Germany's top publisher bows to Google in news licensing row - <AUTHOR> http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/11/05/us-google-axel-sprngr-idUSKBN0IP1YT20141105

<comment><USER2> Wanting to force someone to advertise your product and charge him for it sounds so backwards, especially from a right-wing company. I'm happy this terrible excuse for a publisher couldn't get through with it. Will be interesting to see the Bild headlines about it, at the moment they are still busy rallying against unions (e.g. by printing the phone numbers of union leaders).

<comment><USER3> To play the devil's advocate:

\- Bild makes money from the online visits.

\- Google makes money form the online visits as well.

\- Bild actually provides content for Google to generate that revenue.

Why should not Google pay for the content (a percentage of ad revenue generated by the news.google.com would do nicely)?

<comment><USER4> They don't want Google to be able to buy it. They want Google to be forced to buy it.

If you took ice cream for free that doesn't give anyone the right to force you to buy it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Since Google et al will always get exceptions from publishers, the Leistungsschutzrecht will primarily hurt small companies and start-ups through its newly embedded legal uncertainty.

Little business without a lobby in Germany..

</comment><comment><USER5> I think the point here is being missed a bit. Yes they get a lot of benefit from traffic coming from Google. The point is they want that traffic coming directly to them.

If people go to Google News they see traffic from other alternative news sources as well. These people are Google News users and sometimes see e.g. Die Welt content, but Die Welt wants them to be Die Welt users. The publishers are used to having a direct relationship with their readers, they don't want to be competing with news clips and links from budget internet news sites and blog aggregators.

What's most interesting is that they have their own Facebook pages. So these guys are choosing to use Facebook for free to promote their brand, with pictures and excerpts from their articles. The thing there is that a relationship through Facebook can be more direct. The Facebook page is really an extension of the Die Welt web site, bringing it closer to Facebook users and trying to built that relationship. There's no way to do that through Google News.

Now, I do agree they're going about their relationship with Google in a bone headed and self-harming way. However they are doing it for what appear to them to be valid reasons. That's why papers and magazines always preferred direct subscriptions to sales on news stands. If they could have locked news stands into exclusive relationships, they would have.

So I think we can expect to see more initiatives like this from these publishers. Right now they're flailing around blindly and making fools of themselves, but they are not going to give up on their actual goals and eventually are likely to get smart about it. It'll be interesting to see what that looks like, but I doubt any effective initiatives they may come up with will be to the benefit of news consumers.

<comment><USER6> > The point is they want that traffic coming directly to them.

Very insightful and true. The problem is that they can't find a strategy to make this happen and are capitulating due to their lack of ability.

That is to say, _if_ they could find a way to make aggregator customers instead into their customers, they wouldn't be backing down. What they're discovering, however, is that, even if they weaken Google, they don't strengthen themselves in the process. Readers simply turn to other sources.

This implies that readers perhaps don't value Axel Springer's content over other news sources. Or, at least, they don't value it over the value of aggregators.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> The best thing about their press release[0] is that within a couple of sentences they a) complain that they'd lose seven-digits in advertising a year per brand over the short listing on Google news and resulting decrease in traffic, b) demand that Google pays them for the Google news interaction.

[0] [http://www.axelspringer.de/presse/Axel-Springer-schliesst- Da...](http://www.axelspringer.de/presse/Axel-Springer-schliesst- Datendokumentation-ab-Gravierender-Schaden-durch-verschlechterte-Suchanzeigen- bei-Google_22070688.html)

<comment><USER3> The question is, how much does Google make, a year, from its news aggregator pages?

I bet it is more than Bild does.

If nobody allowed Google to do the snippets, Google's news business would sink. But since they cannot pass the copyright law for the entire world, Google's business is less affected by the ban. Because it is a monopoly.

Shit, these guys have a point.

<comment> nevi-me I see it from a different angle. Google has invested in creating both Google News, and search in general. Yes, Google's business would sink if nobody allowed it to do snippets, but it's also not in their interest to do that.

Let's go to extremes and say that everyone the world over blocks Google from indexing and aggregating their news sites. That means that smaller players can enter the market, but if the blocking is based on principle; then those smaller players would have to invest in infrastructure, IP, and still have to pay publishers! Then publishers then also lose out.

From reading the article, it seems like the company is saying we're shooting ourselves in the foot by blocking Google, yet we still want to piss in our revenue fountain.</comment></comment></comment>


2008. Which startups will be drafted? - <AUTHOR>

Several companies have been acquired in 2007. Which one do you believe will be next year? <comment><USER2> mine :)</comment>


Ask HN: Would you test your web app against simulated infrastructure failure? - <AUTHOR>

Would you pay for a product that provides a third level of testing after unit and integration?<p>It would allow you to deploy your entire app infrastructure onto a set of lightweight VMs, then let you specify tests (infrastructure failures like packet loss, high latency between nodes; getting pushed into swap; running out of disk; nodes becoming unreachable). Then you could run your application against those tests to ensure it fails gracefully under those conditions. <comment><USER2> I'm not sure how much I'd pay since most of the web stuff I do is toy anyways. However, I think there's a big market for this - just like I think there's a big market for this for natively developed apps as well.</comment>


Was Beethoven's Metronome Wrong? - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.smithsonianmag.com/smartnews/2013/09/was-beethovens-metronome-wrong/

<comment><USER2> I can't find a reference online, but one of the tape decks used for Miles Davis' Kind of Blue ran too slow for one track resulting in decades of people wondering how they tuned flat, including pianos

First hit has 1/2 sentence on this

[https://www.google.com/search?q=miles+davis+kind+of+blue+out...](https://www.google.com/search?q=miles+davis+kind+of+blue+out+of+tune&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en- US:official&client=firefox-a#q=miles+davis+%2C+Kahn%2C+%22makng+of+kind+of+blue%22+tape+too+slow&rls=org.mozilla:en- US%3Aofficial)</comment>


Folding at home now has 1M users fighting coronavirus - <AUTHOR> https://decrypt.co/24173/one-million-pc-owners-combine-their-gpu-power-to-fight-covid-19 <comment><USER2> Good to see grid computing brought back from the dead.</comment>


Too many electric cars, not enough workplace chargers - <AUTHOR> http://www.mercurynews.com/business/ci_24947237/too-many-electric-cars-not-enough-workplace-chargers <comment><USER2> I drive an electric car and try to charge at work only twice a week. Although if I notice no one is charging at some point, I'll top it off, range anxiety is no joke.

Our workplace has a 2-port charger just for executives. (Naturally, it's often unused.) Meanwhile the rest of us non-executives get to slug it out for the other 2-port charger. I have discovered that Volts are excellent fodder for "charge-rage." Their 3.3kW chargers work so slowly, it's difficult to keep from thinking "they can just use gas, right?" And their batteries are so small, Volt drivers want to charge every single day. What's worse is, their charge port is alarmed. Even if the Chargepoint display says charging is complete, if you unplug a Volt it sets off the theft alarm.

Kind of fascinating to watch this evolve. Definitely need some better charging tech if electric cars are going to last.

<comment><USER3> My charge-rage is when I see a Tesla in one of the two charging spots at the Stanford shopping center. They have enough range to not need the power, the owners typically park there because they are the best spots in the garage.

<comment><USER4> Why do you care? I don't get upset at a Prius when I see one at the gas station and there are no available pumps. If people are using just for the good parking spot there is a simple fix--don't put them right up front.

If I had a Tesla and was able to both get a charge and a good spot you better believe I would take it, even if I wasn't dangerously low on power.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is interesting, because the social concept of charging is being formed. Will charging be like a gas station, where you are only allowed to be at the charger while using it, or will it be like parking, where you usually have an implied right to use a space until you move your car away.

I think that at least for employer provided free charging it should be the latter. Whenever people start fighting over charging spots, or start leaving work to shuffle cars around, the employer loses. An employer should just set up simple free charging to as many spaces as necessary, so people can just park, plug in and not worry about their car.

You can just run an electric cable in a conduit by a row of parking spaces, and put in simple weather protected 110V plugs along it. Over 8 hours this should provide more than enough energy for a simple commute. For people that must have high speed charging, you can put in a couple of paid chargers.

<comment><USER6> Valet parking service that takes care if it? Depending on the price of the charging station vs a regular parking space, it'd make sense.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> If you can't get home without charging, then an EV isn't a good idea for you. I understand that everyone should be able to get an EV, but with the way the infrastructure is, you gotta draw the line somewhere. Having spots that are not dedicated, first come first serve, and without expectation of use will make everyone far happier in the long run. Yes, things come up and you may find yourself out of range because of an unexpected detour, but once you start having people that MUST charge or they can't get home, then you only get what this article mentions.

Charging money for the stations is also another way to alleviate some of this problem, but the stations that accept credit cards are VERY expensive. For example, a ChargePoint system is $4000 for the first unit and then $2500 for the second unit. And then there are ongoing cell reception plans and money sharing per kwH used. It's not cheap. The reason you see a lot of chargepoints in NorCal is because in 2011 or 2012, chargepoint offered free chargers to people that wanted them.

<comment><USER8> If you can't get home without charging your EV, you should move or get a new job. Suburban living is not eco friendly, I would hope that there are a small number of people who want an electric vehicle but would have such a long daily commute that they would have to charge it every day.

<comment><USER7> There are a few tesla owners that drive 200 miles a day. Only a handful are above 15k miles per year.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is going to continue to be a problem as the US infrastructure for electrical vehicles is slowly upgraded. I think the only solution for now is to never depend on a charger outside of your home. People who have to drive more than a single charge in a day just may not be able to use EVs for now.

<comment><USER10> I think you are incorrect. Depending on a plug within your house is not a solution. That is avoiding the problem. Solution* is U.S. government rolling out standardized electrical socket plug for vehicles and investing in infrastructure to make it cheap enough to be installed virtually everywhere. After that getting commission together and drafting set of standards for wireless charging (this is decades away, but it needs to be common if we are to see electrical cars supplant fossil fuel vehicles universally.)

* Or one of them solutions.

<comment><USER11> Personally, I think the solution is for electric cars to have enough range that you don't need to plug them when away from home on routine trips, and for charging to be fast enough and available enough from dedicated stations that you can still do road trips.

Even if every parking space out there has a charger, I don't want to plug in every time I park my car. I want my car to go hundreds of miles in between charges so I don't have to care. That's not yet practical unless you spend serious money, but anything else seems like a workaround.

<comment><USER12> This is clearly the Tesla plan and definitely the way most people charge them.

<comment><USER11> Not coincidentally, that's exactly what I was referring to with "unless you spend serious money".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> jack-r-abbit I'm not sure how much these stations cost but I could also see the potential for a company to employ a low level person to work as sort of a charger valet. You drop your EV off with them and give them the keys. They manage the rotating of cars as they get full.

<comment><USER13> This. Not everything need to be solved high-tech.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Is it just me, or is the solution not to add more chargers, but to add more cables connected to a single charger, and have it round robin charge all the attached vehicles throughout the day?

<comment><USER15> It's not always that simple - the electric lines have to support the load of additional vehicles. Even a relatively low charge rate of 12A (like a Volt) quickly exceeds the capacity of standard electrical wiring after about 3 vehicles. It's worse if you want higher speed charging, which requires 30A+ per connector. Adding the infrastructure to support more cables can actually be more expensive than running additional chargers, depending on how the lines were run.

<comment><USER16> I think the idea was that instead of simultaneously charging several cars, it charges them one by one (round robin). You just have multiple connectors to stop employees having to leave the office to change the connectors over when one car finishes charging. But I guess it would require smart-ifying the charger base so it could decide when to send power to each of the cars.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> In some parts of the world there are electrical outlets for everybody so that everybody can plug their block heaters in...

</comment><comment><USER18> Why not just charge employees for the electricity? That should help reduce contention, and pay for expansion automatically as it becomes necessary.

<comment><USER19> That won't give employees an incentive to move their now-fully-charged car as soon as it finishes charging.

Clearly, after the charger fully charges the car, it should give the owner 15 minutes to move their car then start discharging it.

<comment><USER18> Or just charge by the hour.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> My office builder has a handful of chargers for employee use. They are always full. People with EVs come early, and leave their car connected for the entire day (even if it is not needed).

I suspect some kind of "recommended policy" might be coming at some point, as suggested in the article, since there will in no way be enough chargers for EV owners to leave their vehicles connected all day. Although I hope they also add more charging stations.

<comment><USER21> Do the chargers indicate when the car is not drawing current any more? Either with a light or something internet-enabled?

(Are we at webcam filter coffee time again?)

<comment><USER22> Leafs have blinky lights on the dash that quit blinking when the car is charged. I don't know about Tesla. Conceivably coworkers could know when is safe to unplug someone else's car and charge their own. Then again, we can't even get people to make a new pot of coffee when they drain the last of it, so who knows how considerate your fellow plug-in owners will be.

<comment><USER23> Model S has a fast pulsing green light around the charge port when it's charging.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I'd revise that title to "too many cars, not enough public transit."

<comment><USER25> Yeah, I'm not convinced that this is much different from "not enough parking spaces for everybody", or "not enough bike racks to meet demand", with the exception that sharing is actually _somewhat_ feasible for these.

<comment><USER26> It's very different, because there are enough parking spaces for everybody, but they don't happen to have sockets in them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> With many corporate chargers you need to have a special card to charge on them even though they are standard ChargePoint chargers. So if you are near a Google, Microsoft, etc building at night which has hundreds of chargers not in use you can't use them.

Because these companies get a great tax break for installing them I think they shouldn't be able to prevent the public from using them.

<comment><USER7> ChargePoints also have an ongoing cost. You need to pay for the cellular access that is built into them every month. They also charge the company different amounts depending on if they make it free to the employees or some dollar amount.

Also, they are expensive. They can cost $4000+ for the first unit plus installation. This cost scares a lot of companies from even starting the project.

In 2011 or 2012, chargepoint offered chargers for free. And now, in 2014, there are no tax breaks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Maybe charging stations could come with N full charging cords and 2N trickle charging cords and it would be socially acceptable to replace someone's full charging cord with a trickle charging cord once the car was full.

<comment><USER28> Better yet:

Each charging station has N cords.

The first n cords to be plugged in becomes a primary (read full) charge cord.

Once n primary cords are in use, any subsequent cords start as secondary (read trickle charge -- an aside, do EV's really need to be trickle charged). Again, in order of arrival, the secondary cords are put into a queue.

As the initial batch of n cars reach full charge (or maybe 90%), primary cords swap functionality with the next secondary cord in the queue.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> It's interesting to me how this is portrayed as a problem that workplaces need to deal with, and not the real issue which is that EVs are still seriously impractical.

</comment><comment><USER30> So is this technically a 0-World problem? (like 0-day, beyond first-world problem)

Can I copyright that term?</comment>


Enumerating Core Undefined Behavior - <AUTHOR> http://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/papers/2019/p1705r0.html <comment><USER2> For years I've been growing steadily more worried about UB and its nebulous, Heisenfootgun nature. I got a few paragraphs into this noble work, scrolled down to check how much was yet to go, and decided to try reading the Rust book again.

I mean, I'll stick with C/C++ for now. I can write 'good enough' code which does what I expect and seems to be reliable. I just hate the feeling that without spending a truly ungodly amount of time on it, even the best code is peppered with unknown unknowns waiting to bite me at some critical moment.

<comment><USER3> Is this really such a big deal mentally? Idealized there are only two behaviors: Expected and unexpected. Whether that unexpected behavior is a result of UB, or implementation defined behavior, or logic errors, or unforeseen corner cases, doesn't in practice actually matter. Your computer isn't actually any more likely to cause a nuclear explosion because it hit UB than it is to do that because it hit some other kind of bug.

Of course reducing and any kind of bug class is a plus, Rust is great, but I never had the feeling that my C++ code is more error prone than my Java or Python code just because some things are completely UB. What actually happens with UB is that the application crashes and/or data gets scrambled - I've yet to see my PC to feel free to stand up and walk away just because it was technically allowed to.

<comment><USER4> As someone that writes a lot of C++ and quite likes the language, I think it is feasible, given a team of experienced c++ programmers and a good testing infrastructure to write programs that trigger almost no UB for any reasonable input.

What I worry about is the unreasonable (i.e. hostile) input.

<comment><USER5> Really? Isn't is still the case that signed integer arithmetic can lead to UB? Despite this, there's a push for Almost Always Int from the C++ powers-that- be.

[https://stackoverflow.com/questions/16188263/is-signed- integ...](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/16188263/is-signed-integer- overflow-still-undefined-behavior-in-c)

<comment><USER6> C++20 specifies two's complement for signed integer arithmetic, like it was already for unsigned, which means most (basically everything except -INT_MIN) is now no longer UB.

[0] [http://www.open- std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/papers/2018/p090...](http://www.open- std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/papers/2018/p0907r4.html)

<comment><USER4> I believe the representation is no longer implementation defined, but signed overflow is still UB.

<comment><USER7> That's correct, and it's quoted in JF's paper linked above: " The main change between [P0907r0] and the subsequent revision is to maintain undefined behavior when signed integer overflow occurs, instead of defining wrapping behavior."

<comment><USER3> >Status-quo If a signed operation would naturally produce a value that is not within the range of the result type, the behavior is undefined. The author had hoped to make this well-defined as wrapping (the operations produce the same value bits as for the corresponding unsigned type), but WG21 had strong resistance against this.

I really don't understand _why_ WG21 is against this, do you happen to have a link to arguments against it? The only one I frequently see is that "it's faster that way" with a link to godbolt where iterating with a 32-bit signed integer on a 64-bit system is faster than iterating with a 32-bit unsigned integer, because the compiler exploits UB here to ignore overflow. Which is of course a completely useless example because simply using a correctly sized integer for iteration, signed or unsigned, will always result in the fastest most correct code.

I'm not aware of any other arguments against it.

<comment><USER7> At least in the case of overflow, the article mentions a few arguments:

""" This direction was motivated by:

Performance concerns, whereby defining the behavior prevents optimizers from assuming that overflow never occurs; Implementation leeway for tools such as sanitizers; Data from Google suggesting that over 90% of all overflow is a bug, and defining wrapping behavior would not have solved the bug. """

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> For those interested in the four examples of crazy undefined behavior, you can see my tweet here: [https://twitter.com/shafikyaghmour/status/114602835166622925...](https://twitter.com/shafikyaghmour/status/1146028351666229250)

Also there is an R1 version which hopefully will get discussed in the next meeting here: [http://www.open- std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/papers/2019/p170...](http://www.open- std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/papers/2019/p1705r1.html)

</comment><comment><USER9> I don't know why, but I immensely enjoyed the use of that single emoji in the opening paragraph.

<comment><USER10> Agreed a nice splash of figurative colour in a somewhat arid document...

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Good to see this going forward.</comment>


Ask HN: Why can't we stop hurricanes? - <AUTHOR> I googled this and see theories as to how to stop hurricanes -- decrease water temperature under eye of storm, send supersonic jets in to revolve and cause hot air to rise, lasers, etc. -- anyone have a simple reason why these haven't been tried or are absolutely crazy?<p>A follow up: so how can we stop hurricanes? <comment><USER2> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orders_of_magnitude_(energy)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orders_of_magnitude_\(energy\))

The energy needed to evaporate the water Harvey dumped on land (33 trillion gallons) is roughly: 40.65 kJ/mol (Latent heat of vaporization of water) * 210 mol/gal * 33x10^12 gal = 2.8x10^20 J. That's over half the entire world's energy consumption (not just electricity, also fuel for transportation and such) as of 2010. In about a week. And ignoring the energy in the wind.

They're simply really, really, big. Causing substantial change to them once they've formed is effectively impossible. Stopping the formation is effectively impossible because weather is chaotic, so small changes in one place can cause large changes elsewhere. You might stop one hurricane forming only to create a different one.

The real solution is to kill all the damn butterflies. /s

<comment><USER3> We are working on it. [http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Scientists-say- decline...](http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Scientists-say-decline-in- monarch-butterflies-12181328.php)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I've wondered the same thing about tornados in Kansas, yet we still wrecklessly mix our warm moist air and cooler dry air with disregard.

</comment><comment><USER5> This [1] is the NHC report for Hurricane Andrew just prior to landfall in August of 1992. Andrew was small as hurricanes go, and even then, you are talking about hurricane winds (72 MPH/116 KPH at the _low_ end, Andrew was 140 MPH/225 KPH sustained winds) extending outward from the eye (typical eye diameter is 20 miles/32 km) 30 miles/45 km. So you are talking about disrupting a cylinder of wind and rain some 50 miles/80 km across and what? 4 miles/6 km high? That's a _lot_ of energy to disrupt. And that's for Andrew, a _small_ hurricane. Irma has hurricane speed winds out to 75 miles/120 km from the eye, which itself is 23 miles/37 km across.

Good luck.

[1] [http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/archive/storm_wallets/atlantic/atl19...](http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/archive/storm_wallets/atlantic/atl1992/andrew/public/paal0492.031)

</comment><comment><USER6> I think it's one of those things where people have difficulties realizing the _scale_ of things. For example hurricane Irma is the size of Texas or France. If it hits Florida, people won't need to evacuate Miami, they'll need to evacuate _Florida_. Think of the logistics it takes to evacuate a whole state basically overnight, and the _size_ of a threat causing such event: if we barely have the know-how to _run away_ in time, do you think we would have any know-how to block something of that magnitude?

</comment><comment><USER7> Should we stop hurricanes, even if we can?

Yes, hurricanes are destructive, especially to human settlements, but I'd be surprised if there aren't massive ecological benefits to hurricanes in spite of (or possibly because of) the destruction. Forest fires, for example, have well-documented, long-term ecological benefits. Unfortunately it looks like hurricanes aren't studied as much as forest fires.

Just doing some cursory researching online [1] [2], it looks like they basically act as dramatic "flushing" mechanisms:

\- end droughts

\- distribute heat from the equator towards the poles

\- seed dispersal

\- redistribute soil/sediments along coastlines and inlane

[1] [https://weather.com/storms/hurricane/news/hurricane- landfall...](https://weather.com/storms/hurricane/news/hurricane-landfall- benefits-2016)

[2] [http://sciencing.com/positive-effects- hurricane-4462.html](http://sciencing.com/positive-effects- hurricane-4462.html)

<comment><USER8> All these things could have beneficial ecological purposes...IN moderation... but what happens when they go to extremes ala Climate Change.. when we have 15 cat 5 hurricanes per year..or burn 10 million acres of forest per year...etc..

How much of our current excelling weather patterns are a result of global warming? All interesting questions...

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> How can we stop hurricanes? First, accept that climate change is real. Second, act on it.

Year after year the global temperature increases and year after year the hurricanes get stronger. All real climate scientists will tell you there's a correlation.

<comment><USER10> Where do I start with this?

I have no issue with climate change being real. Anyone with a modicum of sense can make those observations? However, your second point requires you to believe in the "dogma" of only anthropogenic causes for this climate change. At this point in time, we have no clue (and I mean no clue, irrespective of what any "real" climate scientist might pontificate) about the extent of actual causes of this climate change.

There may be (and I'm willing to give a small level anthropogenic causal effect) some changes that mankind can do to mitigate possible effects of climate change. They are limited and more in the line of defensive than anything else.

And before you ask, No I am not a climate scientist. But my experience with them is that when presented with specific questions related to the energy requirements of their predictions, they refuse to not only answer the raised questions, they will not dispute the energy calculations provided as a basis to the questions.

I have done a series of calculations, in which you can do the same, based on simple mandatory energy requirements that make the predictions of their models simply laughable.

My basic view today is that if a "real" climate scientist says anything, I will take that it that you had better check the silver draw to make sure the cutlery is still there. At this point in time, I consider it to be more pseudo-scientific than phrenology and I don't give that any regard at all.

And that is a pity, because we need some verifiable climate model will give level of predictability. We have none at this time.

<comment><USER11> Check out oldandtireds infallible series of calculations at realclimatechange.geocities.com

<comment><USER10> Funny, ha ha.

If you actually took the time, about 2 to 3 hours of work and research, you would quickly see that the various scenarios proposed by these "real" climate scientists are a load of codswallop. As they say here at times, "Are you smarter than a fifth grader?" Well a fifth grader can do the calculations with but a little bit of help. If climate scientists were willing to call out their colleagues over the various "unreasonable" scenario results then as a group, I might be more inclined to give them a pass. But they don't, so no.

But so far, I have only had one person on the "anthropogenic" climate change bandwagon who was willing to give it a go. To his merit and credit, he even tried to provide a number of research studies to back his claim (he was not a climate scientist and the papers he referenced are well worth reading). In the end we agreed to disagree on our interpretations of the data presented. He was much more clear and critical thinking than the various "real" climate scientists that I have communicated with over the last two decades.

I have, over the course of nearly forty years, dealt with quite different computer simulations and models and it is so easy to get them wrong, to the extent that for some models, no matter what you put in, you appear to get a reasonable answer out. They're the scary ones, people assume they are right when in fact they are a load of rubbish.

If you were to actually try to do the energy equations, you would see this for yourself. But obviously, you more interested in believing the anthropogenic climate change dogma without at least some level of fact checking to test the veracity of the claims. But that is up to you. We can compare notes after you do your own calculations. Let me know when you have done them.

I am willing to give them a pass (or least a provisional move ahead) if they can clearly show that the basic energy calculations I have made that are required for their scenario outcomes are wrong in any significant way. That is, the calculations are wrong by say 15 orders of magnitude or more.

Average worldwide temperature rises of a couple of degrees (Celsius or Fahrenheit) do not appear to be able to supply enough energy to drive the energy requirements. If they were, then these "real" climate scientists would have been able to demonstrate this long before now. There would be an energy process and pathway available to demonstrate this to all who wanted to see it.

As a number of people here have already shown, the amounts of energy required for some of the existing events are just extraordinary. However, the energy required to drive them is many orders of magnitude short of the energy required to drive the scenario outcomes from the climate change models. This is a problem.

Climate is a multivariate function of a very large number of interacting processes. From the variations of solar output, the orbital position of the planet around the sun, the axial tilt of the planet, position of the moon, cloud cover, global land mass and water distributions, wind processes, storms (from little rainbursts up to the likes of Irma), volcanoes (land based, ocean based, ice based), forest fires (which you are getting right now), ground cover or lack of it, flooding, oceanic algae distribution to a myriad of other interacting effects and variables. To attribute climate change to anthropogenic effects as the main driver is, well, unreasonable without extraordinary evidence. Computer models that don't give reasonable, verifiable predictions are not evidence, no matter how distinguished the climate scientist may be.

<comment><USER12> Quite a lot of anecdota and question begging. Ho-hum.

<comment><USER10> I suppose there is a bit of anecdote, but then I generally find that anthropogenic climate change believers won't take up the energy equation challenge and so show that they are not willing to actually put any effort into the discussion.

Climate change deniers and anthropogenic climate change believers don't appear to have any inclination to do any sort of serious thinking about the subject. Both appear to take a very simplistic political view about the matter and just react along party lines.

Just as your comment shows little effort to even engage in dialogue.

<comment><USER12> Your original comment has nothing meaningful to discuss. You don't present your data or analysis thereof, so we cannot discuss that. Here you call for 'serious thinking about the subject', but you engage in aggressive strawmanning (believe in the "dogma" of only anthropogenic causes for this climate change) and repeat the party line that climate models are all unreliable (this is a long-debunked falsehood). These are non-starters for meaningful dialogue.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> You Americans, thinking you can control everything...

</comment><comment><USER14> The energy requirements to influence a hurricane are on the order of the entire output of the US power grid... At a minimum.

<comment><USER15> Why not just harvest a hurricane's energy to weaken it?

<comment><USER2> The small ones output on the order of magnitude of the annual power consumption of the US in a matter of days. Where would you store the energy? How? Even if you could get wind turbines that could survive it...

<comment><USER15> Just been an overall question. There might be a solution no one ever thought about. Why wind turbines? Kites could work as well. There might be a better product not yet invented to solve the problem. It might be even better to start at an earlier point by extracting heat from the oceans to lower temperature and therefore avoid the formation of tropical storms at all. Just some brainstorming ideas :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> How about coating the sea surface with a very thin layer of oil to reduce evaporation?

</comment><comment><USER17> Stop pumping excess heat energy into the atmosphere.

EDIT: While this won't stop them from happening, this is definitely not helping things.

<comment><USER18> That's not going to stop hurricanes.

<comment><USER17> It for sure won't, but it definitely isn't helping

<comment><USER18> Interestingly, newer models are suggesting that hurricane activity will decrease with global warming.

Basically, as the temperature rises, the colder regions will increase in temperature the most - thus raising the global averages. Because of this lack of heat disparity, less transfer of usable energy, there will be fewer hurricanes and they think they will be weaker in general.

I'm on a tablet, but I can dig out the study (I think), if you want. Google will guide you, otherwise. I was just reading this a month or so back. From a physics viewpoint, it makes sense. Then again, I'm a mathematician and not a climate scientist.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> They're absolutely crazy.

<comment><USER19> Decrease water temperature over a huge area that's constantly moving?

How many supersonic jets are we talking? 50,000?

Lasers or magnets might work though...

<comment><USER20> > Lasers or magnets might work though...

Actually if you can merely slightly resist the heat exchange that will kill these storms just fine. 0.1% difference in heat exchange ? They're weakened to the point of irrelevance. What would happen if we caused an oil spill on purpose ?

We would need to create a circular oil spill where the air is going up (around the eye), in a way that would slightly decrease (slightly is more than enough) the heat exchange and thus the flow of air towards the eye. So an oil spill surrounding the eye of the storm should kill the storm.

Of course the earlier you do this, the more effect it would have. You'd effectively have to do it constantly to avoid having to do it for massive storms.

Alternatively, you could nuke the air above the storm, or otherwise heat it up. That would kill the reason for the funnel to exist (cold air relatively low in the athmosphere on top of warmer water). The advantage I guess is that you could decide to do this and it might kill the funnel in a matter of minutes. We have nearly fallout free nukes nowadays (fallout measured in grams, which when spread out over 1000 sq. km isn't going to do anything).

Of course, this would be climate engineering. If we were willing to do that, we could easily have solved global warming by now. The issue is, what if it goes wrong ? Who will seriously risk doing this, and therefore carrying the responsibility afterwards ... Because we all know, nobody gets blamed for doing nothing, and if you do something and fuck it up ... wow.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> How about a really, really big fan?

</comment><comment><USER22> Coz there is no such thing as a hurricane.

</comment><comment><USER23> Trump's wall can keep out those hurricanes ...

<comment><USER24> Could you please comment civilly and substantively, like the guidelines ask, or not at all?

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)</comment></comment>


Call for comments - RethinkDB wire protocol - <AUTHOR> http://www.rethinkdb.com/blog/rethinkdb-wire-protocol-call-for-comments/ <comment><USER2> See the "required is forever" warning here: <https://developers.google.com/protocol-buffers/docs/proto>

You may want to make even your conceptually required fields optional.

As an example, if you tried to proxy a newer version of the protocol through an old proxy (assuming it's deserializing), unknown enumeration values for required fields could cause errors.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks!!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Why bother trying to encode the query syntax into the wire protocol? Why not just accept queries as a string, then have some simple way to pass parameters? It seems like encoding the whole query language syntax makes the clients far more complex.

<comment><USER4> Transmitting a string over the wire would pose a wide range of problems:

1\. it's not efficient

2\. we'd need to design a complete new protocol (keep in mind that you'd need to include query parameters) which for advanced query language like RQL is challenging

3\. with a new protocol we'd need also versioning (for ensuring backward compatibility)

And the list is probably much longer.

alex @ rethinkdb

<comment><USER3> Thanks for entertaining me :). I'm only talking about the actual encoding of the query itself, not parameters, return types, etc.

Looking at the github page, it seems all the names of things are still being transmitted as strings (of course), so "r.add(1,2)" is unlikely to be smaller decomposed into discrete items (each with at least a 1-byte pb tag overhead).

I'd think it'd be passing a main query string, with placeholders for parameters. "r.add(@a,@b)" or something, then have a parameter block where you can efficiently encode non-string parameters.

Basically, keep protocol buffers and the rest, just don't encode the syntax tree - let the server parse it.

<comment><USER5> So, basically using SQL prepared statements. Which are fine for simple queries where the behavior is always exactly the same, but become very complicated when you outgrow the "one hour blog" demo phase. It's much easier to build queries out of data structures in most languages, and if you're already building a data structure, there's no reason to convert it to a human-editable text form just so it can be parsed again.

<comment><USER3> Oh, I see. So in the ReQL docs all those examples aren't really a "language"? There's no underlying "RQL", it's just using a language with some nifty client libraries to build up an internal state that gets serialized. That's a neat approach.

<comment><AUTHOR> Right. Technically we could write a "language" by just writing a string parser that converts strings to protocol buffers (some day we might do that). But embedding into host languages is so nice, there was no need to do it so far.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Hey all, slava @ rethink here. As the post mentions, the new protobuf spec is here: [https://github.com/rethinkdb/rethinkdb/wiki/protobuf_rfc_raw...](https://github.com/rethinkdb/rethinkdb/wiki/protobuf_rfc_raw_spec)

Would really appreciate anyone's questions or comments!

</comment><comment><USER6> Maybe consider re-using an existing wire protocol, such as that for Postgres or MongoDB (whatever is closest conceptually to your database)? Or use HTTP? That way you don't need to re-invent a client for every language.

<comment><AUTHOR> We did (even had a few implementations). Nothing could come close to enabling an awesome user experience as a custom one, so we decided it's worth the effort.</comment></comment>


Demo: GraphQL with Node-Oracledb for Oracle Database - <AUTHOR> https://blogs.oracle.com/opal/demo%3a-graphql-with-node-oracledb <comment><USER2> This looks very interesting! I work at Prisma and am also the author of the GraphQL vs REST article/video that's linked at the end of the article.

At Prisma, we're currently working on an DB connector for Oracle that'll automatically turn your Oracle DB into a GraphQL API. Feel free to check it out and join the discussion on GitHub: [https://github.com/prismagraphql/prisma/issues/1644/](https://github.com/prismagraphql/prisma/issues/1644/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Is there any branch for the Oracle Connector?</comment></comment>


DriveJoy Local Car Renting Platform - <AUTHOR> https://www.drivejoy.co.uk <comment><AUTHOR> DriveJoy is a local car rental platform where users can rent cars near them while it's a great way for car owners to make money when their car isn't being used.</comment>


Kung Fu People - putting all people who do kung fu on a map - <AUTHOR> http://kungfupeople.com/

<comment><USER2> I was ready to put a name, location, and a style up; but the "first name, last name, username, email, password, confirm password," formed a barrier I'm unwilling to cross for the sake of the offering.

<comment><AUTHOR> Interesting. Thanks for the feedback</comment></comment>


Startup Business Plan — How an Investor will Evaluate Your Work - <AUTHOR> http://roachpost.com/2010/02/24/startup-business-plan-how-an-investor-will-evaluate-it/

<comment><USER2> decent post, but the smart investors sincerely care about your product. if you're an early stage startup, it's actually the validation to me that your team can walk the walk. I think fred wilson said something at fowa like: "we try products for a bit first and if they're within our investment thesis/we like them, we invite the founders to come pitch us".</comment>


The Hyperpublic Programming Challenge - <AUTHOR> http://hyperpublic.com/challenge <comment><USER2> We thought this would be fun to make and fun to work on for an hour or two. Let us know if you have any feedback or questions.

<comment><USER3> who else has done awesome challenges? Greplin had a cool one...seatgeek...who else?

<comment><USER4> ITA has some clever challenges (including an archive of past puzzles):

[http://www.itasoftware.com/careers/work-at-ita/hiring- puzzle...](http://www.itasoftware.com/careers/work-at-ita/hiring-puzzles.html)

But then that's the thing, a lot of places have these kind of programming challenge puzzles.

What's the closest to a Putnam for programming challenges?

I know Facebook is trying to position their Hacker Cup this way, but it had a rough start that makes you wonder if it's the best thing for Facebook to run on its own.

It seems like there's an opportunity for a prominent and widely-sponsored event run by a third party.

I presume the sponsors would love a window of exclusivity to see the best results from recruitable competitors.

Even without the obvious recruiting benefits, it would at least capture the imaginations of aspiring programmers worldwide.

<comment><USER5> I've also spent some time on <http://hacker.org>

Rather than focus on a specific "answer," you instead write algorithms to solve various flash games based on NP-complete/hard problems. Its interesting since there's always ways to improve. You can start out with a brute-force solver, but as the levels scale your program won't.

They also recently added a "challenges" section, which is more about specific coding tasks. Those are also pretty fun & scale well.

And yes, despite the domain name & poor design, it's actually a pretty serious site. The same guy also did <http://goproblems.com/> , which is cool if you're into Go (the board game, not the lang).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I've published my python solutions for reference, kibitzing, critique, etc. on github: <https://github.com/sblom/hyperpublic-challenge>

Anyone else published solutions? I'd love to see one in Clojure.

</comment><comment><USER7> I wonder how many people solve it and then do not send in their key. I know I'm not. I cannot be the only one that was more interested in doing the challenge than the rewards.

</comment><comment><USER8> At the risk of looking like a complete idiot, I think your solution to problem #2 is incorrect.

Update: I was wrong. It's kind of scary how sure I was of my incorrect solution.

<comment><USER9> do you say this because your greedy algorithm solution of 450225 didnt work?

<comment><USER10> Thanks for the ``greedy algorithm'' hint ;-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> oooo I want a free Dropbox pro account!!!

</comment><comment><USER12> This is great. We're working on a startup that could use an open location database such as Hyperpublic. Keep it up!

<comment><USER13> ... a little too obvious?

Funny how all those accounts saying nice things about hyperpublic have been created within the last hour.

<comment><USER3> the dude who wrote that started jaiku...fyi

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Hey Hyperpublic, rad contest idea!

</comment><comment><USER15> Hey Hyperpublic, kudos for keeping things interesting

</comment><comment><USER16> This challenge sounds fantastic! Great job -- I really want the prizes, too.

</comment><comment><USER17> Awesome prizes - would love to win the the one month desks at Hyperpublic HQ in NYC or (and?) one year free Dropbox account.</comment>


Vote For Top-100 Science Fiction, Fantasy Titles - <AUTHOR> http://www.npr.org/2011/08/02/138894873/vote-for-top-100-science-fiction-fantasy-titles?ps=cprs

<comment><USER2> Really surprised that nothing by Michael Crichton is on that list.

Semi-related: I am somewhat annoyed by the tendency to categorize SciFi with Fantasy. They are completely different genres. SciFi I love because it is usually at least a little bit be plausible. Wizards and goblins, though, not so much.

</comment><comment><USER3> Glad they are running the poll. But the set up where you have to choose 10 books out of 100 and there is long, long scrolling list seems biased in favor of the folks at the top of the alphabetically-ordered list.</comment>


You don't have to quit Facebook – just start lying about yourself - <AUTHOR> https://www.thestar.com/entertainment/2018/03/26/you-dont-have-to-quit-facebook-just-start-lying-about-yourself.html <comment><USER2> This strategy seems pointless because the one remaining "category killer" aspect of Facebook which they can then market is the _friends_ communication interface. If people stay on Facebook and maintain the same friend interconnections, Facebook wins 85% of the battle anyway.

I thought of advising friends to set up a fresh browser specific to Facebook usage, using it only incognito and clearing after every session (as I do), but benefits of such precautions would be wasted in the big picture of interconnected friends, most of whom see no downside to being productized.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is too much trouble. Also, Facebook has intrusive ways of extracting information you choose to not share, like asking your "friends" what your current city is. Better to just delete it.

</comment><comment><USER4> I misread the title as, "just starting lying to yourself" I thought this was appropriate due to the cognitive disoance involved.

</comment><comment><USER5> Why not do both?

</comment><comment> a-fried-egg That's tedious. Just quit.</comment>


Music Start Ups - <AUTHOR>

Hello,<p>Anyone know of or are working on any music based start ups out there? I know Guvera has been really pushing their ad based free downloads. I'm not convinced of this platform. If anyone wants to share some ideas, let me know. <comment><USER2> What sort of start ups? Production, reviews, discovery, communities? etc

<comment><AUTHOR> web based start ups. Yes, sort of an online community based music discovery tool.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> airtist.com has the same model here in Europe</comment>


iHuman (Film) - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IHuman_(film) <comment><AUTHOR> Documentary about artificial intelligence, social control and power with such experts as Ilya Sutskever (OpenAI) etc</comment>


Parse your CSV files with SQL SELECT queries (no DB necessary) - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/zalando/bigbash <comment><AUTHOR> This is a very cool SQL SELECT to bash converter to easily parse and analyse data from your CVS files :D</comment>


More and more people loathe Renoir – Is it time for a revival? - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/museums/more-and-more-people-loathe-renoir-is-it-time-for-a-revival/2019/06/24/b0b3c5d8-8ded-11e9-b08e-cfd89bd36d4e_story.html <comment><USER2> Looking at the further works of the author, his specialty seem to be shock- value clickbait. So we can probably ignore him.

And the "more and more people" seems to be a crank who organized a silly protest on Boston Common, a quote from a contemporary novelist, and a friend labelled "discerning." Visceral disgust at Renoir calls into question your discernment.

> Hating Renoir is...rooted in the feeling that a modern nude should express > some convincing quotient of reality.

Renoir is hardly a modern painter. Should we go back and impose the ideals of musique concrete on Mozart?

</comment><comment><USER3> Renoir hating is one of the dumbest hipster trends out there. It is one of those idiotic self-congratulatory instagram movements which are designed to just cause mild shock enough to be followed and perhaps gather the attention of a bored journalist. Of course you have to be very careful that the shock is really mild and it does not affect the interests of anyone powerful, otherwise you won't get into the papers.

I am far from being an expert in art, but I like looking at Renoir paintings, they bring me joy and that pretty much makes them good art.

To call into doubt the artistic skill of Renoir, in today's age when artistic skill is mostly lacking and decreasing fast is stupid and embarrassing. If you think Renoir lacked skill, stop bitching and pain something better. Because when I look at contemporary art I see ever decreasing skills replaced with various stunts, shock value and technology.

Yes, it is true he painted mostly young women. Well perhaps he found young women beautiful. Many of us do you know. If you find something else beautiful perhaps you can create art that shows that and not shit on Renoir's pretty fantasies.

<comment><USER4> What? Art today is great and more and more great people are sharing their art with the world. The internet is full of amazing young artists.

Major art museums are in sad state though. They stock the same bland overly abstract art made by some rich donator's kid made that would've pushed boundaries 100 years ago, but today, looks like nothing more than the tired "splash some paint on a canvas" trash. But small hole in the wall museums are full of boundary pushing art, and the internet is overflowing with it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> If you are gonna hate, hate Degas, what g*d damn pervert! I can imagine the jolly time Dodgson and Degas had rowing their boats up a brackish stream.</comment>


Change the default branch name to main for new projects on Gitlab - <AUTHOR> https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/221164 <comment><AUTHOR> Note how the discussion was censored with a CoC reference though there have been no real issues.

Typical corporate behavior.</comment>


Thoughts on my site ? - <AUTHOR> http://www.pushtruth.com So I just finished the first alpha version of an idea I had. Let me know what you all think of it, or have any suggestions, questions, comments.
Here is the description of the site:
PushTruth.com is a real-time content site that allows users to post articles, pictures, video and music. Users can vote on the items submitted and see hot stories grow in real-time, or unpopular stories strink. Users can also zoom in & out to view smaller items. Stories can be posted in the future also (eg: a press conference to be released on YouTube 2 days from now). Users are also able to drag the main interface as well. <comment><USER2> I really don't know what I'm looking at. An aggregator of some sort, but why is is layed out like this? It's not obvious to me.

</comment><comment><USER3> Try again, without using Flash!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the comment. Flash was necessary for a number of aspects of the site (most notably, the zooming features). I definitely understand people having an aversion to Flash, but there are lots of things you can do with Flash that arent possible with HTML/AJAX/etc

<comment><USER4> I'm sorry to be so brutally honest, but a lot of those things you can't do with HTML/CSS/JS are things you really shouldn't be doing at all. Full-page flash breaks usability in _so many_ ways. It completely kills accessibility. It makes things run very slowly. It means I can't open links in new tabs. The only method of scrolling (clicking to drag) is not at all obvious. I could go on.

The usability (or rather, lack of it) is its biggest problem right now. There are additional design issues, but they're practically irrelevant at this point.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Empty for me except for next and previous buttons

<comment><AUTHOR> What browser are you using ?

<comment><USER5> FF 3.5 with Flash Block (but not NoScript)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the reply. Yea, the site uses Flash, so that explains it.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


NlpTools - Natural Language Processing Toolkit for PHP - <AUTHOR> http://nlptools.atrilla.net/

<comment><USER2> TOPIC: GRAIN - Romney's birth certificate evokes his father's controversy TOPIC: CORN - U.S. tourists freed unharmed in Sinai

<http://nlptools.atrilla.net/web/topicid.php>

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Is nlpTools of interest to the SW development community? How could I raise funds for its continuity?</comment>


Impatience: The Pitfall of Every Ambitious Person - <AUTHOR> http://dariusforoux.com/impatience/ <comment><USER2> I'm a big fan of both Robert Greene's _Mastery_ and Leonardo da Vinci, but I think using da Vinci as an example of patience is fairly misleading. After having read numerous biographies on the man, my conclusion is that it's remarkable that he managed to get as much done as he did. He was the ultimate dabbler, interested in and curious about virtually everything. His works took a long time to complete because he generally was distracted by some minor detail for years on end. If the ideal is productivity, then surely Michelangelo is a far better role model.

Of course, the _real_ question here is whether productivity is what one should be ultimately aiming at. Doing _very few things very well_ (alternatively, _creating a small number of high-quality things_ ) is a better ideal, to my mind.

 _' It is my ambition to say in ten sentences what others say in a whole book.'_ \- Friedrich Nietzsche

<comment><USER3> _> Of course, the real question here is whether productivity is what one should be ultimately aiming at._

This is a very good question also for the society as a whole. We are technically able to sustain the whole population with a fewer and fewer percentage of people working on holding up our living conditions (food, water, heat, housing, network communication, etc.).

On top of that we (as a society) create lots of bullshit work which we again try to perform as efficiently as possible. And as soon as productivity increases, we work hard to create more demand for more of the same nonsense, and if that doesn't work anymore, we invent a new type of bullshit.

Why are we doing that? (Well, I'm aware of the typical cynical answer: reducing violence and crime, but there must be a better way to achieve this.)

What if we concentrate on improving our living conditions, and on top of that, everyone who wants to work just picks their favourite problem and tries to find a solution for it, valuing quality over being the first, valuing long- term solutions over short-term minded crap?

<comment><USER4> How do we decide who gets to be part of the leisure class and who gets to be part of the working class? Assuming we decide that we cut the bullshit work and let everyone not working live on something like UBI.

<comment><USER5> The working class would be the new upper class so a lot of people would try to be part of it. Nice communist Utopia.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Anecdote from my own running training: when I get impatient, I get injured.

There is this idea that if you can just get this hard workout done even though you're not fully recovered, you will get closer to your goal. You hear the siren song to be patient, skip the workout or make it an easy day, but choose to push hard anyway. And so instead of missing one good training day, you have to spend 4 weeks or more off of running.

And so everyday I have to remind myself to be patient, be consistent, and be honest with myself.

<comment><USER7> The worst injury I've done to myself at training was when I wasn't patient and did deadlifts not long after a sprain. It's impossible to pinpoint the exact moment you're okay to train again, and it will feel okay before it is okay.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> On the one hand - I agree you have to be patient in order to execute at the right times. On the other hand, that's only in terms of timing...

You can't be patient and wait for opportunities. You have to be consistently searching for them, and execute as you find them - staying as nimble as possible.

For instance, I am always 100% invested, but always in various types of assets. Some investments I can get my money out in 24 hours, others take weeks or months to divest. That enables me to execute quickly when I see opportunity, but only in a limited fashion.

I don't believe it's "impatience" that keeps me invested at that level. It's the fact that, being idol does nothing.

Hell, I'm even platform around identifying new opportunities. I didn't / don't want to be patient, so now I'm building something to enable faster decisions:

[https://projectpiglet.com](https://projectpiglet.com)

Kind of reminds me of a similar parable from the story Time Enough for Love by Robert Heinlein, in it there was a man "too lazy to fail"[1]. The idea is summed up by a quote:

> Progress isn't made by early risers. It's made by lazy men trying to find > easier ways to do something.

Ambition is just trying to accomplish things. In my opinion, it's impatience that pushes us to solve problems, else we'd all settle for the way things are. The trick, is learning to solve them in a way that mitigates risk. Which is really what the author is trying to get at. Arrogance (or over confidence) might be a better description of the pitfall, than impatience.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_Enough_for_Love#"The_Tale...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_Enough_for_Love#"The_Tale_of_the_Man_Who_Was_Too_Lazy_to_Fail")

</comment><comment><USER9> It's funny that he would take the famously lazy and impatient Leonardo as a role model here.

Unless he thinks _The Last Supper_ is supposed to be like that.

<comment><USER10> Laziness, impatience, and hubris enough to dabble in lots of fields. Leonardo was truly a great hacker.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> "If your work is not hard, you're not doing great work." \- that sums up German mentality :D

<comment><USER12> There's a tendency to avoid the "boring" problems this way though. I find that a bit in myself and others when it comes to software dev. A lot of problems in software are of the boring kind. Establish convention and reinventing the wheel rather than applying machine learning and coming up with brilliant algorithms.

By avoiding or skipping over the boring problems i think you tend to miss a lot of the bottlenecks for actually making something valuable.

<comment><USER13> But boring problems -are- hard problems. I find very little is 'hard' in the sense of being difficult but ultimately overcomeable. Most things are either impossible (but can be fun to think about), or rather simple but requiring a lot of time (learning a new thing), or easy and quick (which we do and don't think about), or easy but long, and thus boring. And it's these latter that are, to me, 'hardest', because they're the ones I, and basically every one of my colleagues, least want to do. But as you say, they also can be some of the most valuable.

You mention machine learning and brilliant algorithms? Did you clean your data? Did you refine the parameters to the algorithm? Did you try different algorithms and compare? Machine learning is -boring-. Like, the things it enables are exciting, once it's working it's exciting, but the process is boring as hell. And I find that aspect every bit as 'hard' as understanding the underlying math.

<comment><USER11> I think it's a bit more nuanced - it's a question of reward. If you know there is hard+boring problem that needs to be done, the reward pops up immediately - the problem doesn't look great on CV, so it's a net negative for your future employeability comparing to (shallow) "fun" problems; is completion of such a hard task going to be accompanied by significant equity or bonus and can you trust manager/CEO promises about it (99% you can't), or at best you can hope for a pat on the back and not being kicked out of the company once the "boring" part is finished and is making money for the owners that don't want to share anything with you? These things happen way too often in our business...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> > Look at it this way. You've spent enough time getting where you are — don't > screw it up by wanting to go too fast. Spend more time on your work. Take > pride in it. That's the only way we can do truly great work.

My favorite quote.

</comment><comment><USER15> Why is the story about investing in 2009-2011 in this post?

Unless they invested right in 2011, and your benchmark for "impatience" is investing in late 2007, their accidental market timing probably lost them money.

Plopping everything they made into some popular ETF when they made it probably would've been better.

The only actionable advice I saw in here was journaling. Pure platitudes otherwise, and as talon pointed out the examples aren't great.

<comment><USER16> I think the author was contrasting being a "fair-weather," unknowledgeable investor (in the stock market, or by analogy in prorjects) who buys in when things are going up and pulls out when they go down, versus being a committed, knowledgeable investor who waits for a specific opportunity.

<comment><USER17> The analogy makes sense but is much easier to see in hindsight. Plenty of people during the Depression bought stock after they believed the market bottomed out only to witness their wealth go to nothing because the market continued shrinking after short periods of growth. It's almost impossible to know whether a crash has turned around when it's happening.

Dollar cost averaging, diversifying assets, and keeping liquid on hand is easier than trying to predict the market.

<comment><USER18> Most who bought stocks after the 1929 crash and held made very good money during the depression. The average dividend yield of the S&P index during the 1930s was about 7.8% per year.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Impatience, greed and fear can be confusing bedfellows when investing.

</comment><comment><USER20> Lol. Anyone on an hourly rate should use this line to their fee-payer.

Rough heuristic is that in most projects, delay + downside-uncertainty = go- nowhere failure/death. You need to chip away at one or the other with your loop of actions to get anything done. Otherwise it is just luck.

</comment><comment><USER21> Ambition is the enemy of consistency.

Be consistent.

<comment><USER22> consistently mediocre? what are you trying to say?

<comment><USER21> Better to be consistently good and progressing in life than an ambitious failure who tried to fly too close to the sun and failed and never amounted to anything.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> As someone young, and highly ambitious, I've taken to seeking like-minded peers by asking people where they'd like to be in 10 years.

It has the air of being a quite typical interview-y type question, though I think it's useful to see, given youthful optimism and the astounding future promise of our field (software + computing), just how many shy away from declaring great personal hope and aspiration, seeing no place for themselves in the future's next great achievements or assuming they will 'just happen' around them.

It's a shot in the arm to actually hear someone young candidly express grand aspirations whilst soberly embracing the year and years of toil those aspirations demand. It galvanises me, and no matter how much work I've taken on recently, makes me feel far less tired.</comment>


Retired People Could Be Ideal Customers for Self-Driving Cars - <AUTHOR> https://www.economist.com/business/2019/02/23/why-retired-people-could-be-ideal-customers-for-self-driving-cars <comment><USER2> This seems like really obvious -- in a good way -- market targeting.

For the very old, that ship has already sailed. Thinking of my surviving grandmother, her take on losing access to the car is "it's a bummer but I didn't have one until I was twenty five anyway."

And many younger people would prefer not to need a car at all by virtue of living in a human-scale environment.

But for my parents (baby boomer) generation, what I hear from them is "I don't know what I'm going to do when I can't drive anymore, that's just terrifying." They love their cars, and feel crippled when they can't drive anymore, as they lose access to the suburban lifestyle they've spent their whole life pursuing.

Thus, going after the "active retirement" people who have money and want their "freedom" back is probably the best possible place for a self-driving car business to start.

(edited for clarity)

<comment><USER3> You must live in a big city huh? I know zero young people who would give up the convenience of a car, and I suspect this is the case for a majority of the country.

<comment><USER4> People on HN tend to have this huge misconception that the entire world is one dense urban core.

Many more people live in suburbs than in cities. The suburban population is actually growing faster than the urban population [1]. For this plurality of people, cars aren't only convenient but irreplaceable.

[1] [http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2018/05/22/demographic-and- ec...](http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2018/05/22/demographic-and-economic- trends-in-urban-suburban-and-rural-communities/)

<comment><USER5> > the entire world is one dense urban core

Suburbs as a place where you can only survive with a car are mostly an American phenomenon. Most other countries mix low density commercial and residential areas a lot more, making a car-less lifestyle much easier.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Sadly not the retired people of today. This is a little pessimistic, but fully self-driving cars where they basically guarantee that you won't have to touch the wheel, or are level 5 autonomous, will likely take another 30+ years to mature. Hopefully we'll see this in the lifetime of boomers, and we'll get to hear tales about how everyone used to text and drive, while now everyone just texts while the car drives itself.

<comment><USER7> 30 years ago the most powerful intel cpu was a 386. I'd be very careful to make predictions with absolute certainty like you given that we have already a level 4 commercial self driving service in Phoenix and it will expand in other cities during the course of the year. It's also worth noting that until 5 years ago the absolute earliest and optimistic prediction was to have self driving cars in 2020, and this prediction has already been beaten.

<comment><USER8> Self-driving cars don't exist. Self-driving cars that work only in areas of the country where real winter doesn't happen do though.

<comment><USER5> Which is "good enough". People who have the choice between "no car" and "self driving car that sometimes refuses to start because of the weather" will still prefer the latter, as long as it's not too frequent in their climate.

Not being able to drive on certain roads because of road quality and other restrictions also become much more acceptable if you alternative is not having a car at all.

<comment><USER8> No, no. It's not about refusing to start or anything like that.

In places that have winter it's not some roads. It's all roads. The surfaces will be completely covered for months. There will not be reliably or static visual indicators. People will park haphazardly and arbitrarily. People will act like people and form new arbitrary lanes to drive in. Parking lots will be free for alls. This is not something that only occurs during snow events. It's a multi-month permanent thing.

Interpreting this all and driving safely requires an general understanding of the environment and human behavior that machines just won't have for a very long time. It's hard enough for humans.

<comment><USER5> I live in a place that has a month of snow or so each year. But we also have snow plows and road salt, so the time roads are actually covered in snow are limited unless you are in the middle of nowhere.

Of course there are places where it's worse, and the US tends to have more extreme winters because of their unique geography (no mountain ranges that block wind from the North, combined with a huge land mass in the North). But that's the exception, most inhabited places have very managable winters.

<comment><USER8> Ok. I am talking specifically about Minnesota, Wisconsin, (upper) Michigan, (northern) Iowa, North and South Dakota. These are not desolate places in the middle of nowhere. They are very inhabited. I specifically live in a state university city. These places have well established snow infrastructure. And what I said before is still true.

The winter I describe does exist. It exists for many tens of millions of people in the USA in many states.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> My mom is getting up there and when I think about this and Lyft/Uber really the Gap is with Lyft/Uber you don't always know if you'll get a driver that will help you with heavy or bulky objects. With a taxi you wait longer but you can request it. But with Lyft/Uber there is still a good chance there would be help (currently).

With self driving there is no one to help.

As you get older you would want someone to make sure you got into the place. Someone to help you with groceries or other objects to the door.

This would nessiciarily drive you away from local business and to delivery for everything (online likely). And make it less likely you'd take the car if you needed assistance.

Eg as you get older where you have trouble driving you're likely going to need additional assistance that just a car can't provide.

<comment><USER10> Ha, if the Lyft/Uber/taxi driver even gets to the address! It's a constant annoyance for many at my dad's dialysis clinic that every car service basically decides to stop in the middle of a lane on a large street and leaves after 30 seconds, rather than pulling into the parking lot with loading zone in front of the waiting room. Even if you put the pin in the right spot.

I've been trying to convince my dad to use GoGoGrandparent instead of using the Lyft app so someone else can deal with ensuring the driver isn't an idiot, but he actually WANTS to track the driver himself.

Anyway, I'm feeling like by the time level 5 autonomous cars are around, we'll also have worked on improving helper robots for a big chunk of those needs.

<comment><USER9> Something's gotta get the robot in and out of the car.l unless they're all accessible. Which given the demographics they may be

<comment><USER11> The robot can stay at home.. the mall or medical center will have its own robots.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> It's workable, but there's a problem. The fake-it-til-you-make-it self-driving car companies have unicorn-sized valuations. One that's actually doing it is measured on cost and return on investment. This competes with taxi and van services. You get rid of the driver cost while taking on lots of new costs. On a small scale, it probably loses money.

Navya and Local Motors, with their little slow shuttle vans for airports and such, have this problem.

<comment><USER13> It seems as if there's a common assumption that taking out the driver opens up fundamentally different use cases. Even if we assume self-driving cuts costs in half (not obvious), that's a big drop but is it a fundamentally change how people can use cars drop?

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> The thing I don't get about how most companies are approaching self driving cars is why they are trying to first get them to run on regular roads. It seems like getting them to work well on contained campuses with limited traffic like old age homes, universities, hospitals, corporate campuses etc seem like they'd be ideal places to test and deploy low speed self driving vehicles rather than setting them free on public roads as their first market.

<comment><USER15> As far as I can tell, these companies convinced their investors that they're going to be the next Uber, so they need to look like they're making direct progress toward that goal. Driving around a retirement home might seem like a distraction when Tesla claims to be shipping a fully autonomous car by the end of 2019.

<comment><USER16> Tesla claims things, and this is a perpetually moving goal. IIRC, they first announced it in 2015, to be completed by 2016. Well...I assume it could be a _business_ tactic, to force competitors' energy in this direction, just as you have noted.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Or we could just build things closer together. Pros:

1\. We've known how to do it for 5,000+ years and it still works. 2\. People can walk or bike so they don't wind up on My 600-lb Life. 3\. Reduced greenhouse gas emissions. 4\. Reduced stress from traffic. 5\. Reduced traffic deaths. 6\. Doesn't rely on billions of dollars of unproven tech that may net work and we can get started today. 7\. Reduces the soul-crushing boredom of suburbia, which has about as much character as a glass of water. Social interaction is important for humans.

<comment> frosted-flakes Cons: You have to live in a shoebox and experience the soul-crushing boredom of urban cities, which has about as much character as a slab of concrete.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Full disclosure: I work for Drive.ai, and these might not be the views of my employer.

But yes, retired people or just sleepier communities with an older population makes sense. It's not just because of an early stage rollout of self driving cars for a good tech shakedown, but also communities like that stand to benefit the most from it.

My dad back in the motherland retired recently and have generally poor eyesight in the dark, so he'd rather take a Grab than driving by himself if he needs to go out at night. Self driving cars could fill this need.

</comment><comment><USER19> So long as it is a car that CAN self-drive not one that CAN ONLY self drive then that sounds great.

Retired doesn't mean crippled!

My mother in law is 84 and is a perfectly competent driver. I suspect that she would find a self driving car more difficult to manage than the Land Rover she currently drives simply because the UI will be unfamiliar. I'm 63, and retired, and while I enjoy the additional features that my Tesla S has I don't want them instead of being able to drive the car myself.

<comment><USER20> My 90 year old grandmother took a drivers test at the instance of he children last year. She passed both written and driving portions. My other grandmother who is about ten years younger on the other hand is a menace that should of had her license taken away years (and multiple accidents) ago.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> The remake of Driving Miss Daisy just isn't going to be the same...

</comment><comment><USER22> The same way as nuclear fusion will help retired people to spend less on electricity. Both things will likely never happen.

</comment><comment><USER23> Here is recent a talk/lecture by Oliver Cameron, CEO of voyage, explaining in detail why they chose retirement communities and how they built their company.

[https://youtu.be/-j0tc0Y1CIE](https://youtu.be/-j0tc0Y1CIE)

</comment><comment><USER24> These cars will have accidents, and they will have victims. Perhaps there is another hidden benefit for offering them to retired people - they have already lived most of their lives, and if an accident happens, it will be less of a loss.

<comment><USER16> I don't think EH was in either of those categories.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> In general there are lots of ideal customers for all sorts of non-existent products.

</comment><comment><USER26> It would create a bad image from a marketing point.

</comment><comment><USER27> Oh really? People with money to buy a car but who can't safely drive are the ideal customers for self-driving cars? Mind-blowing!

</comment><comment><USER28> Also insurance payouts will be lower on crashes.

</comment><comment><USER29> So is mass transit. This sounds like a solution looking for a problem.

</comment><comment><USER30> Paywall. How are commenters reading the full article?

<comment><USER31> [https://outline.com/](https://outline.com/)</comment></comment>


Designing Emergent AI - <AUTHOR> http://christophermpark.blogspot.com/2009/06/designing-emergent-ai-part-1.html <comment><USER2> Was there no other explanation on how this was achieved other than the fact that each node has individual AI?

<comment><USER3> There was also mention of a tiered command structure (units, groups, everybody), fuzzy logic, and different (I assume simpler) AI game mechanics.

I remain unenlightened. The phrase "emergent AI" sure is cool, though--taking notes, EA?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> When it comes to topics such as emergent AIs and the Cult of the Singularity, I only hope our new emergent über-intelligent overlords at least keep me fed and my cage clean.</comment>


The Heirloom Project - <AUTHOR> http://heirloom.sourceforge.net/ <comment><USER2> This, along with the software available at suckless.org, gives us but a glimpse of the elegance, leanness, minimalism and simplicity of the original UNIX. (Still, I am not sure what is the best way to have a UNIX experience today. One, more practical, probably would be to use a minimal install of Slackware; a more radical approach would be to play with Version 7 either on a PDP-11 emulator or using an existing port of the same to x86 available at [http://emma.nfshost.com/v7x86/.](http://emma.nfshost.com/v7x86/.))

<comment><USER3> Regarding "a UNIX experience today", I'd think some *BSD system maybe? I.e. FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, or similar.

<comment><USER4> You could run Solaris[1]. They don't seem to provide versions older than 10.

[1] [http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/server- storage/solaris10/d...](http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/server- storage/solaris10/downloads/index.html)

<comment><USER5> Elsewhere on the internet (without resorting to seedier places like torrent sites) you can find versions of SunOS 2.x/3.x/4.x as well as Solaris 1.x, 2.x, 7.x and 8.

<comment><USER4> A google search for "old unix emulator"[1] turns up a wealth of options.

[1] [https://www.google.com/search?q=old%20unix%20emulator](https://www.google.com/search?q=old%20unix%20emulator)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is a nice project to reimplement the GNU core utils with simpler/shorter code.

There's a couple projects that superceed it now though Rob Landley's Toybox and Suckless sbase/ubase.

* [https://landley.net/toybox/](https://landley.net/toybox/)

* [http://git.suckless.org/sbase/tree/](http://git.suckless.org/sbase/tree/)

* [http://git.suckless.org/ubase/tree/](http://git.suckless.org/ubase/tree/)

<comment><USER7> GNU core utils are more complicated reimplementations of the ancestors of these things.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> mailx is a phantastic tool for scripting and automatic processing of mails and mailboxes.

<comment><USER9> Going from mail to mailx was a HUGE improvement back in the day.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Gunnar Ritter dropped off the internet half a decade ago. Nothing on that site is maintained. It's a shame; I hope people pick up the mantle.

<comment><USER11> Heirloom Doctools is maintained by Carsten Kunze at [https://n-t- roff.github.io/heirloom/doctools.html](https://n-t- roff.github.io/heirloom/doctools.html).

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I have the Heirloom Bourne Shell on all my boxes. I don't use it interactively, but I make an effort to restrict all my shell scripts to use nothing that is not in HBS and the Heirloom toolchest. It's a matter of pride to me that all my scripts be portable to virtually any *NIX system. I think it builds character and pride.

<comment><USER13> Why not build for POSIX sh, instead? It's more, umm, standard, and can be expected to run on any OS built in the past decade or more. It's equally character-building, if you've been accustomed to building for modern bash (at least, it was for me). I haven't seen an actual Bourne shell in maybe 20 years.

<comment> yjftsjthsd-h Posix is a great standard, but you need an implementation to actually run (and test) on. I've used dash for this as well, but heirloom sh should be pretty close (and at worst probably a subset and therefore safe).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Please do NOT use sourceforge.net

<comment><USER15> I didn't downvote you, but I'll ask the question...

Why not? The new (2016) owners BizX turned that ship around. They seem to actually give a shit:

[https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/4n3e1s/the_state_...](https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/4n3e1s/the_state_of_sourceforge_since_its_acquisition_in/)</comment></comment>


I got GPT-3 to predict the timeline of the pandemic - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/acapellascience/status/1285448694444089344 <comment><USER2> > It's [sic] leaders

Dammit GPT-3, not you too!</comment>


Microsoft pulls in $1.35B in revenue for Surface line - <AUTHOR> http://www.windowscentral.com/microsoft-pulls-impressive-135-billion-revenue-surface-line <comment><USER2> They certainly did something right, though I'm not quite sure what it was. A few years back, you couldn't step in front of an undergrad class here (Canada) without being subject to a wall of glowing bitten apples staring at you, now at least a quarter I'd estimate are those surface tablets.

Who knew people would take a chance on laptop that doesn't work when on your lap.

<comment><USER3> My wife has an SP3. Not only does it work fine on a lap, but it has a very nice stylus. It runs Adobe Indesign just fine. It runs Steam just fine, along with many slightly older games. The builtin speakers are good, as is the keyboard cover. It's quite portable and has a battery life of several hours when running Word + browser.

The Surface RT on the other hand remains kind of pointless.

<comment><USER4> Well, seeing as Windows RT is not receiving updates and the Surface 3 runs full Windows, isn't the "Surface RT" essentially dead?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> My sister has an SP3 and likes it a lot. She's a student in college and I feel like this is a good niche for the hardware. The main draw to the Surface for her was the pen because of how well it worked compared to other options. She downloads pdf or ppt presentations and can annotate and take notes in class.

Is there any other hardware that can do this just as well? I think maybe the ipad pro but I have never used one.

<comment><USER6> My sister does the exact same thing with the Lenovo Thinkpad Yoga. She bought a separate stylus for it, but the combination has worked well for her.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7>
        iPad: 7.1B - doomed category
        Surface Pro/Books: 1.35B - super impressive, categories of the future!

<comment><USER8> Isn't this what people said about the original iPhone?

<comment><USER9> It's a bit subjective since one company had huge market share out of the gate and invented the category, while the other keeps releasing 'new' products, years later. So yes, there's growth for now. For Wall Street, growth is pretty much key.

<comment><USER8> Why is it that when MS makes a "new" product and category, you put it in quotations, yet when Apple does it, you don't?

Your approach to these companies is hypocritical at best.

At least MS is trying to invent a new category these days.

>>> had huge market share out of the gate

That's just wrong.

<comment><USER10> > _Why is it that when MS makes a "new" product and category, you put it in > quotations, yet when Apple does it, you don't?_

Because one dominates and defines the market, as can be seen by any before and after, and the other is just putting out some products few people care about.

<comment><USER11> So is the iPad Pro a "new" product or a new product?

<comment><USER10> iPad pro is a "new" product. The original iPad was a new product.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I used a surface pro 3 for a couple weeks before ultimately returning it. Windows as a dev platform couldn't cut it for me, and the ubuntu VM in Virtualbox did not survive multiple sleep cycles one puts the surface through during normal use.

The thing i did love about the surface is that the processor is not sitting on my lap, where as the macbook air/pro burns my legs all day long.

I would love for apple to make a version of the macbook that puts the processor behind the screen.

<comment><USER13> hey I'm not trying to troll you or anything, sincere question: Exactly how do you work? On a sofa? Airplanes?

(irony zone, shortly after posting this, I realized that I'm typing from a lounge chair with my laptop squarely on my legs… but this is an unusual circumstance for me)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> They kind of did the same thing with the xbox. Sunk a ton of money into. Instead of just pure revenue growth it is important to look at margins. The overall profitability of the product.

</comment><comment><USER10> > _Microsoft pulls in an impressive $1.35B in revenue for Surface line_

Really? Impressive for whom? 1.3B is less than what Apple made with the iWatch -- and that's after decades of MS losing money and trying to go somewhere with their table OS and then tablet offerings.

<comment><USER15> Wait, where did you get Apple Watch numbers? Apple hasn't released those.

<comment><USER10> " _Though Apple won 't share specific sales figures for its new Apple Watch, disclosures made by the company this week reveal that the wearable device reached more than $1.69 billion in sales by the end of September_"

[http://appleinsider.com/articles/15/10/29/apple-watch- sales-...](http://appleinsider.com/articles/15/10/29/apple-watch-sales- topped-17-billion-in-five-months)

<comment><USER16> So that's 6 months of sales versus 3 months for the Surface, so not directly comparable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> But how much profit did that generate? I don't see any mention of profit in the article.

<comment><USER18> Since when does anyone on HN care about actual profits?

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> My wife switched to a SP3 from a macbook, because it looked like a very compelling device.

It lost all bluetooth and wifi - 4 months out of warranty (hardware issue). From googling - this was not a completely uncommon occurrence.

Yes - we should have gotten the extended warranty, but this was an expensive device, and we expected quality hardware that would last.

From a usability perspective, it is a device that is in-between. It is not a stellar tablet nor a stellar laptop.

<comment><USER20> Funny, my wife and I had a 2014 Macbook Pro with retina display and the backlight on the screen went out. We also have a SurfacePro 3 and have had no issues whatsoever. We brought the Macbook to the apple-store (with extended warranty) and they initially tried to tell me that screens were not covered (as they are almost always broken due to accidental damage). I had to come back with a flashlight and show them that you can still see the image, it's just the back light went out and you cant really break just the back light. I was really starting to move away from Apple anyway but this really sealed the deal for me. However, I know that my experience is anecdotal, and it's plural is not data so take my experience for what it's worth.....

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I think this is impressive but it will see even larger growth when businesses start adopting them in lieu of the standard Dell laptops.

</comment><comment><USER22> One thing I want to know from Surface Book owners is whether the keyboard can be configured for smoother productivity.

Naviagational (Home/PgUp/PgDown/End) and volume keys are on by default meaning that you have to press the Fn-Alt-Function Key if you want to use Alt- Function. The problem with that is that an independent Fn press will lock out the function key, toggling the behaviour so that Function Keys are now the default.

I would like it if LAlt-FunctionKey was different behaviour from RAlt- FunctionKey. LAlt-F4 would close a program while RAlt-Function Key would change the volume. The requirement to use the Fn Key and the fact that the Fn can be locked (and easily and accidentally unlocked/locked again) is a serious usability issue.

Actually I'd prefer a full real keyboard... nevertheless the Surface Book and the SP4 keyboards are massive improvements.

Moreover, does anyone know if the undocking button next to the Delete key can be locked out, say, requiring a key combination instead?

</comment><comment> sjm-lbm This is impressive in general, but particularly so in light of where they came from: [http://www.zdnet.com/article/microsofts-900-million- surface-...](http://www.zdnet.com/article/microsofts-900-million-surface-rt- write-down-how-did-this-happen/)

</comment><comment><USER23> I wasn't really surprised by this, I've got a Surface Book (ordered after the announcement) and so far have been very pleased with the hardware, and hoping the software can catch up. For me, to replace a paper book and paper notebook you have to have a great reading experience and a great drawing experience. For me, the Surface Pro 4 has both of those.

That said, I'll probably end up getting the tablet version to augment the Surface Book unless they can fix detach. Way too often I try to detach and it won't because something is unable to release, and when I'm in "clipboard" mode there are _no_ ports on the clipboard. I can get around that partially by using the dock which has ports but I'd really like a USB-C port and a micro-SD card slot on the display half.

<comment><USER24> It's really excellent harware. But sadly it's not very usable in Linux yet [1]. I'd love to use a fanless Surface with a tiling window manager as my daily driver.

But it comes nowhere close to my MBA 2012 (used by Linus for sometime) in terms of Linux compatibility. Almost perfect with a stock kernel except for really minor problems (no battery ACPI ticks when it discharges).

[1] [https://www.reddit.com/r/surfacelinux](https://www.reddit.com/r/surfacelinux)

<comment><USER23> Linux support is, as you say, non-existent. That might be better with the new Dell Skylake laptops. That said, I've never found a pen-aware Linux sketching program that had any utility and I don't have the time to write one.

<comment><USER25> Sketching or note taking? Xournal is a pretty good note taking software and I've been using it for several years at this point.

<comment><USER24> Yep, xournal was the one I had in mind.

For the remaining stuff I'm completely keyboard-driven. Yet I prefer Surfaces to regular laptops. This is for ergonomic reasons.

I find it easy to place them split from the keyboard, which makes a great mini desktop. Also I can hold them as a tablet if I'm reading or surfing casually.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> " _Microsoft and Nokia have sold a total of 110 million Windows Phones compared to 4.5 billion iOS and Android phones in the same period. IDC recently reported that 400 million phones were sold in the recent quarter, meaning just 1.1 percent of them were Lumia Windows Phones. Microsoft does not have any compelling Lumia handsets, and the Lumia 950 and Lumia 950 XL were both disappointing flagship devices with unfinished Windows 10 Mobile software._ "

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10993847](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10993847)

</comment><comment><USER27> A general accounting question...do all companies count revenue the same way for scenarios like:

\- Product is purchased by store.

\- Customer actually buys product.

\- Customer returns product.

\- Unsold product is returned by store.

In other words, I don't know how to compare this to anything else because I don't know if it's counting units that didn't reach real customers, or if the announcement would be a lot different two weeks from now after some people return their Christmas presents?

<comment><USER28> They all count differently depend on the news they are trying to sell.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> even if they'll give Surfaces for free, and pay people to use it, I am afraid, more and more people will use Android and iOS. It is simply too late for MS to "own the desktop". IN december I 've seen first time in my GA account that hits from Android users prevailed over MS OS, iOS being on the 3rd place.

UPD: since its mostly dull corporate websites, I think I am correct.

</comment><comment><USER30> >Microsoft pulls in an impressive $1.35B in revenue for Surface line

Why don't they publish the profit they made on their Surface line of products? This is a lot like the revenue they reported for Azure. Until we know what they actually made these numbers are of very little value.

</comment><comment><USER31> Impressive indeed! Over 19% of Apple's iPad revenue.

<comment><USER32> It's more comparable to at least a MacBook Air laptop.

<comment><USER9> They spec'd the Surface Book to match up with a MacBook Pro, but I honestly don't think the quality is there.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> I got a surface book for work, its pretty sweet.

</comment><comment><USER34> If I ever get a tablet, it will be a surface. Simply because so much of the work I do resides in spreadsheets, and Surface is optimized for excel and productivity.

<comment><USER35> IMO, tablets are consuming devices. And as a tablet, my Surface Pro 4 is not very good - it is a bit too heavy and has a too short battery life.

As a portable laptop with a pen and screen with an excellent sRGB colorspace support - and with a nice keyboard - it's awesome.</comment></comment>