How Tim Cook is changing Apple - <AUTHOR> http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2012/05/24/apple-tim-cook-ceo/ <comment><USER3> Apple has been an outlier kind of performer under Steve Jobs, because Jobs was an outlier kind of human being. All I take away from that article is that people better start tempering their expectations of this new Apple, because once the product pipeline that Jobs oversaw is depleted, what we have left is merely a "very good" company built on a great foundation.

So much of the article seemed to point out the Tim Cook was friendlier in terms of investor relationships, but who cares about that (from a technologist point of view)? I mean, the biggest indicator of the shift in their priorities is that they took 100 billion dollars in cash and used it for stock buybacks and dividends. Can you imagine Google doing such a thing? They would never dream of this, because they are too busy re-investing their profits with their big-picture potentially world changing research projects.

But hey, kudos for Tim Cook for not trying to be someone he is not, he's a money and operations guy. So money and operations will get looked at at the expensive of innovation. But this is not good for those who are used to miracles from Apple:

 _"It looks like it has become a more conservative execution engine rather than a pushing-the-envelope engineering engine," says Max Paley, a former engineering vice president who worked at Apple for 14 years until late 2011._

 _"I've been told that any meeting of significance is now always populated by project management and global-supply management," he says. "When I was there, engineering decided what we wanted, and it was the job of product management and supply management to go get it. It shows a shift in priority."_

Yuck. The geek inside dies a little at reading this.

<comment><USER4> _"I've been told that any meeting of significance is now always populated by project management and global-supply management," he says. "When I was there, engineering decided what we wanted, and it was the job of product management and supply management to go get it. It shows a shift in priority."_

As an engineer, I understand why you are scared that "global-supply management" is getting involved. But you forget that the volumes that Apple works at have changed in the last 10 years, to the point where new products need to be manufactured at launch, in quantity that no one else in the industry has ever heard off. Good old days where you could manufacture 1 million iPhones in the first quarter and be happy, those days are over.

So pay a bit of respect to global-supply management. Manufacturing is actually as respectable as engineering. Just different concepts, but both optimize under heavy constraints to achieve near-impossible goals (at least at Apple).

<comment> excuse-me Apple's real innovation is in supply management (well that and iTunes)

Anyone can make a thin smooth aluminium laptop. Being in the position of making the premium priced top of the range product, while paying far less for your components than your big box competitors and having such a stranglehold hold on supplies of those components that you can keep competitors out is amazing.

It's as if Audi not only made great cars - but also had all the worlds supply of tires and engines and was paying half as much as chevy for them!

<comment><USER5> I feel like this is ignoring the tough decisions Job's made when they didn't have the supply chain. The original iPod was priced at US$399 and US$499. It had very few features and most people called it lame.

When Job's decided to remove floppy disk drives and made iMacs that you couldn't upgrade the components from computers people called it lame. (This really upset people)

When the first iPad came out most people called it lame. (Has everyone already forgotten this? People were screaming it was going to fail, because it didn't run OSX).

To dismiss Apples success as only dependent on supply chain management is missing the mark in my opinion. Apples success in a large way hinged on Jobs ability to make decisions that in the immediate would piss people off but in the long term seem obvious.

<comment> excuse-me Apple's CURRENT (and future) $$$$ success is now because of their supply chain.

Yes they have some very nice products - but what has moved them from a niche supplier of shiny toys for the 'money > sense' crowd to a gaziilion $$ market cap - is that their excellence in delivering on these products.

A lot of this feeds into the the products. They don't need cheesy Blah inside stickers because they don't need to earn that extra $0.50 They don't have to bend over to the demands of Walmart buyers or chase the latest fad because they are in a position to decide the fad.

But they don't have a unique technical skill. They have an Intel CPU, an NVidia card and a li-ion battery in an aluminium case with a Unix OS and a pretty gui. It's delivering this package at that price with that margin that now makes them special.

<comment><USER6> While I don't disagree that Apple's technical skill isn't best of breed, where Apple has shined - both now and in the past - is their ruthless determination and focus on UX and HCI. Apple goes further than any company on the planet to make technology devices (computers, laptops, music players, tablets, etc) that delight their users and just work and make them happier and more productive.

Apple doesn't have "cheesy blah inside" stickers because that doesn't delight users and make the product better to use. They're stupid. Apple also doesn't chase fads because fads are just that, "a fad" and rarely do fads have long lasting staying power like a good product should.

<comment> excuse-me I'm not sure that Apple's UX is that much better than Windows7/Gnome/Unity. They have done a very good job of making it easy for you to buy from them with the integration of iTunes but a single button mouse and a single menubar at the top doesn't necessarily make every app easier to use.

Where they do shine is in build quality and user experience which comes from owning the entire product - HW/OS/sales channel/support - and having enough margin to do it well. That's the difference between them and an equally specced Sony laptop running Windows.

It's the profit margin that really makes them special. Sony used to make products of this design and build quality but then to compete had to cut costs and so quality and had to accept the bloatware and stickers. Apple's brilliance has been in managing the process so that they can cut production costs while increasing quality and adding more stuff.

I give a huge amount of credit to Cook for this. Jobs demanding rounded corners on dialogs or sticking to a single button mouse whatever focus groups said was good technical leadership, Ive's produce design is great. But dominating the manufacture and supply network to the extent that Apple have done and with the effectiveness they have done is a major achievement and is not easy.

Look at Boeing having to delay the 7E7 because it couldn't get rivets - <USER2> Apple has 747 freighters booked ready to fly new products straight to the store the day they are released.

<comment><USER7> >I'm not sure that Apple's UX is that much better than Windows7/Gnome/Unity.

... this is insanity. These UXs you refer to are Apple copies that were released years after the Apple UX. Windows7 has a nice UX because Apple forced it to. People were abandoning Windows for OSX, so Microsoft invested in their UX.

Your comment is like saying, "Henry Ford's Model T was no big deal. It's hardly even better than my 1990 Honda Civic." No shit!!!!

<comment> excuse-me To a buyer today it doesn't matter who did what first in Guis.

It's like saying a BMW is unsafe because they copied seatbelts from Volvo.

<comment><USER7> That's a non-sequitor and you have now changed the goalposts of the discussion. The discussion is about what got Apple its marketshare in the first place.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> _Indeed, the vibe, in the words of a former employee, is of an Apple that is becoming "far more traditional," meaning more MBAs, more process, and more structure._

This doesn't sound like a positive development to me. This kind of structure almost always seems to lead to less accountability and more business-speak bullshit.

<comment><USER9> An influx of MBAs after the original Jobs ousting was the hallmark, if not the actual cause of, the death spiral that Apple was in until Jobs returned. I worked there for a stint during those stagnant MBA-life-sucking days.

Another one from the article:

> investors now have the CEO's ear for the first time in years

To that, I say, "Oh crap".

Jobs took Apple to greatness because he obsessed over making incredible products. Build incredible products and the money and investors will follow. Change your focus to investors, operations, or accounting and watch as the products suffer.

CNN's breathless and laudatory tone in describing all these responsive changes from Apple just serves as a reminder that reporters should just keep their views to themselves. You can tell that this CNN reporter/editor has a tingle up his leg over Cook's touchy-feely professionalism... as though that's going to improve Apple in any way that matters to those of us who use their products.

Cook may not be a disaster on the level of John Sculley, but his focus on the corporation of Apple rather than on the coolness of its products would worry me if I was long on AAPL.

<comment><USER10> Investors have always had Tim Cook's ear--that was part of his leadership role at Apple for many years. Now that he is CEO I don't see why that would change.

Tim Cook is a very talented business and operational manager. I don't think he should try to become a "product guy" CEO just because Steve Jobs was a product guy CEO. He should stick to spending his personal time on doing what he does best--operations.

Yeah, product development at Apple is going to suffer because Steve Jobs is gone. There's nothing anyone can do about that, including Tim Cook. The thing that Cook has to do is protect what remains of the great creative processes that are still going. If we hear that investors have Ives' ear, that's when it's time to panic.

<comment><USER11> Almost exactly what I came here to say. As long as Tim and Jon have a good relationship (or at worst, big decisions that aren't plainly suicidal defer to the design team) they'll be in good shape.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I point to 3 stories of CEO succession that worked. Not every company will turn into HP or Yahoo. A couple co's that had visionary founders have been able to survive for a century or more:

Bob Iger taking over from Michael Eisner: Forbes has a nice write up about his time at Disney which reads very much like the profile of Cook. Iger is a quiet delegator, but has had a tremendous amount of success.

[http://management.fortune.cnn.com/2012/05/09/500-disney- iger...](http://management.fortune.cnn.com/2012/05/09/500-disney-iger/)

Michael Eisner taking over from Walt Disney: He didn't directly follow Walt, but Eisner reinvigorated an iconic company that was rudderless after Walt died. Paints a picture of what Apple might have looked like if people asked "What Would Steve Do" at every turn.

[http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/20/books/review/020LEONAR.htm...](http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/20/books/review/020LEONAR.html)

Jack Welch taking over from Thomas Edison: Again, not directly, but GE was on the ropes when Jack rose to the top and employed a strategy very different from the founder to get 20 years of solid growth.

[http://www.businessweek.com/managing/content/apr2008/ca20080...](http://www.businessweek.com/managing/content/apr2008/ca2008049_455024.htm)

Ultimately, you want someone with a vision at the top, even if it's not the same vision as the founder. Cook seems to have a plan and can execute on it well. Give the guy a chance!

<comment><USER13> I don't know the story of all of these, but I know that Iger was at Disney for years before becoming CEO. He was promoted up, and not some outside former CEO that was brought in. Same with Cook, and I believe this same is true of Welch.

Maybe there is something to promoting from within vs hiring some former CEO?

<comment><AUTHOR> Funny you mention it, that is exactly the subject of a new Economist story[1][2]

[1] [http://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2012/05/daily-c...](http://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2012/05/daily- chart-15)

[2] link from within the charts page above: <http://www.economist.com/node/21555895>

<comment><USER14> Jobs did a good job of grooming his replacement(s). Promoting an insider means strategic continuity and established trust.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> The more I read about Cook the more I think he was the right choice for the role. Trying to replace Jobs with another Jobs-lite CEO wouldn't have worked, because they wouldn't have been Steve.

It's clear Cook cares about the company and wants to drive it forward, and it's clear that things aren't as focused on letting the engineers rule the roost, but we'll judge him over the next 5 years rather than when he's barely had chance to settle into the seat.

<comment><USER16> Were the engineers ruling the roost in Steve Jobs' years? The story has seemed to be that the designers/visionaries steered/put the engineers in their place.

<comment><USER15> From what the article says it was the engineers, but I think you're right on the money on that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I didn't draw the same conclusions that others seem to be drawing from this article. Having been in the tech industry for over 20 years now, I can tell you that a company's CEO having a firm grasp on the business side is nothing but win.

This doesn't mean that Apple will become Microsoft, or that all the technical innovation will end, it simply means that they are taking the steps they need to take to ensure that the techies will be ABLE to keep innovating.

But, don't let me get in the way of a good hand wringing session :)

</comment><comment><USER18> Cook is running Apple well and should be applauded for implementing changes that make Apple a modern company with social responsibility. But in the end he will be judged on whether he can come up with new, innovative products and lead them to success. All products released during his tenure have been iterations as the article mentions.

<comment><USER19> You mean whether Apple can come up with new, innovative products. Cook should be able to recognise good from bad and keep an eye on quality, but not be expected to come up with The Next Big Thing.

Read some of Ive's infrequent interviews, he uses the word "we" never "I" to discuss the design process. That is what makes Apple so successful.

<comment><USER20> Or because he's British and uses the royal "we" <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_we> :)

<comment><USER21> I can't speak to Ive's personality in particular, but many product designers view their work as inherently collaborative.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Mark Andreessen, paraphrased: "Salespeople can be very good at optimizing a company over a 2-4 year period. The [Andreessen-Horowitz] fake hedge fund trade is: when a sales guy replaces a product guy as CEO, go long 2 years, then short."

Source: [http://blakemasters.tumblr.com/post/22660214207/peter- thiels...](http://blakemasters.tumblr.com/post/22660214207/peter-thiels- cs183-startup-class-10-notes-essay)

<comment><USER23> Just for fun I went through a small sample of US companies who changed from technologist-led to MBA-led; this trade is garbage. Sometimes facts make inconvenient clever quips.

<comment><USER24> I don't doubt you, but I'd love to see your small sample. The quip _feels_ right to me, but I'm biased and would like some facts.

<comment><USER25> Same here, though I am more interested in how one could quickly collect a list of companies that have undergone that specific leadership change. Proprietary or public database? Google? Old-fashioned human memory?

<comment><USER23> Bloomberg (8K(date of change in executive management) + bios(presence of "MBA" after exec without and at least a B.S.; finance, accounting, marketing, etc. excluded) | Jensen's alpha over IWM and sector SPDR over [0,2) versus [2,5)) -> R. Russell 2000 members 2006-2012. Bias may be introduced from these all being large, public companies - I don't know if VC-backed companies led by engineers v ops guys have a different story. I didn't dig very deep to try and see if I could remove noise, but TL;DR too much noise and drawdown at the outset.

Disclaimer: I'm not an MBA and don't intend on getting one. That being said, I've noticed Silicon Valley discounts solid operations knowledge as much as Wall Street tends to discount the difference between a hacker and an okay coder. Andreesen is a smart man and was probably making a rallying cry/culture call rather than an analytic one with this line.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> His attitude toward the competition (Amazon and Samsung) strikes me as similar to Jobs' decidedly friendlier attitude toward Microsoft when he returned to Apple. I think this bodes well for Apple. The only way for Apple to stay where they are in the technology landscape is to continuously disrupt their most successful products - in other words, they need to have products so good in the pipeline that they take the present day competition in stride.

</comment><comment><USER27> >>>In a February appearance at an investor conference hosted by Goldman Sachs, for example, he mentioned that he had worked at a paper mill in Alabama and an aluminum plant in Virginia

The most incredible people always have the least predictable life stories.

<comment><USER28> Heh, this is actually a predictable path. He has a BS in industrial engineering, and typically that means you do work in plants in the middle of nowhere where labor is cheap.

<comment><USER27> Ah I suppose I'm guilty of romanticizing it a bit -- I rather imagined him to be working on an assembly line.

<comment><USER28> Well, it is true that it is more of a blue collar job than many others, even if you are in management or doing engineering work on the line. I had a friend who worked at a paper products factory in rural Pennsylvania as an IE as his first job out of school, and he didn't care for it. The kind of area where everyone young just wants to leave, and you are coming in as a 21 year old. Not fun. And I particularly remember he had to buy a 4WD Jeep because the plant was always open but they didn't do a good job plowing roads.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I think we all saw this coming. I remember when Cook was first chosen, CNBC kept referring to him as the "logistics guy." That's good news for just about any company but Apple.

Sculley was a "logistics guy" and it worked for Pepsi. By 1995 Apple was a bureaucratic, MBA-filled, artist-less mess. Apple isn't HP or Samsung or one of a dozen other bland electronics companies for a reason.

</comment><comment><USER30> Completely tough job to follow in the foot steps of big figure like Jobs. You wish Cook all the best in the new role. If he succeeds, Jobs will get the credit for leaving a strong legacy. If he fails, he can only be g forgiven for not being Steve Jobs.

Nevertheless what a fantastic opportunity to be involved with a leading company.

</comment><comment><USER31> I think what's going to happen eventually is that the A-level engineers are all going to leave Apple and start their own company, when they start getting frusterated with the new Apple. I don't think Tim Cook understands the arguably 25:1 dynamic range that exists in software the way Steve Jobs did.

</comment><comment><USER30> Just heard a podcast with Adam Lashinsky. He is the Senior Editor at Fortunate magazine and author of a book on Apple. In the podcast:

"[Lashinsky] shares an insider look at Apple, one of the world's most iconic and secretive companies. Based on his research into the technology giant's internal processes and approaches to leadership and building products, Lashinsky offers insights and surprises from his book, Inside Apple: How America's Most Admired--and Secretive--Company Really Works."

Cook was the supply chain guru Jobs employed to turn Apple's supply chain model into one like Dell's. No surprise with this knowledge Cook is now CEO of Apple.

[1] <http://ecorner.stanford.edu/authorMaterialInfo.html?mid=2931>

<comment><USER32> And he is taking Michael Dell's advice to give money back to the shareholders.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> > If anything, Apple under Tim Cook will embrace efficiency to an even greater > degree, especially as the company grows bigger and more complex -- to the > _dismay of those who think techies should rule the roost_.

I don't understand this line of logic. Tim has an engineering degree, and optimizations are a core of 'techies.'

</comment><comment><USER34> The bit about praising his competitors shows "The Benjamin Franklin Effect" in action: [http://youarenotsosmart.com/2011/10/05/the-benjamin- franklin...](http://youarenotsosmart.com/2011/10/05/the-benjamin-franklin- effect/#more-1459)

</comment><comment><USER35> so Jobs has been gone 6 months and the previous #1 company in the world is still number one and didn't collape? I think we need to wait at least a couple years before any statement can be made about the CEO's leadership abilities... just saying

</comment><comment><USER36> As long as they release great products and make existing products better, I'm happy.

If not, I have to look for other things and I don't really see something which could hold a candle to Apple.

</comment><comment><USER37> This is what's referred to by reporters as a "snow job".

</comment><comment><USER38> Apple has gone from the disruptive upstart to the elephant in the room that everyone will be trying to take down in the future.

</comment><comment><USER39> "Steve Jobs' successor is making his mark and trying to keep the Apple magic going."

I think that says it all.</comment>


The 25 Coolest (and Most Unconventional) Keyboards - <AUTHOR> http://speedingcomputer.com/2007/12/coolest-and-weirdest-keyboards/

<comment><AUTHOR> Anyone here ever successfully use an unconventional ergonomic keyboard?</comment>


Ask HN: Best practice to stay healthy? - <AUTHOR> What you eat/What you do to keep yourself healthy? <comment><USER2> For the past few years I've been doing the most boring thing but it works. I'm eating minimally processed foods, sticking mainly with vegetables, fruits, and meat, avoiding bread, pasta, and any drink with calories.

For exercise I've been focusing on weight training, specifically compound movements with a barbell (squats, presses, cleans, pulls) and HIIT for cardio. I had been working out at home but recently I joined a CrossFit gym and I like it better.</comment>


Show HN: The Million Dollar Homepage as an Ethereum Smart Contract and DApp - <AUTHOR> https://thousandetherhomepage.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> Author here. My friend and I have been doing some smart contract audits, and we wanted to build a fun contract ourselves. We remembered the Million Dollar Homepage from 12 years ago, and decided to reimagine what it would look like today _on the blockchain_.

Not an ICO, more of an experiment / art project.

We present, the Thousand Ether Homepage: [https://thousandetherhomepage.com/](https://thousandetherhomepage.com/)

The smart contract itself: [https://etherscan.io/address/0xb5fe93ccfec708145d6278b0c71ce...](https://etherscan.io/address/0xb5fe93ccfec708145d6278b0c71ce60aa75ef925#code)

What's cool about it:

\- It's immortalized on the Ethereum blockchain. As long Ethereum is around, your ad slot will be yours to do with it what you please. No need to rely on us to run the service indefinitely.

\- There's no email signups, no passwords, no credit cards.

\- You buy ads by calling a method on the smart contract with the correct Ether value, and tada. All done from an Ethereum-enabled browser (like the MetaMask extension or Mist/Parity.

\- Once you buy an ad, the DApp _knows_ who you are from the wallet integration and you can edit it without logging in explicitly.

\---

All the code is open source, so check out the nitty gritties: [https://github.com/thousandetherhomepage/](https://github.com/thousandetherhomepage/)

<comment><USER3> I would love to start an art project that can buy me an Aston Martin :)

<comment><USER4> The "Fork" button is right there... :)

<comment><USER5> I think this concept is "who executes first wins". I'm looking at the guy in this thread who tweeted out the idea a while back and especially the guy who's posted his tutorial on how to create one with a tinge of sympathy ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm on the Keybase team and as you can see we jumped to sponsor a small block. We participated in this for two reasons:

(1) shazow (co-author) was also the author of the official Keybase Chrome and Firefox extensions, and he did an amazing job. We'd gamble on anything he does. The space we bought wasn't that expensive from a company perspective, and it was an educational experience. And maybe it will draw us attention.

(2) Holy crap, it's really impressive a dapp like this is possible with Ethereum. If it hasn't sunk in yet how this thing works, really read the FAQ and stop to think about it. As shazow and ontoillogical said, "there's no backend!" and "It's immortalized!"

<comment><USER4> By the way, here's a GIF of what the buying process looks like:

[https://gfycat.com/BleakSimilarGermanspaniel](https://gfycat.com/BleakSimilarGermanspaniel)

This is the part that blows my mind, it feels like magic every time.

(P.S. Thanks for your support, Chris!)

<comment><USER7> That GIF is neat, but I don't see your ad when I look at the page.

<comment><USER8> It looks like they did it on the Rinkeby Testnet for that demo so they wouldn't have to spend real Ether.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Heya, I'm other said friend. We also put together some anticipated FAQs: [https://thousandetherhomepage.com/faq](https://thousandetherhomepage.com/faq)

Some random fun facts:

\- The frontend "DApp" piece is done with VueJS which has been very fun to work with. It's hosted as a Github Page.

\- The backend is done with... there's no backend! The data is directly on The Blockchain, fetched from the browser through a standard-ish API (Web3) provided by your wallet or a gateway.

It's like serverless, but without a server.

<comment><USER9> Awesome project (hi Andrey!). Question: Why is a browser plugin required to access DApps like this? I don't immediately see a clear discussion of this on the web.

<comment><AUTHOR> You don't need a plugin to view the DApp. If you log in without one you'll see a version pulled from a gateway.

In order to interact with the DApp (buy or publish an ad), you can use a plugin or a wallet app like Mist in order to be able to send transactions to the smart contract. You potentially do it manually by interacting with the contract through a ethereum console and sending the right transaction to the right address, but the browser plugin / app makes the process seamless.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I love this idea! I actually just finished creating a video course that teaches you how to build a similar thing: [https://www.newline.co/courses/million-ether- homepage/](https://www.newline.co/courses/million-ether-homepage/)

In our version you're able to bid for each pixel -- if the previous owner is outbid, the funds are returned. Sending funds in Solidity from a contract is really tricky to handle because there are so many ways it can go wrong.

For example, when you send funds to an address, it can purposefully reject your payment and even call back into your own functions. This is like if when you called a REST API, the API was potentially malicious and could call any public function in your code (!).

This is a really fun project and it's cool to see how you can connect web-apps to the Ethereum network.

<comment><USER4> Very cool, thanks for sharing! Another challenging dimension is to balance what the EVM is good for with the problem you're actually trying to solve. It's certainly interesting to work in an environment where inefficiency literally translates into money.

Going for literally every pixel is too expensive, so we went for deci-pixels (10x10 pixel blocks). Incidentally, the original Million Dollar Homepage took the same approach to avoid fragmenting the space too much.

<comment><USER11> How expensive is the search for empty blocks going to be towards the end? Would it be possible to introduce a more efficient algorithm in the future, or would it invalidate past sales?

<comment><USER4> We have an array index lookup for empty slots, the search should be constant time throughout.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I'm sure the authors don't have malicious intent but this project reminded me of emergent activity getting closer to the "un-erasable bad byes" scenario I commented on recently. [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14434786](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14434786)

Anyways, it looks like a fun project and it will be interesting to see how it finally turns out.

Staying on the same theme, I have no doubt that somebody will also clone the recent Reddit "place" experiment in Ethereum. ([https://www.reddit.com/r/place/](https://www.reddit.com/r/place/))

<comment><USER4> Right, we were worried about this also. The best solution we could think of is include an NSFW flag on ads that an admin (myself and Max) can force, which prevents the ad from being rendered by default.

The "bad bytes" are still out there, but at least we don't have to subject the consumers of our frontend to it unless they opt in.

<comment><USER12> _> , but at least we don't have to subject the consumers of our frontend to it unless they opt in._

Right... but if your project gains huge awareness (or "notoriety" depending on perspective), someone else can replicate your work and show the bad bytes. (Because the urls are still there in the blockchain.) Unless I'm not understanding the architecture, the project would have escaped your ability to control it.

<comment><USER4> I think that's fine. There are really two parts: The part which stores the data (the Ethereum blockchain) and the presentation layer ([https://thousandetherhomepage.com/](https://thousandetherhomepage.com/)).

There's nothing we can do about the data that ultimately ends up on the Ethereum blockchain.

But we do control the presentation layer (the domain, the frontend). We're going to do our best to do The Right Thing within the confines of what we can control.

If someone else buys another domain (eviletherhomepage.com) and renders a bunch of illegal content on it, I would argue that's on them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> OK, so I basically know next to nothing about cryptocurrencies. I do know, however, that Bitcoin is undergoing a cooling of sorts on account of the block difficulty getting higher and higher. As a result, transactions now take forever to verify and fees are going up. At some point, unless drastic steps are taken, this will presumably result in a "heat death of the universe" scenario. (I guess the software is constantly getting updated and there's battle over forks etc., but this can only go so far, right?)

To what extent does this happen with Ethereum, and won't it mean that distributed applications will basically become unworkable at some point in the future?

<comment><USER14> > I do know, however, that Bitcoin is undergoing a cooling of sorts on account > of the block difficulty getting higher and higher. As a result, transactions > now take forever to verify and fees are going up.

Completely untrue. Difficulty is proportional to the hash rate. Transaction time varies as a result of multiple factors.

Some reading and historical difficulty/confirmation time data:

[https://blockchain.info/charts/avg-confirmation- time?timespa...](https://blockchain.info/charts/avg-confirmation- time?timespan=2years&daysAverageString=7) [https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Difficulty](https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Difficulty) [http://bitcoin.sipa.be/](http://bitcoin.sipa.be/) [https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Confirmation#Confirmation_Times](https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Confirmation#Confirmation_Times)

<comment><USER13> I see. (As I said, I know next to nothing about cryptocurrencies.) So what happens when the last block is mined? Everyone just hopes that miners stick around based on transaction fees? Does Ethereum have a similar "last block" problem, if it even is a problem?

<comment><USER14> > So what happens when the last block is mined?

The best estimate is that the last block will be mined around 2140 based on the block reward halving frequency of four years. According to math and knowledge that there are 32 halving events, in 2136, the block reward will yield 0.00000168 BTC per day, which is 0.00000042 BTC per block.

We will all be dead ;) but to answer your other question yes transaction fee's will continue to incentivize miners but who knows where the protocol will be by then. It could be completely changed.

<comment><USER15> I won't be dead. I'll be putting my DNA into the blockchain and will have immutable eternal life.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> The idea of emergent PR via this sort of mechanism combined with a trustless and difficult-to-regulate infrastructure offers significant promise for breaking the glass ceiling that makes fame so difficult to achieve.

Ever wonder why news personalities and many celebs are so seemingly mediocre? It's this glass ceiling.

Platforms like Youtube solve part of the problem, but big fame takes big money, and so the funding mechanism has to be much more direct and consumer- driven than ad revenue sharing. ETH is perfect for it.

Many regulations on money transfers and political donation are designed so that they benefit those already in power. If you want to be a real leader it takes spending in excess of $1B, but once you do it you are feared and adored and have a place in the history books.

This is the game that our leaders are playing already, which is why Paul Ryan has a net worth of over $7M and the Clintons have wealth over $250M. They are simply the beneficiaries of massive marketing campaigns and care little for ideas or substance. Trump is the most blatant one to date.

It will be a good thing when this game is open to real competition so that non-elites can take a shot at getting the next $2B image makeover and a few years controlling the nuclear football.

It all starts with the simple freedom to fundraise and donate so that non- elites can form coalitions to elevate one of their own to larger-than-life status.

<comment> aaron-lebo Have we not seen the effects of this already? YouTube, Kickstarter, Twitter have already made it possible for nobodies to became massively famous. Most of them are mediocre.

It seems to me the surest way to guarantee mediocrity is to incentivise blatant money grabs. Here's a million a dollars for your billboard of ads? That's not going to build the future we are hoping for, it's gonna make someone else in 10 years make another copy.

<comment><USER5> Plus the punks that skip traditional routes to mainstream attention end up on major record labels just like the original elites anyway.

Alex Tew, the original Million Dollar Homepage creator, runs a VC funded startup in Silicon Valley. Social media stars tend to make their money shilling for big brands. I can't think of any internet stars I'm particularly desperate to see go into politics, and that's not because I'm delighted by the status quo

<comment><USER16> > I can't think of any internet stars I'm particularly desperate to see go > into politics, and that's not because I'm delighted by the status quo

This is a good point, but consider how a lot of politics is kept off of typical social media channels, either due to overarching censorship or decency concerns, because of concerns about repelling advertisers, or simply because the main issues we are fed have mostly to do with what powerful interests want (fear of Islam, fear of Russia, fear of immigration, fear of global warming, etc.)

Certainly such a system would be full of many of the same noise and garbage that fills social media, but I think it would be very interesting to see what would emerge if the constraints imposed by elites were not relevant.

Right now, the only people who focus on social media are the Kim Kardashians and Donald Trumps of the world. More serious people avoid it. Even Michael Moore, in an attempt to use social media to spread his views, now acts like a B-list celeb and plays to a very large, mainstream audience. He essentially plays the part of earnest lefty filmmaker, but he's not anywhere near power.

<comment><USER5> I think you must inhabit different social media worlds from me. I see an enormous amount of politics on social media, which tends to be even more lowbrow and fear-driven than the mainstream media for reasons which have nothing to do with capital and everything to do with clicks.

<comment><USER16> Well, I'd argue that what you're seeing is a second-tier of power/wealth- hungry individuals. The first tier occupies our political leadership.

The behavior is basically identical, but with dramatically different payouts. Both involve finding a tribe and riding that tribe's enthusiasm to greater notoriety and wealth.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Just an FYI this has a pretty bad security issue (XSS) which you might wanna fix ASAP (else people's Ether might get stolen :/):

[https://twitter.com/IAmMandatory/status/915439417665261568](https://twitter.com/IAmMandatory/status/915439417665261568)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for also submitting a ticket [https://github.com/thousandetherhomepage/ketherhomepage/issu...](https://github.com/thousandetherhomepage/ketherhomepage/issues/7) !

We've added a blacklist of url schemes and CSP. I'd like to have a whitelist if I can find one with all known-good schemes we'd like to be able to support. Know of one?

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> A naïve question for someone who doesn't really understand Ethereum: Why are smart contracts needed here ? Would it not be possible to send specific structures in a blockchain with the icon and the url, and just using a now old-style thing like Bitcoin ? What do nodes need to agree on ?

<comment> TD-Linux You could do this with Bitcoin too. You would just send Bitcoin to an address, with an OP_RETURN with the coordinates and a hash of the pixel values you put there. Only the first one would "win". The Ethereum contract does have the feature that you effectively get your money back if you're not first - <USER2> transaction that tries to take already-taken pixels is invalid. You could implement this today on Bitcoin with HTLCs and zk-SNARKs, but there might be a simpler solution that I'm not immediately thinking of.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Thanks for building this! I was wondering about this a few months ago, glad it's finally here. This is such a good example. [https://twitter.com/johncoogan/status/890780575480430593](https://twitter.com/johncoogan/status/890780575480430593)

<comment><USER4> Ah there you go! We had the same thought a few weeks ago.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Whoever bought the ad for syscoin.org didn't use an absolute URL and the link goes to [https://thousandetherhomepage.com/syscoin.org](https://thousandetherhomepage.com/syscoin.org).

<comment><USER21> Do this mean that typo is not editable as it's in the blockchain?

<comment><AUTHOR> If you own an ad, you can "publish" to change the link or image url any time you want. All it costs is the transaction fees.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I made something similar [https://ethereumpixels.com](https://ethereumpixels.com) not too long ago! Had more of Reddit's r/place on my mind. The source code for the contract and the webapp can be found here: [https://github.com/EthereumPixels](https://github.com/EthereumPixels)

</comment><comment><USER23> It just needs to be served over IPFS and you wouldn't need to run any kind of server at all :)

<comment><USER4> We actually have an ENS domain purchased and plan on deploying it to IPFS as well!

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> The system seems to be vulnerable to an XSS attack injected via the contract; the exploit seems to work on Chromium(60) but not on Firefox(55)

[https://twitter.com/IAmMandatory/status/915439417665261568](https://twitter.com/IAmMandatory/status/915439417665261568)

<comment><USER17> This is my bad, I could've made it work for Firefox but was just testing if it was vulnerable at all. I don't really wanna pay the ether to fix it since I don't actually want to exploit anyone :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Great work guys! I did a similar project months ago, if you want to check: [http://etherbillboard.com/](http://etherbillboard.com/) The main difference that the image is stored directly in the blockchain, but you have to draw it :) Ethereum Dapps are amazing!

</comment><comment><USER26> Smacking my forehead right now, wishing I had thought of this first. This is practically guaranteed to raise $300k and it's actually legal and ethical, unlike most of the cryptocurrency schemes these days. Great job, you'll soon be regretting not making it the 10,000 ether homepage I think...

<comment><USER27> I did think of it and didn't follow through.............

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> This is the most stupid awesome worst best idea ever. I have so many feelings tied together, it's hard to express.

Good for you guys. I can't wait to see it filled up!

</comment><comment><USER29> Can someone quickly explain how file storage / bandwidth off the blockchain works? Who pays the gas to deliver it to end users?

<comment><AUTHOR> You pay for gas when you send a transaction (i.e. buy an ad or publish an ad).

For displaying, if you browse with Mist or MetaMask, you're pulling the data from the blockchain. When you don't, we show you the ads statically by using a Ethereum gateway.

Either way, reading doesn't cost gas, just bandwidth to keep the blockchain in sync.

<comment><USER29> Thanks. How is the Ethereum blockchain suppose to support hosting this data forever if nodes don't get paid for it?

<comment><USER30> The data literally is the blockchain.

Ethereum provided two types of data storage. One you pay for bytes used but your script has access to this like normal memory.

The other type is outputting log events. DAapps can't read these but blockchsin explorers can read them directly from the underlying blockchain data.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> This is so well executed. After looking at it many times, I am really impressed.

However, from an ad spending perspective, I see few drawbacks which hold me back:

\- Nowadays, most users are on mobile; often 50%, sometimes even more; this concept doesn't work on mobile because everything is so tiny

\- Then, just imagine, this thing is full of ads _and links_ ; I don't think that Google's SEO team will classify this page as spam but who knows, from a technical perspective it is a spam page because of that many links

\- With so many ads on one page you will face a very low CTR

</comment><comment><USER32> Warning: The bottom right corner links to a google logout page.

</comment><comment><USER33> This is a great idea. Mostly for the marketing angle, but it also will start to show people what is possible. It's like a taste of a entirely new network, which will have capabilities that we can't even imagine right now. The blockchain space is really hot for a reason, lots of hype, but also lots of promise because it offers a glimpse of systems that will disrupt many entrenched companies.

<comment><USER34> Buttershakes, have your thoughts about the bitcoin November HF changed at all since your comments before the Bitcoin Cash fork went down? Would love to hear them. Have read that thread several times. So much drama, but I can't see a way where the majority fork won't just simply obliterate the minority fork.

<comment><USER33> Yeah I've given it more thought. It really all comes down to mining power. Right now a lot of miners are signalling for segwit2X. If they end up committing their resources to it and the companies in the ecosystem do also, then the minority fork will be Bitcoin core. At least until such time as they merge back in. There is way too much drama around this entire thing, but that is what happens when you have billions of dollars on the line and a huge ideological and corporate divide.

Bitcoin is about the proof-of-work, everything else is really secondary in the structure. It's too easy to spawn nodes for them to have much economic power in the system. If the companies and wallets support 2X then we will see it rapidly become the dominant chain. It ain't over till it's over and nobody is going down without a fight, I expect in the extreme case Bitcoin core will switch proof-of-work and claim to be the "real" Bitcoin if the miners abandon them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> tar--help Don't know much about blockchain so excuse me for the question. Say someone uploaded a copyrighted image, who (if anyone) would a dmca notice go to? If you got one what could or would you do? Does safe harbor apply in this scenario if you can only tag as nsfw with the option to view instead of block completely?

<comment><USER4> If you uploaded the bytes of a copyrighted image to the Ethereum blockchain, then the notice would go to... I guess every peer who downloads and reshares the blockchain.

But also it could go to any gateways which promote and display content from the blockchain, like our thousandetherhomepage frontend. It would be our responsibility to stop violating the terms to the best of our ability, and the NSFW flag is that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I feel that aesthetically this is going to come out a bit ugly, since it's not actually pixel-based like the original was. Low-rez image filter w/a passthrough for correctly-sized images?

</comment><comment><USER35> Now I'm wishing our business already supported crypto currency... I'd buy an ad for us then. (Completely non-tech, but this looks like it could get a lot of publicity.)

</comment><comment><USER36> Is there a moderation before the ads go live?

<comment><AUTHOR> Not exactly.

There's an NSFW flag that causes our DApp to not display the ads by default. We (Andrey and I) are able to force the flag true to ads at our discretion.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> How was SysCoin able to replace their broken link? I thought a pixel once placed was eternal and immutable.

</comment><comment><USER38> I'm honestly surprised it's not ridden with ICOs like my Facebook sponsored post feed these days.

</comment><comment><USER39> Is it possible to a stick a ride / offensive message on the ad because it isn't moderated?

</comment><comment><USER37> Of course I happened to click on the bottom right square without thinking. Not recommended!

</comment><comment><USER40> Heh I had thought about doing this about two weeks ago. Using BTC instead tho. Good luck!

<comment><USER41> How did you plan to do the smart contract with Bitcoin?

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> Why is the contract code so hard to read? Bytecode?!

</comment><comment><USER31> But where exactly is the image data stored?

<comment><USER43> If you read the source code ([https://etherscan.io/address/0xb5fe93ccfec708145d6278b0c71ce...](https://etherscan.io/address/0xb5fe93ccfec708145d6278b0c71ce60aa75ef925#code)), you'll see that it only stores links to images in the Ethereum blockchain. Thus it is the buyers responsibility to make sure that the image stays. The best way to do that would probably be to store it on IPFS or something else.

[Edit] The (probable) reason why they're not storing the images on Ethereum is that that would (currently) be way too expensive. There's things like Swarm [1] which will allow storing data next to Ethereum in a much cheaper manner.

[1] [https://ethereum.stackexchange.com/questions/375/what-is- swa...](https://ethereum.stackexchange.com/questions/375/what-is-swarm-and- what-is-it-used-for)

<comment><USER44> Just how expensive would it be? I mean, for every pixel they are getting 0.001 ethers so surely a part of that could have been used for storing inside the blockchain? That would make it completely permanent.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> Ahhh you beat me to it :)

Nice work!

</comment><comment><USER46> Needs more ICO.

</comment><comment><USER47> Now that I've visited this page once, I'll never visit it again.</comment>


Netflix: Encoding for streaming - <AUTHOR> http://blog.netflix.com/2008/11/encoding-for-streaming.html <comment><USER2> Interesting, but three years old. The two things of interest to me: the variety of source materials they have to encode from, and the fact that their player (at the time) increases or decreases bitrate on-the-fly depending on bandwidth.

Anyone got a more recent source for what they're doing?</comment>


F-35 hit with damning reports as Pentagon eyes full rate production - <AUTHOR> https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/28488/f-35-hit-with-cluster-bomb-of-damning-reports-as-dod-eyes-full-rate-production <comment><USER2> Comments moved to [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20169191](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20169191), which was posted earlier and is also the original report.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is the actual report from Defense News. Why not link directly to it?

[https://www.defensenews.com/air/2019/06/12/the-pentagon- is-b...](https://www.defensenews.com/air/2019/06/12/the-pentagon-is-battling- the-clock-to-fix-serious-unreported-f-35-problems/)

<comment><USER4> Because there's like 674 ads on the linked page (if you're not running ad blocker)

<comment><USER3> The article OP linked to has 24 trackers blocked by uBlock Origin, where the original source has 8 trackers blocked. Either way, get an ad blocker, I suppose, but we should read the original source wherever possible to support the actual journalism

<comment><USER4> I have an ad blocker, I turned it off to see the predicted mess underneath.

And yes, 674 was an exaggeration, it's called hyperbole

<comment><USER5> Using Perfect Web Browser on iPad (the best ad blocker I know for iOS), the site blocks my access completely. So the number of web-malignancies on the site may as well be infinite.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


PHash - open source perceptual hash library. image/video fingerprints - <AUTHOR> http://phash.org/

<comment><USER2> I recently tried out pHash and it seemed to be a good tool for detecting nearly duplicate images. Certainly superior to calculating md5 for images and comparing those.

However, if the images have different cropping, slight rotation or different brightness/contrast setting pHash didn't seem to work well enough. I got better results with <http://www.imgseek.net/> for my image set.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I was searching for some methods to get a fingerprint for an image and this was basically the only lib I found. Otherwise, most often, I got recommendations about using OpenCV and collecting SIFT/SURF (and maybe other) features - although I never saw a ready and working implementation.

An overview of some StackOverflow questions: [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4196453/simple-and- fast-m...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4196453/simple-and-fast-method- to-compare-images-for-similarity)</comment>


The case for hydrogen-powered cars - <AUTHOR> http://www.thedrive.com/tech/14431/are-hydrogen-cars-the-next-big-thing-again <comment><USER2> When discussing hydrogen cars, I particularly like the blog of Mux about this topic.

Part 1: [https://ssj3gohan.tweakblogs.net/blog/11470/why-fuel-cell- ca...](https://ssj3gohan.tweakblogs.net/blog/11470/why-fuel-cell-cars-dont- work-part-1)

Part 2: [https://ssj3gohan.tweakblogs.net/blog/11493/why-fuel-cell- ca...](https://ssj3gohan.tweakblogs.net/blog/11493/why-fuel-cell-cars-dont- work-part-2)

Part 3: [https://ssj3gohan.tweakblogs.net/blog/11556/why-fuel-cell- ca...](https://ssj3gohan.tweakblogs.net/blog/11556/why-fuel-cell-cars-dont- work-part-3)

Part 4: [https://ssj3gohan.tweakblogs.net/blog/11572/why-fuel-cell- ca...](https://ssj3gohan.tweakblogs.net/blog/11572/why-fuel-cell-cars-dont- work-part-4)

<comment><USER3> The first part is a 60-minute read. Could you summarize the thesis of the first part or 2 into a few bullet points?

<comment><USER4> It literally starts with a summary:

> This is an extremely long, in-depth blog series, so I'll start by giving you > a summary.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The one advantage of hydrogen cars, refueling speed, is not actually an advantage for typical driving habits.

A hydrogen car takes about five minutes to refuel. On a typical day, a battery car takes about five _seconds_ to refuel: you plug it in and you leave it overnight. Sure, the actual charging takes longer, but who cares? You're not involved.

On long trips, this reverses, but how often do you do those? Most people do a couple a year. You might lose a couple of hours waiting for charging there. Otherwise you're saving minutes every week.

This is something I see people having a hard time truly understanding. They see that a car takes hours to recharge on a home 240V outlet, think "that's a long time!" and stop there. They don't realize that it's a time _saver_ most of the time.

Even if there was a hydrogen station on every corner, and the price was as cheap as electricity, I'd still never buy a hydrogen car. Who wants to visit a fueling station every week?

<comment><USER6> This only works if you live in a house or an apartment that has electric car outlets installed.

Most apartments have no place to plug in your electric vehicle.

<comment><USER7> Apartments will probably eventually offer electric charging. It's a small investment, and they can turn it into an additional revenue stream (which they love) and/or can advertise it as an amenity that sweetens the deal of leasing there.

However, will they plenty of charging stations, so that you never have to worry about moving your car so someone else can charge? That seems doubtful. I suppose they could allow a monthly lease of a reserved charging station, though.

<comment><USER8> I doubt they will if they have to pay for it. Apartment complexes, in my experience, hardly retrofit anything. The RE market is so messed up that complexes don't have to do much of anything to increase their rent. What was there at time of build (be that the 1980s or 90s) is what you're likely to get.

What the US needs is a political desire for New Deal type programs. Work still sucks outside of 2-4 (?) metropolis areas. Probably a large infrastructure project could get charging stations to the masses at the apartment level, and not much else.

One exception though could be a vast surge in oil prices. We're talking 7$/gallon.

<comment><USER9> Subjectively, charging stations are "everywhere" in apartment complexes here in Las Vegas.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I think hydrogen cars is a technology that kills itself.

Since pure battery electrics will always have lower operating costs (if the hydrogen is produced from electricity and not oil/gas), and that a BEV is cheaper to assemble (less parts, less piping), the market for hydrogen cars is completely dependent on the price of batteries.

As batteries get cheaper, and rapid chargers get faster, the niche that hydrogen can occupy gets smaller.

The thing is, hydrogen cars are electric cars. It's possible some of them will even include a larger battery and become plug-in. So every hydrogen car sold will also benefit the development of better BEVs.

To me, this is a clear feedback loop that benefits pure BEVs. And where will BEVs be when hydrogen cars actually hit the market with significant numbers and models? What if 150kWh batteries are standard? What if 400kW charging is standard? What if the price is not much higher? These are all within reach. It's just a matter of time, and the hydrogen economy does not seem to be moving fast enough that its got time to spare.

But I fully support all subsidies and financial support for development of hydrogen fuel cells. Maybe it won't be success in cars, but it could be in other fields.

<comment><USER11> > Since pure battery electrics will always have lower operating costs (if the > hydrogen is produced from electricity and not oil/gas)

There are other options. You can producte H2 directly from sunlight. [https://setis.ec.europa.eu/setis-reports/setis- magazine/fuel...](https://setis.ec.europa.eu/setis-reports/setis- magazine/fuel-cells-and-hydrogen/mimicking-nature-producing-hydrogen-sunlight)

And we might run out of Lithium. Or Cobalt. Or Vanadium. I doubt that we run out of Hydrogen.

<comment><USER12> The point is - it's neither one nor the other: Combining working fuel cell technology with batteries really gives the best of both worlds:

\- Batteries are the most efficient in the long run and very dynamic at power release, but they are heavy (more than half the weight of Tesla's truck is the batteries), use lots of rare resources and take pretty long to recharge. It's getting better, but if you _really_ want to drive a few thousand miles with short fuel breaks in an emergency, you can't.

\- Hydrogen fuel cells suck at dynamic release, they really want to have a constant power draw. They're less efficient than batteries, but you can refuel quickly and don't have to carry the fuel weight with you all the time.

Taking all the technical challenges of storing hydrogen and making efficient fuel cells aside for the moment, combining the two technologies is really awesome in a way. You can get rid of two thirds of the batteries — and suddenly you have a car that's all of: easy to instantly refill, still dynamic to accelerate and overtake on the highway due to the batteries, but you also just have to dimension the fuel cell for average, not for peak power draw.

Considered the hydrogen is CO2 neutrally generated, it's really the optimum solution.

<comment><USER13> > if you really want to drive a few thousand miles with short fuel breaks in > an emergency, you can't.

What kind of emergency would involve driving a few _thousand_ miles quickly? I can only see a few hundred (hurricane evacuation).

At those distances, why wouldn't you fly?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Things not so often mentioned in the Hydrogen vs batteries discussions:

\- just fueling hydrogen vehicles requires an substantial amount of electricity for the compressors. An electric vehicle could drive at least 10% of the distance on this electricity alone. That is not counting the compression work at any the production site and when filling the trucks.

\- distributing hydrogen requires trucks. In most places, the elecricity network is available.

\- refueling with a hydrogen vehicle is faster then recharging. But you have to refuel them at fuel stations. Electric vehicles can recharge at home or any parking lot with outlets - more and more companies have parking lots with electrical outlets.

<comment><USER15> The charge rate on electric vehicles is very slow, though, unless you're using one of Tesla's superchargers (which aren't everywhere).

I think that, when people are worrying about charge time, they're really asking, "Will charge times mean that a 5-hour trip to visit Mom and Dad now turns into a 10-hour trip, or, worse, something that requires an overnight stay?"

<comment><USER16> Batteries are rapidly approaching the point most people will want to stop before their charge runs out.

~330 mile range is available today, which is pricy, but quickly dropping. The expected 50% battery price drop within 5 years is probably going to make 300+ mile ranges become standard and likely 600+ Mile ranges will start showing up. Further once you get into the 400+ mile range territory particularly charging say during lunch can significantly increase range without completely filling the battery.

<comment><USER15> I can see it charging sufficiently over lunch if you use a supercharger. And that will be great if you've got superchargers installed in the parking lot at the place you stop for lunch. But I wouldn't fault anyone for feeling like that's a pretty big "if". Especially if truck stop food isn't your bag of peas.

<comment><USER17> EVs don't have to replace ICE cars over night. Many people never drive long distance but commute every day. There will be a number of years where we have time to improve charging infrastructure. IMHO chargers for people in cities that don't have a garage are more important than superchargers next to highways.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> If you could remove the protons from the hydrogen then the remaining electrons could be piped through wires, vastly simplifying distribution

<comment><USER19> I guess we'd need to suspend the wires above the carriageway?

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Not sure if hydrogen cars are the future. But at the least, for a few years, they will run side by side with BEVs. Definitely in the form of buses and garbage trucks.

That's why I'm currently quite fond of platinum as a speculative investment. Fuel cells require quite a bit of platinum. Yet platinum has rarely been cheaper relative to other commodities like gold. I think because the market is discounting a decline in diesel engines and maybe because of recycling. (Even though platinum has been more expensive than gold even before catalysts were common.)

In addition, platinum deserves to receive a geopolitical risk premium. 80% of the world's platinum is mined (at a loss!) in South Africa, which is prone to intense labor disputes and looking less attractive every day. And the next big producer is Russia. Yet above ground stock piles have declined in the past decade.

In the 1+ year that I've been in platinum, it hasn't been a success. The market just remains comatose. But we'll see :-)

<comment><USER8> Platinum is also something like 3 orders of magnitude rarer in the crust than gold. What it's value needs is a use case. Gold appears in many more places than the one or two places platinum does.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> "This remains a categorical advantage over BEVs, which even under fast- charging conditions typically require several hours to fully recharge."

-That's BS. Should say 30 min. to 1 hour. Hydrogen is a dead end. Toyota and Hyundai are only making hydrogen cars for the ZEV credits.

[https://youtu.be/UOt9KF2fsdw?t=128](https://youtu.be/UOt9KF2fsdw?t=128)

[https://youtu.be/zC3zM9rrUT0?t=609](https://youtu.be/zC3zM9rrUT0?t=609)

</comment><comment><USER22> Hydrogen has serious technical issues compared to batteries. It is very hard to store, easily flammable, can cause metal issues -- see hydrogen embrittlement and attack -- and is basically not present in nature except as a byproduct of fossil fuel extraction.

So you need to dump a bunch of energy in creating a very difficult to handle material. In comparison, battery tech gets 7-10% better each year and has the immense economies of scale of electronics, electric motors, and power electronics all driving down cost and increasing competition.

There's a reason oil and gas companies propelled a lot of this development.

<comment><USER23> _Hydrogen [...] is basically not present in nature._

I am probably misunderstanding the whole "most abundant element in the universe" thing. Can you explain?

<comment><USER22> Hydrogen the atom is very common but what is needed is hydrogen the gas i.e. molecular hydrogen or H2. Hydrogen is very reactive so it's usually always bound up, for example in water. Stripping off the hydrogen atoms into H2 gas is energy intensive.

Since it's so reactive, it's both a pain to handle and to extract unless you have a lot of natural gas reserves, where it's relatively abundant.

Or you find it in the interstellar medium but I mean good luck mining a nebula.

<comment><USER23> thank you for the excellent explanation!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> This seems kind of silly to me. I'm no expert but as far as I can tell, almost all the difficulties confronting electrics are known quantities that we make slow but steady progress on each year. Meanwhile this author is saying, that for hydrogen to be viable we just have to solve this one massive distribution system problem and we're good.

Isn't it kind of obvious which tech is more likely to overcome its impediments? Especially since problems that can be solved in small bitsized pieces is exactly the kind of thing big corporations are good at?

</comment><comment><USER25> Hydrogen is a dream technology, but it comes with some caveats. Right now production tends to be linked to fossile fuels, either as a result of extraction, refinement, or from electrolysis powered by coal. Presently the only for this to scale and be green will be nuclear power, and the politics are poisonous around that in every way. It's expensive to even try to build a plant, and without the political will to deal with the waste, it's dsngerous too.

Then there's storage of Hydrogen, which is manageable, but not trivial. Transportation is difficult, but again possible to manage given enough drive to make it work. Fuel cells also currently require expensive catalysts such as platinum. I don't see any of these problems close to being approached, never mind solved.

This is a well written and comprehensive article, but I don't feel it has answers to the central issues of scaling up the Hydrogen economy. On the other hand, Hydrogen can be green, while mass produced lithium batteries are anything, but.

<comment><USER10> > This is a well written and comprehensive article, but I don't feel it has > answers to the central issues of scaling up the Hydrogen economy. On the > other hand, Hydrogen can be green, while mass produced lithium batteries are > anything, but.

This is not really fair..

Batteries can be produced cleanly just as much as hydrogen. It's just a matter of chemistry, mining practices and cost.

Furthermore, batteries is not a fuel. It is not burned. It can be recycled or reused.

But I get what you mean. All in all this is a technological arms race, and it seems to me that batteries have a pretty big head start. Though it's not over until we get a battery that is made from cheap common elements that has 2-3 times the capacity of todays batteries. In the meantime I suppose hydrogen fuel for the personal transport sector has a chance.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> There is no case to be made for hydrogen-powered cars. EVs are going mainstream full-power ahead. In 5 years there will be like 50 EV models on the market (already being designed right now).

</comment><comment><USER27> I think we'll end up with enough "next generation" energy (renewable, whatever), that we'll be able to afford the inefficiencies in manufacturing "legacy", high-energy-density fuels -- and product precursors, e.g plastics -- where still needed. (Avoiding further extraction and all the pollution and environmental damage and unqualified and quantified future impacts.) And our overall carbon burden may be enough less (disregarding accumulated atmospheric load, in this arugment), that we can afford the corresponding limited amounts of exhaust.

So, for common transport, I don't know whether pure hydrogen still fits in. It hasn't scaled, and it's still more difficult to handle.

</comment><comment><USER28> "Most H2 is created through a technique called "cracking," which involves splitting the methane molecule (CH4) found in natural gas into two H2 molecules and a free carbon atom."

You can generate methane from rotting garbage, cow dung and whatnot. Almost anything that rots. And some of it is now torched as the transport is too expensive from far away oilfields.

But here's and idea: burn that methane directly in fuel cell?

[https://newatlas.com/platinum-free-methane-fueled-fuel- cells...](https://newatlas.com/platinum-free-methane-fueled-fuel-cells/17064/)

People are WAY too exited about that "only water vapor from the tailpipe!" -hype.

</comment><comment><USER29> Isn't the problem that the _COST_ of hydrogen powered cars / fuel astronomical compared to batteries and petroleum?

</comment><comment><USER30> The only way hydrogen works as a fuel storage medium if you have more electricity than customers for it. In he Orkney Isles wind is used in this way.

Hydrogen does not fit into the more popularly imagined future where renewables creates electricity that is then stored in parked cars, to be used when everyone gets home and the solar has run out.

</comment><comment><USER31> Does anyone know anything about the potential for fuel cell tech to replace diesel in diesel-electric locomotives?

</comment><comment><USER32> _(In investing jargon, this is known as the "Death Valley Curve.")_

All this time I thought it was a biblical reference but I guess it's actually about California. Everything's about California, really, when you get right down to it.

</comment><comment><USER33> 6000 words and no technical arguments of why hydrogen is viable or not.

</comment><comment><USER34> Not related to hydrogen, but it takes as much electricity to refine and distribute gasoline to drive 1km as an electric car uses to drive 1km

</comment><comment><USER35> The hydrogen car is mostly a way to return drivers to slavery to gas stations.

Heavy trucks, though...

</comment><comment><USER36> Stan Meyer tech has been ready for mass production for well over a decade. But it can't be released until the death of the petro-dollar slavery system.

Energy == Money == Power and currently the MIC has most of it. Decentralized production of energy is their biggest threat.

<comment><USER37> That's a perpetual motion fraud.</comment></comment>


The most expensive lesson I learned was to start a startup in Europe - <AUTHOR> http://pando.com/2014/04/16/startups-anonymous-the-most-expensive-lesson-i-learned-was-to-start-a-startup-in-europe/

<comment><USER2> It's strange that Europe is progressive in some ways, but really takes personal bankruptcy seriously.

</comment><comment><USER3> Sounds like Germany.</comment>


A system to help you remember more of what you read - <AUTHOR> https://robertheaton.com/2018/06/25/how-to-read/ <comment><USER2> I find that simply sitting and thinking while -- and after -- reading nonfiction (or fiction, if it's got good ideas) burns the facts and ideas in as well as anything. I don't think most people allow as much time for reflection and mind-wandering as they ought to; expecting yourself to remember fact after fact without taking time to really absorb, reflect, and expand on them doesn't seem realistic.

It's not unlike a memory palace -- rather than just read the fact, think on it, expand on it and give it context and a place to live in your brain.

<comment><USER3> I've tried this and failed - I don't retain much a few months down the road with this method. And as with false memories, what I _do_ retain is often not quite right.

My process is not as involved. I take notes in a notebook while reading. Then I make blog posts out of them. This way I can review/consult any time, any where.

This really does slow down my process, though. I used to read several books in the time it now takes to read one. Writing blog posts is time consuming (and my notes are very rough).

<comment> 2020-3030 I like your method because it shares what you learn with others while helping you repeat and process the material.

And what good is it to plow through book after book if we remember little or nothing? Quite a few universities also don't give people any time to reflect between courses so modern schooling and many people's reading habits are geared more to the initial stimulation of reading and less to memory.

I'm a firm believer in taking notes, reflecting, and explaining the ideas to others for anything we really want to remember or master.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Underlining and highlighting have a mechanical failure for recall — they do not exercise the output circuits even once.

Instead, if you want to remember the thought you were about to highlight or underline, _write it out long hand_ , and _from short term memory not copying rote_ , in a note book.

This exercises the full path: reading, comprehension, decision you'll need to recall, storage, retrieval, and output from mental storage back into physical world.

Plus, the notebook then provides a hook for refreshing the information geography in your storage. Reskim the notes and you refresh the larger narrative and how it hangs together. Revisit the notebook on a periodically decreasing interval, you'll still recall the narrative decades later.

<comment><USER5> Just skimmed the article but underlining only seemed to be one small part of the method.

Understanding by summarizing into Anki cards and then making sure you remember it trough spaced repetition (both "output") seemed to be the most important part.

Distributed learning, practice testing and Interleaved practice all seem to have some scientific backing.

<comment><USER6> What is distributed learning? Is it spaced repetition?

<comment><USER5> It just means distributing your learning trough time, so basically the opposite of cramming.

I guess spaced repetition can be seen as a combination of distributed learning and practice testing.

I got the terminology from here

[http://journals.sagepub.com/stoken/rbtfl/Z10jaVH/60XQM/full](http://journals.sagepub.com/stoken/rbtfl/Z10jaVH/60XQM/full)

Here is a nice summary of the results

[http://journals.sagepub.com/na101/home/literatum/publisher/s...](http://journals.sagepub.com/na101/home/literatum/publisher/sage/journals/content/psia/2013/psia_14_1/1529100612453266/20160822/images/medium/10.1177_1529100612453266-table4.gif)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Relevant: [http://www.paulgraham.com/know.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/know.html)

> What use is it to read [hundreds of books in my life] if I remember so > little from them? [...]

> Reading and experience train your model of the world. And even if you forget > the experience or what you read, its effect on your model of the world > persists.

<comment><USER8> I use this method: [https://jakeseliger.com/2018/06/30/how-i-remember-what-i- rea...](https://jakeseliger.com/2018/06/30/how-i-remember-what-i-read-and- connect-it-to-what-else-ive-read)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> While I agree that the author's method likely helps comprehension and retention, I disagree with his premise that it is necessary for these, or even particularly time-efficient. His key factor seems to be "Learning comes from repetition"; though important to he learning process, repetition is neither the sole, nor even the primary factor. When it comes to retention of concepts, rather than raw data, comprehension and connecting to other knowledge is crucial.

In the author's method, these are reinforced with marginal notes (for comprehension) and a post-reading writeup (to connect concepts). I suspect this to be significantly inferior to more in-depth note-taking, as a significant amount of information may be lost in the time between reading chapter one and finishing the book, whereas complete notes should allow for immediate relation and processing. A high quality book will be organized to assist the reader in relating concepts, and waiting until book completion to prioritize this defeats the purpose of reading a book rather than a collection of disparate articles.

Still, the author is absolutely correct in that active reading is a worthwhile habit, and you should try to find an optimal method for your learning tendencies; While for me focusing on repetition and post-read review is brutally inefficient, everyone learns differently, so it may be perfect for you.

<comment><USER10> The author mentions writing down a summary after every chapter in the book itself. The final notes are prepared from each chapter's annotations and handwritten summaries. If anyone is interested in reading to retain more, try How to Read a Book [1] by Charles Van Doren and Mortimer J. Adler. Reviews and summaries of the boook [2, 3].

[1] : [https://www.amazon.com/How-Read-Book-Classic- Intelligent/dp/...](https://www.amazon.com/How-Read-Book-Classic- Intelligent/dp/0671212095)

[2] : [https://fourminutebooks.com/how-to-read-a-book- summary/](https://fourminutebooks.com/how-to-read-a-book-summary/)

[3] : [http://oxfordtutorials.com/How%20to%20Read%20a%20Book%20Outl...](http://oxfordtutorials.com/How%20to%20Read%20a%20Book%20Outline.htm)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I have a somewhat similar system but without writing anything in the book, because I use ebooks, and it's not quite as intensive.

An example is here[0] but basically I keep notes on:

Places

Things

Characters

Plot

Nothing too long and it's all filled in in a few seconds in an Evernote notebook/note as I read along.

The main reason this is effective for me is that I can very quickly look up a character/place/plot in one single place in just a few seconds.

Often I don't need to re-read the whole thing, just the 'recent past' bits to quickly remember where I was in the plot after I put the book down for a week or two.

It ends up looking like a lot but it's more a consequence of doing a little a lot of times rather than a large amount of burdensome work.

I'm not sure if it helps long term retention, but it does help short term and it certainly helps comprehension when I've forgotten some characters significance or minor but consequential plot point.

[0] [https://www.josharcher.uk/blog/diaspora-greg-egan-book- revie...](https://www.josharcher.uk/blog/diaspora-greg-egan-book-review/)

<comment><USER12> Kindle has this as a feature called XRay. Can click a name for instance, and quickly see relevant info so far.

<comment><USER11> I don't really want anything to do with connecting the Kindle to the internet. Mine has never been off airplane mode and books are transferred by USB so xray isn't very useful to me. Also it means I can't simply scan over the notes to see catch up.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I only record facts that I read in non-fiction (the mark-as-Q method from the article). I highlight them in Kindle while reading ebooks. I then transfer them into Anki flashcards after I'm done reading it.

I don't highlight analysis and commentary. I don't highlight how the author reached a certain conclusion, just the end result.

Some examples of what I am highlighting while reading On Intelligence by Jeff Hawkins:

"This is the neocortex, a thin sheet of neural tissue that envelops most of the older parts of the brain."

"the neocortex is about 2 millimeters thick and has six layers,"

"Stretched flat, the human neocortical sheet is roughly the size of a large dinner napkin. The cortical sheets of other mammals are smaller: the rat's is the size of a postage stamp; the monkey's is about the size of a business- letter envelope."

I wish there was a good way to transfer these highlights from my Kindle into Anki flashcards automatically (if someone knows a way to do this, I'm happy to hear from you). It feels like a chore right now, so I often forget to do it.

<comment><USER14> Just a suggestion:

If you download Kindle Mate (kmate.me), you can import your Kindle highlights to your PC and export them as a text file. Then you could make a script that parses this file line by line and saves it as a csv-file. Then use Anki csv- import.

EDIT: fixed the link.

<comment><USER13> Thanks for the tip. Unfortunately, kmate.me is PC only and I'm on a mac.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Here's a slightly silly way to keep your brain switched on while reading:

Set an alarm to go off every few minutes. When the alarm goes off shut the book and summarise what you read in the past few minutes. Writing it down helps keep you honest (if you do it in your head its very easy to fool yourself). After you summarise start reading again.

Forcing yourself to practice recall helps memory. Being interrupted helps memory too. You don't need any fancy software, just a timer.

<comment><USER16> Interesting, where did you learn that interruptions help memory? I would like to read about it a little more.

<comment><USER17> It is called the Zeigarnik effect.

[https://www.psychologistworld.com/memory/zeigarnik-effect- in...](https://www.psychologistworld.com/memory/zeigarnik-effect- interruptions-memory)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> My reading changed after adopting a similar system. Reading on a Kindle and with a new Google doc created for that book, I:

1\. Highlight the passages that are important along the way

2\. After each chapter I try to summarize its important points and any challenges I have to them.

3\. Over multiple chapters, I have a section at the top "Key Ideas" with the top 5-10 points over the course of the book.

4\. After the book is done, I edit the doc to include a "My Thoughts" section and gather all my critical thoughts into one place. This is probably the most valuable.

Overall, even if I don't remember the details of a book, now I have a collection of summaries that I can pull up to remind myself about each book if it comes up again later and I need a refresher.

As a bonus, it's super easy to write a review of the book afterward because you have all the pieces almost already in place.

</comment><comment><USER19> If this article is your cup of tea you might also be interested in "Learning How to Learn" a Coursera course by Barbara Oakley and Terry Sejnowsk. It boils down to a similar system but gives more background, science, and detail.

[https://www.coursera.org/learn/learning-how-to- learn/home/we...](https://www.coursera.org/learn/learning-how-to- learn/home/welcome)

</comment><comment><USER20> Inability to recall what you have read maybe is not that all is lost.

Reading changes your brain; in brain connections are continually created while synapses that are no longer in use degenerates. Or in other words you are a very different person today just by reading all those books in all those years, that you don't remember anything of now.

<comment><USER21> Just like what Ralph Waldo Emerson said: "I cannot remember the books I've read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me."

<comment><USER20> Beautiful!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I don't want to remember more of what I read; I want to have access to a breadth and depth of ideas I can justify with evidence.

Repetition and flashcards will help you remember the content, but it won't help you understand it. That's only done by actively engaging with the content and connecting it to and comparing it with other facts and ideas.

The summarising, keeping lists of questions, and writeups will help you understand the content, and I think is the only valuable part of this process. Why rote memorise when you have lovely writeups you can refer back to.

I find Luhmann's Zettelkasten method, as described in 'How to Take Smart Notes' more persuasive. As you read make bibliographic notes in your own words (on page X it says Y), store these in one place for everything you read. Also note down key ideas as you read with cross references to the bibliographic notes, and to other key idea notes that are relevant; store all these notes in another place. When you're filing a key idea have a look for similar ideas already noted; is this the same? Supporting? Contradictory? These questions help engage with the content. Over a lifetime you can amass a treasure chest of ideas that you can refer back to at your leisure, as Luhmann did.

<comment><USER23> > _I don 't want to remember more of what I read; I want to have access to a > breadth and depth of ideas I can justify with evidence._

That's bad, because without remembering you don't have the ability to quickly know where to look for those ideas and how to evaluate them. Nor do you know how to justify them with evidence (because that depends on remembering domain knowledge of evaluating, classifying and using the evidence itself).

Even if we assumed that you kept a working memory of "first principles" of every knowledge domain you're interested in, and only cared to search and evaluate ideas on demand, you'd still be at a disadvantage to anybody who remembered not just first principles but also higher level information about the knowledge domain -- and thus could skim through tons of BS or bad ideas and sources of information and quickly pick and evaluate only what's relevant.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Trying to improve my own knowledge management, and looking into how regular people who specialize in this area (people who read tons of non-fiction books) handle this stuff, extract and conserve knowledge, I've stumbled upon methods like "Zettelkasten". Does anybody here have experience with it?

<comment><USER25> I've tried maintaining a zettelkasten (zettelkasten?) Using software, but all available software just seemed overly convoluted and weird.

Another huge problem was that I read everywhere, anywhere and anytime. Maintaining a zettelkasten required me to be at home, near my desktop.

I've tried many, many, many things, and have written like 5 different note- taking programs over time, nothing ever really worked for me. Even keeping a notebook with me at all times wasn't working out well, I always lost my pen, realized too late that my notebook was full, etc (adhd forgetfulness ;c)

Now I own a remarkable tablet, and while it's not the perfect note-taking system, at least I I always have the pen with me, it has all my notes, and it's this weird mix of being simultaneously sort-of analog and digital.

<comment><USER24> Interesting, I was eyeing the reamrkable as well, but for drawing. It's hackable, it runs Linux right? So it might be possible to hack into a portable Zettelkasten with good UX! :)

<comment><USER25> Oh yes definitely, it comes with root-access by default (and Vim preinstalled!). And there are interesting open-source libraries available to hack in new features: [https://github.com/canselcik/libremarkable](https://github.com/canselcik/libremarkable)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> To digress from the main point: the suggestion of writing in (physical) books makes me cringe. Once you do so, they become absolutely worthless to anyone but you. Trying reading a book that someone else has underlined and/or annotated - it's highly distracting and annoying.

<comment><USER27> I used to be a professor of American Literature. I literally owned thousands of books in the margins of which I wrote copious notes for research and teaching.

When I left academia to move cross country, I had a yard sale and at the end of the day a few hundred books were left over.

A young man who had come by earlier still had some interest in the books and so I bequeathed them to him.

Then I moved cross country.

Over five years later, I received a FB message from someone who asked if I had ever taught English in Ohio, and I confirmed that I had.

He replied he wanted to thank me because he was the recipient of those books. He was a Ph.D. student in Math and he read many of the books he got from me and said he learned so much about literature and writing that he never would have as a result of the notes in my margin.

I was humbled that he found my scrawlings worth reading and even more humbled he was able to learn something from them. I honestly think his intelligence was the real key driving his learning, but I am beyond grateful that whatever notes I left in the margins of those books provided enough information to encourage a self-motivated learner to think deeply about the works he was reading.

So while some may find annotations distracting and annoying, there are some that can find those same annotations to be pointers to a fuller understanding of the material so annotated.

EDIT: Change "and" to "to be" in last sentence.

<comment><USER26> > So while some may find annotations distracting and annoying, there are some > that can find those same annotations to be pointers to a fuller > understanding of the material so annotated.

The problem is that there's no guarantee that your marks/annotations will add value for the next reader. It depends on who you are.

Of course, such value is subjective, so it depends on who the second reader is.

Because of this, my preference is to have an unmarked book.

Also, the way in which you mark is the book makes a difference. Using the margins is fine - I can live with that. But when the body text is underlined en masse or seemingly arbitrarily with pen and by freehand, I think it's really hard to argue that value has been added.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Incremental Reading[1] is a related tactic that coverts reading material into facts preserved via space repetition software.

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

</comment><comment><USER29> I also find it useful to organize my notes by topic rather than by book/author/time. Over time, I will build a master reference for topics that I'm interested in.

OneNote/Evernote is especially helpful when you use handwritten idea maps (e.g. [https://1drv.ms/u/s!AvGG5UqSCqXTnjq9_pD_gb7SJPce](https://1drv.ms/u/s!AvGG5UqSCqXTnjq9_pD_gb7SJPce)). I can't run out of space on my page and I can easily modify the contents if I find better material down the road.

</comment><comment><USER30> If anyone is interested in a deep dive on this topic, I highly recommend 'How to Read Book' by Adler and Doren. It is a fantastic how to on learning and understanding new ideas.

[https://www.amazon.com/How-Read-Book-Classic- Intelligent/dp/...](https://www.amazon.com/How-Read-Book-Classic- Intelligent/dp/0671212095)

<comment><USER31> Here's a nice summary of the algorithm: [https://pastebin.com/wGFMM1pZ](https://pastebin.com/wGFMM1pZ)

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> I've been doing something very similar to this for about ten years. I did experiment with using Anki for it, but ended up with a more manual approach involving wiki software and manually rescheduling when I'd read a chapter again. Anyway, can highly recommend.

</comment><comment><USER33> Very similar to how I read [http://muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2013/07/how-i- read-research...](http://muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2013/07/how-i-read- research-paper.html)

</comment><comment><USER34> Can anyone recommend software to help generate quizzes, preferably with a spaced repetition component? So, instead of a single card that associates "agua" with "water", a set of cards like "____ es mojada" or "vaso de ____ fría". It might have a multiple choice interface where the order of the choices varies, and maybe the wrong choices vary as well.

<comment><USER35> Anki calls this _cloze deletion_ : [https://apps.ankiweb.net/docs/manual.html#cloze](https://apps.ankiweb.net/docs/manual.html#cloze)

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> I remembered enormous amounts of what I learned in college and grad school. My friends are often shocked (or claim to be) at how much I can recall years later.

Now, I did take notes and we did write papers but I think the key to it is really: I explained it to other people. Either in class or socially (probably some people considered it boring but it was a nerdy school and it wasn't uncommon.)

</comment><comment><USER37> My question: if great none of the essayists, thinkers, writers, etc. have used and endorsed such a method, why am I going to care enough about the method to even read such instructions? If they have, why isnt this explained in the introduction?

</comment><comment><USER38> Isn't this article 10 years too late?

Today people need youtube tutorials to show them how to edit a 10 line configuration file. A (video) tutorial explaining to them how much time they lose watching videos instead of reading would be more appropriate.

<comment><USER39> "prefer" != "need"

Most of that is what they are used to.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> This reminds me of this 15-minute break period[0] that was recently featured on HN.

[0]: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16364423](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16364423)

</comment><comment><USER41> it's unnecessary to remember the whole book just for explaining it to someone what you've read. that isn't worth another 4 hours.

for a non-professional book, it's the idea behind the story or the art of writing or both, that values. if you can't explain what you've read, i think it's most likely you haven't catch the main idea of the story rather than the story itself.

</comment><comment><USER42> Compared to doing nothing anything is better if you want to remember more. Dunno if this one is better than others.

<comment><USER43> Can you recommend any of the others?

I'm aghast at how little I remember about the books I read! I'm very interested to see other approaches.

<comment><USER44> I only read on a kindle, so obviously the marginalia system is out of question. Here's what I do: I highlight the passage, write a note where I summarize it _with my own words_. That's all. But I also have a (physical) notebook where I write using the Feynman technique. On top of it all, I read at least 1 hour a day where I'm fully focused (or at least at 80% capacity) and you know what ? _Good shit sticks_ : I trust my brain to capture what it deems valuable. If I forget something I don't sweat it, it's more likely that I don't need it.

<comment><USER45> I agree and also if I read similar concept in other book, even if I did not "remember it", I feel often dots connecting somehow in my brain and "ahh I just read that in other book". So it is more like gathering concepts than explicitly remembering that concept so I can quote it back when woke up past midnight.

If someone wants to quote book from his head go for Anki and drill, most of books I just want to internalize concepts.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> The challenge this days with remembering anything is the fact that we no longer train our mind to remember or store anything. We are slowly learning how not to remember anything. The convenience tools such as Alexa or Google will one day make us even forget our own home address. Convenience is the Evil of Everything. (yep just made that up on the fly).

<comment><USER47> David Krakauer of Santa Fe Institute has expanded on the same concept with some great Youtube videos.

Everybody I meet today has some memory loss, the younger the worse it gets.

In the future there may be "Mind Gyms" for exercising our mental processes to keep them fit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> Interesting..

</comment><comment><USER47> Like the orly shorthand. I've used less polite versions for years in the margins.</comment>


He alerted York council to a huge security flaw. They reported him to the police - <AUTHOR> https://www.yorkmix.com/news/he-alerted-york-council-to-a-massive-security-flaw-they-reported-him-to-the-police/ <comment><AUTHOR> When I read Cuckoo's Egg the first time, I was thinking that instead of attacking security researchers (and putting teenagers in jail), people who, e.g., leave default passwords in place should be the ones to be put in jail or fined.</comment>


John Carmack: 20 years after Doom - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fOzkUKJCxTw

<comment><USER2> A version with improved audio and corrected aspect ratio can be found here. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EaN4wUii0T0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EaN4wUii0T0)</comment>