Fridge 0.2 - <AUTHOR> http://joeyh.name/blog/entry/fridge_0.2/ <comment><USER2> Great project, not just doing it but monitoring the data.

Makes me wonder about the energy cost of losing (i.e. replacing) a 1/2 gal of milk vs the energy cost of a gas cycle fridge. I know food wastage is a huge resource lost but I've always overlooked the fact that energy is a huge one of the resources.

Thanks for writing this up!

<comment><USER3> (pulling random data points from around the internet)

It takes approximately 255 liters of water to make 250ml of milk. So 1020 liters per liter of milk. There's 3.78542 liters per gallon. So that makes about 1930 liters per half gallon milk.

510 gallons of water for 0.5 gallons of milk.

It takes between 2500 and 5000 joules of energy per liter of tap water depending on the water source (2000 times that for bottled water). So up to 9,650,000 joules of energy per half gallon of milk for the water(about 2680 Wh).

1.25 to 1.44 kg of feed to produce a liter of milk (0.2645 gallons). To produce 1kg of wheat requires between 500 and 4,000 liters of water. But then you need to transport the feed to where the cows are...

Then you have to transport the milk. How far is it, and what sort of fuel is used? What sort of bottle is used? If it's come across the country via truck in a plastic bottle, that doesn't get recycled, that could be a lot of fuel. How long was the milk refrigerated before it reaches a home fridge?

There's 4 million joules to make a PET 1 liter plastic bottle. So about 7.5 million joules for a half gallon one(2 kilo watt hours). Often the transportation uses more than that for the bottle, but varies greatly. One amount mentioned is 4 million joules per liter.

That's 4 kilo watt hours just for the bottle.

There's lots more to it, but I guess 1-2 days of solar power production from a 5kW solar system for a half gallon of milk.

<comment><USER4> That data (1000 gallons for a gallon of milk) comes from Natural News, which is... not a very precise source. A cow consumes, worst case (2000 lbs, lactating, it's hot) ~80 gallons per day. That same cow produces 3-4 gallons of milk a day.

On top of that, most of that water is excreted again - otherwise, your cow would gain 640lbs a day. Or, with the 1000 gallons/gallon of milk scenario, some 12,000 lbs/day

Assuming that that water is tap water is also... well, a most pessimistic assumption.

If you wish a quick sanity check of your numbers, US milk production is ~25 bln gallons/year. Roughly ~70 mln gallon/day. Assuming it took one day at 10kW for a gallon of milk, that'd be 700GW continuous energy consumption for our annual milk production. This is a substantial part of the total US energy production.

Second check: Assuming really cheap energy ($0.09/kWh, 10kW, 24h), that gives us a milk energy price of ~$21.00/gallon. Just the energy. This does not quite match, either. $14/gallon if you go exclusively with wind energy, which is IIRC the cheapest right now.

<comment><USER3> Milk costs about $3.50 per gallon in the USA.

If approximately 73% of the milk price is subsidized, that is about $12.96. Also, oil is heavily subsidized, which is the main cost of plastic bottled milk dispatched by oil using trucks.

<comment><USER5> Wow, in Australia it's about 1 AUD or 70c USD per litre. So about the same price, but no subsidies as far as I know.

That said we recently had to fund raise for farmers due to too dry weather and supermarkets increased the price a little bit explicitly to help them out.

<comment><USER6> > supermarkets increased the price a little bit explicitly to help them out

How is this different from normal supply and demand?

<comment><USER7> Because the supermarkets are a oligopsony. This distorts the market.

<comment><USER8> I thought you'd spelled oligopoly incorrectly, then I googled.

I've done a business studies degree so surprised I hadn't come across the term.

TIL.

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

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Kudos to the author! The best thing about this project is that it does not require any tricky mechanical modifications to the fridge itself. Mucking around with wires, inverters, and panels is scalable - I could build this myself using parts I already have in the event of the Apocalypse.

Some of the comments about heat pipes, heat transfer between freezer and fridge compartments etc. miss this point.

I got trapped in a fascinating rabbit hole like this a while ago trying to create hot water without (significant) batteries. The best solution seemed to be coupling the DC from the panels more or less directly to the heating element of the hot water cylinder.

Once you have a few of these lash-ups powering your new age off-grid sanctuary, it sounds like divvying up the power from the panels becomes the next major challenge.

<comment><USER10> Creating hot water is much easier and much cheaper. You run a copper or stainless steel pipe with water, paint it matte black, and put it in an enclosure with a transparent side. The sun will hear it up. It's quite popular in Greece and Italy.

[https://c8.alamy.com/comp/D24NWW/solar-hot-water-glass- tube-...](https://c8.alamy.com/comp/D24NWW/solar-hot-water-glass-tube-heating- panel-on-tiled-house-roof-D24NWW.jpg)

<comment><USER11> I've seen it done in Northern Spain with just a long black PVC tube in a spiral pattern on top of a roof. Worked well enough for three showers/day, even during the winter.

<comment><USER12> PVC and ABS aren't recommended for hot water, nor are they particularly well suited to sustained UV exposure. It'll work in a pinch, but if building something permanent with the luxury of options I'd ignore those.

<comment><USER11> I don't know, I just know it's been working untouched for over a decade. They don't use the water for drinking or cooking, though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Awesome idea and writeups. Something I didn't see mentioned as a consideration was an in-ground installation... not that I know it would benefit, and I know it'd be a whole heap of extra logistics. But root cellars and pit refrigeration were things before the appliance was invented.

TIL about the Yakhchāl ([https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yakhchāl](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yakhchāl)) which I found searching for an example of a pit style. Also that 7-Eleven sprang from an icehouse company in Texas ([https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_house_(building)](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_house_\(building\))).

</comment><comment><USER14> Joey Hess is an all around hoopy frood and all articles on his website are highly recommended.

<comment><USER15> I've always felt he was one of the more interesting personalities on the tech scene. Surprised he doesn't have a bigger following than he does, though I think maybe he likes it that way.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Thermal masses are a super cool way (ha!) to store energy, and I'm surprised they don't get more attention, both in the media, and in terms of research / investment. Heating and cooling accounts for somewhere around half(!) of residential energy use [1], which could be easily time-shifted with some very cheap thermal mass and some economic incentive to do so.

This is actually used in some commercial buildings in places where energy is cheaper at certain times of the day (for example, at night) [2], by freezing ice when energy is cheap, and thawing it when it isn't.

That being said, although this is a super cool project (I have the same inverter, and I made a similar control board ;)), this thermal mass doesn't seem like it would be particularly practical in most cases. Water has a relatively high specific heat capacity of 4.186J/gC, but given the narrow range of temperatures acceptable for a fridge, this doesn't end up being very much - only 79Wh per degree Celsius that the fridge is allowed to swing. If you consider 1C - 6C "acceptable", you only end up storing 395Wh. This is about 30-40% of the capacity of a $100-$200 "deep discharge" lead-acid battery, and is also a much wider range than most consumers would be used to (and may result in frozen veggies, for example).

In order to make this more practical, you really want something that can freeze around fridge temperature. For the same amount of water used above, freezing and thawing the water would store 6,308Wh(!), around 16x as much. If you could get something that freezes at 3C/4C with a similar heat of fusion to water, you could have a much smaller thermal battery that lasts _much_ longer, without the substantial temperature swings you see with your current design.

[1] [https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=96&t=3](https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=96&t=3) [2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_storage_air_conditioning](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_storage_air_conditioning)

<comment><USER17> I've heard about projects where they store heat underground - not sure if they use a certain medium or groundwater or something, but they basically pump heat into the ground during summer (and cold out into the HVAC) and vice-versa in winter. I guess ground itself - whatever is down there - is good enough. See also the London underground for an undesired underground heat storage.

But yeah, back in the day they would get blocks of ice from nearby lakes and put them underground, it'd last all year.

<comment><USER18> Yeah, here's an example of one in Alberta, Canada: [https://www.dlsc.ca/borehole.htm](https://www.dlsc.ca/borehole.htm)

Some of the things I found crazy when reading about it is that they can get the ground temperature up to 80 degrees celsius by the end of the summer, and then the ground stores enough heat (without just dissipating off to the environment) that it can provide a majority of the heating for 52 houses over the course of a cold Alberta winter.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> What milk can be kept 2 or 3 weeks in the fridge? Is there a special methodology? I never reach that conservation time with milk.

<comment><USER20> UHT milk: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra-high- temperature_process...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra-high- temperature_processing)

It has a shelf life of months, it's highly popular in southern Europe.

<comment><USER21> that does not need refrigeration either, does it? I've never seen it sold in the fridge area in supermarkets.

<comment><USER22> If i'm not mistaken you should refrigerate it once open.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> > Using a supercapacitor to provide power while shutting down on loss of solar > power, instead of the current few minutes of use of batteries.

I wonder why this is necessary. I've also seen it mentioned in the wiki, but no explanation.

Isn't a compressor the only electrical thing in a fridge? I know you must be careful with leaving some time between restarts, but why can't you just shut it down immediately on power loss?

<comment><USER24> [https://fridge0.branchable.com/battery_bank/](https://fridge0.branchable.com/battery_bank/)

> Fridge0 does not need a big battery bank, since it stores cold in its > thermal mass and runs only when solar power is available.

> But, at least a mimimal battery is needed to run the computer control. > Probably on the order of 5 watts for a computer like a raspberry pi; this > could be reduced more with a more embedded computer like an arduino.

> Enough battery to run the fridge for a minute or two is also needed. > Consider what happens when the fridge is running, and the sun goes behind a > rain cloud. Suddenly, there's not enough power to run it, but it's still > turned on. The inverter will try to run with whatever small solar power is > still coming in, but it's not enough. Some inverters might manage a clean > power off, probably accompanied with loud beeping. Other inverters might > fail in more interesting ways.

> To deal with this situation, the computer needs to check the incoming solar > power frequently, and power off the fridge if there's not enough. The > battery is needed to keep the inverter and fridge running until that > happens.

Basically, it sounds like the answer is because with a solar panel, there are states that are between "off" and "on," you rather just get an amount of power proportional to the amount of sunlight, and there's a concern that those states could cause problems if you don't provide a more constant power supply and active switching to fully shut off the power when your solar panel is not producing enough power for the "on" state.

<comment><USER25> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hysteresis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hysteresis) and Power Sequencing [https://en- support.renesas.com/knowledgeBase/16978575](https://en- support.renesas.com/knowledgeBase/16978575)

<comment><USER24> Thanks for the references! I'm familiar with the concept of hysteresis, but hadn't been familiar with the idea of power sequencing for MOS devices, such as the VDD + 0.6V maximum ratings or latch-up. That's good to know!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The thermal mass trick applies to all refrigerators/ice boxes, not just off- grid scenarios.

I tend to keep a number of filled water jugs occupying any otherwise unused space in mine since I don't keep them brimming with food stuffs.

It smooths out the temperature swings from opening the doors, and generally results in the compressor running less as a result.

Edit: it also buys more time before food spoils in power outages.

</comment><comment><USER26> Probably the best cold battery is to have a freezer compartment that's full of salt water which freezes at several degrees below 0, and some kind of adjustable heat link between the freezer and the fridge.

<comment><USER27> That was my original plan, but I went with the simplest possible thing before trying it, and so far the simpler plan has worked.

<comment><USER25> One could have frozen 1 gallon milk jugs in the freezer and manually put them in the fridge compartment as needed.

<comment><USER28> I freeze quarts and half gallons. They preserve seemingly indefinitely when frozen and the jugs hold up fine. Give it ample time to thaw before you use the milk, and it'll be normal. In a single person household without much home food prep this prevents a lot of waste without excessive trips to the store. As an aside, the stuff that comes from a partially thawed jug is interesting. It seems concentrated, as if the full water content is the last part to return to the liquid.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> As far as peanut oil goes, it's actually not that much lighter than water by volume (91%), but it has _half_ the specific heat, so it stores 45% as much heat per unit volume.

I couldn't find a reliable source for the phase-change energy for peanut oil, but it would have to be pretty high to make up for the difference.

<comment><USER30> Latent heat of fusion is typically 100 times bigger than specific heat.

I couldn't find a source for peanut oil, but [1] has values of around 200kJ/kg for various vegetable oils. Heating 1kg of water by 5 deg Celsius would take only 22kJ, so the oil should be a lot better.

[1]: [https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02549465](https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02549465)

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> From the same site - moreutils, Unix utilities; just posted it here, after seeing this thread, and due to seeing moreutils recently:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18772237](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18772237)

</comment><comment><USER32> Any luck with phase change materials for more dense « cold » banking?

You do say « However, this needs a material that freezes at a higher temperature than water, and most such are oils, which are less dense and so store less cold overall. », but I wouldn't underestimate the enthalpy of melting.

Depending on your climate, a long heat pipe would be interesting to move heat outside when it's cool enough outside (even if only during a few hours overnight). But that's getting complicated to fabricate oneself.

Oops, edit: you have it outside already. How do you prevent freezing everything ? (Again, climate dependent).

<comment><USER33> >How do you prevent freezing everything

They don't. If it's too cold outside for too long, everything will freeze.

<comment><USER27> Or add a small heating element, but it's not been necessary so far, it would probably need a full week below zero to freeze.

I do some minor adhoc regulation by putting leftovers in the fridge when they're still piping hot on colder days, vs letting them cool down more on warmer days.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> One thought, if this is combined with a freezer and there is a pumped heat exchanger between that and the fridge, you can effectively use the freezer as the battery.

<comment><USER35> Regular refrigerators use the same principle, albeit with a mechanism much simpler than a heat pump. They have holes between the freezer and refrigerator compartments and use a fan to push cold air from the freezer to the refrigerator. A heat pump would make that exchange much more efficient.

<comment><USER36> I doubt that heat pumps could be more efficient than direct exchange of cold air?

<comment><USER35> There are periods where you don't want the cold air to move into the refrigerator. Direct exchange allows the cold air to move around at all times -- regular refrigerators just turn a fan on and off, but some heat is always exchanged through the holes. A heat pump would just make the exchange more controllable.

<comment><USER37> I have a fridge that works with just holes. You can either have the fridge or the freezer at the right temp but not both.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> One of the interesting possible uses for 'thermal mass', with photovoltaics, is as an energy storage method for cooling purposes. I've seen whitepapers and prototypes of systems designed to implement the following for office building air conditioning, with no batteries, and no energy drawn back from the grid:

1) Build a big PV array

2) Use the surplus energy from the PV array during the day to chill water into a big block of ice.

3) Use a standard chilled-water-loop air conditioner system to run the AC chillers off the meltwater from the giant block of ice.

4) Repeat next day.

In this example the big block of ice becomes the energy storage method (surplus kWh used to freeze water), and is 'consumed' when it melts.

[https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/ice-energy- laun...](https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/ice-energy-launches-the- combined-rooftop-pv-ac-energy-storage-system)

[https://cleantechnica.com/2016/11/25/time-shift-excess- solar...](https://cleantechnica.com/2016/11/25/time-shift-excess-solar-ice- storage/)

<comment><USER32> I've dreamed of programming an HVAC thermostat to run the A/C or heat extra- hard just before peak electricity pricing kicks in.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> I'm surprised nobody's talking about how the code is mostly Haskell, and how it's being used to control electronics which seems to be a rare usecase (AFAICT): [https://git.joeyh.name/index.cgi/joey/homepower.git/tree/](https://git.joeyh.name/index.cgi/joey/homepower.git/tree/)

<comment><USER40> But Haskell has been Joey's favorite programming language for years. Why would it surprise us that he uses it for this? It's not like turning off the fridge needs submillisecond guaranteed response times!

<comment><USER39> Not everyone knows who Joey is . . . .

<comment><USER40> They're one of today's lucky ten thousand!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> if you find this interesting Joey (the creator) is regularly posting updates on this and his other off-grid projects, as well as working through the core ideas with others on Scuttlebutt ( [https://www.scuttlebutt.nz/](https://www.scuttlebutt.nz/) )

</comment><comment><USER8> Re thermal mass.

Could you not section of the part of the freezer with the cooling elements, and fill with water. You could then cool that below zero increasing the effectiveness of the thermal mass.

You'd also get some freezer space into the bargain.

The only issue would be passively moving cold into the fridge proper. I know greenhouses use wax cylinders that expand in heat to open louvre vents, I wonder whether something like that would work.

</comment><comment><USER42> For putting the thermal mass above the food, could a workaround be to put a heat sink on the bottom of the lid, and connect it to the thermal mass with an equally heat conductive material?

Also, before I saw what the heat sink was, I wondered if you could use shotcrete on the walls of the freezer, to act as the thermal mass.

<comment><USER43> I was wondering if this might work better with a traditional freezer-on-top refrigerator where you just use the freezer as pure thermal mass.

<comment><USER44> The chest style is optimal because with a traditional freezer-on-top refrigerator, you lose a lot of cold air each time you open the door. Whereas with the chest style, hardly anything is lost because the cold air doesn't rise.

<comment><USER43> I think we might be talking about different kinds of optimality.

I think the chest style is best for total energy consumption. But as we saw, his biggest problem was around thermal stability. If we put the freezer/fridge fan under computer control, you might be able to get more stable fridge temperatures despite the air loss because you can drive the freezer temperature much lower, getting more stability value from the thermal mass. (And it's also worth filling in any big air spaces in the fridge with more thermal mass, so that opening the door is not a big deal.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> Would it be possible to run a comparison vs. some of the ultra-efficient mini- fridges out there? I had previously seen a few folks on youtube showing some of their setups with existing mini-fridges.

I live out on some land with just solar power and batteries for stretches of time and am weighing refrigeration options.

</comment><comment><USER46> > Fridge0 aims for 0.5C to 5C, but it may sometimes heat up to 8C on a rainy > week, and that's no real cause for alarm.

I wonder what testing they've done to be able to say that a warm fridge isn't a source of alarm, other than "the milk doesn't go bad"?

<comment><USER47> His methodology stated in the article is that he's been eating the food in it for a year now and hasn't gotten sick.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> tl,dr: chest freezer hacked with extra thermal mass and smarter control maintains temperature while only running when the sun shines on the solar panels.

</comment><comment><USER49> Seems strange to call it a "zero-battery-use fridge" and then follow it with "It ties into the typical offfgrid system of a solar charge controller, battery bank, and photovoltaic panels"

<comment><USER32> Mostly agreed.

The big issue with off-the-shelf AC fridges is the current draw required for them to start.

If you want to go completely zero-battery, you'll need to highly-oversized your PV array just to handle the 1-2 second inrush starting current.

Or devise a slow-start function, overriding the AC flow to the compressor. So instead of starting at 60hz, you would start at 1, then 2, then 3hz, etc.

I guess OP means they could add a fridge to their off-grid setup without changing their existing battery budget for their other needs.

<comment><USER25> One could have a high current lipo connected to the inverter that can supply > 2kw for seconds. A 14.8v 4Ah 50C battery can supply 3kw for 72 seconds, more than enough to even out start/stop and shade cycles.

<comment><USER9> Or an ordinary (and cheap) lead acid car battery. These are designed for very high, short term loads, perfect for this application.

<comment><USER40> Some LiPo batteries, like those used in quadcopters, actually have power densities more than an order of magnitude better than lead-acid batteries; I _think_ they can be small enough that they're even cheaper.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> Demand elasticity.

<comment><USER51> With zero quality of service impact to boot (once the 1/2 gallon milk bug is fixed).</comment></comment>


What happens when you give homeless people a prepaid credit card.  - <AUTHOR> http://www.thestar.com/news/gta/article/854018--how-panhandlers-use-free-credit-cards?bn=1 <comment><USER2> Being homeless in Canada is 'something else'. You don't really realize how harsh those winters are until you're in Toronto and you see the streetpeople after a night at -30 Celsius.

I've lived on King street, where it ends on the lake, and from there it was about a 20 minute walk to the office. Every day I'd walk that same route and meet probably between 5 and 10 people living 'off the street'. They'd all be equally friendly. They had their own spots.

The police in Toronto was pretty laid back at the time (I'm no longer there so I have no idea how they are today), when a really cold night would approach they'd round up the homeless people and bring them to a shelter. But every year, in the spring one or two bodies would be found in the melting snowbanks. The unlucky ones that avoided the shelters and slept in 'their' spots only to never wake up again.

Winter in Canada is harsh.

<comment><USER3> Ditto Chicago. The fact that every homeless person in the country does not save up the $50-$100 (less than a week's work in a major city) in bus fare and make a beeline for Miami or San Francisco has some scary implications about the depths of the problem and/or their ability to make some simple improvements in their situation.

<comment><USER4> > _...or their ability to make some simple improvements in their situation._

I think it's almost impossible to understand if you've never been completely destitute, but, ironically, for most people as their situation worsens their ability to cope becomes overwhelmed and their ability to make rational decisions disappears.

This is probably the number one problem of poverty, and it applies to the poor and homeless in developed countries, as well as to the populations of completely broken nations. For example, as they become poorer and poorer, many people become more and more irrationally attached to their "stuff" and refuse to part with it, even if leaving it behind and moving on would dramatically improve their situation. They become extremely reluctant to try anything new. I think their psychology is such that they've been overwhelmed by the failures of everything they have tried, and they don't feel like they can handle a whole new failure; they seem more comfortable repeating the same mistakes over and over again. Malnutrition and stress also do a really nice job of exacerbating any latent mental issues they have, and those won't go away after a year of comfort, which frustrates those people that would try to help them.

So, I don't know what the answer to all that is, but I am convinced that the earlier it is addressed, the better, and that it's unreasonable to expect most people to resolve their own situation.

<comment><USER5> Old but good HN discussion on homelessness

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=116079>

> 2) The existence of the minimum wage hurts the homeless. The people I worked > with were incapable of producing $6 an hour of value for an employer. If > there was no minimum wage, they could work $2 an hour of value and then > gradually work their way up.

<comment><USER2> It wouldn't work though. Employers would take advantage of the situation, market rates would drop to the point where the homeless person would no longer be able to create $2 of value per hour either...

<comment><USER6> Minimum wage just outlaws all jobs that are worth less than $6 per hour. Suppose the unemployment rate is 5%, if minimum wage were raised, unemployment would increase. If it were lowered, unemployment would decrease.

There is a widespread misperception that businesses naively overpay employees for work that is actually worth less than minimum wage. This is not the case, which is why there is litter on sidewalks and beaches (for example) and why there has been a rise in the use of robotics (mechanical car washes, street sweepers, assembly line robots, grain harvesters, etc.)

Maybe in the short term some workers were overpaid, but it is generally very brief and does nothing to equip those overpaid workers for the future since industry is striving to correct the inefficiency and develop a robot, etc.

I think the point you are missing is that it's not just about the wage someone is paid, it's also about the training the job provides. Minimum wage prevents people unable to add $6/hour of value from having a job at all, which makes them helpless wards of the state. Great accomplishment.

<comment><USER4> > _...if minimum wage were raised, unemployment would increase. If it were > lowered, unemployment would decrease._

And yet, there are so many stories from wait staff about how important tips are to their ability to survive. Lowering unemployment at the expense of a much larger group's ability to survive is not a good idea IMO.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> An intresting idea. For those that would like to be charitable to the homeless but are concerned about how it gets spent, we've started carrying a few $10 gift cards to McDonalds (or something similar). That way we know it gets spent on a relatively decent meal, and not booze. Recently we've seen more homeless families with kids - and it's especially nice to be able to give them a few of those.

edit: An added benefit during the winter, is that they get to be a 'paying customer' somewhere warm for at least a couple of hours.

<comment><USER8> I get the idea, and that's kinda nice, but I would see it as a bit unfortunate that McDonald's get your money and that they get to eat McDonald's food (as opposed to something healthier and subjectively more ethical).

I do a bit of dumpster diving and otherwise collecting food that would otherwise go to waste (there are a few restaurants near where I live that will happily give you their leftovers if you go them at closing time). If I ever see a homeless person I always offer them the food that I have.

<comment><USER9> Believe it or not, to somebody who hasn't had a whole lot to eat in the recent past, everything that one would normally hold against a McDonald's meal becomes a big advantage. That high-fat, protein-heavy, "empty carbs" meal, the one _you_ probably shouldn't have for lunch every day, is pretty much exactly what a homeless fellow ought to be eating in the winter. Sure, it'd be nice if he could get a veg or two to go along with it, but there's a requirement for concentrated calories you probably wouldn't understand.

(I've been homeless in Toronto, back in the mid-'90s. Big recession. Some of you may remember it. It took eight weeks to get a gig shining shoes, and even then I was among the working homeless until I'd saved enough to pay rent up front on a room you probably wouldn't think of living in. And no, eliminating the minimum wage wouldn't have helped -- I would never have been able to afford to move indoors. I do wish I could figure out where these amateur economists get their ridiculous ideas. I'm sure it looks good on paper, if you eliminate things like, oh, the cost of food and shelter from the equation. Remember, the solution should be as simple as possible, but _no simpler_.)

<comment><USER8> I pretty much agree with everything you've said, except that "everything one would normally hold against a McDonald's meal" includes much more than its nutritional properties.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> A good portion of the problem of homelessness could be addressed by a sane approach to substance abuse. One innovation is a special 'drug court'. If a person charged with an offense has a drug problem, they have the option of entering a rigorous rehabilitation program with intensive support and somewhat intrusive monitoring. The upfront costs are a little higher (than standard courts) but data indicates that it really pays off in the long run.

And related to that, it would be really helpful if drugs were treated as a mental and social health issue and not as a law enforcement problem.

<comment><USER8> A better approach would be destroying capitalism.

Edit: Sorry, I do more or less agree with you that what you are describing is pretty much the right way to handle drug problems, but I think it's important to point out that poverty and homelessness are symptoms of capitalism, which is the real problem.

<comment><USER11> Wow, I'm really surprised to find someone on HN who is against capitalism. Here are a few points for you to consider, they might help you clarify your position on capitalism:

1\. What you are probably really against is collusion between big government and big business. This is a real problem and is antithetical to true capitalism.

2\. In a free market economy, there is plenty of room for charity and there is no one stopping people from organizing and participating in communes.

3\. Taking my money through force to redistribute through inefficient state run welfare programs is not going to benefit anyone but the government. The poor will continue to be poor, and the elite will continue to extort those who actually add value.

<comment><USER2> He's right though, in the communist countries that I've visited there was nobody homeless.

I am surprised that on HN someone that states something that contributes to the discussion gets modded to -4, I thought we reserved that for trolls.

You can find plenty of things wrong with communism, and I think that for the most part capitalism is to be preferred but that doesn't make him factually wrong.

<comment><USER3> I imagine the reason he got modded to oblivion was that he made an extraordinary claim _"...I think it's important to point out that poverty and homelessness are symptoms of capitalism, which is the real problem"_ with no attempt at justification.

Besides which, capitalism is not a form of government. So he started from a position of error and then went out on his limb from there.

<comment><USER8> It was an extraordinary claim (given the demographic here) and I made no attempt to justify it, so I can see why it was modded so harshly. I think the modding was a bit extreme, but I knew when I was making the post that it was going to be a -4 type of thing.

However, I don't think question of whether or not capitalism is a form of government has anything to do with the point I was making.

<comment><USER12> Meant to upvote you and fat-fingered it, sorry.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Stories like this make me wish that it was easier for homeless people to be declared mentally ill and placed into mental health facilities. (Damn you, deinstitutionalization.)

There are some people who are homeless because they're poor, but in the vast majority of cases it seems that the primary problem has nothing to do with not having a home.

<comment><USER2> > Stories like this make me wish that it was easier for homeless people to be > declared mentally ill and placed into mental health facilities. (Damn you, > deinstitutionalization.)

It's actually good that it is not so easy to declare people mentally ill, especially when they're not. Canada has a history of having it's 'social services' go completely out of control when given too much power, one nice example is the service that ostensibly protects children from abuse.

(But in fact is just as likely to do great damage to both children and their families).

I think many people would like to institutionalize the homeless just so the 'problem would go away', but homeless people are a symptom of a society that has issues, not just of those people.

For instance, banks and lawyers contribute to the number of homeless people by making it too easy to declare people bankrupt, seizing their possessions and means of generating income or their house, or to destroy someones life in divorce proceedings.

And then there are those that simply don't want to be part of the 'rat race' that have no other option but to become homeless (the Roma in Europe for instance). That used to be 'ok', but these days everything has to be owned by somebody so there is no way to be out of it all without trespassing.

It's not all clear cut. For sure there are mentally ill people that are homeless but I'd be highly surprised if that was the majority. For the most part they're just ordinary people down on their luck abandoned by friends and family. And plenty of them hit the bottle or drugs after becoming homeless, not before.

<comment><USER13> _I think many people would like to institutionalize the homeless_

I absolutely do not want to institutionalize the homeless. I want to institutionalize the mentally ill.

 _For sure there are mentally ill people that are homeless but I'd be highly surprised if that was the majority. For the most part they're just ordinary people down on their luck abandoned by friends and family_

You're right that the vast majority of people who become homeless are not mentally ill. However, the vast majority of people who _stay_ homeless are mentally ill.

<comment><USER14> > I want to institutionalize the mentally ill.

Institutionalize is a nice, clinical sounding word, but what it means is incarcerate. Imprison.

You are talking about locking up people without them committing any crime, without any trial, without them having any appeal or defense, for a week, or a year, or their entire life.

You, I suspect, would condemn a police authority who wanted to imprison whoever it liked, for however long it liked, on grounds of serving the general good. It is just as wrong to give a medical authority those powers and declare they'll only be used to help the people they're imprisoning.

<comment><USER13> _You are talking about locking up people without them committing any crime, without any trial, without them having any appeal or defense, for a week, or a year, or their entire life._

Not at all. In Canada, at least, people in psychiatric institutions have ample opportunity to challenge their detention. Their cases are reviewed and they are considered for release far more often than those who are convicted of crimes are.

<comment><USER14> In the bad old days in the U.S., crazy people, or people deemed crazy, could be kept in a mental institution against their will for years and years. When I hear people decrying deinstitutionalization, I assume they want to return to those bad old days.

I don't know about Canada, past or present.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> LCBO is the Liquor Control Board of Ontario.

<comment><USER2> The Canadian government has all kinds of monopolies, the LCBO is just one of several. You can really see how Canada has its roots in The Hudson Bay Company when you study how that came to be.

In case you're interested:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hudson%27s_Bay_Company>

<comment><USER16> In the US, we have state monopoly liquor stores as well. They were instituted as part of the regulation scheme when alcohol was legalized at the end of Prohibition. They continue on as major revenue generators for the states. Many states don't have them, but many do as well.

Ontario is one of the Canadian provinces which implemented Prohibition as well: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prohibition_in_Canada>

<comment><USER17> It's really interesting how disconcerting this is. I live in Pennsylvania, which has the same state store concept. I've lived here all my life. I don't travel much, and so the once a year or so that I leave the state, I have a roughly five second period when I walk into a 7-11 and they have beer in the cooler.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> As an American who has visited Canada many times, I've always been struck by the high functioning of Canada's homeless population. There are a lot of homeless youth and young adults who panhandle, etc.

Also, in Canada the work force is far more competitive (higher unemployment drives this). The person helping you at a fast food restaurant is a good communicator, appears clean, and is helpful and good natured. Across the border in the US, many fast food employees are noticeably less able.

So my hypothesis is that due to higher unemployment, many "homeless" in Canada are in fact people who would easily hold down a job in the US.

The US homeless, on the other hand, almost all appear to have psychiatric problems or substance abuse problems. I'd speculate that few US homeless would be able to hold down a simple job even if they were given a $5K per month stipend and fully subsidized apartment for the first year.

<comment><USER18> Here's a good essay on Canadian vs American unemployment numbers. Structurally, the Canadian unemployment rate has largely tracked the American one, but been higher. The professor who wrote this essay delved into the reasons why and found that the unemployed in Canada were more likely to search out work and therefore be counted as unemployed (i.e. the definition of unemployed in both countries being folks who seek work but currently have no job).

<http://faculty.arts.ubc.ca/criddell/canusune.pdf>

Also, Canadians have traditionally been supportive of quality public education and other social institutions. The person serving coffee at a Tim Hortons working minimum wage probably was in the same school system as the person he or she is serving who might be a banker. Private schooling is typically relegated to the upper middle class/rich, and those parents who want to send their children to religious schools (e.g., Jews or Muslims, as Catholic schools are fully publicly funded in many provinces).

Speaking as a university dropout and child of a middle class family in the poorest, most stigmatized part of Toronto, it was expected of all my friends that we get a post-secondary education. There was no question about it. Census numbers seem to back this up ([http://www12.statcan.gc.ca/census- recensement/2006/dp-pd/pro...](http://www12.statcan.gc.ca/census- recensement/2006/dp-pd/prof/92-595/P2C.cfm?TPL=RETR&LANG=E&GC=35080)). There were roughly 14 000 people aged 25-34 in that area of the city. Only 4 000 of these people had no post secondary education. Anecdotally, there's a Catholic high school in the area that installed a day care so that it could accept mothers (usually unwed teenagers of course). It was a little bit controversial when it was first started, but this was in the early 1990s long before these kind of things were normal. Incidentally, that same Catholic high school also supplied free condoms in their bathrooms, much to the dismay of the Church. There's much more of a push to be educated here in Canada than what I see in the U.S.. So that might be what you saw during your visits.

Also keep in mind that because we have universal health care, it's much easier for the mentally ill to seek and get the help they need before it's too late and they end up on the street. That said, I live in downtown Toronto now and most of the older homeless that I encounter seem to be mentally ill or have addiction problems. The younger ones usually come from abusive households, so that's what drives them into the streets.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I read this article a while back: [http://www.allvoices.com/contributed- news/4018083-beggar-ear...](http://www.allvoices.com/contributed- news/4018083-beggar-earns-50000-per-year)

$50,000 (AUD) a year! no tax as well.

What do you guys think about a beggar earning more money as the average Australian who actually works and earns money(I'm simply giving Australia as an example because I live there)?

<comment><USER20> I think it's a scandal and a disgrace - SOMEBODY call 60 minutes!

But no, seriously, why do people have such a big problem with this? The person begging and earning 50k is hardly getting money for nothing - I've done both telemarketing and shopping mall face to face direct sales and that's not easy or enjoyable. I think directly asking for money would be worse.

If someone spends 20 to 40 hours a week and manages to make a decent living, I don't see how that is bad, and I'm sure I can think of jobs and maybe entire industries that have a worse net effect economically or socially but are considered OK.

There are definitely more dishonest yet not as maligned ways to make a living than donning some old clothing and pretending to be poor.

<comment><USER21> People have a problem with this for a number of reasons, including but not limited to:

1\. They feel duped. They gave some money to a person because they thought that person was down on his/her luck, then find out that they were played. People don't like being defrauded.

2\. They are intellectually outraged because the beggar has made a career out of taking money in exchange for nothing of value, although some might argue that the warm fuzzies provided by the act of giving count as something of value.

3\. They are angry that these beggars are destroying good will toward other beggars who are begging because they really do need help.

Of the ones I discussed, I image #1 is the biggest factor.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> >Card 5: $75. Laurie buys $74.61 worth of food, phone minutes and cigarettes at a gas station convenience store. Returns card.

Looks like Laurie checked the balance on the card and used it fully. She was the only one to use almost the entire balance.

<comment><USER23> To me, Laurie is the only one that has a shot at improving her condition.

<comment><USER24> She's been out of a job for 10 years...

<comment><USER23> Obviously they are all in tough situations. However she spent the money somewhat wisely, knows how to use a computer, skype, and has some programming skills. She also sends out resumes. I'm not saying that she will make it, but from this pool she is the one who may manage to get out of it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> What really killed me was seeing the homeless buy or sell drugs/booze. I went from a really wealthy suburb to a college campus that was more representative of "the real world" and encountered the homeless on the edge of campus for the first time in life.

At first, we'd give money and feel awful about the homeless situation. Then, we saw a couple of the regulars making a drug deal. Then we saw that again.

After that, in my mind, any dollar I'd give isn't going for a McDonald's sandwich. Instead, in my mind, I was practically buying crack for the homeless myself.

The sad part is that I realize that it's likely that there's only a few bad apples and they're not all representative of the whole batch...but it's enough to let me say "no" without feeling guilty.

<comment><USER2> Everybody has their own way of rationalizing why something is not 'their problem'.

You could buy some food and give that instead. I've had a guy panhandling outside a supermarket here refuse food that I'd just bought because it wasn't money. Clearly he wasn't hungry but to me that doesn't make me look at all homeless people in the same way.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> these homes people seems awfully nice, but these are Canadians people we're talking about here. Let see how they do, say...San Francisco? Hey, SF Chron, are you listening?

<comment><USER27> Yea, what about NYC?

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Insufficient sample size for drawing conclusions about target population. /sarcasm

<comment><USER29> Right, that shouldn't be the point of this article. I think the takeaway are the personal stories.

Has anyone ever talked to a homeless person before? I recommend doing so from time to time. It's easy to judge some of these "bums." You'll find out some of these people have serious psychological/psychiatric problems (with alcoholism/drug addiction being a result, not just a cause).

<comment><USER2> There was a girl living in a house of mine that stood empty for a year because I couldn't sell it. Before then she was living in an old caboose.

We talked quite a bit, she was a gifted artist on the one hand and totally out of touch with the world around her on the other.

She said she could talk to trees and was completely fascinated by eyes. Last I heard from her she was living in Spain, doing drugs living on the street again.

I don't think she was homeless out of need as much as that she simply chose not to be a part of this society of ours.

<comment><USER30> I am not a doctor but from your description of her there's a good chance she had schizophrenia. Her statements are consistent with it, and problems keeping friendships and jobs leads to financial and social problems with then leads to homelessness which then leads to more problems, including drugs, and it snowballs from there.

If this was the case, the root affliction is not her fault, and she probably needed anti-psychotic medication on a regular basis, and government financial aid to keep her off the streets. Talk therapy is almost useless for that condition. Though giving her shelter and helping her to keep social connections is vital. So it sounds like you helped her out a lot.

<comment><USER2> I don't think it is possible to psycho-analyze someone based on so little data.

If everybody that talked to trees or other spirits had schizophrenia you'd have to include each and every religious person, to me their beliefs are just as weird as someone talking to trees.

It's not that simple.

<comment><USER30> Agreed, thus the wording of my first sentence. However the belief that you can talk to trees (delusion) combined with being fascinated with eyes (possible hallucination or sensory distortion) combined with no job or home all adds up to something highly consistent with schizophrenia. I've had a lot of direct personal experience with someone who has this condition, and have done a lot of reading and talking to doctors, so I have some basis for making this estimation.

Regarding religion. That's complicated. It may very well be the case that some people who make religious claims are in fact mentally ill. There are likely also other people who claim to follow a religion who are not mentally ill: they were either raised by their parents to believe that way, or, they chose it.

<comment><USER2> > combined with being fascinated with eyes (possible hallucination or sensory > distortion)

In an artistic sense.

A sample of what she could do:

<http://pics.ww.com/v/jacques/eckart/dscf1836.jpg.html>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I think asking them to return the card games the experiment. They might get paranoid and think it's some weird undercover sting. Or more likely, maybe they think they've found a sugar daddy who's going to start hooking them up every week, so they want to play nice.

It'd be interesting to see if the results would be different if you just dropped the card off and walked away.

</comment><comment><USER32> So am I the only one curious about the potential embodied in this experiment?

If you have accountability (via the credit card system) and challenge/reward (through a broader giving community), maybe you have the beginnings of a new and effective system for helping people.

<comment><USER33> But does it scale? Once you get beggars knowing they can get free money like this, how much do their attitudes change? How many people start to scam the new system? Does the scamming effectively prevent it from helping people who actually need it?

And as pointed out in other comments, many 'homeless' are homeless by choice, not because they can't get one. Some beggars aren't even homeless... They just choose to ask for money instead of earning it.

It's very difficult to make a system work properly when all humans are involved.

<comment><USER32> Yeah, people will either go along with a game plan or game the system itself. But maybe this is a way to structure in some freedom and personal connection that isn't there currently.

The move to electronic benefits from paper food stamps has reduced fraud substantially, and perhaps most significantly reduced the social temptation to game the system. So it seems like there's a similar benefit possible from moving from hard currency panhandling through rechargeable gift cards and public-purchase credit cards.

If a Kiva-ish system is more beneficial than standing out on the street, maybe you give people the freedom to stop structuring their life around panhandling and give them incentives to live more independently.

And these tools could even help provide a system that actually fills the gap between someone just making it in the working world and giving up on it for the more toxic world of panhandling.

But it's true that you are facing the most enormous incentives to game the system imaginable. It requires some really careful and clever reward design. I know it seems a little overenthusiastic, but I keep thinking it would be fascinating if there were a nonprofit that offered game design resources to other nonprofits...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Became clear that the problem is not in the need of money, but in finding a purpose, fulfilling an immediate need. If they had used the money in the most efficient way, they wouldn't be there in the first place (obviously)

</comment><comment><USER35> The minor side-story here is that all these cards probably ended up, even if further used by the author, with small balances remaining on them. Pure profit for the issuer.

</comment><comment><USER36> "...a man who had appeared with a can of beer and poured half into her paper cup. Joanne appeared sober."

I wonder about the accuracy of this reporters story, after reading this passage.

<comment><USER2> I think the operative word is 'appeared'.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> "Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day. Teach a man to fish and he will eat for a lifetime. " -Confucius

<comment><USER12> "Sit around feeling smug about your superior moral philosophy without doing anything, and the poor bugger'll starve to death."</comment></comment>


Nim lang compiler was originally written in Pascal - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/nim-lang/pas2nim <comment><USER2> Since Nim is influenced in some way by Python, I would rather believe the original compiler was written in Python. Interesting.</comment>


The State of the TclQuadcode compiler (2017) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://www.tcl.tk/community/tcl2017/assets/talk101/Paper.pdf <comment><USER2> TCL is fun to write. And with Tk desktop apps are fast and easy to whip up. Kicks Atoms Ass for internal apps and doesn't eat all your ram. I don't get why its gets so much flack. It's sort of a fun mix between lisp and perl. I hope it never dies.

</comment><comment><USER3> Lots of people hate on TCL, yet, it is still a scripting language used in routers and in NaviServer, which is used by TU-Wien to teach over 40K people, with Gustaf Neumann spearheading it [https://dblp.uni- trier.de/pers/hd/n/Neumann:Gustaf](https://dblp.uni- trier.de/pers/hd/n/Neumann:Gustaf) . It is used heavily in many other places as well to do useful work.

And don't forget "expect" which is based on TCL also.

<comment><USER4> F5 Networks uses it too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> This quote sums it up for me "I believe Tcl has been mischaracterized and has suffered in terms of open popularity. But for insiders, it remains as one of those secret indispensable Ninja tools that is used over and over again for competitive advantage." [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12025218](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12025218)

</comment><comment><USER6> The whole thing that it is an ahead-of-time compiler, that is, it runs in advance of execution rather than generating code when a procedure is first executed.. Is very cool.

</comment><comment><USER7> I hope there will be another update next week at the Tcl Conference in Houston, TX !

</comment><comment><USER8> I have mostly good words on TCL. But I would be more interested in having a lisp compiler that is adapted to TCL. Tcl faces significant competition these days.

</comment><comment> fake-name Upsides: It's neat!

Downsides: Oh god TCL is _horrible_.

<comment><USER9> _Oh god TCL is horrible_

Think of it as a C library with a very flexible configuration file... TCL is amazing and was doing what Lua and Node do a decade or more before they badly reinvented a subset of it and called it new.

<comment><USER10> What makes Lua worse than TCL? Not a TCL expert.

<comment><USER11> He is not saying that Lua is worse. Tcl was doing event based programming decades before Node and lua make it trendy.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Sydney datacentres prep emergency measures in face of massive duststorm - <AUTHOR> http://www.zdnet.com.au/news/hardware/soa/Sydney-datacentres-prep-anti-dust-measures/0,130061702,339298692,00.htm

<comment><USER2> Fuck, this morning we got up to a massive dust storm. The sky was red, then turned yellow, then the weather changed and it became freezing cold.</comment>


Facebook spreads rainy-day blues to sunny places, study says - <AUTHOR> http://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-facebook-emotional-contagion-20140311,0,7783839.story#axzz2vr1qa6wL

<comment><AUTHOR> The study publication in PLOS ONE is "Detecting Emotional Contagion in Massive Social Networks."

[http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjourna...](http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0090315)

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0090315

Abstract:

"Happiness and other emotions spread between people in direct contact, but it is unclear whether massive online social networks also contribute to this spread. Here, we elaborate a novel method for measuring the contagion of emotional expression. With data from millions of Facebook users, we show that rainfall directly influences the emotional content of their status messages, and it also affects the status messages of friends in other cities who are not experiencing rainfall. For every one person affected directly, rainfall alters the emotional expression of about one to two other people, suggesting that online social networks may magnify the intensity of global emotional synchrony."</comment>


Ask HN: It's 2018 – why aren't all text messages delivered over the internet? - <AUTHOR> Outside of iMessage and Google's RCS, SMS messaging feels like something out of the stone ages (okay, 1990's) eg very small text size limits, reliance on cell connectivity etc.  I was recently in rural Massachusetts where I happened to have WiFi but very poor cell reception.  I could receive messages from my friends with iPhones but not reliably from anyone else.  I realize this sort of scenario will become less common but just curious about why this is still a problem?  I'm surprised to see WiFi calling beat messaging here (I've seen WiFi calling as an option on both Android and iPhones for a while now). <comment><USER2> Telecoms standards are slow to be defined and slow to be adopted. There would need to be a standard defined for this but there would also need to be an incentive ($$$) to implement it.

In today's mobile networks P2P (person to person) SMS is decreasing due to Whatsapp, iMessage, etc. and A2P (application to person) SMS is increasing. In the future it is suspected that majority of SMS will be A2P. A2P has more value (e.g. Facebook wanting to deliver a two factor auth code to you) so it makes sense that operators are currently focusing on monetising this.

Also, a lot of countries block Over The Top (OTT) messaging (i.e. iMessage, Whatsapp, etc.) so for some countries (and businesses) SMS is still the most reliable text delivery format.

</comment><comment><USER3> First time I've even heard of RCS. I see a few news articles from Jan/Feb '17, which brought on some new carriers, but nothing major, and nothing in USA.

Having just switched from iPhone to Pixel 2, I still cannot get over not having iMessage a month in. The third party apps that let you text from your computer are pretty bad.

</comment><comment><USER4> Travel to rural or out of the way places in the US and you will see why. Internet is not as common as you think. Also, at large events (sports, conventions, concerts) Internet can be next to impossible, but TXT messages get through.</comment>


Great Western Railway accounts breached (uk) - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-43725640 <comment><AUTHOR> Doesn't really say if it was brute force or they're using unsalted encryption.</comment>


Ask HN: Convince a programmer to switch over to Mac (from Linux) - <AUTHOR>

Macs seem to have become extremely popular for developers who don't even necessarily develop for Mac, and I'm wondering why. Comparably spec'd notebooks are up to $1000 less than a Macbook. Where's the added value?<p>I'm in the market for a new laptop, and haven't found any compelling reasons for switching over as a backend web developer. I'm really curious about what I'm missing as a non-Mac developer. Is it just a status purchase? <comment><USER2> I was a big linux user that switched to MBP too a couple years ago. I was very skeptical myself, but I'm very happy with the switch. Besides looking cool, here's some other points from my experience: It just works better. Granted, a couple years ago, ubuntu wasn't as nice as it is now, Mac OSX just works so flawlessly, never restart, never shutdown (just close the lid), sleeps and starts up in literally 1 second, great battery, connects to wifi flawlessly, and LOVE the multitouch mouse features. I also really like certain programs including iMovie, Logic (music production), Photoshop. I've tried switching to Gimp, for example, which just doesn't feel right to an old-time Photoshop user. On Ubuntu, I was pretty happy with overall experience, and if I was ONLY using it for development, it would be just fine. I would recommend Mac to any developer, but if you are already very comfortable with your Linux laptop, you're probably not missing anything THAT compelling. BTW, I got my mbp for about $1300 and would not think it's worth it for much more than that.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. I like Macs exactly for the reasons you listed -- battery life is awesome, great touchpad, great boot/wake-up times, and the box is undeniably beautiful. I just found OSX's window management really clunky and unintuitive, but that's coming from a 15-year linux/windows user.

Is your MBP a 15"? How did you find one for $1300?

<comment><USER2> I have the 13", and I would strongly recommend this if you plan to be taking it around a lot. It's the perfect size / weight for me, and I don't think twice about bringing it around. In regards to the window management, I have to agree. It took a while to get used to, but now that I'm used to it, it's no problem. It's really just what you're accustomed to. Another note is that Mac devs love TextMate, but I've always just used VIM, so Mac is no better to me in this category!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I was a long time linux user too. I switched for the quality of the hardware and because I was tired of fighting poor hardware support.

For me a Mac is a much better experience, you focus on your work, the hardware/OS just work. No more fighting with XF86Config, broken wireless driver, and a hardware market focused on bringing the cost low instead of improving quality. If you look at how much time you spend on a computer, the cost is not the most important factor. When I get back to a pc, it always hit me how much the quality is inferior, but then I think about the cost pressure to sell a laptop at 400$ and I undersand.

What I don't like on Mac, is that I feel as a just another follower of a cult, yes the look is good but I think I would prefer a less flashy brand.

</comment><comment><USER4> Don't over-think it. Unless there's some particular thing that only a certain operating system can run/do then there's really not much difference. People just have that inherent need to rationalize everything they do, so they will be saying how they're using this or that system because it's faster, more stable or whatever else. When in fact the biggest reason is that simply they are used to it.

I'm a Windows guy and couldn't care less to switch. I don't know where those crazy stories of Windows crashing everyday etc. come from. An OS just like all the rest, if you have to actively look for a reason to switch then there's probably none.

But still sometimes perhaps it's nice to just change the environment. Makes life more interesting.

</comment><comment><USER5> Background: I've been using different flavors of GNU/Linux since 1999, but switched to Mac OS X in 2004 because I fell for the "Apple experience" and felt like I was spending too much time tinkering with drivers and so forth, while Mac OS X "just works". I've just switched my main work machine back to GNU/Linux (Ubuntu with Xmonad).

Hardware: I've bought quite a lot of machines from Apple (also for my business and family members) and while there have been some problems too, the experience has been great. Apple makes durable products, with metal and glass where their competitors use plastic. The durability of the casing should be a factor when buying a laptop, especially if you're going to be using it professionally. Can anyone recommend a similar product from one of Apple's competitors? I'd like to make the switch on the hardware level as well, but not at the cost of quality, durability and design.

Software: it just works, so you don't have to spend any time on configuration and customization. The operating system itself is quite nice to work with. I don't have any complaints there, although new users will probably need some time to get used to the idiosyncrasies. GNU/Linux has some practical advantages as a software developer, like better package management through things like pacman and apt-get, but you'll find that Mac OS X is quite adequate as a platform. The developer community on Mac OS X is quite productive when it comes to making tools, Mac-related screencast and blog posts, so you'll find a healthy ecosystem as a developer. A lot of games and professional applications that don't natively run on GNU/Linux are also available on Mac.

Some of the reasons I'm moving away from Mac OS X, however, are the lock-in, DRM and the closed mentality of the company. They suck developers into a closed ecosystem, by luring them in with the large audience they control on their mobile platform. The word "control" is chosen on purpose here, because that is what it feels like as an Apple user (less so on the desktop, but the non-mobile stuff is moving into that direction too, with the App Store).

So why am I switching back to GNU/Linux?

\- I wanted to try a tiling window manager (I'm very happy with XMonad so far),

\- my needs have changed (I hardly use GUI applications anymore; apart from browsers),

\- I'm unhappy with the focus on the mobile platform and the influence it has on the desktop platform (e.g. App Store),

\- I don't like how Apple restricts developers and recently started charging for XCode (pragmatically this isn't really a major issue, but it bugs me nonetheless),

\- I find some of their business practices quite unpleasant (e.g. how they deal with warranty in certain situations and the well publicized App Store shenanigans),

\- I don't want to be locked in anymore,

\- I prefer the GNU/Linux philosophy of openness and being able to tinker with the software I run on my computer,

\- et cetera.

I'm very ambiguous towards Apple. I think they make great products, but I dislike the closed environment and some of the business decisions they have made. I've felt like that for a couple of years now, but the otherwise pleasant experience has kept me from switching until recently. If you don't mind supporting the company I would recommend buying an Apple laptop, because you can always install a GNU/Linux distribution if you're disappointed with Mac OS X. Ethics and philosophy aside, they have the best offering for regular consumers and most professional users. As a developer it depends on your preferences, but since Mac hardware can run all popular operating systems it won't be a bad investment if only for the quality of the hardware.

Personally, I'm not planning on buying any new desktop computers from Apple, but next time I'm in the market for a laptop I might still buy a Mac (running GNU/Linux) if I can't find a PC laptop with the same physical and esthetic quality.

<comment><USER6> with regards to the issue of charging for xcode: xcode 3 is still free :)

The business decision that should scare you the most was the killing of the xserve line. Don't try to run a business production platform on a mac.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> My uninformed impression, never having owned an Apple product:

They're expensive, they crease your wrists, and the risk of some physical defect is great enough to be infuriating when they're so known for design and so expensive.

(They also look like shit after they're a few years old, based on my team mates units, but maybe that's from expecting them to be shiny MOMA-worthy objects.)

For playing well with the other team mates: Mac users have always been on different versions of Office than the rest of teams' members that I've been with, different enough that it causes unnecessary friction while trying to figure it out.

As a non-Mac developer: them are some expensive terminal windows.

As a ..nix developer: the ports (?) system, and its brethren/competitors, always seem to have different/old versions of software. The saving grace being that it _does_ have those expensive terminal windows.

tl;dr: Harumph!

</comment><comment><USER8> The multitouch trackpad is probably the best non-keyboard input device I've ever used - coming from someone who's used a Dell trackpad, Thinkpad trackpad + trackpoint, multi-button mouse, single-button mouse (which would be the worst non-keyboard input device I've used :), and, for many years, a trackball.

The screen (15" anti-glare 1680x1050) is also much nicer than many other laptops I've used, the build quality is superb, and I like being able to stop in an Apple store to get something fixed. With Dell, they sent someone out next business day to fix an issue I had, but Lenovo made me mail in my entire laptop, leaving me without my primary computer for the better part of a week.

Also, Linux virtualization works amazingly well on a Mac. I installed Ubuntu using Parallels, and set it fullscreen to my second desktop, so clicking Cmd+1 and Cmd+2 seamlessly shifts between Linux and Mac. It's really, really cool.

</comment><comment><USER9> I still don't know why but I get more things done using my MacBook for few hours in the evening than with a Windows machine the whole daytime...again, don't ask me why, but that's the reality and I'm happy for that.

</comment><comment><USER10> Truthfully, if I didn't have to do a lot of graphics work as well, I wouldn't use a Mac. But being able to dive from Eclipse into Illustrator>Photoshop>After Effects, then into the terminal, sftp, ssh, remote mysql and dive back into Safari/FF/Chromium to test it, is very useful for my workflow as an all-in-one freelancer. I certainly wouldn't be able to use Windows for it. I could use Ubuntu, but would suffer on the graphic design front, especially dealing with motion and typography. If I didn't have the added design requirements, I'd probable just use some linux flavor. As it is, alone, the hardware/software combo isn't worth it if you're just coding.

If someone is just developing, not designing, then no reason to go OS X. If design and dev are tightly bound in the workflow, then it's the only good solution right now.

<comment><AUTHOR> I definitely understand the Photoshop argument in favor of Macs. I just can't get used to GIMP, but luckily I don't need to do a whole lot of graphics work.

I've heard people talking about the software, overall, being better for programmers, but with no specific examples or comparisons to similar tools on nix/windows. I'm assuming you haven't seen a big difference either if you're using Eclipse primarily.</comment></comment>


Google Voice invites for students - <AUTHOR> http://www.google.com/googlevoice/students.html

<comment><USER2> This seems primarily like a marketing ploy. I signed up with my gmail account a few months ago and got my invite very soon (within 48 hours if not 24). Unless things have gotten worse, it seems more like an excuse to try to get students to sign up than Google giving students that much benefit.

Edit: Apparently the situation has gotten significantly worse since I signed up, which is not that long ago.

<comment><USER3> I think half of the reason Google uses invite-only beta services so much is to make people want the service more. People desire things more when they are scarce: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scarcity_value>

<comment><USER4> You realize each new account takes up a US-based telephone number, right? There's no number porting yet.

This time around, Google can't just open up 10 million new accounts. I mean, they _could_ , but it would cause chaos.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> *american students

</comment><comment><USER6> As a student, google voice saved my ass on more than one occasion.

I landed in the hospital for 4 days, with no cell phone reception. If I hadn't been able to send texts over wifi with voice, I don't know what I would have done.

I had my dorm phone working with it too, it really was a lifesaver when I didn't have a cellular.

<comment><USER7> That's when you go: "Nurse, I need to make a phone call, please."

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I have a couple of invites left, if anybody is interested.

edit: 1 left.

<comment><USER9> Would love one. Email's also in my profile.

<comment><USER8> I just sent it, so I have no more invites left. (it seems I cannot edit my previous comment anymore)

<comment><USER9> Thanks a lot!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> They are only sending out invites to american residents then?

I signed up a couple of months ago from outside the US and still didn't receive an invite. Time to try using a proxy!

</comment><comment><USER11> When the heck is Google voice going to support number portability?

<comment><USER12> When the heck are telcos going to support number portability to services like Google Voice?

<comment><USER13> They do. Google isn't currently accepting port-ins.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I just had a grad student begging me for my last GV invite last week. Now I can hang on to it for a more strategic situation :)

</comment><comment><USER15> My university hands out unlimited .edu addresses to students that can be configured to forward to any email address...

</comment><comment><USER16> "for students who have a .edu email address", no?

My university doesn't hand those out. :(

</comment><comment><USER17> I wasn't aware they were this hard to get. I've got 3 left for anyone that wants.

<comment><USER18> I could use one, been waiting for a few months now. I guess I'm in the magic "nah, not you" bucket right now. If you haven't burned your last 3, I'd love one to ismarc31.

<comment><USER17> I sent one to your gmail account (I assumed is your gmail account). I hope I got it right and didn't fire an invitation into the ether.

<comment><USER18> Indeed it was the correct one. I've got it set up and everything now, thank you VERY much.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> You can also buy invites on ebay. Last summer they were going 10 for 2.50.

</comment><comment><USER20> I've currently got 3 invites, if anyone is interested.</comment>


China is winning the trade war with America for now - <AUTHOR> https://www.ft.com/content/3535a470-e8c6-11e8-885c-e64da4c0f981 <comment><USER2> > _The White House would do better to focus on areas where the US has > legitimate grievances with China, such as intellectual property abuse, not > shipments of steel._

Not really. He's smart in doing precisely the opposite. The people who benefit from IP protection ("coastal elites") don't vote for him or want his policies. Meanwhile blue collar steel workers are all but out of work because of a kind of dumping that's recognized as illegal by many countries.

</comment><comment><USER3> [http://outline.com/TKRKzz](http://outline.com/TKRKzz)

For those getting a paywall</comment>


Ask HN: Best alternate client to web-based Gmail? Now that it sucks - <AUTHOR> With the most recent update to web-based Gmail, it is super janky and it feels like the interface gets in my way.  I've started to dislike writing emails now.<p>What are good alternate clients that still get all benefits of Gmail, but with a fast productive interface? <comment><USER2> Funny how it has come to this. There's a common refrain at google. Reliance to regressive change is branded change aversion. It utterly misses the point. If you change something it damn well better be better. Because change forces your user to re-learn. Actively making things worse for no benefit (like the latest gmail update) is the final stage of "that's just change aversion" mentality.

<comment><AUTHOR> Absolutely! I get that they have added in some cool new features under the skin (the auto suggest as you type is cool) but it's too many steps backwards to be worth it!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I recently changed to Thunderbird due to the Gmail gui change. So far it is working really well. There are some very small problems that may be fixable, I just haven't figured out how. Such as, no automatic 30 second undo option on sent mail, a lot of emails get saved as new drafts even after sending, and I can't figure out how to link other accounts and then bring and to send as that account without having to add it as a new account. However, it is amazing how fast it is relative to Gmail. Creating a new email is instant and can be made full screen, where as in Gmail it takes a few seconds for a small compose window to open. Simply opening Thunderbird is instant as opposed to the new Gmail that has taken me 30 seconds at one point. Another reason that I installed Thunderbird is because I eventually hope to leave Gmail. So I'm starting by changing the GUI, and maybe in a year I will update my address.

<comment><USER4> Im actually considering going from thunderbird to gmail, fastmail or outlook

The reason is b/c thunderbird doesnt have a good reply monitor,threading for conversations or plugins to handle it. I have to buy things from vendors all the time and manufacturer reps always never do their job properly until I remind them 2 to 5x _(not an exaggeration)_ over the course of 2 weeks. The reason is b/c most are all low tech and cant manage emails. I wish I could just bypass them entirely but its complicated.

Sometimes vendors dont use emails like firstname.lastname@example.com and use email@example.com and dont tell me they fired their sales rep and hired a new one. So sometimes my emails go to deadlinks again and thunderbird has no monitoring solution and poor conversation threading.

Its becoming a huge hassle for me so I need a better tracking system. Gmail has many integrations for this though on the other hand.

I dont know if I care all that much about privacy in all honesty. I am more worried about getting vendor locked through google,so I might set an smtp/imap account with thunderbird for my google emails.

The new google gmail is not really that bad in all honesty. It loads slow starting out but it does not bother me though. Some of the view modes make my eyes bleed though UX is beyond atrocious especially with attachments.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> FastMail.

Nothing is as _good_ as GMail, which is the most frustrating part, but FastMail gets pretty close in my experience.

I guess disclaimer that I did some brief consulting work with them years ago to explore WKWebView usage in their app; I only recently started using them myself, though, so my opinions at this point are more influenced by that than anything else.

<comment><USER6> Seconded. After 15+ years mostly using Gmail or mutt, I moved to FastMail's webmail about 3 years ago.

I like FastMail's webmail better than Gmail today, but not quite as much as Gmail ~10 years ago.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> What's the official comment on it now that the unequivocal response seems to be negative? Normally you can't comment on here without someone from FANG getting involved and giving some (normally useful) input, but in this case nothing...

A couple of messages on their forum here, but nothing from Google

[https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/gmail/nP0YcpI...](https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/gmail/nP0YcpIQPXw)

[https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/gmail/9k8Y3Yn...](https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/gmail/9k8Y3YnlLEA)

</comment><comment><USER8> I happily pay for Office 365 in my startup which is open source based (PostgreSQL, HTML, CSS, JS, Polymer) just for Outlook and Excel. There are cheap subscription options I think available for consumers. Outlook is for me, far superior to GMail (I'm no MS fanboy, I hate Word and Sharepoint). GMail was fine for a free product, but the thing i hated about it most was that you could not easily sort mail by clicking on column headers such as date/ from / to etc. I could not believe that such a basic critical capability was absent - have they added it now?

</comment><comment><USER9> Two options.

1\. Apple. Really.

2\. Setting up your own Linode with postfix, dovecot and roundcube is just a half of an hour. Domain name registration is about an hour.

Of course, you won't get any services, which is the main product Google is trying to sell indirectly (it monetizes your content, services are free as long as you your generate content).

<comment><USER10> Is roundcube really the best option? I just can't stand using it.

<comment><USER11> I use rainloop for my self hosted. Works much nicer, especially on mobile devices

<comment><USER10> Thanks! Looks nice, I will definitely try it out.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> What changes exactly is everyone talking about that made it worse? I literally feel no difference in the UI/UX (apart from the initial 2 second load animation).

<comment><AUTHOR> The main issue is performance -- so janky -- animations shudder. There is even a delay waiting for text to appear while I'm typing an email.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Thunderbird, for classic email usage is the best option if you don't want to pay for Outlook.

And you are right the interface not only gets in your way, most of the time it doesn't open the email when you click on it. Incredible that at Google those praised engineers make a unusable product.

<comment><USER14> They're just trying to materialize their brand everywhere.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> you can go 10+ years back via [https://mail.google.com/mail/?ui=html](https://mail.google.com/mail/?ui=html) but that's probably not what you're looking for either.

<comment><USER16> Thanks! I think I like this better.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Superhuman. Not cheap, but I love how fast it is with its native app (Electron I think). They write updates immediately locally, and sync that in the background, so you can breeze through your unsorted email quickly (pressing keyboard shortcut 'e'), and pressing 'tab' to switch between split inbox views. They also show read/open receipts if you enable it, and have keyboard shortcuts for unsubscribing as well. When you reach inbox zero they reward you with a new, beautiful picture every day.

A fully-featured integrated calendar is lacking but apparently will be improved in the coming year or so.

</comment><comment><USER18> ProtonMail's web-based client is solid. The bonus part is you can ditch Gmail all together as well. Hosting on your own domain is also nice if you don't like @protonmail.com or @pm.me. If the price is too much, they are going to have some great Black Friday deal coming (it's actually secretly available now if you enable it in the CSS).

<comment><USER19> I have on big problem with the protonmail web interface (and apps). It can't do full text search, only subject and sender which makes it hard for me to use.

<comment><USER18> I had a similar search issue. For paid users, they also offer a "ProtonMail Bridge" client for macOS/Win that can make it so you can use your regular mail client with ProtonMail.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Apple Mail.

</comment><comment><USER21> Which parts get in your way? I much prefer the previous gen to current default settings but I've found that you can largely emulate the previous gen even if it's not perfect.

<comment><AUTHOR> > Which parts get in your way?

The slowness, lag, ugly font. Even scrolling is laggy. I'm just waiting for it to respond often. Sitting around waiting for the collapsible sidebar to collapse.

<comment><USER21> I definitely notice it's a bit slower to load new pages of emails, never noticed any laggy scrolling though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I run my own mail server (using Exim) and use Heirloom-mailx as the user interface. I find it is better than other stuff I have tried.

</comment><comment><USER23> Gmail app on android. I guess you cold run it in an emulator on the desktop too.

</comment><comment><USER24> I've started to use FastMail, which is great. The thing I miss is the automatic triaging of emails provided by GMail (personal, promos, forums, updates, social). FastMail provides something similar, but with a lot of false positives, and sady the filter is not available in the mobile app :-(

</comment><comment><USER25> still not as bad as reddit</comment>


How the US killing of a top Iranian general rekindled Kim Jong Un's worst fears - <AUTHOR> https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2020/01/07/asia-pacific/north-korea-iran-kim-jong-un-killing-drones-donald-trump/#.XhV7-EczZPY <comment><USER2> More generally, with treated and agreements almost never ratified by senate, it would actually be foolish to trust any act accomplished by executive power to successfully be carried from an administration to the next.

</comment><comment><USER3> South Korea capital Seoul with its 10 million inhabitants is very close to the North Korea border and within reach of their artillery. They can retaliate the death of their leader by killing millions.

<comment><USER4> Indeed, pretty unfortunate location of their capital. I remember hearing that when buying real estate in Seoul, the flats facing north Korea were cheaper because of this. Not sure how true this is.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> And all because a dude want's to get re-elected.

<comment><USER6> Because a dude wants to get re-elected, or because many Americans absolutely love war? This strategy couldn't work if the former wasn't true.

<comment><USER7> American PEOPLE don't like war.

<comment><USER8> Where are the massive protests?

<comment><USER9> Americans may still not war but I think they have lost the ability to voice it, through protest or votes. Just like here in Australia. We're complacent, because things have actually been pretty good for a while. Now that things are looking a bit dicey, we find our voice is out of practice and no one knows what to do, or they are too comfortable to want to risk losing what they have.

I always figured complacency would be what undoes a democracy, as leaders and the media got better at keeping everyone entertained while they sell off the economy and wage foreign wars without our tax money but not our consent.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Hey HN NYC, interested in a meetup this weekend? - <AUTHOR>

Any interest in a get together at Shake Shack on Saturday, August 9? <comment><AUTHOR> This is on, for those interested.

Noon at Shake Shack on Saturday, August 9. Look for me in a light blue Plaxo tshirt.

</comment><comment><USER2> Also interested! What time?

There is a google group, BTW: <http://groups.google.com/group/nyyc>

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Thanks to those who came!

<http://datainsightsideas.com/post/45336208>

</comment><comment><USER3> Wow. I have plans but I might just have to break them if Shake Shack is involved...

</comment><comment><USER4> Cool, but what's Shake Shack?

<comment><USER5> Burgers and Ice Cream and stuff - <http://shakeshacknyc.com/about.html>

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> My name is Amrith. I would be interested in joining as well. Is this still on?

</comment><comment><USER7> I might be free, but it's only been three weeks. Maybe the weekend after?

<comment><USER8> I don't think we have to be regular about it....

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'd be interested in attending as well if enough people can make it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Just something casual, I figure.

Meet at 12? Chat in line, get food, hang out, etc....

<comment><USER10> And we recognize each other, how?

<comment><AUTHOR> I can wear some Plaxo or Facebook tshirt so people can recognize me and then the fun starts there!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I can be in too. What time we talking?

</comment><comment><USER10> So is this on?

</comment><comment><USER8> I'll be there.</comment>