it would be easier to draw on grid paper.

<comment><USER3> This is more like an URL shortener than like a QR code.

<comment><USER4> A URL shortener that requires a proprietary app instead of a web browser.

<comment><USER5> and costs money, lest your shortened URL "expires"

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is nothing more than a (pointlessly!) complex URL shortener... Meshtags are exactly equivalent to the following hypothetical service which I call "SuperNumericShortener":

1\. Pick any random number, say 1234. This is your identifier.

2\. Register this identifier and your URL at SuperNumericShortener.com

3\. Write "SNS-1234" anywhere you want.

4\. Install a fancy smartphone app that can take a picture of a writing and recognize "SNS-1234".

5\. The app opens your browser to [http://SuperNumericShortener.com/1234](http://SuperNumericShortener.com/1234) which redirects to whatever URL you chose.

That's it. Oh and you can pay to reserve short identifiers (since they are likely to be claimed by other users of the service).

And for some reason meshtags use triangular shapes instead of numbers. Maybe it makes the concept look fancier than what it really is. Or maybe the author thought it would be easier to recognize a meshtag than detecting the shape "SNS" and do OCR to extract the following identifier? Either way, "SNS-1234" is easier to memorize, faster to draw, can be communicated in writing and speech. All advantages that meshtags lack.

Edit: here is something I would really want: in my Android Chrome address bar, next to the microphone icon, I want a camera icon that lets me snap a picture of a written URL, and opens it directly. No obscure QR code, meshtag, or whatever.

<comment><USER7> Google Goggles will open up a written URL just from a picture. For handwritten ones I think it just has to be really legible but for printed ones it works easily.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> It's a confusing solution for a problem that does not exist, which is how to use a pen to draw readable shapes, a problem many of us learned how to solve in elementary school.[0]

[0] [http://www.auburn.edu/academic/education/reading_genie/lette...](http://www.auburn.edu/academic/education/reading_genie/letters.html)

<comment><USER9> Sorry, but the problem is how to use a pen to draw _machine_ readable shapes. Machines find reading QR codes and OP's triangles easier than reading letters.

<comment><USER10> If you wrote numbers or letters as precisely as the triangles are drawn in the example, I doubt computers would have much of a problem reading them. We've got fast algorithms for digit classification that are pretty much perfect on the MNIST dataset with just 0.21% error (and I'm pretty sure there are errors in the dataset itself, which brings the real error rate down). MNIST is an easy image recognition task compared to others but it's not done with clearly written numbers.

Here's an example of some that were misclassified by an algorithm: [http://www.concordia.ca/content/concordia/en/research/cenpar...](http://www.concordia.ca/content/concordia/en/research/cenparmi/resources/herosvm/_jcr_content/content- main/image_0.img.gif/1422905661053.gif)

<comment><USER11> Machine-readable codes also have space-efficient error correction built in, something that plain text does not support. A text label can become unusable with the loss of a single character.

<comment><USER10> Only if the code has no error correction built in. If the code is presented to the user to write down it's perfectly possible to have redundancy in the code.

<comment><USER11> Then it's not plain text anymore (not human readable)...

<comment><USER10> How so? You can easily have error correcting codes that are human readable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Thought I'd clarify generally a little bit. QR codes definitely have a lot of advantages over Meshtag - and they're perfect for what they do. I'm by no means suggesting this could "replace" QR codes.

Where Meshtag fits in is that it's aimed at users and not companies. I think a large reason most people don't scan QR codes is because they assume they're just trying to sell you something. But if you saw a meshtag that somebody drew on a wall somewhere, wouldn't you be curious?

Also, thanks for all the feedback! I have dreamed of being on hacker news since I started coming here. Any UI/UX designers in the Boston area, hit me up if you want to get involved!

<comment><USER12> Actually, when I see MeshTags I assume "they're" just trying to sell me an cumbersome url shortening serivce.

By the way, the assumption that people don't/won't use QR codes is wrong. Here's one example: Chinese associate QR codes with product information (ex.: scanning a code on a bottle of soda).

Many people don't use QR codes but I think your assumption (QR codes will evermore be perceived as commercials) is totally off base.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Even though everyone else is talking about this as an impractical solution, I think it's clever at least.

I don't know that I would ever use it, but I like the novel concept of it. If this was just a for-fun kind of project, I'd think it was pretty awesome. If you're trying to market it as a business, you're going to run into all the problems everyone else has already mentioned.

<comment><USER14> Yes, I think people are missing the point. It's not like the author is proposing an IETF standard or claiming this fixes some inherent problem with URLs. It's a novelty and is aesthetically pleasing.

I could see someone making stuff on Etsy stitching/drawing this in as a signature that links to their homepage.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Sam, Cool stuff. I get what you're doing here, but from these comments I think QR code reference really throws people off. While comparing to QR might explain how it works, I would do my best to position this as nothing like QR codes (and highlight use cases that make it unique from QR) to avoid the comparison.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! I think you're right, I'm going to get rid of the QR code reference in the landing page headline. Maybe just 'Hand-drawn, scannable web links'. I will then have an FAQ box that says 'How is this different than a QR code?' where I list a lot of the feedback I got from this thread.

<comment><USER15> Agreed. There's still no easy way to get from physical to digital. Be sure to focus on the problem you are solving. Show how many mediums can be used as well to solve the problem. (chalk, toothpicks, box of pencils, bricks etc.) Maybe even one page dedicated to each use case. (retailers, restaurants, street performers, celeb events, app unlock codes, etc) some other thoughts:

How can I get someone walking by my restaurant/store who has a question or is looking for more info to interact with my website and get today's coupon?

Be sure to allow camera photos/screenshots to be used via app. If I can scan a tag i see in a video or on a page then that's one more use case.

Your tag is simple enough, can I draw it myself in your app if it doesn't scan, or correct it if its unrecognizable? Knowing I can sketch it manually in your app might avoid some frustration.

Maybe reach out to some snapchat star and brainstorm innovative use cases you can highlight (xyz was here etc?) good luck!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Hand drawn alternative to QR codes? Writing the URL down in letters?

<comment><USER17> If the problem is machine recognition of handwriting, the Graffiti alphabet is both human readable and writable and easy enough for a 32MHz 68030-ish CPU to recognize in realtime.

<comment><USER18> Graffiti is recognized by observing the strokes (direction, turns, etc) _as it is drawn_ , with each pen lift/touch marking the characters. This is quite a different problem from doing OCR on it in a photograph, where you can (hopefully) see the shapes, but you do not know where the strokes began and ended.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> > No. Unlike QR codes, meshtags of any color on any background can be scanned. > There just needs to be enough contrast between the meshtag and its > background, and the background must be a solid color.

qr codes can be any color, just need to have enough contrast, also depending on the redundancy level of it you can actually omit a significant fraction of the qr code and still have it scan

<comment> ryan-c You can take it up to 11 like this: [http://files.rya.nc/qr.png](http://files.rya.nc/qr.png)

<comment><USER20> I don't see anything on your blog about how that QR code can possibly work (I just scanned it, it does work, but my eyes tell me that's impossible)

You have any background on how that QR was constructed?

<comment> ryan-c The very short explanation:

* Split source image into red, green, and blue channels

* Run through the halftone qr generator[0]

* Recombine resulting QR codes into an RGB image

* Average combined QR codes with the source image

I'll probably post an article walking through the process using imagemagick some time next in August.

0\. [http://vecg.cs.ucl.ac.uk/Projects/SmartGeometry/halftone_QR/...](http://vecg.cs.ucl.ac.uk/Projects/SmartGeometry/halftone_QR/halftoneQR_sigga13.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Damn, whole lot of hate in these comments. Chill out guys, nobody's trying to kill QR codes here.

samfpetersen, you made a cool thing. Expiration of small tags is an interesting way to solve the landgrab problem. I think these would be _fun_ to use and I hope I see some around.

<comment><USER22> All the snarky and negative comments on anything that gets created here is really turning me off. Been using HN for a long time, but it might be time to move on.

<comment><USER23> OT On snarky and negative comments: you haven't seen habrahabr.ru, a site that fills the niche of HN for Russian speakers almost exactly and is sort of most respected here in tech. It has good articles and often publishes Russian translations of top HN items with about a week's delay. AND it feels like you're walking into a prison cell full of uncivilized criminals cursing at each other when you get to the comments.

The HN culture is very very good.

<comment><USER24> I agree, it's the best I've seen on the internet. Still, I wonder if it would do any good if the site admins would post some kind of civility reminder every month or so, to remind people what good conduct looks like - with examples.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I don't really get why I'd use a Meshtag over a QR code.

Pretty much everyone has a QR reader already, whereas this requires people to download a new app (for no real gain on their part either). It also requires them to have an internet connection, which for any thing other than a URL, is really not necessary.

The problem it says it's trying to solve, making them drawable, isn't really a problem at all. I've never wanted/needed to draw a QR code, that's what we have text for.

<comment><USER26> > I don't really get why I'd use a Meshtag over a QR code.

They look cooler. QR codes are obviously computer readable nonsense. Many have complained about how ugly QR codes are. This is a nicer looking alternative.

That said, your criticisms are valid. Meshtags probably aren't going to replace QR codes, but they may inspire a nicer replacement.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> I think everyone here who's pointing out that this is equivalent to a link shortener is missing something: the majority of QR codes in existence right now... are encodings of link-shortener URLs.

<comment><USER28> There's a big difference between QR codes ("Quick Response") - which I agree are mostly encodings of links and shortened links - and Data Matrix encodings of generic data. Both _look_ like black and white squares, and can often be read by smartphones.

Either way, you make a valid point!

(As an aside, I don't know how many QR codes are out there, but for one of my products we're intending to print 10^8 data matrix codes this year, of which there'll be perhaps 1000 batches, i.e. only 1000 different codes.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> This is cool, though as said in the other comments, it's unfortunate that the readability of the codes are tied to the availability of the service, like a URL shortener, i.e., not very mesh.

Did you do much research onto the actual "serialization format" of the tags? Aesthetically they are nice, but I wonder how deep the rabbit hole goes for drawable-but-not-necessarily-human-readable dense formats, which is a slightly different utility function than regular written languages. I imagine there's some overlap with the psychology of memorizing passwords which are opaque semantically, but still need to be remembered.

</comment><comment><USER30> I much prefer QR Codes as there is nothing to buy and their embedded data makes them standalone. Meshtags seem more like a graphical version of bitly or tinyurl.

</comment><comment><USER31> I think a lot of people are missing the point here.

What we basically have is a pictograph URL shortener. This may be complex from the computer side, but from a human side, this could be vastly simpler.

E.g: \- Draw a Triforce and go to Nintendos Zelda page. \- Draw a big triangle, with a line across the top to make a mountain, and go to some page about Everest or something.

And since it's the segments that matter, the possibilities are endless, spokes of a bike wheel, a pizza, pacman, airplane. It also easier to remember than a url, and if your memory is a bit fuzzy, just start drawing and you can figure out if it looks funny.

Good job Sam!

</comment><comment><USER32> hey, this is wonderful. it would be great if street painters adopted this to communicate with their audience. i would love to go into a tunnels with cool street paintings and scan these signs and get access to playlists, videos and messages that the painter wants us to visit. these cool triangles could become symbols of an underground movement if promoted in these communities.

<comment><USER33> Except that the meshtags won't last forever by design.

<comment><USER32> "Small meshtags have lifespans that depend on their complexity. A simple tag might only last for a week, while a more complex one might last for 6 months or a year. Very complex tags will never expire. This prevents the simple tags from being used up." So the mantra is, i guess, make it complex. Also leave it to the imagination of a street painter, i am sure they will make art out of it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> So what happens when somebody just defaces one and draws a couple of extra lines?

<comment><USER35> You get a nice phishing attack :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> As a tag system, this doesn't seem to have any advantages compared to QR codes, and it has several disadvantages (central authority, possible conflict, only encodes the key rather than the direct value).

However, this system does have an advantage for other purposes: those where the ability to reproduce it from memory is important. QR codes aren't memorizable; meshtags seem more so. Consider how many people prefer Android swipe-unlock patterns rather than PINs or passwords. Many people have good spatial memories, much more so than their memory for arbitrary strings. You could use this in cases where the property of being able to reproduce this from memory is important. Figure out how many bits of entropy this can represent, create and document a perfect 1:1 mapping between meshtags and an encoding, and target use cases QR codes can't handle.

For that matter, how robust is this against minor errors, and how high- resolution can you make it and still reliably resolve it? Can you pack this more densely than a QR code and still reliably read it? If so, you've got something particularly interesting.

</comment><comment><USER37> I've never in my life wanted to draw a bar code or QR.. Also I can hand-write a URL which both a human and OCR can read. So this all seems pointless.. outside of it possibly being a fun exercise to par take in.

</comment><comment><USER38> I love this!

For it to be compelling, it needs to be readable in a bunch of iOS / Android barcode scanners, though. Any plans there?

<comment><AUTHOR> That would be cool; they'd have to interact with the meshtag database in order to retrieve the data. I can dream though!

<comment><USER38> You should get in touch, offer to provide code and cut them some stock options. It would help solve the big question of uptake for an investor.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kW39Mt5kscQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kW39Mt5kscQ)

Another interesting alternative. Prettier than QR and IMO meshtag.

</comment><comment><USER40> After playing with your app for a while, I have following feedback: 1\. It could be some kind of niche fun, for example in case of urban/alternate/augmented reality games. 2\. Drawing properly recognized tags requires significant skill - about 30% of my drawings weren't recognized at all. 3\. Some kind of scanning-progress-bar or other indicator wold be helpful for impatient users :) Taking into account points 2 and 3, it would be beneficial to improve users onboarding if you think about mass adoption.

</comment><comment><USER41> This is really clever, and solves a lot of the problems with QR codes. Not just the hand-drawable-ness, these also look a lot better aesthetically.

<comment><USER42> It adds one huge problem -- there is no central authority I need to rely on for QR codes. My QR codes can't get sold out from under me to someone with more money, as these can.

<comment><USER43> That's the same disadvantage with a URL. If you just wrote "whatever.com" the main problem is that you probably don't want to go to whatever.com, but some child page. But the main reason the child page isn't it's own site (like "whatever-child.com") is because you'd have to buy a new domain or go through some registration mechanism to make it act like that.

But if you're willing to pay and register, why wouldn't you just write the URL of the site you paid for and registered? Not only is it writable, but it's human readable and type-able, too...

So the big advantage is that it's probably cheaper, (and maybe splashy and fun.) And unless these get popular, nobody is going to know what it is, so you have to write "Go to www.meshtag.com and download meshtag so that you can see our message!" Which is a bit like hiding your product in someone else's store.

(But that's probably why I'm an unimaginative cynical clod.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> As many have already discussed that this is akin to a URL shortener, and not stand alone (like QR is ), I have a different question.

Your app has in-app-purchases. Please provide examples how you are monetizing this?

Also, I notice you use a G+ identity to tie all codes to, yet your pictures shows "Anonymous" as creator. Is that really anonymous, or fakenonymous?

<comment><AUTHOR> As for monetization, I figured why the hell not. If somebody really wants to buy a simple meshtag that they can memorize and reuse (maybe it has their contact info), I'm not gonna stop them :). This isn't really a moneymaking scheme, this is a side project and my first Android/iOS app.

As for anonymity, it's anonymous to other users. If you deselect the anonymous checkbox when editing the tag, other users will see your name, and that's it

<comment><USER44> Please don't think I'm criticizing on your choice of monetization. Making money to continue doing what you like is a pretty big cornerstone here at HN :)

I was more curious what you were charging for.

Also, you're being discussed over on [https://www.reddit.com/r/occult/comments/3esa6n/drawable_alt...](https://www.reddit.com/r/occult/comments/3esa6n/drawable_alternative_to_qr_codes_sigil/)

You really hit it with triangles / sigils and the occult. Perhaps a pivot? Too small a market?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> So this is a program that can analyze an image for a structured drawing, encode it as a unique bit-stream, and translate that bit-stream into a URL.

I can very easily draw "[https://goo.gl/e0aeeD"](https://goo.gl/e0aeeD") on a chalkboard. Android users could use Google Goggles to grab the text without typing it in, and paste the URL into Chrome. If I had to, I could leave off the "[https://"](https://") part, and it could still work.

I get how it's easier to process the triangle-based image into a usable bit- stream than it is to do OCR, but how does that make things easier for the user?

</comment><comment><USER46> There was a Media Lab project that did something similar 2 years ago -- and is open source [https://github.com/JeremyRubin/Graffiti- codes](https://github.com/JeremyRubin/Graffiti-codes)

</comment><comment><USER47> So, even though this is kind of fake (it's more like a hand-drawn UPC barcode alternative), a _real_ hand-drawn QR-code alternative is something I've been thinking about doing for a while. In particular, I was thinking that matrix parity codes like the ones schoen at the EFF discovered in printer dots [https://w2.eff.org/Privacy/printers/docucolor/](https://w2.eff.org/Privacy/printers/docucolor/) would be an ECC that's practical to compute by hand, and then you could draw ECC-correctable matrix barcodes with a pencil.

Has anybody done this?

</comment><comment><USER48> Although I agree that this doesn't seem like the most useful idea, I do think it is really cool and it sounds like some interesting image processing.

To the OP, how did you come up with the idea? Is the algorithm from image to URL complicated?

</comment><comment><USER49> I really like this - I think it would be an awesome way for people in cities to leave ephemeral easter eggs with chalk on a brick wall, for instance. Just because a lot of folks don't see the business value or purely technical use doesn't mean it's not awesome.

Or maybe make a meshtag scavenger hunt, with each tag leading to the next clue. Sure, you could do it with a QR code, but these look cooler, are ephemeral by nature, and have more of a fun feel to them.

The image processing code was probably really fun to write, too. Kudos on a really awesome project.

</comment><comment><USER50> A problem I see with this is recognition. A QR code can be printed onto a piece of paper with no further information attached, and even some less-techy people will know what to do with it, because it's clearly a QR code. These drawings are pretty ambiguous, and unless it catches on with the less-techy crowd you'd have to add an attached note "Go download the Meshtag app to read this!", which would probably not happen too often.

They are however, much prettier than regular QR codes. :)

</comment><comment><USER51> Has anyone tried anything like this, but instead of posting the information associated with the tag in a private database, to post that info into the Bitcoin Blockchain?

</comment><comment><USER52> Doesn't it look like a replacement for the (dead) Microsoft Tag [1] ?

[1] [https://tag.microsoft.com](https://tag.microsoft.com)

</comment><comment><USER53> I think this is a great idea. I'm surprised to see so many negative feedback. To me the great thing about it compared to a QR code is that you can draw it by hand which also means you can cheaply make it as big as you need it.

The aspect that it depends on a central service make it less dependable than an QR code and I'm wondering if this could be fixed. Still, I think it's a really interesting idea.

</comment><comment><USER54> QR codes and such I imagine will fade as more applications support live OCR. Its only a matter of time before phones will ship with the native app using text detection to make hyperlinks clickable from the camera app. There's already text grabber and the like on iOS/Android. This seems like a stop-gap. It's cool but I just can't see using it.

</comment><comment><USER55>
      "A meshtag is a "drawable barcode" that you can create
       by drawing straight line segments at 6 different angles."

I count only three angles. The entire grid can be constructed via a series of parallel lines extending infinintely: one horizontal, one diagonal left, one diagonal right. There aren't any other angles.

<comment><AUTHOR> This is what I need you guys for!

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> This could be useful for dead-drop style communications. Should be easier for two people to memorize how to draw a reasonably complex shape than an arbitrary string of bits, numbers, or letters. If you can do that there's no risk of leaking the drop location: just draw it, scan it to check the drop, then destroy the drawing.

<comment><USER57> If the system was namespaced, it'd be even better -- essentially make Meshtag just the translation layer (drawing to id), and then pass that identifier into any backend you like.

</comment></comment><comment><USER58> I would only be interested in the retrieval of the raw data of a meshtag. It's of course smaller than the shortened url. I always wanted to make a simple method to mark my handwritten notes, scan them, then the scanned pages "organize themselves" by the hand drawn tag (in this case meshtag) at the top right corner.

</comment><comment><USER59> Or you can colour a QR in by hand (I did this to test the concept of storing 128bit salts on custom credit cards). [http://imgur.com/ClCeHAj](http://imgur.com/ClCeHAj)

</comment><comment><USER60> I mean this honestly. Do people actually even use QR codes?

Filling up your phone with a bunch of hi-res pictures of bar codes, not to mention having to load: 1\. QR code app 2\. camera app 3\. browser app

These things are 100% in the gimmick column in my life.

<comment><USER61> Well, it kinda does show that you've never used QR codes, otherwise you'd know that all of this is pretty much handled by the app. Which means:

No need to store the hi-res pictures of bar codes; no need to load up camera ap, as that's handled by the QR code app; no need to load up the browser, since a small embedded one appears to open the link, as a rule.

That said, yeah, it's 100% a gimmick. I have only seen one or two problems for which QR codes really made sense, and none of them included scanning a URL with your phone.

<comment><USER60> Guilty as charged!

</comment></comment></comment><comment> d-crane Personally, I think this really cool and hope it sticks around for awhile. If I saw meshtag graffiti, I would absolutely scan it, and that's the kind of use that's exciting to me. Awesome stuff!

</comment><comment><USER62> How many bits can it encode? I bet not many. And I bet it is far easier to just write down two or three characters like "Am3" or "IX8" and use OCR to extract the information.

</comment><comment><USER63> I think it's a mix of QR code plus Microsoft Tag. Tag suffers from the problem of requiring an internet connection but they do provide stats on how many people scanned the tag.

</comment><comment><USER64> This is really neat! It does seem like it is much more prone to error than QR codes, though. Would a meshtag that is rotated 120 degrees represent the same one or a different one?

<comment><AUTHOR> Same one!

</comment></comment><comment><USER65> Very novel, but I feel like its fundamentally flawed; for most people it would easier to remember a URL than it would be to remember a 'meshtag'.

</comment><comment><USER66> I still remember how this went.

Connect the dots… la, la, la-la.

[http://i.imgur.com/FZrXlee.png](http://i.imgur.com/FZrXlee.png)

</comment><comment><USER67> Funny, not long ago I created a writing system that worked on the same principle. It proved a bit too unwieldy for writing but it was a fun exercise.

<comment><USER68> Have you heard of elian script? This reminds me a bit of it. Also, elian script is fairly easy to write once you get the hang of it, if you were very good at it it could be faster than the latin alphabet, as it takes less movements per character.

<comment><USER67> Just looked it up. Interesting. Thanks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER69> Does it bother anyone else that the screenshot shows an hexagon that doesn't match the angle of the triangles?

</comment><comment><USER70> Methinks you overestimate the ability of people to draw proportionally. Or at all. :)

</comment><comment><USER71> Why does the app require a Google+ login? What needs verification?

<comment><AUTHOR> I used Google+ so that you wouldn't need to create a user id / password. Each tag that you create is "owned" by you, and you probably wouldn't want other people to edit it (though there is an option to "unlock" a tag so that they can). It doesn't user your Google+ info, it's just for verification

<comment><USER72> For creation and updating, I can see why you would want to authenticate and authorize users, but there should should still be a way to have the app go into a read only state if all I want to do is scan.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER73> As people have pointed out, this tag is reliant on the service operating. What about using Bitcoin's blockchain to store URLs/bytes? Make the tag a digest of a public key. Physical and digital graffiti.

</comment><comment><USER74> Is there an API and intents for this?

</comment><comment><USER75> This is a great idea!

</comment><comment><USER76> One word: graffiti.

</comment><comment><USER77> f __k the haters. its a cool idea.</comment>


YouTube Accounts Of Famous Singers Hacked. Despacito video deleted. - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/gvarisco/status/983628167872000001 <comment><USER2> Many other VEVO channels are affected as well, I believe a major issue with credentials (password reuse?) across VEVO.

<comment><USER3> There is a N:N relationship between Google Accounts and YouTube channels. A channel can have more than one manager and a manager can manage more than one channel. It's possible that someone at Vevo has access to many of the channels, and just their one google account password was compromised.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Despacito Video no longer available: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kJQP7kiw5Fk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kJQP7kiw5Fk)

<comment><USER4> I just told my 7 year-old son hackers deleted the Despacito video (he was in my office when I saw this story). Without skipping a beat, he said "did they hack and delete Justin Bieber, too? Please, please, let it be so!"

<comment><USER5> Did he create that belief by himself or was it thrusted by you ?

<comment><USER6> What child (or adult, for that matter) would ever have an honest belief about a person they hadn't met? Humans are mirror images of their environment, adults are just better at passing it off as original thought.

Why do you think religion is so conveniently regional? It just so happens that people born in a Protestant family believe Luther was right, and people in the Middle East just happen to mostly believe in the teachings of Muhammad? Possible, but the odds are slim.

I know you were being rhetorical, but just say that. "He believes that because of his environment." Great, what else is new?

(Ps: the vapid ire for Justin Bieder is broadly dispersed. It's quite likely they picked it up from pop culture. Patting each other on the back for irrationally hating this guy is the saddest fad of the decade, and adults really should know better. But there you go.)

<comment><USER7> There was a way to phrase this that doesn't make believers feel nearly as unwelcome on HN. Please try to find it next time.

<comment><USER8> Is that official HN policy? I understand the desire to not make people feel unwelcome, and it is fairly rare that a conversation about technology needs to bring in religion. However, one could argue that challenging beliefs is a part of HN culture as well.

I admit I'm not unbiased in this regard. There's a part of me that respects religion and there's a part of me that feels it's the one of the worst things in the world. There's a part of me that does want to give people a hard time for holding beliefs that I consider to be insane, and there's a part of me that has better things to do with his time and isn't sure he could offer anything practically better than what he would tear down.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I wonder how they did it. If they made a video how it was done it would be awesome

<comment><USER10> And put it on YouTube... That would be epic

<comment><USER11> And get demonetized!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This seems more like a bug on VEVO side, since if it was a bug in YouTube, it would surely qualify for a bounty

</comment><comment><USER13> Damn it..Youtube has already restored the videos. That's unfair. This proves that once you give them the data, it's not your's anymore to control.

<comment><USER14> Fucking hell. Unfair? It's _unfair_ for YouTube to restore damage done to stolen and defaced accounts? Yeah, ok.

Anyway, you're assuming that YouTube went rouge restored the videos completely without input of the original uploader instead of the rightful account holder taking back control over the account? Why jump to that conclusion?

If your issue is with Youtube not deleting videos from their server, it's entirely in the account holder's interest for deleted videos to go to Purgatory for a period of time. YouTube HAS to plan for the case of hacks and mistakes because their users are humans. A very small minority will complain about "yar, yar, they said 'delete'" but the vast majority would say "I'm so glad YouTube undid the damage."

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Not all heroes wear capes ;)</comment>


When Tomatoes Were Blamed for Witchcraft and Werewolves - <AUTHOR> http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/when-tomatoes-were-blamed-for-witchcraft-and-werewolves <comment><USER2> > combined death toll could have been as high as 500,000

Makes me wonder if maybe there really were witches, and we were just successful in wiping them all out. I kid.. I kid..

<comment><USER3> Makes me wonder if there really were witches, and they were the ones doing the witch hunting, using their inside knowledge to illustrate false plots.

Hiding in obvious sight, etc etc.

<comment><USER4> The show Salem on Netflix is centered around this exact point.

<comment><USER2> Pound me the witch drums

The witch drums

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Tomacco?</comment>


The Pi You Know Is A Lie - <AUTHOR> http://www.scribd.com/vacuum?url=http://www.math.utah.edu/~palais/pi.pdf

<comment><USER2> Is scribd an improvement for windows users or something? It seems that for most people here it's an anoyance and a worse user experience than just linking to the pdf. Does it solve some problem I'm missing?

edit: Try zooming all the way in. You're in for some hideously unreadable fuzzy font rendering... why oh why.

<comment><USER3> It does not seem to improve matters on my Ubuntu, either.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I independently 'discovered' this a few years back, basically on the grounds that there are infinitely many shapes with constant diameter but only one (the circle) with constant radius. It stands to reason that the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter contains a spurious factor of 2; it must be that the ratio of circumference to _radius_ is the more fundamental quantity.

This discovery was almost enough to make me want to memorize an embarrassing number of digits of 2π; 6.28 is really pathetic. (What's embarrassing, you say? Try 3.141592653589793238462643383279502884197169399...)

<comment><USER5> How are you defining diameter? <http://mathworld.wolfram.com/Diameter.html> only defines it for circular and spherical objects.

<comment><USER4> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curve_of_constant_width>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> PDF: <http://www.math.utah.edu/~palais/pi.pdf>

<comment><AUTHOR> That's what I entered, but it came out on Scribd!

<comment><USER7> <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=179721>

<comment><USER8> I dislike the current system because it attributes a violation of copyright to the submitter that they're not actually responsible for. In practice it's not a real issue, it's just kind of tacky.

It would be better if all submitted PDFs were turned into Scribd documents, but each user had a profile option for whether to change their PDF links to point to the Scribd doc or to leave it pointing to the original download.

<comment><USER9> or they might just add a hyperlinked "[pdf]" or "[scribd]" _after_ the original link, pointing to scribdified version.

internets ignoring my choice of pdf viewer -- that sure feels wrong.

oh well, greasemonkey to rescue.

<comment><USER10> Already done: <http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/25039>

<comment><USER9> my version (<http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/26925>) was there 1 minute before that :)

<comment><USER10> Yeah, I just tacked it on to my blacklist, which I'm sure not everyone wants.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> That's interesting.

I'm not trying to hijack the thread here, but the non-standard scrolling in Scribd bugs me. When I use two-finger drag on the macbook pro to scroll, scribd just doesn't move like a normal page.

<comment><USER12> Yes! Bothered me as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Yeah man. I love this paper. All of the equations look so much prettier without 2 in front of pi everywhere.

</comment><comment><USER12> Volume of the n-ball?

Generally, what I would consider the defining equation for pi. Has no factor of 2?

V_n = pi^(n/2) _R^n / Gamma(n/2+1) = C_n_ R^n

C_n = pi^k/k! for even n=2k

C_n = 2^(k+1) _k!_ pi^k / (2k+1)! for odd n=2k+1

Of course we could just change the definition of gamma, but I prefer gamma as an extension of factorial.

</comment><comment><USER14> Indiana once tried to pass a law saying pi actually equals 3.2

<http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a3_341.html>

</comment><comment><USER15> Almost as bad as negatively charged electrons.

</comment><comment><USER16> I don't see why this is such a big deal. Scaling by a factor of 2 doesn't make any of the math lose it's beauty. The underlying math is still the same. Calling 30 minutes "an hour" doesn't make time go faster. It's all semantics, really.

Anyway, pi is so engrained in our mathematics that the costs of switching would surely be higher than any superficial, aesthetic benefits.

<comment><USER17> The author knows this, and was making a merely aesthetic point which you seem to have sucked all the fun out of.

<comment><USER18> I think the aesthetics are important. You can see further when they are better.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Holy... Eliezer Yudkowsky? Why, hello...!

<comment><USER20> Wowsers, that's a good point. I didn't know he's on YC, that's great.

<comment><AUTHOR> Aw, shucks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> From the article: The proper value, which does deserve all of the reverence and adulation bestowed upon the current imposter, is the number now unfortunately known as 2pi.

Does this mean we can have 2pi day on Jun 28?</comment>


Show HN: PHP Plumber – the base layer of a web app with drop-in components - <AUTHOR> http://phpplumber.12startups.co/

<comment><USER2> I'm always sceptical of so-called "drop-in things". PHP Plumber is supposed to contain "Drop-in create, read, update and delete functions" \-- what is that even supposed to mean?

But the bigger issue for me is that there is practically no license information. It's supposed to be built ontop of Laraval, but what does a buyer actually get? Can I use one license for all my projects? Do I need to buy it for each project? Is it anually? What about use in non-commercial projects? Am I required to put a credits link somewhere?

Considering I get something similar by just slapping Laravel + a few bundles + Bootstrap together, I don't think this startup idea could fly, much less could substain a business for a longer period of time (and __if __I bought into it, I certainly wouldn 't support to be dropped a year later because you go out of business).</comment>


Ask: Small PC to Build Test-Cluster at Home? - <AUTHOR> Hello HN.
I would love to build a test cluster as a playground for OpenStack, Docker, Kubernetes, you name it.
Anyone out there with a nice idea which hardware to use? IntelNuc? Zotac AIO? Anyone with experience out there? <comment><USER2> I recently needed a server so I went to the local reuse center which offers refurbished machines that are lightly used -- ex. Dell and HP machines that were leased to dentist's offices, bank tellers, users like that. I spent $200 on a i5 Haswell machine.

Some of the machines were fairly compact desktop machines, and I liked that, but I wound up with a large desktop machine because I'd have room for expansion. (Maybe get a 10-series graphics card for media transcoding when they become available again.)

Small machines have more heat and heat creates more problems. I have owned two Mac Minis and they both have burned up hard drives at a high rate. It runs maybe 10 to 15 centigrade hotter than a typical desktop machine. The Mac Mini has a great design for cooling that stays clean, but I've had laptops and other machines in my house get seriously obstructed with dust.

I would watch out for NUC, Celerons, and other low-end parts from Intel, both in the sense of bad performance, but also because features are missing that matter for you. (For instance, you want the best virtualization support you can get)

<comment><AUTHOR> buying used machines is a good hint. Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I built a six node raspberry pi cluster as a project during the holiday break. I used the general instructions Scott Hanselman posted on his blog.

[https://www.hanselman.com/blog/HowToBuildAKubernetesClusterW...](https://www.hanselman.com/blog/HowToBuildAKubernetesClusterWithARMRaspberryPiThenRunNETCoreOnOpenFaas.aspx)

<comment><AUTHOR> already thought about this option, but in the end it isn't very flexible.

<comment><USER3> If I can ask. What flexibility are you lok8ng for that the PI cluster doesn't have. I boot mine using PXE and it runs most everything imaginable in the modern linux stack. Apache, docker, Kubernetes...

<comment><AUTHOR> Testing OpenStack would be hard :-)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Hacker League - Bringing together hackers with hackathons - <AUTHOR> http://hackerleague.com/

<comment><USER2> Sweet idea! I'd love it if this becomes widely used, and I can keep track of nearby hackathons more easily than the haphazard mailing-list/invite method of today.</comment>


The Web We Have to Save - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/matter/the-web-we-have-to-save-2eb1fe15a426 <comment><USER2> I enjoyed reading this. It was throught-provoking, and managed to find words for feelings I hadn't realized I had.

      But the Stream, mobile applications, and moving images:
      They all show a departure from a books-internet
      toward a television-internet.

" _books-internet_ " vs " _television-internet_ ": I agree in many ways, and yet I find myself reading and consuming more blogs now than I did a decade ago. Still, though, I tend to read them more when they pop up on my "stream" (well, mainly HN ;)) rather than going directly to various people's blogs.

<comment><USER3> It seems like a classic economies of scale problem. You want an aggregator to be exposed to the best stuff, but the guardian at that gate is a moneyed interest.

<comment><USER4> There's a solution to this. Know that the best stuff will stay written longer than you will remain a reader, and expect that the stuff you read will mention it eventually.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Great article. Some people may think this is only a problem in certain countries. Not true.

Here are some observations I have made. I could not possibly convince you and don't have time. But please do not delete or downvote my comment to the point of censure.

* Surveillance and criminalization of non-permitted subjects occurs in many countries including the US.

* Governments are really just an official version of organized crime.

* Google, Amazon, Reddit, Facebook, Amazon are examples of technopolies.

* Capitalistic and communistic systems primary problem is generally unrecognized and it is overcentralization.

* Technology means applying what we know to create structures that solve problems and this applies to overcentralization, organized crime, etc.

* the future of the internet is ethereum, aether, swarm, ipfs, bitcoin, ndn, etc.

* these technologies for decentralization together with better standards and adoption of metalanguages for information exchange, and integration of real social and physical sciences into economics, can overcome these problems.

* unenhanced humanity 1.0 will never catch up with technology. Within 5-10 years, integration with artificial superintelligence will be necessary to maintain any relevance.

* ultimately the best solutions to our problems will be provided for unenhanced humans to pacify their activities in large human zoos.

</comment><comment><USER6> Very Long, but at the same time, fascinating and thought provoking. The world is indeed heading in worrying ways, toward simplification and control, something we in the tech community must work to stop, especially when these things are happening in our domain.

</comment><comment><USER7> If data costs and speeds weren't an issue, would we be aided by having a simple and secure web server on every mobile device? I know that's a big if, but if apps helped people create static content on their device that was optionally mirrored when they were unavailable, this could be an interesting shift?

</comment><comment><USER8> Morlocks and Eloi discussion again:

the Eloi have their pre-digested clickbait content fed to them in a stream of thought-free celebrity drivel.

The Morlocks spend their time reading and writing text, some of it code.

</comment><comment><USER9> But how do we save that web? I want to - can't think of how but want to help.

<comment><USER10> The fine people at IndieWebCamp[0] are proposing some nice solutions.

Basically, self hosting. But with an attitude :-)

[0] [http://indiewebcamp.com/Getting_Started](http://indiewebcamp.com/Getting_Started)</comment></comment>


MIT mathematicians solve age-old spaghetti mystery - <AUTHOR> http://news.mit.edu/2018/mit-mathematicians-solve-age-old-spaghetti-mystery-0813 <comment><USER2> Odd, I saw that spaghetti phenomenon on smartereveryday just a few days ago, but it appears it was posted in 2014. Heh.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ADD7QlQoFFI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ADD7QlQoFFI)

Anyway, very cool.

</comment><comment> semi-extrinsic I don't get how this is an interesting result. When you are allowed to change the applied stress (not just simple bending), getting it to break into just two pieces is easy.

By holding the spaghetti with two fingers at each end and applying compression together with bending, i.e. making the spaghetti look kinda like a sine wave from bottom to bottom, I can break spaghettis into just two pieces with success rate well above 50%. And I have confirmed with simple bending of shorter spaghettis that it's not just because of a shorter effective length.

Here's a picture of five spaghettis broken into just two pieces, along with one unbroken for comparison:

[https://imgur.com/a/gOTiHG3](https://imgur.com/a/gOTiHG3)

Now I gotta explain to my wife why there are broken spaghettis.

<comment><USER3> is that actually spaghetti though? it looks like linguine ...

<comment><USER4> According to the article, the model doesn't apply to linguini, so I'm not surprised it doesn't always break into 3+ pieces.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Ah, cool! I also wonder if the twisting stress means that the noddle breaks before it is bent quite as far, which would also reduce the snap-back effect.

I also wonder if the twist-back breaks up the snap-back waves by redirecting their momentum.

</comment><comment><USER6> Fun fact: when a cylindrical shaped object fractures from a twisting stress it leaves 45 degree break patterns. Try it with a pencil.

<comment><USER7> Depends on the material. Brittle materials will. Ductile materials tend to break on a 90 degree plane - [https://goo.gl/images/QYMJmf](https://goo.gl/images/QYMJmf)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I guess I've never tried doing it one noodle at a time or something, cause breaking a bunch of them at once results in them broken in two. Maybe they prevent each other from snapping back enough to break again?

<comment><USER9> I've never bothered to break them - why would you want tiny bits of spaghetti? Also wouldn't noodles be something completely different - like when I think "noodles" I think of an Asian dish, not a plate of spaghetti.

<comment><USER10> It's called a "spaghetti noodle", like in the subheading of the article.

<comment><USER11> *in the US (but not necessarily in other English speaking countries)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> finally my code will be clean!

</comment><comment><USER13> Now if only someone could explain why toppled smokestacks break into three pieces, my life would be complete :-)

</comment><comment><USER14> I've been trying this all night, and I can't get any of them to break. Maybe I overcooked it.

</comment><comment><USER11> Hm, it's interesting that this was unsolved for so long, given that any pasta chef can teach you how to break spaghetti, fettucini, etc. in two by twisting while bending. Very odd.

</comment><comment><USER15> Not sure what the big deal is... this was solved back in 2005 in one of the top physics journals [https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.95...](https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.95.095505)

<comment><USER16> FTA:

"Feynman's kitchen experiment remained unresolved until 2005, when physicists from France pieced together a theory to describe the forces at work when spaghetti — and any long, thin rod — is bent. They found that when a stick is bent evenly from both ends, it will break near the center, where it is most curved. This initial break triggers a "snap-back" effect and a bending wave, or vibration, that further fractures the stick. Their theory, which won the 2006 Ig Nobel Prize, seemed to solve Feynman's puzzle. But a question remained: Could spaghetti ever be coerced to break in two?"</comment></comment>


Break Google's +1 Interwebs... Social Experiement, how many +1's are too many? - <AUTHOR> http://theplusonesite.com/

<comment><AUTHOR> How many places can Google's javascript implementation carry out to? What happens if someone gets 17,000,000 +1's?

</comment><comment><USER2> I do not understand the purpose of this.</comment>


Bird One Scooter – Pre-Order - <AUTHOR> https://shop.bird.co/pdp.html <comment><USER2> This is a weird offering for an individual purchase. Look at the unique features:

1\. Non folding stem: Adds durability for a rental, but the super quick fold is a huge part of the appeal of a scooter, because it means you can easily take it with you on the train, put it in the trunk of a car, or store it under your desk. If you didn't care about compactness, you'd probably buy an e-bike.

2\. Huge battery: Adds to the cost and weight, which makes it more annoying to carry. Great for a rental where Bird is paying per charge, but very few people need to ride 30 miles between charges, and for those that do, they'd probably rather have an e-bike that is faster and more stable.

<comment><USER3> I own a Xiaomi Mi m365 scooter that I use daily for commutes around downtown Denver and while it's lighter than this bird, it is by no means lightweight. It won't fit under a desk. It attracts funny looks if I bring it into a business or restaurant, and locking it up on the street is annoying and time- consuming. Even when it's folded and locked up, people try to steal it.

The Bird One marketing document doesn't really go into detail, but the huge battery and GPS functionality suggests to me that the expected approach for using these scooters is to park them on the street and leave them there. If they borrow the anti-theft functionality that you see in VanMoof bicycles, this scooter makes a lot of sense. You ride it around town. You charge it in your garage. You leave it on the street when you're done with it. If it's stolen you look up its GPS location and the police help you get it back. There's low urgency to charge it. If it breaks, they'll fix it for you. And if you don't have it with you, Bird comps your rental scooter.

That's a lot more compelling of an offering than just a "heavier, faster, longer-range" scooter.

<comment><USER4> >If it's stolen you look up its GPS location and the police help you get it back.

Do your police do that?

<comment><USER5> I want to know the answer to to this. Must be a nice place to live.

<comment><USER6> In the Netherlands the police definitely will not. Vanmoof has their own team to track down bikes and retrieve, but so far this seems more like a marketing stunt than actual service (they have a youtube channel "Van Moof Bike Hunters").

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I think one of the issue with people from silicon valley trying to make consumer products is the fact that it will always be too expensive for people outside of silicon valley.

When you live there you have a huge salary and the feeling that 1k is nothing, so selling a scooter for 1k is nothing, reality is that SV is a world of its own. That's complex product management issue in my opinion

<comment><USER8> True ..

I got a boosted board when I moved to San Francisco.

Well, reason number one is that the public transportation system is a joke in this city compared to the European cities I am used to.

The price still felt steep but I can afford an 1k skateboard with a tech salary. Especially if I can recoup part of its cost by avoiding lyft rides.

<comment><USER9> I've long contemplated a boosted board, but am hesitant to spend $1k on a skateboard that I can't use when it rains.

<comment><USER8> That's a valid concern.

I live 25 minutes from work by foot, 10 by boosted.

When it rains, I just don't bother using my boosted, I go for a nice walk instead.

It is possible to use it when it rains but :

\- most important point : your adherence will be way worse. With slick wheels, the board slides a lot when it rains. Your braking distance becomes way too long.

\- you also get your pants and shoes wet. Not as important as point one of course, but still annoying.

I live in SF so I don't expect to see any rain in the next 6 months.

<comment><USER10> > I live in SF so I don't expect to see any rain in the next 6 months.

Really? My perception of SF was that they get frequent rain is generally one of the wetter places in California

<comment><USER8> I don't know the city and its weather very well yet (I have been there for less than 2 years).

My perception is that the weather of the past few years has been widely out of what is expected in all the places I have resided in.

Last year SF has been very dry

[https://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2018/10/01/approaching- fro...](https://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2018/10/01/approaching-front-san- franciscos-long-dry-spell-rain/)

one article on the topic .. 159 _consecutive_ days (or maybe more) without rain.

Which was great for skating :)

The weather was not that hot either .. mostly between 13 and 21 °C.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> $1299??? Apart from the GPS and "Free Rides Package" and "Bird Service Center", what's the value added? I could just get a Segway Ninebot ES4 for less than $800?

<comment><USER12> The Bird Service center would be actually extremely useful. I bought a Xiaomi M365 (which is what Bird initially used) and dealing with tire punctures is really difficult. The first time I changed the tube, it took me a week to finish it. The bolts on the holding wheel are extremely tight from the factory and tire is such a tight fit too, I broke and bent multiple tire levers trying to get it on. I tried bringing it a couple local bike shops, but none of them would look at it.

<comment><USER13> There's your problem right there... Why make a scooter with tyres instead of solid rubber with suspension? That's what Segway did with the Ninebot, and their scooters are great. So confused right now.. Tyres are meant for the low end/cheap scooters, not the high end stuff.

<comment><USER14> Funnily enough, both m365 and Ninebot model you are referring to, are made by the same company.

<comment><USER13> I've heard this statement a lot, but does anyone have a source? First I heard they were manufactured by Ninebot, then I heard that they were just designed by Ninebot. The build quality is actually quite different between the different brands.

<comment><USER14> I have both models, I discovered it in the manufacturing label and was surprised as well.

Turns out Segway is owned by Ninebot and a large chunk of Ninebot is owned by Xiaomi.

In terms of build quality, both are pretty similar.

Here is the source:

[https://www.engadget.com/2015/04/15/segway-ninebot-xiaomi- ac...](https://www.engadget.com/2015/04/15/segway-ninebot-xiaomi-acquisition/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This feels like Bird trying to head-off people who might learn they can buy a bird scooter from impound for about $30, and a kit for about $10 to convert them back into normal scooters.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18604049](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18604049)

</comment><comment><USER14> Seems like a desperate attempt by Bird owing to the inherent flaws in the business model. The pricing is wrong, one could really buy good scooters at that price band. What were they smoking?

</comment><comment><USER16> Better option is to find cities impounding abandoned scooters and auctioning them off. They can be repurposed with a new IC from China.

<comment><USER17> I've been looking but haven't been able to find any. Has anyone had any luck?

<comment><USER18> For auctions [0]? Or hardware [1]?

[0] [https://www.usa.gov/state-surplus-sales](https://www.usa.gov/state- surplus-sales)

[1] [https://www.ebay.com/itm/Durable-Board-Dashboard- bluetooth-M...](https://www.ebay.com/itm/Durable-Board-Dashboard-bluetooth- Module-Part-for-Xiaomi-MIJIA-M365-BIRD-Scooter/293025080088)

<comment><USER17> For scooters themselves. None of the auctions I've been to physically or online have had any, in a major Northeast metropolitan area.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I wonder how that works in practice. The scooter looks like a Bird scooter and is branded with Bird logos. If you leave it anywhere, won't people take it and try to ride it?

<comment><USER20> Yes. My friend has the same Xiaomi Mi scooter that Bird uses, and we're in a busy Bird market. He usually parks it within line of sight and often has to pester riders to quit trying to ride it away. In one case, a Bird charger took it (assuming it was broken) and he had to trace it back via a GPS tracker he installed.

Even though it's very obvious it's not a Bird (no labeling, doesn't have the large box on the handlebars, doesn't show up on Bird's map) people assume its a Bird scooter anyway and start fiddling with the controls.

Now he U-bolts it to bike stands, and now riders leave it alone in confusion.

<comment><USER21> The Xiaomi is small enough to take indoors. Why not do that?

<comment><USER10> It might not be easy to take it into all indoor places, like tight restaurants, bars, grocery stores, etc

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Interesting change in their business model. Wasn't the initial goal of on- demand scooter companies to give people the convenience of renting without the hassle of owning?

What's the benefit of buying this from Bird vs any other scooter mfg? Unless, this is some sort of rev share where they can let you rent in their network and make money.

</comment><comment><USER23> $1300? What the fuck! The birds in SF are just the Xiaomi scooter which costs $450. [https://www.amazon.com/Xiaomi-Electric-Long-range-Fold-n- Car...](https://www.amazon.com/Xiaomi-Electric-Long-range-Fold-n-Carry-Ultra- Lightweight/dp/B076KKX4BC)

<comment><USER23> OK, so it's got double the battery and weighs 10lbs more.

<comment><USER24> It's also not foldable

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I'm sorry but at 1.3K i was expecting a bit more, or maybe i'm just off but that price looks high to me.

<comment><USER26> That price is high. If you go to Alibaba or Aliexpress you can find the same scooters for $400-500 or if you buy them bulk around $250-$300

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> This seems like a rip-off, and a pretty high-risk buy given how new Bird is to hardware...

With a quick Google search, you can find the same Segway scooter that many of the scooter companies (including Bird) have used for around $500, new.

</comment><comment><USER28> You can get a street legal new Honda Ruckus or Yamaha Zuma 50cc for ~2500. 115mpg, no motorcycle license required, 100+ mile range, and no charging. This is a tough purchase price, when you can order direct from amazon or Alibaba for at least 50% lower.

<comment><USER29> Do they stink worse than a bus, leaving an oily trail of smoke?

I can't understand why petrol mopeds are still sold.

<comment><USER28> In the US, those two brands make high quality products that use a 4 stroke motor, so no oil mixing. They are quite popular around college campuses and do not smell.

<comment><USER30> Do they sound like a bunch of angry bees?

<comment><USER31> No, they aren't 2-stroke, they're 4-stroke. They sound similar to a little 250cc roadbike - quiet and puttering.

<comment><USER30> Depends on the muffler system more than the engine. Large 4-stroke engines can be louder than helicopters.

I'm just curious because often the smaller the engine, the noisier it is.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> It says "Free Rides Package" and "Bird Service Center", but there's zero detail on what either of these means. Anyone know? It feels like those might a decent portion of why the price is so high, but can't say.

<comment><USER33> From [https://shop.bird.co/](https://shop.bird.co/):

"Bird One owners get access to additional rides on our dockless shared network in 100+ cities worldwide—so even if you're away, you're never without Bird." [They mention "20 free rides" but don't say if that's per month, per year, or a one-off with the purchase.]

"Bird Service Centers offer expert vehicle care and added peace of mind." [No word yet on location or what sort of care is included.]

The Verge has this on the service centers/anti-theft:

"If your scooter breaks down, VanderZanden said you can bring it (or mail it) to one of Bird's service centers, located in North America and Europe. If the scooter is stolen, Bird's "bird hunter" network of freelancers may be able to track it down and find it."

[https://www.theverge.com/2019/5/8/18535698/bird-one- electric...](https://www.theverge.com/2019/5/8/18535698/bird-one-electric- scooter-ride-share-own-price)

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> This is too expensive for what I need to commute to work and back. Any other recommendations for electric bikes/scooters/boards?

<comment><AUTHOR> Before the scooters and e-bikes hit Atlanta, I was very close to purchasing a Van Moof. A friend of mine has one here and says it's one of the best purchases he's made. [https://www.vanmoof.com/en_us/electrified-s2-x2](https://www.vanmoof.com/en_us/electrified-s2-x2)

Then Bird, Lime, Lyft and Jump all appeared. There's always several Jump bikes outside of my place, which negates the need for my own bike.

EDIT: Just realized that this is also probably out of your budget. Going to leave it for anyone else that's interested though.

<comment><USER34> The option to "subscribe" is enticing! $25 a month is pretty good if using daily.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> I don't see how "Uber scale" scooter rental is viable long-term. Interestingly, this appears to show bird acknowledges it at some level.

Unlike cars, the purchase and maintenance cost of scooters is minimal. And you don't need a license or insurance. The only reason to rent one is lack of scooter parking or if you're visiting. Eventually society will catch up and scooter rental will be like bike or car rental. A viable business, but not nearly the scale of rideshare.

You only need to look at how successful Jump bikes are vs scooter rental to see where this is going. I've already seen many people around town that were driven to buy their own scooter after trying out the rentals. It's just one big advertisment for buying your own scooter.

Rental will still exist, but I expect the market to shrink, not grow, in the cities that already have rentals available. The barrier to buying your own is too low to make this a viable SV style business

</comment><comment><USER36> Everyone is talking about the high price, but they should be talking about the bigger offense — Electric Rose.

We're going to look back at everything "consumer electronics pink" in a few years and cringe. I'm surprised Bird is willing to let their marketing team further complicate their brand for the sake of short term sales.

<comment><USER37> what's wrong with having a pink color option?

<comment><USER36> It looks bad. Especially after a few months of being abused or the first rainy day. Same problem with the white Birds in their current fleet. There's nothing wrong with pink, but it makes more sense for a Google Home Mini than a mode of transportation. Bird selected pink because it's an "in" color. The product is going to outlive the color trend, which will result in further branding confusion in the future.

See Jump for effective use of color. Take note that they only use one…

<comment><USER37> pink is not a trendy color... pink has been a fairly common color for as long as people have been making multiple colors of things. it's the "female" color.

white / pink stuff does get dirtier more easily than black. it just requires you to care for your things and keep them clean and don't abuse them.

next you suggest we should make all shoes in a single color?

<comment><USER36> It definitely is trendy – [https://www.pantone.com/color-intelligence/color- of-the-year...](https://www.pantone.com/color-intelligence/color-of-the- year/color-of-the-year-2019)

There are other reasons, outside of complicating branding, to stick to one color: [https://blog.bolt.io/sonos-x- hay-8fb9e96fcc72](https://blog.bolt.io/sonos-x-hay-8fb9e96fcc72).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> In case you missed it, see also this very well researched LA Times article from a few days ago:

"Can Bird build a better scooter before it runs out of cash?"

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19835491](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19835491)

</comment><comment><USER39> Or if you're a hacker you can buy one at auction for almost nothing.

[https://hackaday.com/2018/12/07/liberating-birds-for-a- cheap...](https://hackaday.com/2018/12/07/liberating-birds-for-a-cheap- electric-scooter/)

</comment><comment><USER40> There are additional details on the home page of their shop [https://shop.bird.co/index.html](https://shop.bird.co/index.html)

The "free ride program" details:

20 FREE RIDES • Up to $5/ride on shared Birds • $100 value

</comment><comment><USER41> Boosted is launching a scooter next week too: [https://boostedboards.com/coming- soon/scooter/](https://boostedboards.com/coming-soon/scooter/)

</comment><comment><USER42> I honestly fail to see the appeal of this as opposed to say Solowheel Glide 3 for last mile commuters. Doesn't fold, so forget folding it under the seat of the bus/train/etc. What's the point?

</comment><comment><USER43> Is this a joke ?

</comment><comment><USER44> Is Bird getting ready for an IPO? Why are they targeting the consumer directly instead of the rents market they are supposed to focus on?

</comment><comment><USER45> Phase 1 - give scooters away basically for free Phase 2 - sell same scooters for 1300USD

This is a business strategy that only works with heroin.

</comment><comment><USER46> We have Segways all over the campus where I'm at. We used to have Lime and Bird's but the security concerns nixed that.

</comment><comment><USER47> They missed out by not calling it Birb.

</comment><comment><USER48> What does "Free Rides Package" mean? Do I need to pay to use my own scooter?

</comment><comment><USER49> The price is a bit high for my taste, but having an onboard GPS tracker is nice.

</comment><comment><USER50> Or, you could ride a bike.

</comment><comment><USER51> Hard to compete with what's out there in the market. Service centers aren't that big of a selling point when you can buy these around $500. I think they're better off raising the price to $2K and adding some "Level 2" autonomy to it.

</comment><comment><USER52> One more gimmick to try and salvage a dying business.

</comment><comment><USER53> Are these still made by Ninebot?

</comment><comment><USER54> Is it just me or is this being offered at a 1000% markup or so?

<comment><USER55> Looks more like 200%-400% to me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> *its

"it's" = "it is"

<comment><USER57> Here's how I keep this straight mentally.

The rule is, in English, you can make a noun possessive by adding "'s" to the end.

Let me emphasize one part: that's the rule to make _A NOUN_ possessive. "It" is a pronoun, not a noun! The rule doesn't apply any more than it applies to a verb or an adjective.

Hence you don't have stuff like "you's", "he's", "she's", "we's", or "I's", and you also don't have "it's".

<comment><USER58> Pretty sure we do actually have he's and she's. "He's being an idiot", or "she's wrong about that."

<comment><USER59> You're just proving the point: "'s" is only possessive for a _noun_. Your examples aren't possessives.

<comment><USER58> Yes, I misunderstood his point entirely. On reading my response again I also realize that my examples come off as a not so subtle insult, and which is not what I meant.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> > "give your commute a higher purpose with zero carbon emissions."

Can people please stop claiming electric vehicles are zero emissions?

<comment><USER60> Why should they? What sort of emissions do electric vehicles have? I suspect you'll say that generating electricity causes emissions, which is only true in some cases

<comment><USER61> One of the bigger arguments is also in the production itself can be not very eco-friendly, eg: creating the batteries themselves.

<comment><USER62> You are exactly right. People have a tendency to discount the production of the non-emission-generating thing in the first place. The energy and emissions required to build something like this is non-trivial.

It should be mandated that if you want to appeal to green-fingered consumers with your marketing, you have to state the emissions deficit from which your product operates and how many years it would take to recover from it with typical usage.

<comment><USER63> Okay, I'll play: what is the "emissions deficit" of a small electric scooter? Even combined with mass transit, surely the power consumed is miniscule compared with driving alone in a car, and the car is many times the initial manufacturing cost in metal parts, motors, even batteries.

I commute in the summer on a Boosted Board, which uses most of the 99Wh battery to go one way (8km). My electricity in Ontario is largely nuclear and hydro, but say it's the worst case scenario and all the power comes from gas— the emissions from consuming 0.1kWh is ~35g CO2:

[https://canadianenergyissues.com/ontario-power- stats/](https://canadianenergyissues.com/ontario-power-stats/)

[https://www.google.com/search?q=240+tons+%2F+602+MWh+in+g+pe...](https://www.google.com/search?q=240+tons+%2F+602+MWh+in+g+per+99Wh)

This is a far cry from what it would be driving that same distance in my Mazda 5, which would be a little under a litre of fuel (21MPG -> 11.2 L/100km), or 2.3kg of CO2, a 65x difference.

It's possible you're coming from a place of legitimate care, but honestly your comment sounds a lot like concern trolling to me. If there's anything out there which needs an "emissions deficit" sticker to help dissuade conscientious purchasers, lets start with private automobiles.

<comment><USER62> > what is the "emissions deficit" of a small electric scooter?

I'm sure it's unintentional but it's not clear to me what you're asking. So a range of possible answers:

1/ I don't know because they don't tell us what it is.

2/ It's the sum total amount of emissions directly caused by its production divided by the number of units produced. See also: carbon offsetting on planes.

3/ It's a number greater than zero and given that the electric scooter in question does not appear to be obviously replacing a car but walking or cycling, it's a meaningful question to ask.

> Even combined with mass transit, surely the power consumed is miniscule > compared with driving alone in a car, and the car is many times the initial > manufacturing cost in metal parts, motors, even batteries.

This is totally true, but I don't think it's anything to do with my point, which is:

> It should be mandated that if you want to appeal to green-fingered consumers > with your marketing, you have to state the emissions deficit from which your > product operates and how many years it would take to recover from it with > typical usage.

I don't disagree with anything you say about your Boosted Board being better for the environment than your Mazda 5. But it's nothing to do with my point.

> but honestly your comment sounds a lot like concern trolling to me.

I legitimately care that people are allowed to market goods as being environmentally friendly or "low emissions" without having to substantiate the emissions which go into their manufacture. Especially when they seem to me to be marketed as an alternative to cycling or walking, which seem to be obviously low-emission.

> If there's anything out there which needs an "emissions deficit" sticker to > help dissuade conscientious purchasers, lets start with private automobiles.

Again you're not really arguing the point, but sure, I think this is a good idea (?). Especially for cars marketed as environmentally friendly but which come at a significant creation cost.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER64> Evidence their business model isn't working out. Their scooters (along with all the other companies) have all but disappeared from my area, where they once littered the sidewalk.

Once you fall once or twice on these scooters, it's hard to ride them again. Especially when it's the scooter that's broken, as is often the case. It's a shrinking market base, consequently. They (Uber-Jump, Lime) should have given incentive by offering some kind of coupons after an accident, instead of declining all responsibility and sending you the terms you signed or ghosting their customers.

<comment><USER65> I hope they fail. The sidewalks in Long Beach are a mess with these scooters. I see kids who are clearly not old enough to drive riding these things around, sometimes three on a scooter. Meanwhile the bike share program bikes now sit unused on the racks. This isn't replacing cars in my area, it is replacing exercise. The beach path is filled with these things, creating a real hazard since the exercise path is now a motorway.

<comment><USER66> I only just became aware of how obnoxious these things are. We just took a trip to San Diego and stayed in the Gaslamp and these things are everywhere, from multiple companies. By early evening they're just dumped all over place, sometimes in piles. Then the people riding them are a hazard, if they're on the sidewalk they come around corners and almost cream pedestrians, if they ride in the street they almost get themselves killed driving like idiots in traffic.

I hope this trend goes away.</comment></comment></comment>


Google partners with Startup Weekend to support entrepreneurs around the world - <AUTHOR> http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/11/supporting-entrepreneurs-around-world.html

<comment><AUTHOR> I work with Startup Weekend managing this program, and it should be great! If anyone is involved with GTUGs or local Startup Weekend events (or wants to be), either comment here or email me (email@example.com).

Let me know if you have any questions!

<comment><USER2> hey zach! as a local GTUG organizer, I'm really excited by the idea of running 'Google Bootcamps' to give developers (and entrepreneurs, designers, marketers for that matter!) insight and education into Google's vast platforms and tools.. tied into this wonderful development to inspire and build amazing ideas into startups that change the world. can't wait to start! ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> This is interesting, especially when read in parallel to the NYT's article, Google's Chief Works to Trim a Bloated Ship. That article claims Google is shutting down many small projects to focus on more, this is me talking. "marketable" projects. Maybe partnering with startup weekend is a way to stay connected to new innovations and innovators with out having them on the Google payroll. Really interesting. And exciting.</comment>


China is monitoring employees' brain waves and emotions - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/china-emotional-surveillance-technology-2018-4 <comment><USER2> The next season of Black Mirror may just be a documentary on China</comment>


Mocko Sketchbook: Prototyping mobile apps on paper - <AUTHOR> http://mocko.us/

<comment><USER2> This looks pretty neat. If you want another choice with different layout options, try Sketchy Notebook [0].

[0] [http://sketchynotebook.com/](http://sketchynotebook.com/)</comment>


Pirate To Join European Parliament As Youngest Member - <AUTHOR> https://torrentfreak.com/pirate-to-join-european-parliament-as-youngest-member-111120

<comment><USER2> Youngest member of current parliament and female, it's awesome to have variety in the seats.

</comment><comment><USER3> She sounds like a bright, reasonable young lady. I wish her success. I'm wondering though if maybe they'd get more votes if they didn't call themselves the Pirate Party. I mean, they can talk about their various political positions all they want but their name will make them seem like a single issue party. Their electorate care about the same things any electorate cares about. Health care, the economy, and just putting food on the table. I think that's pretty universal. The Pirate Party needs to broaden its audience if they'd like to gain more seats faster and change that name. It comes off as a gimmick.

<comment><USER4> One might argue that they've gotten so much exposure so far _because_ they are called the Pirate Party. (The name is alluring. It's exciting to read they have a member in Parliament because it's so contrary to what you expect.) Pretty good advertising.

The desirable outcome isn't that they become the most popular party, but that more parties begin to adopt more of the sensibilities of the Pirate Party, which would suit people who prefer to align themselves to less excitingly- named but more powerful groups.

<comment><USER5> That reminds of Google's strategy with Chrome. But just like Chrome, even if they don't pursue to be the most popular party, they might just get there if the other parties keep shooting themselves in the foot with laws like SOPA.

<comment> guard-of-terra That used to be Google's strategy with Chrome; right now it they perhaps DO pursue to be the most popular browser. It is becoming so, anyway.

<comment><USER6> I doubt Google expected people to flock to Chrome quite as much as they did. If you get that momentum you'd be a fool to squander it.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>