The American-Western European Values Gap - <AUTHOR> http://www.pewglobal.org/2011/11/17/the-american-western-european-values-gap/ <comment><USER2> I find it interesting that more women than men consider religion important to them, when religion is partially to blame for them being marginalized in society.

On the whole, I just look at those figures and feel a deep amount of shame for my country (US). We'll catch up, but I think part of the reason for these figures is that the US is relatively rural.

<comment><USER3> I am consistently amazed by the profound contempt which modern liberalism holds for the traditional role of the wife and mother. In traditional societies, motherhood is not looked down upon or held in contempt, but mothers are honored. As the managers of families and the people that consistently invest the most in the next generation, they are the backbone of society. Every successful person today owes his success to a chain of hundreds of successful mothers, stretching back into pre-history.

It is only as our planning horizon has shrunk from a thousand years to six months that we begin to look on motherhood as a form of slavery. Females are told that they must do anything _but_ a traditional female role to have value in society. We cajole women to act like men. In a way, liberalism is ironically misogynist.

It is little surprise then that Western liberals no longer breed above replacement rates. Denigrating motherhood is not the way for a people to last the aeons of time. I believe the future of the West is profoundly more conservative than the present, because Darwin. Liberalism is a _suicidal_ ideology.

<comment><USER4> If managing families and raising children is such an honored and fulfilling role and makes you the backbone of society, why don't conservative men fall over themselves to fill that role?

My guess would be that they don't actually believe their own ad copy.

<comment><USER5> Just as there are roles specified by society for women - there are roles specified for men. Actually nowadays I think men have much less choice than women if they care about society opinion at all.

Nobody blinks an eye when some women doesn't have kids and choose career. On the other hand being a "house husband" that doesn't work and "only" deal with house and kids is still considered weird and people think you are "not 100% man".

See the whole "real men" stereotype. There's no "real women" stereotype. We have one sex that have a choice, and one that doesn't. It's even visible in fashion. Women wear what they want. Men doesn't wear dresses.

BTW at least part of the differences in salaries is direct consequence of that. People expect men to keep working no matter the family situation, because "man should work". With women there's significant probability that they'll eventually choose kids, and salary reflects that belief.

Feminists try to deal with the salary gap by regulation - I don't think it will work. You need to change society so men have same choice women have. It will be even harder.

<comment><USER4> I don't necessarily disagree [1]. The point that I was making was that childcare is often sold as a high-status job, when in reality it is generally a low-status, low-reward job. This ties directly into your argument about stay-at-home dads being looked down upon. It's the other side of the same coin.

[1] Nor do I necessarily agree, either, but I don't want to get sidetracked.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> A lot of the questions are misleading -- placed with an American bias as to what they meant. Eg the first table measures whether people value:

(a) "freedom to pursue one's goals without state interference."

vs

(b) "State guarantees nobody is in need".

The formulation shows an American understanding/bias on the issue. For a lot of Europeans (a) is not about real freedom, because it translates to big corporations and private interests shaping your life and be given free pass to exploit people.

That is, we don't see "state" as an enemy that restricts us, but as the (imperfect of course) embodiment of our collective will, as stated through democracy, that helps set the stage for our personal freedom.

So those same questions are also read as:

(a) Do you want to forgo a lot of democratic procedures, and have society be a jungle where you are supposedly "free" but in practice the "big fish" can crush you at will, or have you starve to work for them cheaper?

vs

(b) You want people to vote and use the state power to restrict exploitation and need in the interests of the majority, and thus be able to enjoy your individual freedom better.

So it's not really about valuing "freedom" vs "state", it's about how different peoples see how freedom works and what state does.

<comment><USER7> What's the difference between "big corporations and private interests" on the one hand and "state" on the other? They seem in all cases to be organizations of human beings with the capacity to concentrate and assert power over other human beings.

The difference seems to be in the scale and scope of that concentration and assertion of power. So, if you're inclined to minimize the capacity of _any_ external institution to shape your life or to exploit you, which option is most optimal? Do you prefer option (a), which admits at most a haphazard and ad hoc system of institutional control - one which can, with some effort, be evaded - or option (b), which establishes a universal and de jure system of institutional control, evading which requires resources inaccessible to most?

I've always found it odd that so many think the solution to the concentration of power in the hands of a plurality organized institutions is to concentrate all power in the hands of a single organized institution.

<comment><USER6> > _What 's the difference between "big corporations and private interests" on > the one hand and "state" on the other? They seem in all cases to be > organizations of human beings with the capacity to concentrate and assert > power over other human beings._

The difference is in the use, origin and organization of such "capacity". Which makes all the difference in the world.

For one, state power comes from elections and laws passed by elected representatives of the majority. Corporate and private interest power on the other hand is arbitrary.

Second, the democratic state (however imperfect) was founded to serve the people. And in most cases it was founded BY the people, through bloody struggles against opressors (feudalism, colonial powers, the King, etc). Corporate and private interest power on the other hand is self serving.

To put it in another way, "private interests" amount to a dictatorial state (or, to be more presice, to a constellation of dictatorial regions of control). Something people fight to get rid of, and establish democratic states.

> _The difference seems to be in the scale and scope of that concentration and > assertion of power._

Private interests, if left unguarded, can drawf states in scale and scope (and have done so, in tons of historical examples, especially for less powerful countries. The term "Banana Republic" is an example of that).

So, nope, the difference is in the origin and check of that power, as well as the purpose of it.

> _So, if you 're inclined to minimize the capacity of any external > institution to shape your life or to exploit you, which option is most > optimal?_

No question about it: stump private interests at every opportunity.

<comment><USER8> There can be a marketplace for private companies. There is competition for hiring workers as well as for selling goods. But the state is a monopoly. While the state might start out as well-meaning, it will quickly attract corruption which imposes itself on every citizen, leaving them without recourse. If you leave a bad company and join or found a better one, that's business as usual. If you revoke a government, that's revolution.

<comment><USER9> "If you revoke a government, that's revolution"

In a democracy, its called an election. They happen regularly and you have a direct say on them. The directors of large companies however you have absolutely no say on.

Also, its not always possible to just "join or found a better" company for many, many reasons. Perhaps my comparative advantage isn't in building up companies against entrenched competition. Perhaps there isn't capital available to start a company in a particularly capital intensive or regulated industry. Perhaps the company tactics are awful enough to destroy me even if I tried (eg. mafia visits, suppliers refuse to deal, FUD campaigns).

<comment><USER8> An election just rearranges the people who are in various pre-determined positions. It doesn't change the structure of the government. If there is a "chief surveillance officer", an election might change who is in that position but you will still be spied on. In fact, what is more likely is that you won't get to vote for that person directly, but the president you elect will appoint a candidate and the congress you elect will approve that candidate. This means you are even more removed from actually making any changes.

Even if a market is hard to enter, it's better than having armed officers show up and charge you with treason for trying to overthrow the government. Reflect on the political situation leading up to the American Civil War. Even with that many people who felt that strongly about the issue of states' rights, they were not able to change the structure of the government.

<comment><USER9> All good points. But in most democratic countries while you don't vote for the "chief surveillance officer" you vote for the person who is his boss (unlike say, here in the UK where you can only vote for your local representative). They ought to be able to push changes down from the top and have the ultimate executive power to help them do so.

(PS. I am not aware of the US Civil War (beyond the Ironclad battle) so I can not comment on that)

<comment><USER8> Well you might be aware that our federal government is divided into three branches. The President doesn't get to decide what the laws of the land are, that's up to Congress. So Congress creates a department, funds it, sets limits on it, and then the executive branch uses those funds to do the job. It get complicated, but to be specific, elections don't change laws. You would have to elect enough representatives to change the law, a president to sign the law, and then the courts would have to accept the law as constitutional.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> > About half of Americans (49%) and Germans (47%) agree with the statement, > "Our people are not perfect, but our culture is superior to others;" 44% in > Spain share this view. In Britain and France, only about a third or fewer > (32% and 27%, respectively) think their culture is better than others.

The French only say that because they disagree with the "our culture is not perfect" bit.

<comment><USER11> Oh look, French bashing, how very avant-garde.

<comment><USER12> rayiner's joke is aimed at this category of people :

>3\. WE KNOW NOTHING ABOUT THE REST OF THE WORLD in this article : [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6037848](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6037848)

So, for people who only know France through Pepé le Pew, that is a good joke !

<comment><USER11> So are you saying it becomes funnier if you are more ignorant about the subject?

<comment><USER13> Pretty much, milking a stupid cliche. Most Americans' only exposure to France is stereotypes they've seen, or if they're more well traveled, exposure to Parisians. Which is like if I came from another country, visited NYC, and concluded that Americans were generally pretentious, almost never made eye contact, and paid obscene amounts for rent.

<comment><USER14> Ironic that you mention the cliche joke, then follow it up with a stereotype about Americans exposure to culture.

<comment><USER15> Yes and irony is often hilarious.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> One possible reason for the British response in the Religious vs National Identity question is that British identity can be a very fractious thing.

The UK is made up of constituent kingdoms, but not all of these are on the island of Great Britain. Thus you can be technically British (i.e. of the UK) without being British (i.e. of the island of Great Britain). This most notably manifests itself amongst the Northern Irish, some of whom see themselves as Irish (ethnicity, or wanting to be of a united Irish state) or British (of the United Kingdom, but of island of Ireland).

To confuse things further, there's a debate going on over whether or not Scotland should stay part of the United Kingdom or become a separate country. Scottish nationalism is a very strange creature. Thus some people may identify with being Scottish first, or solely as Scottish. This occurs to a lesser extent in Wales and in England (being Welsh and English, not Scottish, that would just be silly).

Additionally there are many people who are first or second generation British with foreign parents or grandparents, particularly from former colonial territories. I have friends who identify with being both British and Indian, despite being born and raised on the island of Great Britain.

It all makes for a big, typically British mess. Finally, my wife was born in Turkey, moved to England and became a British citizen, but she can never become English because there's no English citizenship status.

<comment><USER17> "Scottish nationalism is a very strange creature."

Why? We already have seperate legal, educational and health systems and a government that deals with a lot of domestic policies.

We have a clear national identity and seem to be immune to the swing towards the far right that seems to be happening in England. Personally, I would far rather be in a Scotland that is independent, free of Trident and part of the EU than left as an appendage to London in the Former UK.

[Sadly, I suspect we won't get indepedence, but I rankle a bit at this being described as "strange"]

<comment><USER16> Because unlike other common forms of nationalism, it's based on a sense of self-determination rather than a sense of superiority (e.g. American, historic British, Italian and German nationalism etc.).

<comment><USER17> Ah - I'd never really thought of it like that. So when you meant "strange" you meant "nice strange", not "scary strange". If that is the case the I am standing down from my state of ranklement ;-)

[NB I believe the French (our occasional ancient allies) - had a saying along the lines of "As touchy as a Scotsman"!]

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Interesting that the US believes they shape their own destiny or that they are the product of their own work, yet the 'cultural superiority' question seems to indicate that they don't necessarily value what they have produced.

<comment><USER19> The death of Manifest Destiny... ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manifest_destiny](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manifest_destiny))

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I find it interesting that Americans have so little trust in their democratic government, yet have so much faith in authoritarian phenomenon of religion.

<comment><USER3> Religion is a far more decentralized, organic, community-based institution (at least in America). In contrast the American government is a distant faceless bureaucracy, and even if a small subset of its employees are elected that doesn't make Americans feel better about it telling them what to do. But Americans are perfectly happy teaming up with their neighbors to help the elderly in the community once a week with their church groups.

Religion _as it is practiced_ is not the bogeyman of liberals' dreams.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> This 'study' reaks of bias and hand waved conclusions...the list would be so long, perhaps the extensive use of 'Americans' as a short hand for US citizens in an international opinion survey is the most blatant give away ?

It comes from the Pew Reasearch Center, an US think tank chaired by former Bill Clinton's secretary of States, funded by a very wealthy conservative entity, and scanning the other surveys I get the same feeling of being very transparent on the methodology while strongly aiming for a given output. Like this one the NSA for instance: [http://www.people- press.org/2013/06/10/majority-views-nsa-ph...](http://www.people- press.org/2013/06/10/majority-views-nsa-phone-tracking-as-acceptable-anti- terror-tactic/2/)

PS: even for a selected target, what does questions like 'Our people are not perfect, but our culture is superior to others' point to ? They surveyed that short of half of the Christinans think themself as Christian first and citizen of a country second. For these people, what does 'our culture' even point to ?

</comment><comment><USER22> The age difference in the cultural superiority question is really eye opening. It went from 60% of 50+ Americans saying 'yes', to 37% for 18-29 -- second lowest after France.

Glad to know that my generation has a sprinkling of modesty.

</comment><comment><USER23> I'd be interested to see the exact phrasing of each question.

<comment><USER24> I've taken a Pew Research Poll before. What struck me immediately was the inane and terrible format of the questions. I actually said to the individual giving the poll, "None of these questions really allow me to confer how I feel about the issues that I know you're asking me about. They're basically nonsense."

<comment><USER25> I wonder if there is room in the market to disrupt polling then. I have never been part of a poll but have heard similar bad things about their structure, so I wonder if anyone is out there trying to make it more accurate.

<comment><USER26> On the technical side you need two things for disruption:

1\. A sane test design. Before trying to pull an MVP here, please take some psychology classes on that topic since there's already a huge body of work on how to design a test in a way that lets you infer reliable data, even if participants think the test is nuts (and try to sabotage it), or if they try to second-guess "desired" answers ("Of course I'm not racist").

2\. Comparable data sets over time/regions. People are interested in how things change. That's the incumbent advantage in this market, they have all that stuff.

#2 also helps to get _some_ useful information out of insane questions (since they're consistently insane over the years).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> "Western Europe" is an odd and outdated term as it is the EU that is acquiring political and economic powers and which some seek to federate. Leaving out the most religious EU countries like Malta, Cyprus, Romania, Poland and Italy you will get a very skewed picture if you are mentally equating Western Europe with the European Union (which is a term often conflated itself with the ambiguous "Europe"). Large portions of legislation in "Western Europe" are decided upon by Southern European politicians in the European Council and the European Parliament where representation is weighted by population in various ways (QMV and MEP caps).

Some "North Eastern America" with a selection of blue states would give you pretty different results to the USA mean as well. The question people would ask though is: what justification do you have for putting that geographical constraint on your study?

<comment><USER28> "Western Europe" is a sort of Americanism historically used to distinguish European NATO states and allies from Soviet-bloc states ("Eastern Europe"). Many states to the south and even far to the east (e.g., Greece) fall under the geopolitical concept of Western Europe in this context.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Arnold Kling has developed his "three-axis model."

The three axes are: \- Civilization/barbarism \- Oppressor/oppressed \- Freedom/coercion

The idea is that people will have different attitudes on issues and that these attitudes can be "plotted" on these three axes.

It is only a model, but I think it is a good one.

</comment><comment><USER30> Many of the questions are so stupid that I would refuse to answer them.

</comment><comment><USER31> Unfortunately, my experience with corporate America aligns strongly with this post.</comment>


Show HN: Shirts for Sandy - Raising money for the relief fund - <AUTHOR> http://www.shirtsforsandy.com

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi HN! I know this isn't the usual HN project, but I remember seeing something like this posted for a snowstorm a while back. I'm in CT and since I was locked in my college dorm yesterday as Hurricane Sandy made landfall, I decided to get some like-minded people together and design and sell a T-shirt to help the relief movement as the storm continues its path. We will be donating 100% of our proceeds to charity (currently we're looking at AmeriCares[1], but please let me know if you have any suggestions).

Technology wise, I set the entire thing up in a couple of hours with a static page and put it up on an AWS S3 bucket. We're collecting the orders in a PayPal account now to build up a large order and then getting our shirts printed, allowing us to minimize our printing costs as much as possible.

We're selling our shirts for $14 (free shipping) at <http://www.shirtsforsandy.com>. Even if you can't buy a shirt, we would greatly appreciate it if you donated a few spare dollars to the relief effort or if you could spread the word about what we're doing. Our Facebook page is at <http://facebook.com/ShirtsForSandy>.

[1]<http://www.americares.org/></comment>


Voice is Next - <AUTHOR> https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/voice-next-charles-bai?trk=pulse_spock-articles <comment><USER2> > I believe the majority of human-computer interactions will be voice-enabled.

No, unless we'll be doing with our computers (phones included) something radically different from what we're doing now.

Games played by voice? Maybe but the "majority" of them?

Facebook? Speech to text is a thing right now. Voice only messages would change the nature of the social network.

The web? Is text based and touch based.

What I believe is that voice will become another HC interface especially for a new class of devices (Echo, etc) but there are places where its simply not appropriate. So, important yes, majority no. Not in 10 years.</comment>


Show HN: Instagram Analytics and Like Predictor - <AUTHOR> http://gllass.com <comment><USER2> You guys... the only effect that sockpuppet accounts and voting like this has on HN is that all your accounts get banned. Please don't waste your and our time.</comment>


Apple Glasses: VR and AR Are Coming - <AUTHOR> https://www.macrumors.com/roundup/apple-glasses/ <comment><USER2> If you're wise enough, you shouldn't go and buy the first edition of this Apple product. 100% of the time you're at the start of the planned obsolescence chopping board and will be using outdated hardware made by accidental or deliberate mistakes Apple made just for it to be replaced in 6 - 8 months.

Be wise and wait for the second or third revision.</comment>


A tale of evolution. How Facebook and I grew apart. - <AUTHOR> http://gilest.ro/2010/a-tale-of-evolution-how-facebook-and-i-grew-apart/ <comment><USER2> I wanted to agree with you, and I'm only on Facebook because of non-geek friends, but I survive with twitter, newsfox (Firefox plug-in), and tumblr -- sometimes sharing via dropbox. Buzz is, unfortunately, a vacuum. And Google Reader for some reason doesn't quite work for me over Newsfox.

I agree that Facebook is horrible, in many ways, and hasn't progressed much at all in any useful or meaningful way (for HN-type users), but Google, while having the tools, needs to apply them better to win over the market.

Hell, I'm desperate to lead my non-geek chums over Facebook's horizon, but Gooogle's apps aren't there yet. Heaven only knows why, though :-/

<comment><AUTHOR> In a way I hope your non-geek friends will never join buzz because I definitely experienced facebook jump of the shark exactly when my grandmother and her tea friends started joining.

I don't know what google plans really are: I don't know whether buzz is so unfriendly because they want to target a different audience or simply because they don't see much future in it.

Reader is a good tool. It's faster than the aggregators I tried in the past (netvibes mainly), it works on my phone and it has a smart stumblupon-like feature that is promising.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Every friend I have left (51 at current count) has expressed doubts re: Facebook use, and has contemplated switching to something. Every one came to the conclusion that the disadvantages to switching far outweigh the advantages of switching; more, there's no real competitor to switch.

You need to limit your Facebook friends. Having too many FB friends mimics the feeling of being overly fakely social: You get much more closeness if you stick to the people you really care about. Stop treating it like a monolithic connection. Friend and unfriend people whimsically. Stick to people you really care about interacting with.

Facebook is about the social. If you're not using it as a strictly conversational tool, then it doesn't work well. (Other than sending messages, but whatever.) It's not for documenting links, or documenting conversation. It's about today rather than last week or last month.

And no other tool handles that as well. Tumblr doesn't handle conversations well, Twitter doesn't handle multimedia well. Buzz is hideous and bad and it gives me skin-crawlies; plus I don't have a Google account. If there was a similarly social service, I'd consider moving over, but there's not.

</comment><comment><USER4> I having waiting forever for google to support search operators in its reader. I get by by dumping my entire feed locally. But there really should have been a way to do this on their server side.

</comment><comment><USER5> Somehow, I doubt Facebook will miss you. The product is not designed for you.

<comment><AUTHOR> Not now, definetely. But I did enjoy facebook in the past actually.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Isn't it slightly contradictory to not have a 'buzz this' button at the end of your essay?

<comment><AUTHOR> Very much so. I just added it, thanks. As I said, I really just switched.</comment></comment>


Electric Velomobiles: fast, comfortable, and more efficient than cars - <AUTHOR> http://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2012/10/electric-velomobiles.html

<comment><USER2> So from what I gather and the various photos in the article, you are put into a 'low slung' vehicle weighing only 35kg and drive along with other road users in their 1-2000kg vehicles. Sounds fun. I give you two weeks on a highway.

My daily commute (3km by bicycle) includes 100m of main road (and optionally an amazing two tunnels (<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ltsADGmrjVQ>). The rest is a shared use path. I now take the lane on this section because so many cars/vans have tried to pass me dangerously. I was seriously thinking of buying a head cam.

If you really want to make a change and get people out of cars you need to make the infrastructure you provide safe enough for a 10 year old to cycle it. This means not putting different types of transport in conflict. Have segregated car/cycle/pedestrian lanes. Prioritise cycling over all other forms of transport. Recognise it as a transport 'service' and make it core to government transport policy.

This stuff is beginning to happen in the UK. (See London.) Studies are showing the massive benefits to a city (financially) putting in segregated cycling lanes and the long term benefits these bring to companies (cyclists don't have as many days sick). There are also the obvious health benefits.

The problem with America is that it loves the car (as does the UK) and is only just beginning to wake up to the fact that converting your city into a massive parking lot just doesn't work and is socially/financially a bad thing.

So make it safe enough for a 10 year old to use, design out conflict (seperate out cars/cycles/pedestrians) and put cycling as a priority above everything else. Do not give me a 35kg vehicle where I am forced to queue with all the rest of the cars.

<comment><USER3> I mostly agree with you about segregated infrastructure. But something going over 50KM/h belongs on the highway with cars and not in the bicycle lane.

Sure, it's dangerous, but how much worse is a velomobile with a flag than a motorcycle or scooter? Lots of people drive those. (And lots of people die on them too...)

<comment><USER4> Much, much worse.

First, my head is typically above the level of cars on my motorcycle and can easily see, with peripheral vision, around 300 degrees, meaning I can have a broader view of what's happening. Situational awareness is critical to staying alive around cages...err...cars.

Second, my cross-section for a car next to me is much thicker than a flag. It is at least the depth of my body and the depth of my fairing.

Finally, a flick of the wrist puts me far in front of the idiot trying to kill me. Acceleration is a crucial tool to staying alive on the streets around cars.

All of those are impacted by a velomobile. It's unfortunate, too, because I'd love to ride on.

<comment><USER5> On the other hand, on a motorcycle your head hits that car/wall first. On a velomobile, your feet do.

Also, the protection may be flimsy relative to that of a car, but it probably is a lot better than that of a motorcycle, for instance if you flip over and slide over the Tarmac for a few meters.

Your concerns are valid, though. The best way to cater for them probably is through a culture change. Having separate bike paths _and_ car drivers who are always on the lookout for cyclists because they always are there (example: www.youtube.com/watch?v=UlQYP4WN-5w) will help a lot.

And no, fast bikes need not go on the highway; they just need a fairly wide and straight flat surface (example: [http://bicycledutch.wordpress.com/2013/03/14/f35-high- speed-...](http://bicycledutch.wordpress.com/2013/03/14/f35-high-speed-cycle- route-twente/))

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Unfortunately they cost close to a car ~5000 euros. Here is a couple of links related to bicycles like that

<http://www.dutchbikes.nl/pagina/links.htm>

I've met them on the street a couple of times and while they are really fast, I would be worried about the safety - you're really low - you don't see much from there and what's worse you're almost invisible behind a line of parked cars. Some of them have a pole with a little flag for this reason.

<comment><USER7> I keep coming across velomobiles and they are slick and all, but I would find it hard to justify the price when, as a casual user, all you get over a good €1000 bike is some protection from the elements, while also losing a lot of mobility and parking convenience.

I would rather like to see (recumbent) bikes with a cheap nylon-like soft cover against the wind and rain, that would probably shave a lot of the cost going into the body.

<comment><USER8> > all you get over a good €1000 bike is some protection from the elements

and speed. <http://www.kreuzotter.de/english/espeed.htm> at 200w i would be 50% faster (with no wind) than with a road bike. with wind its far more. imagine going 50km/h or 60km/h with a bicycle

<comment><USER7> Make that a €2000 good electrical bike then, you're still paying €3000+ for the fancy body.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> My e-assist cargo bike is more practical but tops out at 20mph. Picture: <https://twitter.com/jchris/status/312728928919896064>

It was pricey for a bike but cheaper than the car I replaced with it.

</comment><comment><USER10> I'm a bike commuter, and in the past 3 years electric bike commuter. I had leg injuries and the electric bike I purchased enabled me to continue commuting by bike with light peddling. For the past 3 years my commute is 4 miles each way, with 1 mile of climbing on the way home.

I did not find the arguments laid out for velomobiles all that compelling. All but 2 advantages of a velomobile can be had with a US $1000 electric bike, such as:

* pedal assist for acceleration and hill climbing

* not arriving sweaty

* very low fuel/electricity cost

The velomobile could potentially give me:

* rain protection

* faster speeds

But it would also lose me:

* portability (can carry up stairs, take in commuter rail train, etc.)

* storage space (barely bigger than a regular bike so home: garage, work: office).

* multiuse paths

Even at the SAME cost these disadvantages would outweigh the advantages for my use case - it currently only takes me about 3 minutes extra to get to work and about 6 minutes extra to get home over a car. The roads to work are all 25 MPH with lots of stop signs and traffic lights so being able to slide by cards on the right is an advantage of a regular-sized bike. And it doesn't rain that much where I live - I commute via bus 5-10 times/year due to rain. I really don't like taking a bus so that would be a time I'd love to have a velomobile - but not at a cost of thousands of dollars so I can skip taking a round trip bus ride 5-10 days a year!

On the other hand, I can certainly imagine a use case for a velomobile: If you live in a flat area with lots of rain and snow and a commute that uses roads that go faster than 25 MPH - perhaps the Midwest of the U.S.

edit: formatting

</comment><comment><USER11> Another bicycle innovation, the sailing bike: <http://www.whike.com/en/>

<comment><USER12> That looks very fun, but not very practical, at least where I live. I guess that most users would mostly use it as a normal recumbent, except during the weekends and holidays, when it is easier to go to a large and flat area to sail.

edit: spelling, and other small edits.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I would feel scared in it on the streets due to low height - rinding a bicycle is fun, efficient but a tad risky; but riding a recumbent or this one feels like a deathwish since a SUV or truck wouldn't notice a 90cm high vehicle right in front of them, it would be obscured behind car front hood.

<comment><USER11> I see quite a lot of these vehicles in fly by on the dutch roads, they use the road and not the bicycle lane. They are becoming quite popular. Luckely we don't have that many "tractors" as we call the big SUV's. Drivers already have to mind the bicyclists so the velocycles are just another road user.

When i'm on my racing bike i can barely keep up with the non electric velocycles, often driven by 40 year old or so professionals commuting. They are incredibly fast for little energy expended.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> low tech magazine is one of the best reads on the internet. every post is something really in depth (huge amounts of research) and interesting. good to see this on hn

</comment><comment><USER15> Efficient simply because of how much you have to be willing to do without. The most obvious is climate control. Sure you might not get wet but damn I would not want to be that close to the road in the dead of summer and I cannot imagine the fun on cold days either. Top it off with no real crash protection; just versus normal objects; most likely very little standards in manufacturing, and then there is visibility; both for the user and others. Storage, well as long as it fits on a bicycle it should fit here, maybe.

So yeah, its more efficient than an automobile but it does not compete with automobiles. Why compare not compare it to something in everyday use, like bicycles? Price most likely. So they went with an absurd comparison.

<comment><USER3> A scooter or motorcycle is the best comparison. Similar levels of safety & cost & climate protection & fun, IMO.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> The OP spends a lot of time on the licensing issue. They complain that they cannot be licensed as an electrically-assisted bicycle and in some places cannot even be licensed as a moped.

Not licensing as a bicycle means that it must use the road and cannot use bicycle lanes and also means that a driver's license is required to use it.

Which seems totally reasonable. These things move at 50km/h+. They would be a menace on the bicycle paths and belong on the road. I also have no qualms limiting them to people old enough to get a driver's license.

Electric velomobiles have a speed and safety profile similar to a scooter -- they should be licensed as one, and be required to follow the same laws as one.

</comment><comment><USER16> Put photo-voltaic cells on top and we have a dream vehicle.

<comment><USER17> What, on a velomobile, would profit from this?

<comment><USER16> These are electric velomobiles, so you can charge the batteries from solar energy.

You can go in the morning to work, put them in a sunny parking lot and in the evening you have it fully charged.

<comment><USER17> are those cells really that strong? :o

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I can totally see those catching on. Personally, my choice of car has nothing to do with how people perceive me. This is especially true of women who always say tell me they don't care what kind of car I drive, and I really believe that's their honest opinion.

Oh no, I'm late for work -- no worries, rather than walk today I'll just hop on my segway.

</comment><comment><USER19> Reminds me of the Sinclair C5, Sir Clive Sinclair maintained it was the most successful electric vehicle ever until recently when it was overtaken by the Nissan Leaf. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinclair_C5>

</comment><comment><USER20> How are velomobiles different from a covered moped?

<comment><USER21> Cleaner and cheaper power source. Moped cars (which I assume you meant) are quite popular in Europe for rural 16-18 old kids, as they can't drive regular cars yet:

<http://www.bbc.co.uk/newsbeat/20451602>

<comment><USER20> I meant a two wheeled motorized bicycle. Some have been around since WWII <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V%C3%A9loSoleX>

The laws vary state to state in US. No car likes being stuck behind a low powered slow moped though.</comment></comment></comment>


Reddit User confirms Siri/Cortana transactions are recorded - <AUTHOR> http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/2wzmmr/everything_youve_ever_said_to_siricortana_has/ <comment><USER2> I was under the impression that this was common knowledge. Here's a 2-year-old article about it in Wired: [http://www.wired.com/2013/04/siri-two- years/](http://www.wired.com/2013/04/siri-two-years/)

\---

Once the voice recording is six months old, Apple "disassociates" your user number from the clip, deleting the number from the voice file. But it keeps these disassociated files for up to 18 more months for testing and product improvement purposes.

"Apple may keep anonymized Siri data for up to two years," Muller says "If a user turns Siri off, both identifiers are deleted immediately along with any associated data."

\---

<comment><USER3> If Apple "disassociates" the data, how can they delete the files when a user turns Siri off? Doesn't that imply they still know which piece of data belonged to a certain user?

<comment><USER4> 1) Apple deletes associated data when the user turns Siri off.

2) Apple dis-associates data after six months.

1 & 2 = data older than six months is not deleted, bit is not directly associated with you. So that Siri search for that topic only of interest to communist homosexual terrorist Jews will not have your user ID but might still be identifiable from voice analysis.

You can't escape Macarthyism that easily.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Only "recorded" in the sense that your Google/Bing/Yahoo searches are "recorded," or your browsing history is "recorded". You don't think your Google Now voice searches aren't?

I knew that my searches were probably tracked when I started using Cortana (similar to any other search - unless you're using DDG,) and personally I'm ok with it if it results in a great experience for me. And I'm amazed almost daily at how solid Cortana (and Google voice search for that matter) is.

<comment><USER6> It is a BIT different to keep a voice recording, because you can recognize a voice recording, unlike a written sentence.

<comment><USER7> Not to mention the recording of your surroundings, and audio from before and after the query.

Such a recording contains quite a bit more than your average search engine query.

<comment><USER8> And your search engine query can contain your IP address, geographic information, unique browser fingerprint, and your account information if you are logged in. If Google, Apple, Microsoft, or some malicious entity with access to their data wants to identify you, it is likely trivially easy whether through voice or text data.

<comment><USER7> Oh, absolutely. The difference is that with voice, they also have the potential to identify the people with you, what you're watching on TV, what radio station is on, etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> You can check the audio that Google stores out in - [https://history.google.com/history/audio](https://history.google.com/history/audio)

<comment> FLUX-YOU Other useful things that were posted in that thread:

[https://www.google.com/settings/takeout](https://www.google.com/settings/takeout)

[https://www.google.com/settings/dashboard](https://www.google.com/settings/dashboard)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Uhm, yes, duh. Isn't this common knowledge? How do people think speech recognition systems are trained? What's more upsetting is that this person is so uninformed about speech systems that they think this is weird, AND they have access. The only people who should have access are the people who are actually doing science.

Ahhh. Reading clarified it: this is someone who got hired to do transcription.

"I'm given an audio file (sound bite) and the corresponding text based translation (how the phone translated the speech). My job is to listen to the file, compare it to the text and provide feed back on how correctly the sound bite was interpreted by the phone. If the text and speech are a perfect match, I just move on. However, if the phone either translated something incorrectly due to a heavy accent or loud background noise, I note that in my evaluation. "

</comment><comment><USER11> I think the main thing from this claim is that the audio is shared with third parties.

<comment><USER12> Apple Siri uses Nuance speech recognition technology; afaik Siri run on their server at launch.

It seems they outsourced tasks to another company to improve the speech recognition. The classification task that the Reddit user does can be used by Nuance to improve their data.

As another Reddit user mentioned that after doing the job for a while you will start recognizing speakers: [http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/2wzmmr/everythin...](http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/2wzmmr/everything_youve_ever_said_to_siricortana_has/covn14e)

<comment><USER13> There are hundreds of millions of iOS and Android devices out there. If someone is starting to recognize voices, it supports a common sense reaction that a subset of voice commands are being used for QA/QC purposes to improve accuracy.

<comment><USER12> That's definitely the case. Plus there are some heavy users while many users try out Siri/GoogleNow/Cortana just a few times and never come back.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> A more accurate title would be "Reddit user claims Siri/Cortana transactions are recorded." He doesn't supply any proof.

<comment><USER15> If someone claimed the sky was blue, would you require them to provide proof before believing them?

<comment><USER16> Objection: argumentative.

And yes, if the claim didn't match with my observations I would expect that they have or be prepared to provide proof in some reaonable form. "Extraordinary claims .." and all that.

<comment><USER15> The point is that the claim does match and is not extraordinary in any way.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Title says "Siri/Cortana", yet a large amount of the discussion revolves around the saved history for Google Now: [https://history.google.com/history/audio](https://history.google.com/history/audio)

</comment><comment><USER18> Well, yeah, it might be common knowledge _for some_ , but many don't know, don't care and I enjoy every time it's "revealed" by some community over and over again.

But seriously though, is there a way to do something with Android phone (like using third-party firmware, removing some programs, configuring firewall) to be somewhat sure it's "safe" while still being usable?</comment>


Fundful Peer to Peer Fundraising - <AUTHOR> https://fundfulp2p.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> Create a completely branded peer to peer fundraising campaign in just a few clicks. No signup or monthly fees. Individual & team fundraising, control branding, simple customizing, mobile-friendly, easy social sharing, allow donors to cover processing fees.</comment>


How new 'white space' rules could lead to an urban super-Wi-Fi - <AUTHOR> http://www.computerworld.com/article/2970867/wireless-networking/how-new-white-space-rules-could-lead-to-an-urban-super-wi-fi.html <comment><USER2> Dying inside. This spectrum is essential for wireless microphones. The big corporate rental houses can buy new inventory, but many of the operators are churches, schools, and nonprofit theaters who were able to purchase equipment only with grants, serious fundraising, and years of savings.

You're robbing every nonprofit with a performance space of potentially $30k+ of essential equipment that is now worthless.

I work at a campus venue with around $20k of Shure ULX in this frequency band. We just went through a round of budget cuts and if we have to stop operating this equipment, it will probably never be replaced. This means students can't do amplified musicals anymore.

Even if it is for the greater good, please understand who you're fucking over here before you cheer it on.

<comment><USER3> So there will be a market for Wi-Fi microphones.

<comment><USER4> Looking at what's on Amazon, this doesn't seem like an expensive problem to resolve.

Most people already have all they need for a wifi microphones in their pockets, albeit probably not of the same quality as professional systems.

The unfortunate thing is that their is no mechanism for selling the right to use this spectrum for all those who've made investments in such devices. It may be worth millions to discontinue their use of it and it may only be worth thousands to existing users, but no way for high value potential users to compensate the current users.

Of course, if spectrum were treated like property or you had to pay to rent what you use, everybody could buy or rent what they need.

<comment><USER2> I don't know what you're seeing on Amazon, but there is a lot of cheap crap out there that, unfortunately, doesn't work reliably enough or sound good enough to use in a performance setting. Audio Technica 3000-series [1] is about the cheapest thing that's decent (my middle school operated 16). Note the frequency band options.

WiFi in particular is not designed for a 100% stable connection with low latency and no jitter, and good luck getting it to do that. You can power- cycle your laptop's WiFi every few hours; you can't lose the lead singer in a musical or the pastor in a church service. There are digital, frequency-agile wireless systems like ULX-D [2] which are a little better at dealing with crowded RF landscapes, but this is still low-middle tier. UHF-R is a tier above that, starting around $2000 per system. The gear for really challenging RF environments is Shure Axient, and you can't even get pricing on that without talking to a high-end certified distributor, but anecdotally the transmitters are about $3,000 and a dual-channel receiver is $7,500.

[1] [http://www.amazon.com/Audio-Technica-ATW-3131BD-Wireless- Lav...](http://www.amazon.com/Audio-Technica-ATW-3131BD-Wireless-Lavalier- System/dp/B003R6V5QM/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1439674281&sr=8-1&keywords=audio- technica+300)

[2] [http://www.amazon.com/Shure- ULXD24-B87A-G50-Handheld/dp/B008...](http://www.amazon.com/Shure- ULXD24-B87A-G50-Handheld/dp/B008BMHAKC/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&qid=1439674532&sr=8-4&keywords=shure+ulx-d)

[3] [http://www.shure.com/americas/products/wireless- systems/uhfr...](http://www.shure.com/americas/products/wireless-systems/uhfr- systems)

It's tempting to think of the problems in fields other than your own as trivial, but please don't fall into that trap. You don't want to hear a play through Skype on iPhones (which is a moot point, because you wouldn't anyway). Reliable RF audio that sounds good is a hard/expensive game and eliminating TV whitespace fucks over people who are playing in the lower/middle tiers.

<comment><USER5> This is all very true.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> All of the recent research I've seen on this topic seems to be moving in the wrong direction. WiFi is a shared channel, if someone is using it, you can't use it. Thus it makes sense to _minimize_ the range as much as possible; if your walls are attenuating the signal, that's great, because it means your neighbors can't interfere with your network. 2.4GHz and 5GHz already have too high of signal penetration (I see tens of networks on 2.4GHz in my apartment in Brooklyn), going down to 900MHz or 700MHz just means that if anyone in your city is using the channel, you can't use it. Needless to say, this is not going to make your WiFi experience more enjoyable.

Everyone hates running cables to the various floors of their houses, so I understand why people want more range. But more range for you means more range for other people, which means more interference.

Much of this can be mitigated by using a multiplexing mechanism more intelligent than carrier-sense, like CDMA. But as far as I can tell, the industry is resisting this heavily. LTE-U sounds like the idea is to bring LTE signalling to the unlicensed bands, so you can replace your WiFi router with an LTE router and have better use of the channel capacity (and sharing with other LTE networks). But the industry appears to be uninterested in this use case, instead focusing on tapping the ISM bands for more cell phone capacity.

TLDR: stock up on Ethernet cables. Sigh.

<comment><USER7> I had that gut reaction as well when listen to a marketing guy talk about devices with 5-10 mile range at 900MHz. The 900MHz band is 30 MHz. Not much when you consider population densities of 5-20,000 people per square mile.

Side: I'm not really a WiFi guy but I think WiFi is based on listen before talk would means things like latency are going to be not so good when you have a lot of nodes. Not surprising because WiFi is basically 'wireless Ethernet' and has it roots in file transfer applications.

I think LTE Unlicensed, developed by telephony guys will probably be better at serving low/deterministic quality of service applications in high traffic areas. Also rather than disinterest it's a matter that of some companies are interested in the technology and others see it as a threat. However what I read is they are talking about LTE-U on the 5.8GHz band.

<comment><USER6> That's exactly right, and you bring up another few good points.

1) 802.11ac is 80MHz. If you are just getting a few megahertz between TV stations (I couldn't find the exact number), you aren't going to get your 1Gbps transfer rates with the signalling that WiFi uses. (In fact, you rarely get them in lab conditions, but I digress.)

2) With WiFi's signalling, multiple transmissions stomping on top of each other simply make both transmissions fail. LTE uses different sets of "tones" so that transmissions stepping on each other are still recoverable. (This is like how all the GPS satellites transmit on the same frequency, but you can still hear 10 of them at once. Clever math.)

Certainly, I'd like to see unlicensed city-level wireless Internet that behaves as well as carrier-run LTE networks. You may not get a gigabit but even slow Internet is better than nothing. If anyone is researching this I'd be glad to send some donations their way :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is a really good idea. We should refarm 400-700MHz over the next 10 years and use it for Internet service. The broadcasters will eventually be forced out of business due to IPTV. Have you seen the kind of programming currently broadcasted by some of these UHF non-network TV stations in big cities?

It's dreck.

The non-network TV broadcasters are desperate for audiences which aren't watching their programs, and therefore the ads interspersed in these programs. Their businesses will fail in due time as more people switch to IPTV.

The only snag I see is how to broadcast emergency messages over IPTV. This is something which needs to be resolved before we refarm the UHF TV band.

<comment><USER9> Push notifications for emergency broadcasts. Receive only RF chipsets if absolutely required.

<comment><USER10> Notifications are location dependent. How do you solve the issue without having everyone publishing their location all the time ?

<comment><USER11> You encode the location information in the actual broadcast message:

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

This is a solved problem: weather radios have been doing this for years.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The range of those bands means one has to share them with allot more people.

Resulting in lower bandwidth per person.

<comment><USER13> If APs are cheap, you can get very high capacity by deploying more APs and managing transmission power so as not to step on adjacent APs. The trick is to make the radios smart enough to make coverage good enough without having a carefully designed deployment of APs.

Hopefully we can leave the antediluvian idea of "spectrum ownership" behind.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Why should specific frequencies be assigned for specific uses anyway? Can't we have a marketplace for spectrum in which devices can get access to the most appropriate spectrum in realtime?

Spectrum is expensive because we waste so much of it. If users had an incentive to use the least usable frequencies when they do work, there'd be more room in the most usable frequencies for applications that require those.

As it turns out, the FCC has approved sharing rules for the 3.5 gigahertz spectrum. Maybe this will demonstrate how much better the future can be.

      http://www.rcrwireless.com/20150515/test-and-measurement/isart-2015-google-spectrum-sharing-3-5-ghz-tag6

</comment><comment><USER14> I'm generally against radio communication because everyone has to share the wavelengths.

It would however be very cool and cost effective if you could "peer" over radio link instead of digging cable trenches through cities and people's properties.

With smart access points, they could cooperate to not interfere.

</comment><comment><USER15> In middle of title I thought it would be about finally killing tabs.</comment>


Keeping secrets in memfd areas - <AUTHOR> https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/812325/b642e849751b9068/ <comment><USER2> Didn't Intel try to do just that, with SGX enclaves, and it still got hacked? If Intel couldn't do it for just one architecture, then I can't see the promise of a portable "generalized" system call panning out.

There isn't much empirical evidence that some of these open source memory obfuscation techniques provide users much benefit from external attackers. It feels more like DRM that makes it nearly impossible for us to trace or examine what these open source binaries we're trusting from internet people are actually doing. The GPL forbids that.

memfd_create is also one of those wat kind of system calls, which initially don't appear to enable any use case that couldn't be accomplished by other means, e.g. open+mmap+unlink+close, which posix specifies won't delete the mapping, and the performance of Linux at managing virtual pages in memory is outstanding.

<comment><USER3> > memfd_create is also one of those wat kind of system calls, which initially > don't appear to enable any use case that couldn't be accomplished by other > means

The author agrees with that. It's just a bit simpler. See e.g. [https://dvdhrm.wordpress.com/tag/memfd/](https://dvdhrm.wordpress.com/tag/memfd/)

The benefits of the system call according to above link are:

1) memfd_create does not require a local mount-point

2) There are no name-clashes and no global registry

3) the code required for memfd_create is 100 lines

4) sealing</comment></comment>


A philosophy-quoting homeless man in China has fled internet fame - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/the-internet-was-obsessed-with-this-philosophy-quoting-homeless-man-in-china-now-hes-fled-the-fame/2019/04/01/519e43e2-5220-11e9-bdb7-44f948cc0605_story.html <comment><USER2> From my measly perspective, fame suuucks... there's really no upside. Anonymous obscurity seems a better camouflage rather than people getting up in someone's personal business documenting their every move, criticizing their every breath, treating them differently, expecting to impose on their emotional reserves and time, or acting goofy/toadyingly around them. All people put on pants one leg at a time unless they're missing legs or wearing a kilt. ;)

<comment><USER3> Will Smith's contrary view is that fame is great. You get treated better everywhere and people listen to your mundane opinions on anything. The pain of being ignored or rejected is vastly reduced, whether it's in your personal life, career etc.

<comment><USER4> I hadn't heard that was his POV. I'm surprised. I've always thought fame would be terrible. You can't walk down the street in peace. You can't shop in peace. You can't eat at a restaurant in peace.

<comment><USER5> Money seems to have all the benefits of fame and few of the disadvantages. Having $100m in the bank confers all those advantages without being harassed on the street.

<comment><USER6> Well, with fame, you walk into a fancy restaurant, you get a table. With money, you're still another anonymous schmuck.

I guess if you have that much money you can hire someone to call ahead and say "This man's net worth is this much, and he would like to have a table in half an hour.". Or to be less crass, they can rattle off your impressive CV/portfolio and the restaurant would get the idea.

<comment><USER5> You never been out for a meal with a rich person huh? Guarantee you a rich person (where rich is $50m+)can get that table faster than the b-list sitcom actor who is in front of her in the queue. She dosnt need a CV, just needs her wallet.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Fame is a disfigurement. As the costs of fame increase, how will this effect the distribution of people who seek to do great things? This is probably a much more important question than many things we worry about.

<comment><USER8> Seeking to do great things is not linked to fame. The public is generally ignorant of every great person alive today, they just see the people who need to be seen because it supports their ventures.

<comment><USER9> fully agree. People conflate fame with impact. Everyone's version of impact may be different but having Impact does not necessarily lead to the other.

Consider the case of Howard Thurman, not nearly as famous as Martin Luther king Jr[0], or Nelson Mandela[1]. Yet highly influential on them, and they went on to catalyse massive change.

So his impact if we consider social change, was massive and far outpaced his actual fame.

[0] he mentored Martin Luther King and otherS [1] Mandela came out of prison with a completely different philosophy to when he went in.Mandela appears to have been highly influenced by by his writing while in prison.

<comment><USER8> So many examples of this. This highly charming piece by a former IAS director goes into this so well: [https://library.ias.edu/files/UsefulnessHarpers.pdf](https://library.ias.edu/files/UsefulnessHarpers.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I know a similar story of a semi-homeless man also from Chengdu who have been living in a university campus and attending advanced math classes for years. A guy with virtually no possessions except curiosity. It was pre-internet so only locals knew about him. The university even offered him a job in the cafeteria so he could feed himself.

</comment><comment><USER11> [https://outline.com/YdhRj9](https://outline.com/YdhRj9)

</comment><comment><USER12> Not a word about the content of his philosophy...

<comment><USER13> The SCMP has:

>In one of these videos, the scavenger was filmed discussing the merits of Liao Fan's Four Lessons, a Ming dynasty work from the 16th century, and the Analects.

I presume in Chinese

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Here's a nice, uplifting film about a philosophy-quoting homeless man from Manchester who flees to London. One of my favourites.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naked_(1993_film)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naked_\(1993_film\))

</comment><comment><USER15> I'm surprised this piece doesn't mention The Life of Brian:

Followers: "Speak to us master, speak to us!"

Brian: "Go away!"

Follower: "How shall we go away master?"

(59 minutes into the movie)

<comment><USER10> (Group running)

Forrest Gump: "I'm tired. I think I'm gonna go home"

The followers: "What are we supposed to do?"</comment></comment>


Dijkstra: "You will be treated as grown-ups" - <AUTHOR> http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD12xx/EWD1256.html <comment><USER2> I try to treat my students the same way. The fact that almost no one does so makes it tough. Average high school kids have a tough time adapting to it. But when they do, as Dijkstra says, they become much more effective.

Sometimes there is a group that gets it right away, and runs with it, but it usually takes some time.

There are usually a few who think they are smarter than average (they usually are), that their intelligence will compensate (it rarely does), and that they don't need to make any extra effort. They usually figure it out after a semester.

I also had a class mutiny once. I had a couple of intelligent, but spoiled and opinionated students who were vocally critical of my/this instructional style. There was also a larger than usual number of dullards in the class, who were easily led (by the dissenters). The self-nominated leaders managed to turn most of the class' attitude sour. That was the worst semester I've had yet. Everything became difficult. I had trouble maintaining my own discipline.

The real trick that I would like to learn, is how to turn more of the middle and bottom tier of students into better students.

<comment><USER3> What frustrates me as a student and sometimes teacher is that the role of even the most engaged student cannot be expanded to do the opposite of mutiny: engage the less able students in the class. Why is it that the relationship between an engaged student and a teacher is an individual one? Can the student become engaged with the _class_ of which the teacher is a part? I believe this is the key to solving the problem you pose in your last sentence.

<comment><USER4> In the case of mutiny, it is in the leaders interest to engage with his fellow student. In the case of the good student, he's competing with his fellow student, so it's in his best interest not to help them succeed.

<comment><USER5> It's odd to think of one's fellow students as competitors instead of colleagues. I would call this mindset pernicious, even perverted.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Why do we celebrate this theme of Professor as omnipotent, benevolent dictator of the classroom? My last year in school the combined cost of tuition, books, and room and board hit $40,000. At what point do you become not just a student, but also a fee for service consumer, with an appropriate set of expectations for some level of responsiveness and customer service?

<comment><USER7> See, that's one of the problems I have with outrageous tuition: it creates dumb expectations from students.

In most European countries, your education is quasi free, and as a result students don't complain about professors not providing "customer service". You go to the university to learn from some of the most eminent figures of your field, people who have devoted their life to it, and you do as they say. If you're not happy, well you can just leave. And sure, some of them are quirky or do dumb stuff, but you're 19- you'll live. And TBH, even the professors I had in college who exposed me to the most BS are nothing compared to some of the BS I've experienced in the real world, with clients/bosses/etc.

If you're going to University of Phoenix, sure, feel entitled to some degree of "customer service". But if you're studying under Dijkstra, just suck it up and soak in as much as you can, even if the "customer service" leaves to be desired. Again, you're 19- you'll live.

Sorry, this is a bit abrasive, but I've been on multiple sides of the equation (student in EU university, student in US university, TA in EU university, TA in US university), and the students who say things like "I pay tuition, I'm a paying customer, professors have to do X/Y/Z for me" are rarely the ones at the top of the class (and rarely aspire to do so).

<comment><USER8> No, god no. This idea that researchers should be teaching is just horrible, they're not significantly overlapping skill sets. Unless I have a specific research interest, I'm going to learn a lot more from someone who knows the material I'm trying to learn and has been trained in how to teach effectively than I am from someone who knows the material I'm trying to learn and a lot of other material that's not relevant.

It should be that you do your basic degrees with people who are primarily teachers and then you go and do your more research based work with people who are good at that sort of research, if you want to get into that.

The other way around is just people wasting their talents and their student's time by being really inefficient.

#

The rest of this just seems to be, 'oh they're 19, they'll live... oh we all have to put up with bullshit.' Maybe they will, maybe we do. It's a fully general argument for anything that's not going to kill you.

Life is shit - therefore don't go along with and keep quiet about the shit bits or it'll keep being shit.

<comment><USER7> Your argument does not take into account the fact that a significant number of researchers, including world class ones, enjoy/love to teach, and even the basic classes. For many (myself included), it comes hand in hand.

I agree that researchers who don't want to teach shouldn't be forced to, but that's the extent of it. I've been to 3 universities in 3 different countries, and the number of bad teachers I've had is much lower than good or excellent ones.

(of course this post and my previous one refer to computer science/math academia, since that's what I'm familiar with)

<comment><USER9> If they love to teach, they should also get good at it, because being a good researcher doesn't necessarily mean that you're a good teacher. I'm saying this because, at least from the OP, Dijkstra doesn't strike me as a terribly great teacher.

<comment><USER7> How do you measure "good at teaching"?

<comment><USER10> The first key is the ability to recognize that a student or class of students is not understanding an explanation, and generalize it further or change the example to make it more clear. Do that ad infinitum (a really good teacher can get it right the first time).

The second key is the ability to use examples that pupils find relevant and introduce topics that might not fit directly in the class description, but enhance overall knowledge with the intended discussion's knowledge.

The third key is intangible. And that's the ability to make learning interesting, if not downright fun.

<comment><USER11> That definition would hold for the kind of teaching where the teacher transfers knowledge and skills to the pupil.

Dijkstra was probably the type of professor that aims to inspire/provoke students into teaching themselves.

I have a degree from a universities in Europe and one from the US and the European one had a much stronger emphasis on asking students to teach themselves (it was a Dutch university, Dijkstra was Dutch so I expect that's where he got the attitude), the US one had more "hand holding" in explaining what you needed to do.

As an aside, the drop out rate at the Dutch university was over 30%, while at the American university I think maybe 2 people dropped out in my year. So while there is some consensus that teaching yourself is better than being taught it's certainly not very efficient.

<comment><USER12> > _So while there is some consensus that teaching yourself is better than > being taught it 's certainly not very efficient._

So under which conditions is expecting your students to teach themselves better for _them_ exactly? It seems to me that there's some sort of selection bias going on here if the best students are the ones that successfully teach themselves, and then reflect on the fact that they were able to teach themselves as the _cause_ for why they were able to learn so well. I'm pretty sure that if you stuck a self-learning student in a hand-held environment he would learn equally well, but might risk learning less due to the natural time cost such a teaching style has. The logical conclusion for this are the whole 'advanced placement' classes and such, because like it or not, not all students are going to be equally well-suited to teach themselves, and thus endure poor teaching. A self-learner meanwhile, _will_ be able to endure such poor teaching, regardless of whether they're even aware of how bad the teaching is.

Teaching is not a fixed methodology, it's really an art that's quite broad in scope and requires honing in on each specific batch of students' needs. If you're going for 'mentor' style inspiration teaching, great -- but make sure you're applying it to a student that'll be receptive to it. If they're not, then maybe try to figure out how you can make them be receptive to it, but I guarantee you that it's going to require some level of hand-holding at the onset; and if you're a good teacher, you should be able to pick up on that.

<comment><USER11> Self learning allegedly yields better understanding and retention then other types of learning, so in that regard students who do not drop out would be better off.

I agree that not every student may be able to get into the self-learning mode, although the success of Montesorri schools show that most kids can at least be able to at some level. If you are smart enough to make it into one of Dijkstra's classes, and aspire to comprehend the subject matter he teaches, then you should not need to much hand holding.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Dijkstra describes when instruction at a university ought to look like. However, this requires an experienced lecturer and properly enculturated students, and where do you get them from if you haven't got them already?

 _If I go too fast, it is your duty to slow me down_

Haven't we all met inexperienced TAs who mention the salient points but not what makes them salient, and when you call them out they hide behind their great self-confidence?

 _If I give homework, I give you tasks of which I believe that working on them is very instructive for you_

I think everyone has had their share of ill-set or plain pointless homework at uni.

 _I will not use the overhead projector_

A colleague had a student mutiny because he refused to put up his lecture slides for download. The students were complaining that they had to copy lecture notes from a friend if they didn't show up.

<comment><USER13> I honestly never understood the TA thing. Why not just reach out to the professor in their open hours or before / after the lecture?

<comment><USER14> this presumes that:

\- professors have open hours

\- professors can be found before or after the lecture

\- professors respond to your email

\- professors ever go to their offices

<comment><USER15> Which is ultimately a presumption that the professor still cares about teaching after they have earned tenure.

<comment><USER2> Tenure schmenure, if you want profs who do interesting research, they'll need some time to tend to that research.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Great person != great teacher. To be honest, if you watch [1] his lecture, he doesn't grab me as a good teacher. In fact I would probably fall asleep in his lectures. I've seen a lot of professors and how they teach during my undergrad and graduate mathematics education. It's not uncommon to witness a professor who has numerous awards for their research but who is awful as a teacher. It could be lack of motivation on their part for all I know. Dijkstra could be the very best out there in some matters but it doesn't mean we should take after his style of teaching.

To be more specific, Dijkstra's organizational matters make him seem to me as somewhat cold and detached. Watching his lectures on youtube confirms this feeling. He also TEACHES in that way and frankly this is not the best way to get knowledge into students' heads. Nor will students ever feel like he really cares.

Perhaps such a person will be more engaged if he teaches a graduate course with topics from his research but from what I've seen, this is not always the case. In fact, the worst course I ever had was by a professor with numerous awards, who's also great at giving presentations and talks, but who taught his research topics like absolute crap.

[1][http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qNCAFcAbSTg](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qNCAFcAbSTg)

<comment><AUTHOR>
        > In fact I would probably fall
        > asleep in his lectures.

It's not his job to entertain you. It's his job to make the material available for you to study and assimilate, and to provide insight you would find difficult to gain simply by reading from a text. You falling asleep is your problem, not his.

Everything you say sounds plausible, but a recent paper[0] shows that two teachers delivering identical material, one in an organized and engaging manner, the other disorganized and unengaging, received exactly the evaluations you'd expect, but their styles resulted in exactly the opposite.

In particular, lecturer A was engaging and organized, and got excellent evaluations. Lecturer B was disorganized and unengaging. And yet in subsequent courses it was the students of lecturer B who went on to get the higher grades.

Thinking someone is an excellent lecturer is not the same as being taught effectively.

[0] HN submission[1]: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6041803](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6041803)

[1] Direct link: [http://www.econ.ucdavis.edu/faculty/scarrell/profqual2.pdf](http://www.econ.ucdavis.edu/faculty/scarrell/profqual2.pdf)

<comment><USER2> >Thinking someone is an excellent lecturer is not the same as being taught effectively.

This a thousand times. Most student evaluations are garbage.

>It's not his job to entertain you. It's his job to make the material available for you to study and assimilate, and to provide insight you would find difficult to gain simply by reading from a text. You falling asleep is your problem, not his.

No, but at the same time, we can and should look to optimize the ways in which we deliver material.

<comment><USER16> I agree that student evaluations are mostly garbage but they have saved me from bad professors at times. You just have to know what you are looking for. The reason evaluations are bad is that you can't just put a point scale on a professor and hope things will go alright. If you look at ratemyproffessor you'll see a lot of people giving bad rating because tests and homeworks were hard. This is BAD. You'll also see a lot of good ratings because the professor was easy. This is also bad.

You want to look at the ratings that talk about the teacher's engagement in the teaching process, not in how difficult their material is. Case in point - I had an amazing Group Theory teacher and the assignments and final were really difficult. You'd expect that some people will not distinguish the two aspects of teaching and slap on a bad rating because it's so difficult. Others will see the difference and give a good rating for teaching and describe the course as difficult.

<comment><USER2> I meant the evaluations conducted by the school. The questionnaires are usually terrible, and the students don't know how to answer them.

>ratemyprofessor

ROFL. If I ever get an overall good rating on ratemyprofessor, I will seriously start to question myself. That thing is a popularity contest. Some of the absolute worst on there have great ratings. Some of the comments might be useful, but that's about it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> The comments here are very illuminating about attitudes that some learners have to learning. Thanks to Colin for sharing the link.

Some instructors here ask how to set expectations so that students will be ready to take responsibility for their learning and work hard before giving up. This is a problem that consumes my attention as I offer advanced mathematics lessons (a prealgebra course using the Art of Problem Solving textbook

[http://www.artofproblemsolving.com/Store/viewitem.php?item=p...](http://www.artofproblemsolving.com/Store/viewitem.php?item=prealgebra)

for third, fourth, and fifth graders). Many American elementary school pupils are not used to challenging mathematics lessons. I have to establish expectations appropriately to have any hope of success in class. (And I have enjoyed some gratifying successes with many of my alumni over the years.) To inform parents (and their children) in advance about what my classes are like, I have prepared some FAQ documents about mathematics learning

"Problems versus Exercises"

[http://www.epsiloncamp.org/ProblemsversusExercises.php](http://www.epsiloncamp.org/ProblemsversusExercises.php)

"Repetition and Practice"

[http://www.epsiloncamp.org/RepetitionPractice.php](http://www.epsiloncamp.org/RepetitionPractice.php)

"Links About Learning Mathematics"

[http://www.epsiloncamp.org/LearningMathematics.php](http://www.epsiloncamp.org/LearningMathematics.php)

and

"The Explorer is the Person who is Lost, or Courage in the Face of Stupidity"

[http://www.epsiloncamp.org/CourageandStupidity.php](http://www.epsiloncamp.org/CourageandStupidity.php)

to help the learners get ready for the delight of taking on tough learning challenges. The last of the four FAQs is based on an inspirational speech given in various forms in various places by mathematician Paul Zeitz, a coach of the 1996 United States "dream team" to the International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO), still the only IMO team ever to achieve perfect scores among all six team members. His key word from his speech is featured prominently in the FAQ and in first-day-of-class messages I give live to all my new students. It is now the "inspirational word" for many of my students as they grow up into adult life.

<comment><USER18> > 1996 United States "dream team"

1994 :)

<comment><USER19> > > 1996 United States "dream team"

> 1994 :)

1992 :)

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1992_United_States_men's_Olympi...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1992_United_States_men's_Olympic_basketball_team)

<comment><USER20> 1994.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Zeitz](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Zeitz)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I have a professor at a large state school who taught a couple of large (i.e. multiple hundreds of students) calculus classes a few years back. He assigned homework, but didn't make it part of their grade. It was just practice (the homework was through an online system). Lectures weren't required. Lots of students get stuck in these classes who shouldn't be, and he felt that they shouldn't be forced to sit through lectures that were a waste of their time. He left it up to them to decide whether they needed the lectures or not.

The result? Most of the students decided that they didn't need to do anything for the class aside from take the final exam. Most of them failed, including almost half of the engineering students (who, as a result, couldn't finish an engineering degree in 4 years), and there was a university-wide outcry.

<comment><USER22> Im sorry, but if you think that you can NOT attend a class and do well, you deserve whatever grade you get. It is not the teachers fault for not forcing you to go to class.

<comment><USER23> Well, I don't know. I had an upper division thermodynamic class where the professor was an admitted bad lecturer. He had two policies. One was if you had an A grade already based on the mid-term exam and weekly assignments, you need not take the final exam. The other was if your final exam grade was higher than your mid-term + homework, you get the grade from the final. I personally rarely attended the lectures and walked out with an A prior to the final. Friends of mine also did not attended, but passed the final exam. A number of people who regularly attended the lectures failed the class.

From this experience I formed the belief that a university lecturer can actually be counter-productive to the students learning the subject.

<comment><USER2> >upper division thermodynamic class ... I personally rarely attended the lectures and walked out with an A prior to the final.

You must either be quite a good student or that was quite an easy/poor class. Personally, I try to make sure students have as close to a knowable outcome by mid-terms, so they can drop with a W.

>where the professor was an admitted bad lecturer.

Sometimes this is a ploy in attempt to get students to take some ownership in the process. To paraphrase "Don't expect me to magic this crap into your head with my gift of prose."

>From this experience I formed the belief that a university lecturer can actually be counter-productive to the students learning the subject.

No no no. Maybe those who didn't already know thermodynamics, or have the discipline to teach themselves felt it was important to attend lecture.

<comment><USER24> "or that was quite an easy/poor class."

That sounds like an easy class to test out of. If the prof provides an entire semesters homework, and you can provably ace "class A amplifier bias circuit design" without attending the lecture that supposedly teaches you how, then don't go. I never skipped entire classes but I certainly skipped lectures where I could prove to myself I knew the material.

This works really well in most engineering classes where you can check your work. In fluffy stuff like English Lit being "right" means knowing the prof's politics and personal belief system, so its a bit harder to know if you're right or not, so you can't skip that lecture.

Think you know "integration by parts"? Already did the homework and got it all eventually correct? Then not much point in attending lecture that day. This has a bonus in that you get a lot more out of a lecture if you already struggled with the topic for a couple hours rather than walking in cold.

<comment><USER2> "That sounds like an easy class to test out of."

I would support that idea for quite a lot of the curriculum.

<comment><USER24> CLEP tests rocked

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/College_Level_Examination_Progr...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/College_Level_Examination_Program)

They're like $80 now... in the olden days they were something like $10.

A truly excellent startup idea which no one has apparently tried (that I know of) is a MOOC focused on the CLEP "curriculum", basically a semi-continuous monster study group. There's a giant hole in the MOOC industry for testing and credentialism. Well, there you go, take your CLEP test and they handle all the testing and stuff.

This also shows the ripoff of some industry specific cert exams. Why did a Cisco CCNP Routing test cost something like $200 a decade ago for a total cost for a CCNP of about $800 but a CLEP test in 2013 is only $80? I know there's economies of scale but this is ridiculous. Outsourced reasonable priced industry certs is another MOOC startup ripe for massive disruption.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I've been reading the EWD archives the last few months. I'm coming to find Djikstra to be a role model. I think I would do almost anything to have two hours of his undivided attention today.

<comment><USER26> I follow this Twitter account and it helps me discover him more - [https://twitter.com/DijkstraQuotes](https://twitter.com/DijkstraQuotes)

<comment><USER25> Me too : )

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> In case you miss the link in the upper right, his EWD manuscript archive is here:

[http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/welcome.html](http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/welcome.html)

<comment><USER28> Reading these EWD manuscripts are the reason I believe Dijkstra's lectures would be life changing. A truly wonderful read.

For most professors this format would be terribly difficult. It is hard to teach. It is hard to listen and understand where students are and take them further.

Also, if I may, I'm struck by how similar pg's writing is to Dijkstra. Something about the rhythm of it and its directness.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> * If I am unable to find you in the classroom. I will proceed to search every adjacent desk recursively until I find you.

</comment><comment><USER30> You can see how well that worked out in practice here (video lectures by Dijkstra, not from any course though):

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qNCAFcAbSTg](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qNCAFcAbSTg)

and here:

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3nHv5MUw7Nc](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3nHv5MUw7Nc)

</comment><comment><USER31> Read Dijkstra, read Dijkstra. He is the master of us all.

<comment><AUTHOR> For those who don't recognise this reference, it is a paraphrase of Laplace, who said,

        "Read Euler, read Euler.
         He is the master of us all."

<comment><USER30> And the irony is that Euler was a really poor mathematician by Dijkstra's standards...

<comment><AUTHOR> Interesting you should say that - do you have some supporting evidence? Could you point us at the material from which you draw that conclusion?

<comment><USER30> Read the following EWD to get sneak-peak at Dijkstra's view of mathematics:

[http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD12xx/EW...](http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD12xx/EWD1268.html)

Dijkstra's dream was reducing mathematics to formal logic, Euler's approach was almost on the opposite end of the spectrum, he used a lot of intuitive arguments sometimes dabbling in areas that didn't get a solid logical foundation for centuries to come.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's certainly true that a lot of Euler's arguments were incomplete and non- rigorous by today's standards, but in many cases they were _way_ ahead of his time. As you say, he was getting results in areas where complete and formal foundations didn't get laid for centuries.

And yet he seemed pretty much always to be right. He didn't fall into any of the traps that await the unwary, and which are the usual reasons for formality being required. It seems clear that he really did understand what was happening at a deeper level, even if the arguments he gave were, in some cases, described now as "superbly reckless."

I'm not convinced Dijkstra would've considered Euler to have been a poor mathematician. Now I wish I'd asked when I had the chance.

<comment><USER30> There was a lot of irony in my comments that I think not everyone understood. What I am really saying is that everything Dijkstra wrote on the topic of doing good mathematics contradicts the possibility of someone like Euler existing, yet he did exist and did work of unmatched quality. Whatever value might Dijkstra's work ultimately have I have no idea, but I find his insistence of his way being the only way appalling and his writings get really arrogant at times where he picks some very formal nit and makes it appear like a great intellectual achievement.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Knowing academics in a few countries, i can see how those notes are needed in the us.

Students here are really passives and have weird expectations about course work. And teachers usually don't even show up at their classes leaving all the teaching to TAs.

</comment><comment><USER33> Are there any books or lecture notes for the class? It sounds pretty interesting.

</comment><comment><USER34> This is the way we were taught pretty much every subject in our university. It doesn't work. What happens is, nobody studies anything during the semester (because nobody checks their progress), then there's a one or two week cram session before the oral exam, and after that you forget everything forever.

P.S.: I'm not from US, in our country you could get education for free

</comment><comment><USER35> Just because someone is brilliant does not mean they are a good educator.

</comment><comment><USER36> It's funny that he has to explicitly state that. It pretty much implies he knows they are _not_ grown-ups. I imagine the average college student being scared shitless of interrupting the highly-esteemed professor to ask him wtf he's talking about.

</comment><comment><USER37> It seems more cost efficient to just read one of this books and pay him $500/hour for private tutoring.

</comment><comment><USER38> Has anyone here had Dijkstra as a teacher?

This note could be the intro to a phenomenal learning experience, or a pompous self-important jerk. Given his impact to the field, it could actually go either way.

Can anyone here speak to personal experience with the professor?

</comment><comment><USER39> I'd imagine almost any other 70 old year teaching a math class would pass around a very similar syllabus.</comment>


OASIS -- Building 1000 citizen-sensors for the globe - <AUTHOR> http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/oasis-building-1000-citizen-sensors-for-the-globe

<comment><USER2> Not one of the engineers here, but I hang out with them a lot. Exciting work being done in the fields of machine-learning, hardware (potentiostats), and all open-source. It's a small core-team that definitely has the hacker mindset.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I'm one of the engineers involved in the data science behind the project, so if anyone has any questions, shoot away!

</comment><comment><USER3> One of the engineers here, just saying hi, thanks for posting</comment>


Native image lazy-loading for the web - <AUTHOR> https://addyosmani.com/blog/lazy-loading/ <comment><USER2> Ah right, lazy loading, this is the reason that I have to make sure to scroll down the entire length of a medium.com article I'm reading on my phone and back to the top again to make sure the diagrams and math-as-images load completely before I get on a subway line that doesn't have 3g service. Hate it when I forget. Otherwise I'm left staring at blurry lines that don't explain much about what trying to read until it's time to get off. Sucks when my commute is 40 minutes straight on the same line.

I guess an advantage of a 'native' feature could be that browsers could offer a button saying 'please pre-load this page!'

<comment><USER3> The problem with the tech bubble these days is that people within it assume that everyone has the same internet connectivity they do. And that they have it all the time.

Sadly, Apple has been like this since since at least the late 1980's. Out in the desert trying to help 150 children sign up for health care coverage and need to look something up via satellite connection? Oh, wait... the macOS is downloading Garage Band crap in the background that I didn't ask for and don't need. (I don't remember if Garage Band was the offender, but it was one of the pointless programs wasting space on my business computer).

Just like app developers who only test their apps on the high-end phones they have, not the phones that the majority of people have.

For the web sites I make for work, I test them on all kinds of devices. But I make sure that they all work on the cheapest pre-paid smartphone I could find at 7-Eleven.

The internet was built to bring universal information to all, not just Flash games to the rich.

<comment><USER4> Apple's hardly the only offender here, and if you don't want the iLife programs on a Mac, removing them is trivial. Drag to trash, empty, boom, gone. Apple doesn't do anything to impede removal, nor does it aggressively try to push them on you like so much of the bloatware preloaded on Windows machines.

(And if you had GarageBand in the late 1980s, then I definitely want to know who sold you your time machines...)

<comment><USER3> _Drag to trash, empty, boom, gone._

And then they're back after the next OS upgrade.

<comment><USER4> Are you sure this is still true?

I know it was for a while, but since the iLife apps were added to the Mac App Store, I thought they no longer reinstalled automatically, and if you wanted them back you just downloaded them from the Store. However, I haven't deleted them myself, so I don't know offhand.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Why would I want the loading behaviour of images to be chosen by the site I am browsing?

I would prefer to choose for myself whether images load eagerly or lazily on all sites I visit. This way, I would always know which type of loading to expect as I browse, and I would always get the type of loading I prefer.

<comment><USER6> This is toward the same goal. By standardizing it, browsers would be able to give you a lazy loading preference rather than sites implement their own in script that a browser/user can't override.

<comment><USER7> Well then the problem is users with different browser will get vastly different experience depending on the Browser Vendor, not the site owner.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This attribute appears to have been proposed and implemented by Google. Has any other vendor expressed an intent to implement/actually implemented this yet?

It seems a little premature to describe this as native support "for the web" if the functionality is limited to one vendor and you're forced to use a polyfill everywhere else.

<comment><USER9> The driving force behind this feature do seem to be a couple of Googlers, but at least one person from Mozilla and one from Apple have been involved in the discussion and contributed to the spec changes. The changes have not been accepted into the spec, however, or even reviewed by W3C-TAG, so it isn't a standard yet.

You can find the full discussion here: [https://github.com/whatwg/html/pull/3752](https://github.com/whatwg/html/pull/3752)

<comment><USER10> The Mozilla person involved in that discussion is the editor of the relevant spec, and is only involved in terms of making sure the changes are correctly indicated in the spec. I don't believe he has expressed any opinion on the changes themselves.

I just filed [https://github.com/mozilla/standards- positions/issues/151](https://github.com/mozilla/standards- positions/issues/151) on getting an actual Mozilla position on this.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I hope that they ship this with image intrinsicsize / aspect-ratio or whatever it is called now. Otherwise this lazy-loading will make page jumping and layout instability worse, because images are loaded only after the user has scrolled to their position.

[https://googlechrome.github.io/samples/intrinsic- size/](https://googlechrome.github.io/samples/intrinsic-size/)

<comment><USER12> Firefox at least has implemented Scroll Anchoring.

[https://hacks.mozilla.org/2019/03/scroll-anchoring-in- firefo...](https://hacks.mozilla.org/2019/03/scroll-anchoring-in-firefox-66/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> That's why i love React Suspense very much. It offers the flexibility in the hand of developers instead of some inflexible native API.

<Suspense fallback={<Placeholder />}> <Image src="" /> </Suspense>

When SSR, this one will show a real <img> tag. When SPA, this one will lazy load image.

A Win-Win for both devs and customers.

</comment><comment><USER14> I'm excited about this. There's usually a ton unnecessary CPU usage with the current techniques, not to mention the human time waste of re-implementing them in JS. There's feature detection for this too, so we can gracefully degrade "loading" to existing solutions and take advantage of it right away.

</comment><comment><USER15> Is this something just chrome is implementing or is this actually part of the HTML standard now?

<comment><USER16> The HTML standard _is_ "things chrome is implementing"

<comment><USER15> That's what scares me

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I hope they add an optional setting.

IE: <img src="celebration.jpg" loading="optional" alt="..." />

Then there is a place-holder graphic in place that you could click on to load the image.

</comment><comment><USER18> Hmm, I guess this is good news for WordPress users who won't have to rely on a plugin to do this?

Excited to see what else they are going to bring to the browser to speed up sites.

<comment><USER19> I think the virtual scroller will be performance boon for many sites. [https://chromestatus.com/feature/5673195159945216](https://chromestatus.com/feature/5673195159945216)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Does this support aborting the network call if you scroll the element offscreen before it loads? That's essential to infinite scrolling.

</comment><comment><USER21> Why would you have ever written JavaScript to lazy-load images?

The browser knows what's on the page and can optimize its loading already. Don't screw with that. This kind of assistance from the browser is why.

Also, you don't need to run code in documents. Web pages are documents.</comment>