Show HN: A maximalist CSS framework for full stack developers - <AUTHOR> https://ridgecss.com <comment><USER2> Be careful when using semantic elements purely for presentation purposes. For instance, the <aside> element gives the element a landmark role 'complimentary' telling assistive devices that this is not part of the main content.

That's not really true for your cards, though, they are part of the content.

Also, having multiple complimentary landmarks in the same context (main, footer) is really confusing. Having 3 <aside> elements next to each other would be like having three <header> elements next to each other.

<comment><USER3> IMO, this is the most interesting comment here so far (the second most interesting one being the rant saying "don't use CSS frameworks").

What other potentially unexpected consequences are there for using semantic markup? I would definitely not want to use the <aside> element if it makes my site less accessible to the visually impaired. Are there any other potential traps lurking here?

<comment><USER4> Visually impaired people aren't wasting their time on a CSS framework website.

<comment><USER3> I'm not sure precisely what you mean, but, given the number of sites that use Bootstrap alone, I suspect many visually impaired people are, indeed, browsing sites made with CSS frameworks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Why is this targeting full stack developers? Seems like a quite simple CSS framework.

To be honest, it's also really quite simple. I don't have much feedback - it's basic and it works to that level - except for that "maximalist" and "for full stack developers" didn't register with me, a full stack developer, so you might want to try a different branding

<comment><AUTHOR> Hmm that's a good point, I changed this last minute (just like my other reply)

The original branding ended with "for making web apps fast"

<comment><USER6> Making them fast? Do you mean making them quickly?

<comment><AUTHOR> I do mean quickly, but I like the colloquial "fast"

<comment><USER7> "fast" can (and I would say "will be") often associated with runtime performance. "Quickly" instead is less confusing to know it's about development speed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Kind of expected more from "maximalist", like tons of components. It seems well-rounded though, to cover common needs.

To nitpick for feedback:

\- I'd prefer more spacing for headers, labels, input fields

\- The checkbox and its label might look better if they aligned perfectly with radio inputs.

\- Clicking on checkbox label changes the selection, but it doesn't with radio labels.

\- Clicking on range input makes the whole thing go down a pixel or two. That effect looks OK on buttons, but not for range (in my opinion).

<comment><USER9> Yeah, I'd expect maximalist to be heavyweight and complex. It seems to be an unsatisfied niche with so many minimalist systems out there. There's loads of applications out there for which there's a captive audience of enterprise users who don't mind waiting an extra 3-4s to load scripts if they'll provide better function.

<comment><USER8> What comes to mind as an example of "maximalist" approach is Ant Design.

[https://ant.design/components/overview/](https://ant.design/components/overview/)

Very impressive framework, lots of well-made components, totally ready for enterprise use.

When I experimented with it briefly, though, it seemed pretty heavy, and I wasn't able to just use a small part of it without bringing in a whole jungle.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I see that in the README, you give an example that uses `hstack` and `vstack` tags. Can you just declare you own tags that are essentially wrappers for CSS? If not, I'd love an explanation what what they do.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's not super obvious from the README, but I did throw a few examples together here:

[https://ridgecss.com/examples.html](https://ridgecss.com/examples.html)

There's also the original inspiration for them here:

[https://almonk.github.io/pylon/](https://almonk.github.io/pylon/)

They are essentially swiftui-ish helpers to lay things out with even spacing vertically (vstack) or horizontally (hstack)

<comment><USER11> It appears that menus aren't visible on mobile. Any reason for that?

<comment><AUTHOR> Hmm it's probably my media queries, the menu should show up at the bottom of the screen at 507px

[https://github.com/swlkr/ridgecss/blob/master/ridge.css#L970](https://github.com/swlkr/ridgecss/blob/master/ridge.css#L970)

but since they aren't for you, it's the first bug!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Is there a custom file chooser? (<input type="file">) Those are notoriously hard to style.

<comment><AUTHOR> Oh that would come in really handy!

There isn't one, but I will definitely add it!

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> On this particular page, it's been split up into two stylesheets: the base part, and a theme; and JavaScript is required to load the theme, without which it looks awful. It would be nice for that to be fixed.

My usual complaint about these things is hijacking of existing semantic elements for presentation purposes. AbsoluteDestiny has dealt with that, so I'll lay off this time. Beyond that: you have followed one of the routes I usually suggest, which is using your own elements (e.g. <vstack>). Good! I approve! Just one thing: if you want your markup to be valid HTML, put a hyphen in your element names so that they're proper autonomous custom elements rather than just unknown elements that could theoretically be assigned meaning in the future. <v-stack>, <r-vstack>, <ridge-vstack>, something like that.

Other matters of HTML validity, mostly pretty harmless and about the markup shown on the sample page:

• You have some stray end tags: </img>, </input>. These are empty elements, so they don't have end tags (that is, it's actively wrong to write them, though in practice it's completely harmless).

• You're not allowed to put buttons inside links, though it will _probably_ work almost properly in all browsers. The notable interactivity problem is that the link and the button are both focusable, so it messes up keyboard navigation a little. (A related case is links inside links, which is actively forbidden in the parser, and not handled by browsers. My vague recollection is that Firefox was the only one that did what a sane person would expect in the past, and no one else wanted to implement it, so they ripped the functionality out of spec and browser, to the regret of some.)

• tab-index="1" looks like you may have meant tabindex="1", though I suspect you don't want either.

• The radio button label for attribute is wrong. Should be something like this (or you could just drop the `for` attribute, though allegedly some few accessibility tools are stupid and wrong and make a mess of things if you omit it, even though that's perfectly valid and has been _forever_ ):

      <label for="radio1">
        <input type="radio" name="radio" value="true" id="radio1">
        Radio 1
      </label>

<comment><AUTHOR> I actually like <v-stack> although it could be confusing coming from vue.js, but that's something I can live with.

Thanks for pointing out everything, it should all be fixed if you take a second look, except for the button in a link thing, that's going to take a little bit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> There's a lot of critical reception in this thread, mostly people complaining about bandwagoning. However, there's a lot to be said for eliminating the unnecessary "div all the things" mindset of websites today, it makes html much easier to read and eliminates unnecessary typing. As a css framework, this is also agnostic to rendering frameworks.

I wouldn't consider classless a trend, just another useful methodology we still should be exploring.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey, thanks for that.

Yeah the classless thing AND atomic css both struck a chord with me, so I wanted to try and make something that combines the best of both worlds.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Also a nice looking css framework. My website [1] uses concrete [2] which I prefer for its "sharp edges".

[1] [https://marvinblum.de/](https://marvinblum.de/)

[2] [https://concrete.style/](https://concrete.style/)

</comment><comment><USER16> Reasonably clean, attractive and maintainable, but what makes this particular framework "maximalist" and for "full-stack developers", especially in comparison with other CSS frameworks?

<comment><AUTHOR> It's maximalist unlike most other classless css frameworks, because it also includes a bit of atomic css and alpine.js tags on the examples page.

It really is meant to be used kind of like a bootstrap substitute with less !important and more reactivity coming from alpine.

Full stack developers used to mean "render html on the server and spruce it up with javascript" so that's kind of where I was going with it.

<comment><USER16> That definition of "maximalist" doesn't make a lot of sense to me, but okay.

Your "full-stack" definition is... more or less in the right ballpark, I suppose, but doesn't that imply that Ridge actually integrates an HTML templating language as well?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Couple months ago was shared a good initiative about layout primitives, I keep using it on prototyping it's perfect

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20155098](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20155098)

<comment><AUTHOR> Yep! I borrowed the vstack, hstack and spacer elements from that library, they work great!

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> The spacing seems way too small on some of these, and there's no coherent relationship between the different amounts of it. The web is basically 99% text and spacing, so it's important to get this right.

Apart from that, it's pretty clean, and I like the logo.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey! Yeah the spacing is kind of small, I changed it up last minute and now regret it

Luckily it's easy to change on future themes and even the default one with a few css variables

[https://github.com/swlkr/ridgecss/blob/master/ridge- dark.css...](https://github.com/swlkr/ridgecss/blob/master/ridge-dark.css#L29)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> why css frameworks gain so much traction when there is so much out in there. what is so wrong in existing css frameworks that we cannot improve ? why would someone go to new one when they have invested heavily on some existing frameworks ?

<comment><AUTHOR> I think css frameworks are one of those things where it's not one size fits all

Languages are another one where you can stop making new ones, but why would you?

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> At this point there are multiple "classless" CSS "frameworks" posted on HN daily and subsequently hitting frontpage. This fad has become quite boring, no offense to the author of this particular framework.

What's so hard about just throwing a few lines of CSS in a file and adding a link element to the <head>? You can get the same amount of mileage by spending 10 minutes writing generic rules with the benefit of knowing exactly what part of the page is affected by which rule (more valuable to me than the instant gratification of classless frameworks).

<comment><AUTHOR> It's not difficult at all, you're right.

This particular framework is kind of a shortcut if you don't want to start from a blank css file and want to throw a web app together quickly.

Also, there are differences here from most other classless css frameworks because this mixes classless, atomic css and some swiftui like helpers for maximum html impact

<comment><USER21> > this mixes classless, atomic css and some swiftui like helpers

Do you have a one paragraph summary of what those are and why they are good?

<comment><AUTHOR> Classless css helps you get going quickly with just html, think a <form> with <input> and <label> and everything looks decent. You haven't written any custom css.

Atomic css helps you add some customization, things like padding, margin, colors, borders as classes, again without writing any custom css, you are still in the same html file.

Swiftui helpers are <vstack>, <hstack> and <spacer />. you don't have to mess with bootstrap grids or custom css grids, just slap your elements in an hstack and they are now laid out horizontally as one example.

To sum it up, I would say the mix of these different approaches to css help you ultimately write no custom css yourself, you can focus on writing html, a few classes and that's it.

Edit: capitalization</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How do you decide what is a many-to-many vs. enums vs. array - <AUTHOR> Whenever I'm designing a schema I always find myself wanting to just make everything a many-to-many relation because it makes things flexible and safe (referential integrity).
But then there is always this feeling that these joins are going to make things complicated, verbose, and inefficient, when a simple enum or an array column would be simpler.
My main gripe is that I hate having to impose constraints on my data model early on when I have no idea about how it will evolve over time.
How do others deal with these decisions?
Also, is there any product that would allow me to model the domain exactly as it is (i.e. like a semantic graph), and then have efficient and simple querying? <comment><USER2> Just to note: many to many isn't "safer" than many to one. It is more dangerous in the sense you can have invalid data represented.

For example if you have an invoice line, it belongs to an invoice. The DB will ensure that for you with a foreign key. If you stick a join table in the middle to make it many to many, you can now have a invoice line that belongs to many invoices.

That is probably not what you want, and if it isn't the DB is asking your application enforce the constraint that it could have easily enforced itself.

And that means you are not getting the advantages of an enforced schema!

To answer your actual questions, I'd go for the most constraining option first (which is usually the easiest to implement) and then open it up to many to many later if required. That might need an 'upgrade' script, but that is par for the course in DB design.

</comment><comment><USER3> My advice for making these types of technical decisions would be to follow the spirit of YAGNI. That is, just do whatever is good enough for now. Do not overthink the decision. Do not over-engineer your implementation. Still, do a good job of it, and make it easy to change it later.

It sounds like you are most comfortable with the many-to-many approach, so I recommend using that option. Don't worry about hypothetical future problems that this approach may or may not bring. You can always change it later if it becomes a problem.

YAGNI: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You_aren%27t_gonna_need_it](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You_aren%27t_gonna_need_it)

</comment><comment><USER4> I'd like to see an argument for using enums. I don't think enum constraints belong in the database - it's too business-y and belongs with the business logic. I also agree that join tables are simpler to use/query and will be more flexible. Join tables also make admin features a breeze.

</comment><comment><USER5> Many to many is almost always the right call. I've used an array on occasion when I knew we wouldn't be querying by it and didn't want the extra overhead. You can always extract it to a many to many later if needed.

</comment><comment><USER6> What is the context here? An SQL database?

</comment><comment><USER7> You seem to be lacking basics, just get yourself a proper book and follow it

<comment><USER8> The original question is completely reasonable. Enum vs many to many is a thing. And yeah, I've read plenty of sql books, thank you.</comment></comment>


Where are the high-end restaurants of software development? - <AUTHOR> http://blog.8thlight.com/articles/2009/9/12/thoughts-from-a-boutique-software-shop

<comment><USER2> _This is the common thread that I have seen through these boutique shops–they all have an owner who is a technical leader who creates a strong culture where (excuse the pun) failure is just not an option._

Wait, what's the pun I'm excusing?</comment>


GitHub realtime activity as soundscape - <AUTHOR> https://choir.io/player/f9c750f2bedb0c0f <comment><USER2> Gulp - not sure we were ready for HN yet! At any rate, here's a blog post about what we're trying to accomplish with Choir:

[http://corte.si/posts/choir/intro/choir.html](http://corte.si/posts/choir/intro/choir.html)

It's very, very early days yet, and we're sending out the first few invites today. If this intrigues you, and you'd like to pipe your own data to Choir, put your address down at [http://choir.io](http://choir.io).

</comment><comment><USER3> This reminds me of Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency (by Douglas Adams) where one of the main characters created ad jingles and sounds for businesses based on their quarterly earnings and similar data. Well done!

</comment><comment><USER4> This is the coolest idea I have seen in a long time. I really really really wish you the best success!

I signed up for the beta, and can't wait to try and use it to hook into alerts. I look forward to calibrating ambient frequencies that correspond to things like message rates or queue sizes. Imagine if you had a teapot boiling sound if a queue backs up. Of course you want to go tend to that! Brilliant.

</comment><comment><USER5> I'm finding this very pleasant to listen to - going to use as coding background noise instead of white noise for a day and see how it pans out. There's something very satisfying about knowing the ambient noise is that of code being open sourced around the globe.

</comment><comment><USER6> I'd love to use something like this as a background for getting work done, maybe with a different set of sounds. Definitely loving the key clicks and general "tech"-ness of the bloop theme, but the "intrusive" sounds when larger repos are touched kind of kills that use case.

Dream: Remove the "ignore small repos", change the sounds to be something a bit more neutral (foghorns are right out :P), and use volume instead of SFX for larger repos. Instant perfect programmer ambiance.

<comment><USER7> You might enjoy a stochastic noise machine I made:

[https://sourceforge.net/projects/applpi](https://sourceforge.net/projects/applpi)

<comment><USER8> It sounds like airplane engines from within a 747 - at the volume you set, of course. Much better than jlooch or turing tunes.

I'm a bit disappointed that you erased the github history when moving to sourcefourge, as it would be interesting to compare it to the version you showed six months ago.

<comment><USER7> I erased it, but I'm sure there's still a copy somewhere :)

It's identical code of the last github release, with minor readme changes. And if you're inclined to build it, it should be pretty easy to do from source.

The code is organized into packages pretty well, but I wrote it for fun, so there's not the best comments or unit testing.

Also, it's useful if nothing else for a 100% Java implementation of the 'Freeverb' project that's public domain and originally written in C++ (or maybe C?).

Enjoy the sound/noise/code, it's free!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I was looking for something like this. I created an automated build script that rebuilds the project when any dependency file is saved. I wanted to be able to play a sound when the build was complete so I know it's safe to reload the project. I'm also excited about being able to hear if someone has pushed to the project so I know to pull. Hopefully I can use this.

</comment><comment><USER10> Reposting from the other thread, which seems to be a bit dead:

Watching the github realtime activity with sound was mesmerising. I spent at least fifteen minutes listening to it.

You mentioned there will be Windows and OSX standalone clients coming soon. Will there be an API for writing clients?

<comment><USER2> So, an API for the player aspect of Choir is not in the works at the moment. We've worked hard on the other end, though, making it as easy as possible to feed data into Choir and get sound out.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Nicely done, requested an invite. The github firehose is a bit crazy, though quite amusing for a few minutes.

I could see myself using this for much lower frequency events, like customer conversion or sizeof(shopping_cart).

<comment><USER2> What you describe is one of our core use cases. The Github stream is indeed a bit crazy, as you say, because we wanted someone who dipped into it for a minute or two to hear sounds from the full spectrum. Our real-world feeds are much more subdued.

<comment><USER12> I agree this could be very cool for low frequency events like @mik3y suggested.

I know it's just a demo, but it would be nice to have a visual indication of which events made which sound.

Maybe at some point down the line, your api could expose an image as well (like maybe image/g/3 is the "g/3" waveform in green, while image/b/5 is the "b/5" waveform in red).

Anyways, good work!

<comment><USER2> Yes, making that link clearer is one of the things we're thinking hardest about right now. The (inadequate) measure at the moment is the replay-on-hover when you scrub over the feed messages. I'm not sure how instantly recognizable a waveform might be, but something that indicates pitch and duration could work. Basically, this is the kind of thing we're playing with right now, and why we want a few brave users to join us very, very early on. If you've submitted an invite request, let me know which address you used, and I'll make sure you're in the first cohort of users.

<comment><USER12> Here's some css that helps a little bit IMO (for newer browsers).

It might be even better to scale the green/yellow/red values based on their 0-3 values.

Anyways:

        tr[data-sound] {
        	border-right: 5px solid;
        }
        tr[data-sound^="g"] {
    	    border-right-color: green;
        }
        tr[data-sound^="n"] {
    	    border-right-color: yellow;
        }
        tr[data-sound^="b"] {
    	    border-right-color: red;
        }

I just signed up. Sent you my info via a different channel.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I _love_ how you've solved the "constant scrolling preventing me from clicking that damn link that keeps flying by" problem. Really well done.

</comment><comment><USER14> It looks like the github firehose is about 2 hours out of date? At least I'm getting links to commits that are several hours ago.

<comment><USER2> The feed is realtime. We only see commits when the user pushes, or when a merge is done, etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> This concept is amazing. Are you planning user created soundpacks? I'd love to make few.

<comment><USER2> This is very, very high on our priority list. We realise that this is a subjective thing, and that we're not nearly talented enough to explore all the possibilities. Creating, editing and sharing sound packs is on the way.

<comment><USER16> I'm giddy right now. This is what's been missing for this level of activity feed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Are you opening the source for this up or have business plans for it or both?

<comment><USER2> We're still thinking about which components will be opened, but we're primarily thinking of this as a service. Our pricing model will probably be based on number of concurrent listeners.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Very cool. I'm a big fan of your other work. Good luck with this!

</comment><comment><USER17> Very cool. Have you looked at doing this with stock market data?

<comment><USER2> Not yet. We will definitely be putting together more realtime demo feeds, and stock market data is an option. Any links to realtime feeds of data you'd like to hear?

<comment><USER18> Twitter firehose ? with hashtag filter!

<comment><USER19> I'd love to combine this with sentiment processing to play happier sounds, sad sounds, etc. Brilliant world of possibility. Love the product!

<comment><USER15> Sentiment analysis is an amazing idea. Monitoring what people say about specific brand/product while doing something else provides incredible value.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I don't hear a thing on iOS :(

</comment><comment><USER21> Wow, this is incredibly cool!

</comment><comment><USER16> This is amazing!</comment>


Show HN: Bloomberg-like crypto trading terminal - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/cryptocontrol/trading-terminal <comment><AUTHOR> This is the first version of the trading terminal which basically allows you to make buy/sell limit orders from Binance, Bittrex and Bitfinex. This is probably just 1% of what the entire terminal will become.

Follow our telegram group for more updates: [https://t.me/cryptocontrolio](https://t.me/cryptocontrolio)

</comment><comment><USER2> Sorry but why did you put it on github if there is no code and nothing else than just a readme? Anyhow it seems interesting.

<comment><AUTHOR> basically it's just a downloadable; you can download the terminal from the releases section; I know it's not the best way to distribute a binary :P

[https://github.com/cryptocontrol/trading- terminal/releases/t...](https://github.com/cryptocontrol/trading- terminal/releases/tag/0.0.1)</comment></comment>


Drawing with Sound (Oscilloscope Music) - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4gibcRfp4zA <comment><AUTHOR> Warning for strobing effects and high pitched sounds.

</comment><comment><USER2> Thanks for sharing</comment>


Make Your Own Vacuum Tubes (2008) - <AUTHOR> http://makezine.com/2008/01/07/make-your-own-vacuum-tube/

<comment><USER2> I was wondering the other day if it would be possible -- assuming you had the scientific knowledge -- to make functional vacuum tubes using iron age or even bronze age technology.

The answer to this question is, of course, unlikely to be of practical use.</comment>


Life Lessons at 40 - <AUTHOR> http://versiononeventures.com/seven-life-lessons-at-40/

<comment><USER2> I have some questions for older posters (me - approaching 30):

1\. There is always a new wave in tech. Currently, it's datascience, and previously it was web applications. Is it important to skill up and ride these, or can you keep going as e.g. an applications programmer during the web wave?

2\. Does 30 look as young and naive at 40 as 20 looks at 30? If so, what didn't you know at 30?

3\. You probably earn more at 40 than you did at 30. Broadly, what changed that made you more valuable?

<comment><USER3> 1\. Computer tech seems to move in a ~20 year cycle, so after that amount of time you will have "seen it all" to a certain extent, and you can apply your early experience to the new wave of technologies. For example, centralized mainframes -> personal desktops -> centralized web servers -> personal portable devices.

2\. At 20 I was an arrogant know-it-all, 30 I had solid experience in certain things, by 40 the experience broadens and you find you can take a higher level view of things.

3\. A 30yo offers knowledge of a certain specific technology (what to build). A 40yo offers experience (especially what NOT to build), which makes them more valuable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Inre #6 ("Spend your money on experiences, not stuff"): personally I have really bad memory... so I'd rather spend my money on stuff so that I remember it. Experiences I enjoy, and then as the years pass I remember them less and less.

</comment><comment><USER5> While I have plenty to learn, I feel extremely fortunate to have internalized much of this at a young age. Being able to understand what's important in life makes decisions (both big and small) so much easier to make.</comment>


Do Londoners dream of electric buses? - <AUTHOR> https://www.ianvisits.co.uk/blog/2018/06/26/do-londoners-dream-of-electric-buses/ <comment><USER2> _> Londoners might not dream of electric buses, …_

Every single cyclist dreams of electric busses, believe you me.

Huffing nitrogen stationary-bus-fart oxides turns any public road here straight into an express lane to lung cancer, without even the courtesy of a nicotine rush.

I laugh when people say cycling is healthy. Not in London. Nooo sir. Between the long term certainty of whatever smokers like to aim for, and the short term gamble of "brain-on-asphalt syndrome", it's a bloody joke.

Electric busses can't rule the streets soon enough.

<comment><USER3> Is there any research to back up your claim? What are the chances of getting cancer from this? Is there even a direct link? Is it better in aggregate to be an unfit bus rider or a fit cyclist?

<comment><USER4> There's actually the opposite evidence; it's worse to be in a vehicle than walk or cycle, and there's a few studies that say that the benefits of cycling outweigh the pollution exposure.

[http://www.breathelondon.org/south-east/project/modes- transp...](http://www.breathelondon.org/south-east/project/modes-transport)

<comment><USER5> Most smart people driving in London are going to leave their car's climate control on the "recirculate" setting whenever possible. That gives you a more- or-less closed environment, running cabin air back through the car's filters rather than sucking in dirty air from the street.

But cyclists and pedestrians have no such luxury - they're breathing in the filth whenever they're on, or near, a busy road.

<comment><USER6> If you only have a paper filter that won't help at all.

<comment><USER5> By using the "recirculate" setting you avoid bringing in polluted air from outside the car in the first place, so it certainly does help. Just return to fresh air when away from busy roads and polluted areas.

And paper filters do, of course, remove dust and particulates, which are part of the problem. Just not things like NOx and volatile organics. And depending on the filter, it may not be effective against really small (eg PM2.5) particles.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> China is adding electric buses at an incredible rate. Every 5 weeks China adds a London sized fleet of electric buses:

[https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/04/china-is-adding-a- lon...](https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/04/china-is-adding-a-london-sized- electric-bus-fleet-every-five-weeks/)

[https://www.curbed.com/2018/5/4/17320838/china-bus- shenzhen-...](https://www.curbed.com/2018/5/4/17320838/china-bus-shenzhen- electric-bus-transportation)

<comment><USER8> The Curbed article states that in Shenzen half a percent of the bus fleet is still diesel, but that half percent contributes 20% of the pollution. Can't wait for more electrics.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> A peripheral benefit of electrified buses would be regenerative braking.

I've lost count of the amount of times that grubby, dusty brake pads have led to screeching that makes me feel like my ears are about to bleed, when buses have come to a standstill beside me. I once even wrote to TFL about the problem, weird little man that I am. Never received a response.

<comment><USER10> You're not the only one bothered by that. I find school buses and small delivery vehicles to be the worst on that, given the frequent stops and starts and minimal maintenance they receive. The city buses here are marginally better but not by much.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> TFA has great practical information about the switch from diesel to battery. A few examples:

* How do you arrange parked buses in a garage so that they can charge? Diagrams included!

* Purchase cost: 2x up front compared to diesel, but improving

* Operating cost: 50% lower than diesel (but labor—hiring the driver—is still 60%)

<comment><USER12> No inclusion of the knock-on benefits of NHS savings from fewer cases of diesel exhaust complications.

<comment><USER13> What if having people die early from diesel fumes winds up saving NHS more money though [0]?

0: [https://www.nytimes.com/2001/07/18/news/tobacco-giants- analy...](https://www.nytimes.com/2001/07/18/news/tobacco-giants-analysis- says-premature-deaths-cut-costs-in-pensions-and.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I live on the 153 route in Islington which was recently converted to these BYD all electric buses.

It's fantastic. In a quiet residential area they are nearly silent and when I cycle by them on the way work there's no fumes.

The strangest thing is when you ride them you hear every seat rattle and squeak because there's no roaring engine to drown it out.

</comment><comment><USER15> _A key difference is that diesel can "recharge" a bus in a matter of minutes, so buses simply queue up at a pump and then drive off. With electric, it takes a few hours overnight, so they had to install a long line of charging points right down the middle of the garage._

... Anyone here know why swappable batteries haven't taken off for fleets?

<comment><USER16> In Gothenburg, where Volvo is increasing the trials of electric buses, there are charging stations at the end of lines. So the bus charges roughly 10 minutes, twice per round trip.

As an aside, riding them is very nice -- the noise level is very low.

The project: [https://www.electricitygoteborg.se/en](https://www.electricitygoteborg.se/en)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Most interesting part of the article for me:

> and being of considerable utility, they are remarkably undamaged. It seems > that sticking chewing gum in things only applies when the vandal feels they > wont personally lose out

(assuming this is actually true, and not another in a long local tradition of overly rose-tinted journalistic views of our grim North Sea shithole)

<comment><USER18> \- grim North Sea shithole

Spend some time in other coutries and you'll yearn to return. Trust me.

<comment><USER19> Over 3 years in Spain and no plans to return to Brexitlandia.

The UK has it's good points, but better quality of life can be found elsewhere.

<comment><USER20> Not much QOL though if you're one of the millions of unemployed.

<comment><USER21> And that's why I never bought a place in Merthyr Tydfil despite being famously affordable, and also why I moved out of Aberystwyth when I graduated despite it looking pretty and being a good place for really long quiet countryside walks.

High unemployment in an area sucks even when you personally have a job. Given nothing will stop Brexit, I wish I could say I thought Westminster cared enough to provide replacements for EU support of the poorest regions of the UK… but, and this is mere opinion, I don't think it can see past Kensington nine days out of ten.

<comment><USER20> I was talking about Spain. Opportunities for young people are not good there atm - worse than the UK.

<comment><USER21> I know you were. I'm saying that _conditions in the UK are about to get a lot worse_ because the impoverished areas are about to lose support that Westminster doesn't appear to understand that it needs to replace post-Brexit — support which would still be necessary even if Brexit had literally zero economic effects, which, given their track record of overconfidence since Austerity began, would be a surprisingly good outcome.

<comment><USER20> Come on though, this supposed austerity is nothing of the sort, with lavish benefits still in place and an unsustainable level of public spending, never mind the gargantuan debt - and we don't even have a proper low tax alternative political party anymore now that the Tories have decided to keep the spending taps turned on full. And no one really knows what's going to happen post Brexit. We could become the successful low-tax Singapore style trading hub that so terrifies Europe. I can speculate also.

<comment><USER21> > We could become the successful low-tax Singapore style trading hub that so > terrifies Europe. I can speculate also.

The UK's main problem isn't any _particular_ UK goal, it's the total lack of anyone competent in charge and, separately, the lack of anyone powerful/charismatic enough to pick _only one_ of the, I count six, main mutually-incompatible post-Brexit targets (each of which comes in left and right wing variations) and say "this one and none of the others".

Right now, becoming like Singapore wouldn't have enough support from Brexiteers, never mind Westminster. Unfortunately, the same is true for 100% of the negotiating positions thus far named, and nobody (seems to have) thought about afterwards at all.

<comment><USER20> I agree with you on the absolute paucity of leadership - but I'd extend that to Labour also. And I suspect the lack of planning for afterwards was partly out of denial that the plebs would ever dare vote leave, and partly deliberately to make leaving so disastrous that it becomes impossible - something which the civil service has been accused of.

<comment><USER21> I marginally agree about Labour: they mainly portray themselves better just because they don't need to actually do anything. However, my agreement is not absolute: on the other hand everyone knows that none of the MPs like Corbyn yet the wider party loves him and MPs will therefore mostly do what he says, so he can — bizarrely — be the strong and stable leader that May thought she was, and May can be the leaf blowing in the wind that she thought he was.

As for the latter, I think only the first. The second component would require the government to be as smart as it thinks it is rather than as dumb as it is currently acting. While I am sure some in the government will make such accusations as genuine and sincere beliefs, the government reminds me of a former client who took something like four attempts at telling me to make a button "wider" and rejecting the changes before I ended up asking for a picture and discovering they meant "taller".

By the way, thanks for keeping it polite! This is a massively divisive topic and I want to applaud every single involved person who avoids internet shouting.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Interesting about getting sufficient power supplies in. 2.5MW is a lot.

<comment><USER23> They overprovisioned, and never actually got close to that in practice.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Just down the road from Waterloo Travelodge which is quiet, cheap and a good base for central London explorations should anyone be visiting. While in that part of the Great Wen, don't miss Roupell Street around 5pm.

</comment><comment><USER25> [https://www.energy-uk.org.uk/energy-industry/electricity- gen...](https://www.energy-uk.org.uk/energy-industry/electricity- generation.html)

</comment><comment><USER26> And tall white fountains?</comment>


Test your Startup idea, Quick and Cheap. No coding needed. - <AUTHOR> http://www.lookaft.com/teststartup/

<comment><USER2> "Due to demand we have had to introduce a waiting list..."

Wait, so did you actually build this? Or is this just an example of you testing your startup idea without coding it?

edit: oh man, did you steal that dashboard from Voziq? <http://www.voziq.com/social-media-monitoring-tools/> I don't know if this is hustling (good) or shady (bad).

edit 2: odd that someone else used that exact same picture for a testimonial, but gave the guy a different name and title: <http://www.fusebill.com/legal/terms.aspx>

For what it's worth, HN is very good about giving early pre-MVP feedback -- there's no need for deception.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi nostromo, I've currently got the product to MVP stage and I've around 25 paying customers at the moment.

It does need further work and polish, but everyone that is using the app has given great feedback that it's a really useful tool.

<comment><USER3> Are you going to respond to the stolen pictures or fake names on your landing page?

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi jc4p, sorry for the slow reply I was just having lunch (a pizza and an episode of 24 no less!). I borrowed the image of the dashboard as LookAfts is still a work in progress. I guess I could link an image here for the HNers though.

The other image and title came from one of our users. I've emailed him to see what the deal is.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> What's up with the quote on that page from "John Hobbs" (guessing it's fake) using a picture of Bryan Person (<http://twitter.com/bryanperson>)? The pic is also hosted by Unbounce's s3 account it seems:

[http://unbouncepages- com.s3.amazonaws.com/www.lookaft.com/te...](http://unbouncepages- com.s3.amazonaws.com/www.lookaft.com/teststartup/bvd8o5-bryan- person-1_4jkobhx9fmbbqk8w.jpg)

Isn't this product essentially supposed to compete with unbounce?

edit: I'm guessing that it's because the other option on google image search for "person" don't look that genuine. [https://www.google.com/search?num=10&hl=en&authuser=...](https://www.google.com/search?num=10&hl=en&authuser=0&site=imghp&tbm=isch&source=hp&biw=1486&bih=1222&q=person&oq=person&gs_l=img.3..0l10.1270.1863.0.2061.6.5.0.184.108.40.206.318.4j1.5.0...0.0...1ac.1.ZBSPvuX- tQ0)

</comment><comment><USER5> I think testing / experimenting with ideas is critical - Google (and others) taught us that it works. I think vetting a new business idea before investing time & money into it is also wise - nobody wants to waste their time and money.

But I'm left with an uneasy feeling when folks take the "tease" approach that this is advocating (and, currently, using).

* Here's an idea!

* Here's why it's great!

* Sign up now!

* Ohhhhh sorry -- not actually available. Give us your email though (and thanks for the conversion data point).

I know for me, it feels dishonest. There's no harm actually done - you haven't truly "baited and switched", but you've baited and not delivered, and I think that makes a poor first impression. It sets a tone of dishonesty with your earliest (potential) customers.

I don't know the answer - I wish I did. I understand that if you change the messaging ("Let us know if this sounds good" vs. "Sign up now!") you distort your experimental conversion data, but I think it's worth considering the cost of presenting a poor first impression vs. running the test.

Perhaps there's a middle ground?

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi Nlh, that is a great point and it's something I have wrestled with myself.

I haven't come to a conclusion other than it's physically not really doing anyone any harm and if one stunning start up comes of it that changes the world for the better, then it has to be worth it.

You are letting the visitor know before they drop you their email that you're not ready for them and so you aren't deceiving them.

<comment><USER6> "You are letting the visitor know before they drop you their email that you're not ready for them and so you aren't deceiving them."

This is not true. Your product states that "Due to demand we have had to introduce a waiting list... Because of the of demand we have had, due to the success of Entrepreneurs, Inventors and Business People using LookAft, we need to add you to a queue to get going."

The above statement is very different than "Our product isn't ready yet, but if you're interested you can sign up here...", and is rather deceptive. It makes me think you have a functioning product and an already active user base when that simply isn't the truth.

All this isn't to discourage your efforts, but maybe to get you to rethink the way you approach your potential customers. Keep at it, but first and foremost -- be honest.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Very cool to see this pop up. I think a hosted service for validating an idea could be very useful for many, especially the non-technical founders who could then get some better validated traction to share with a potential technical co-founder.

Great to see Buffer has been an inspiration. If anyone is interested, the screenshot comes from this post with the full details of how I used this method to go from idea to paying customers in 7 weeks: [http://blog.bufferapp.com/idea-to-paying-customers- in-7-week...](http://blog.bufferapp.com/idea-to-paying-customers-in-7-weeks- how-we-did-it)

<comment><AUTHOR> Ah ha just the person! I am in fact a non technical 'founder' and your post was the inspiration that lead me to create LookAft after faffing about for too long creating my own testing pages.

Buffer is awesome, keep up the good work on that. If you have any issues with me using the image please let me know.

<comment><USER7> Awesome to hear :-)

No issues at all, quite the opposite - I'm super happy it inspired this! Let me know if I can ever help with anything, more than happy to jump on a Skype call if it might be good. My email is in my profile ;)

<comment><AUTHOR> Cheers Joel. I will certainly take you up on this. I will drop you an email shortly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> "Because of the of demand we have had, due to the success of Entrepreneurs, Inventors and Business People using LookAft, we need to add you to a queue to get going. "

I think it's fine that you make these things up but please word it another way. As it is now, anyone can see that it's BS. Also, if you have 25 paying customers, do you really need to make John Hobbs of Uni CRM up?

</comment><comment><USER9> Tim Ferriss advocated something like this in his book, The Four Hour Workweek. He said he used to run Google Adwords campaigns for different book titles, and see which one had the highest CTR.

I've often thought about that idea for business ideas. Spend $100 on a Google Adwords campaign advertising your business in 2 or 3 different models, and see which one has the most interest.

</comment><comment><USER10> I'm sure this is one of the things you're least interested in, but there are JPEG artefacts visible in your logo, pretty badly.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi theta. I had to quickly resize the logo when I created the page. I will take a look at it in a minute. Thank you for the feedback.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> "we need to add you to a que to get going." -> que = queue. Oh, and it would be better if the logo would be clickable, now I can't return to the homepage without using the back button of Chrome.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for the heads up. I've updated the spelling and added a link to the title.

<comment><USER12> On the Sign Up page: "success of Entrepenures, Inventors and Business People" -> success of Entrepreneurs, Inventors and Business People

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi Verg, thank you for that correction. I've updated it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Haven't had time to try it, but how is this different from LaunchRock? <http://www.launchrock.com/>

<comment><AUTHOR> Launch rock collects emails and that's about it. LookAft is all about tracking 'conversions' to see what % of visitors would likely sign up and use your service.

It also includes a preliminary pricing page so you can test price points (which is obviously important to see if a product vs customer acquisition balance works out) by seeing how many people click through each price point and give their emails.

Please let me know if you have any other questions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Love how you are testing this business idea in the same manner as advertised with an Unbounce page and a call to action before coding it out. :)

<comment><AUTHOR> The app is coded (to MVP standard) and I've 25+ paying customers. I'm struggling to keep up with demand and so I've had to go to an unbounce page to support the traffic.

Obviously my priority is to keep the service running for the people who have already applied.

<comment><USER15> I tried building a similar app two years ago. It's a smaller market than you probably realize. Moved onto bigger and better ( and profitable ) things. Good effort tho.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for the feedback Juan. I actually specialise in niche apps rather than 'startups'. Perhaps I could ask for your email or twitter to drop you a couple of questions?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Been a member for half a year now yet your first submission and all comments are for your own product?

Classy.

</comment><comment><USER17> The whole idea sounds so much like fooling people i don't feel it is morally justified.

<comment><USER7> I can completely understand how it feels like fooling people, and I felt that too when I thought to use this approach for Buffer.

I think a "ask for forgiveness rather than permission" mindset can be the most beneficial here.

In my mind, there's no doubt that there is much more value in terms of validation that you can obtain through using this method rather than telling people up front that the product isn't ready yet (some people just love to try new things, and that's much worse validation for whether the product will work).

The key I found is communication. If you are very open and ask for feedback, and if you have a two way conversation with the person after they give you their email, then you can actually get them on your side even more since you've had personal contact.

<comment><AUTHOR> The "ask for forgiveness rather than permission" is what is needed in all aspects of life as far as I'm concerned. It's generally what I live by.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> What exactly does this do? I have no idea!

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi Holgers - Thank you for your comment, this obviously means that I need to do a better job selling how the service works!

Basically, you create a landing page for your product or service using a super quick and easy template that we host. This page then links to a pricing page and then when the visitor clicks get started they are redirected to a page that allows them to add their email and receive an invite when the product / service is ready.

What we do which is special, is take all data from the % of users that clicked through and through what price point and show this information visually on your dashboard so you can make an informed decision whether your startup idea / product is viable.

Please let me know if you have any other questions.

<comment><USER18> Arh ok. But I still have to promote my idea and all that right?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes. But that can be done very quickly and easily using adwords to drive some traffic over. It might be a small investment in cash, but you're likely to come across your A* startup idea in days rather than months.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: JustForDevelopers.com - <AUTHOR> Hi,
I have started a new side project called 'Just For Developers' which will be a community for developers.
Register now to get on the beta list: http://justfordevelopers.com
Thanks for your support.
Mike <comment><USER2> Like [https://coderwall.com/](https://coderwall.com/) ?

The problem with this approach, even if we ignore the problems posed by the network-effect, is that developers are strange people, they tend to like to host their own profile, to have access to the code behind the pages, to migrate their content using rsync and bizarre things.

Also, you're trying to get everybody from StackOverflow, GitHub Issues, IRC, Hacker News and all jobs-for-developers platforms to yours. I think it will be very difficult.

</comment><comment><USER3> There are many of these communities now, some big, some small. How will justfordevelopers.com be different? I like what they're doing with [https://devmag.io/](https://devmag.io/)

</comment><comment><USER4> The story needs to have a link. If you have something to add it's better to add it in the comments.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. I did put the link in the original post but here it is again. [http://justfordevelopers.com](http://justfordevelopers.com)

Let me know if you have any questions or queries and I will do my best to help :)</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Rate my webapp, TrackMyCV.com - <AUTHOR>

Hi there, I posted this on Reddit at http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/9x2es/hi_reddit_my_employer_went_insolvent_yesterday_so/ but I'd love to know what you all think. Long story short I was made redundant yesterday so I went home and started coding TrackMyCV.com. In a nutshell it's pixel based tracking for CVs, so you can see how often your CV gets read and where the viewers are located. You can use it to split test your CV and find out which recruiters are working hardest to find you work. Any comments and feedback welcome, thanks! <comment><USER2> Saw this over at proggit, I'll cross-post my thoughts here too (edited because you answered some Q's over there):

* There's a delay, which may make someone think it's broken when first testing it (edit: you mentioned it's temporary, for load reasons)

* How's this jive with PDFs?

* Debugging was on and spitting php code (edit: fixed!)

* I love it that you do a registration, but then don't force me to go do the email verification dance. Thank you, sir.

* You should have an option for email notifications when your resume is hit, and also make sure you let them specify an alternative notification email address in case they'd like to drop in their phone's email-to-sms address. (edit: you said you would)

* The map is also a great idea.

* I also like that you've built in the capacity for adding multiple CV's under one user account. I'd definitely tag each CV I'd send out with it's own unique ID, so that I can see if it gets traction.

* Be sure to log hits from the same IP, as I'd want to know if a company (behind a NAT) is bouncing my CV around internally, or someone's coming back to it a few times in a day (edit: you mentioned that it does, with a 2min delay to prevent over-reporting).

* Obviously this has a lot of advertising potential (at least I see a lot of ads targeted at job seekers) but I also think it has some subscription potential. As an individual, I wouldn't pay for it, but I did work for a consultancy firm and I would have paid for a clean "Pro" interface for tracking all of the CVs we threw out to customers/leads. Stupid that we didn't.

This is a cool implementation of something that I (stupidly) never thought about doing myself, and you make it easier/better than rigging it up on my own. Certainly if someone doesn't have their own webserver w/ awstats. It's also very timely for me!

Props, especially if you did it in the time you say you did. And good luck on the job hunt.

<comment><USER3> He replied here: [http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/9x2es/hi_reddit...](http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/9x2es/hi_reddit_my_employer_went_insolvent_yesterday_so/c0eurwd)

Thanks for your comments

* there's a 2hr reporting delay right now to help with the load

* I believe you can do this with PDF but I may be wrong, I'll test it later tonight.

* Yes I've added an Ask HN thread just now.

* I hate email validation, it's utterly pointless, hate password validation too!

* That's a good idea, i'll get onto that, thanks :)

* Thanks, when you have lots of viewings it groups them by area

* Yeah i think it'll be interesting to see how far CVs travel between businesses and split testing is a fun idea

* It holds unique IPs, but it also records how many times each visitor views each document (with a 2 minute delay to prevent over reporting)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> You said on Reddit that you wrote in a code factory? you give it the DB and it spits out the code? What does that mean exactly?

<comment><AUTHOR> I do my DB design first, set up all the fields and foreign keys. Then I connect my factory to this newly created database and the factory creates the application structure based on the relations etc. The factory then uses code templates to generate a fully functioning web app based on Yii (<http://www.yiiframework.com>) with MVC, unit and functional tests and most of the boring repetitve work done for you e.g CRUD, search, autocomplete, jqgrid data grids, search engine friendly urls etc. After that it's just a case of adding your business logic and customising the CSS. This is something I'll be releasing in future, probably a lot sooner now that i have more time on my hands

<comment><USER4> Wow, I've always thought about making something like that but always figured it would never work. That would be cool if you released it.

Or have you ever thought of selling it as an enterprise tool? 90% of what I've done at enterprise jobs was making CRUD pages for database tables.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's not perfect yet, i have to edit the code templates for every site i build, i'll probably have to write a simpler templating system before i can release it. The cool thing is it's almost a quine - I can make the factory generate it's own code :). I think the plan is to offer a basic free version and a paid version that will allow deeper customisation. At the moment it only supports mysql but thanks to Yii making mssql/oracle/postgres work shouldn't be hard. I'll be working on this this week, I'll let HN know how it progresses

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'd like to see the homepage show me why I'd use TrackMyCV.com rather than Google Analytics, or any other analytics tools out there with mature interfaces. I like the checkmark list, it really stands out, and I actually read each one! More visuals of what the product actually is would be nice as well.

<comment><AUTHOR> I've added screen shots at <http://trackmycv.com/site/tour> I'll have to spend some more time on the copy, seems to take me longer than coding the site!

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Hey, I like this idea!

Bug? Browser / Jquery problem? The instruction link for MS Word doesn't work. It seems to try and load /site/install/program/msword. That direct link throws an error. Since you turned off debugging messages I can't tell what else to do.. :)

<comment><AUTHOR> fixed it, thanks for pointing it out

<comment><USER6> Nice! What service!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Clickable link: <http://trackmycv.com>

</comment><comment><USER4> That's a cool idea.

<comment><USER7> I agree. Using images to track site hits is a typical mobile sites trick, but this is a very interesting application. I wonder if you'll be able to collect a list of IP's of companies; so you can tell if someone from Yahoo! or Google or XYZ has accessed your resume.

<comment><AUTHOR> yeah that'd be great, it'd have to earn enough to pay for the full GeoIP database though, it's running on the free one now

<comment><USER3> IP address geolocation SQL database: <http://ipinfodb.com/ip_database.php>

>The SQL database behind ipinfodb.com is offered for free. We offer the database in different formats (SQL, CSV), city or country precision, 3 or 4 IP digits precision and data in single or multiple tables. Available information in the database : ISO country code, country name, FIPS region code, region name, city, zipcode, latitude, longitude and GMT/DST timezone. The database is updated during the first week of each month.

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks, I'll check that out!</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Overfitted Brain: Dreams evolved to assist generalization - <AUTHOR> https://arxiv.org/abs/2007.09560 <comment><USER2> _> ... all DNNs face the issue of overfitting as they learn, which is when performance on one data set increases but the network's performance fails to generalize (often measured by the divergence of performance on training vs testing data sets). This ubiquitous problem in DNNs is often solved by experimenters via "noise injections" in the form of noisy or corrupted inputs. The goal of this paper is to argue that the brain faces a similar challenge of overfitting, and that nightly dreams evolved to combat the brain's overfitting during its daily learning._

Actually, there's compelling evidence that overfitting is a necessary step for achieving state-of-the-art performance with DNNs!

Many state-of-the-art deep learning models today are trained until they achieve ~100% accuracy on the training data, _and then we continue to train them_ because once they go past this "interpolation threshold" they continue learning to generalize better to unseen data. This is known as the "double descent" phenomenon. See, for example:

[https://openai.com/blog/deep-double-descent/](https://openai.com/blog/deep- double-descent/)

[https://arxiv.org/abs/1912.02292](https://arxiv.org/abs/1912.02292)

[https://arxiv.org/abs/1903.08560](https://arxiv.org/abs/1903.08560)

The author makes no mention of double descent and the need for overfitting. In fact, he seems completely unaware of it.

\--

EDIT: Also, see this comment [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23957501](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23957501) elsewhere on this page.

<comment><USER3> You should be careful over-interpreting this stuff. Double descent is still poorly understood, and some [1] argue it is an artifact caused by wrongly assuming that the model complexity is a linear function of the number of parameters.

I would also argue that "the need for overfitting" is a consequence of broken benchmarks, rather than a feature of deep learning. Why else would adversarial examples arise?

[1] [https://deepai.org/publication/rethinking-parameter- counting...](https://deepai.org/publication/rethinking-parameter-counting-in- deep-models-effective-dimensionality-revisited)

<comment><USER4> Isn't double descent explained by the following?

The network contains many more parameters than data points.

Therefore there is an entire region of lowest training error.

A random point sonewhere in the middle of that region probably generalises better than at the edge.

Once SGD enters this region at the edge, generalisation can still occur because the randomness will most likely cause it to random walk inside the region.

To test this hypothesis you could run gradient descent with line search instead of SGD, and then you should not see this extra generalisation. Then if you add a bit of randomness to gradient descent you should see this extra generalisation again, if this hypothesis is correct. Also, under this hypothesis you'd predict that the speed at which generalisation improves depends on the batch size.

<comment><USER5> Might be a stupid question, but can we skip the random walk and just pick the middle?

<comment><USER6> Not a stupid question at all, but one problem is that the boundaries of a zero-train-loss region are not well characterized and evaluating the validation loss even at a single point is computationally expensive. The centroid of one of these regions might not even be inside it (eg. donut shape but in higher dimensions) Interesting discussion though -- probably worth a few papers if someone were to investigate further.

<comment><USER7> This just sounds like Stochastic Weight Averaging, which works quite well: [https://arxiv.org/abs/1803.05407](https://arxiv.org/abs/1803.05407)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The abstract is indeed fascinating and I'm reading through the full text, which is so far mostly easy to understand for a layman.

The high number of typos throws me a bit though. Amusingly they even misspell their central idea "Overfitted Brian Hypothesis" and I gotta say that the opening reminds me a bit of fluff you see in mindless high school essays.

> During the Covid-19 pandemic of 2020, many of those in isolation reported an > increase in the vividness and frequency of their dreams (Weaver, 2020), even > leading #pandemicdreams to trend on Twitter. Yet dreaming is so little > understood there can be only speculative answers to the why behind this > widespread change in dream be- havior.

<comment><USER9> Maybe presence of typos is the way to signal non-authorship by GPT-3?

<comment><USER10> GPT-3 can produce typos.

<comment><USER11> Indeed: GPT-3 is liable to produce the same density of typos as its learning corpus, which is from humans.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> In the book "Why we sleep?", Matthew Walker suggests something similar. That dream sleep is fundamental in making associations. In this case, generalizing and getting rid of overfitting. He talks a bit about problem solving when sleeping and how this leads to "a-ha" moments when waking up.

This means that the idea in this paper is already "out there", contrary to what the abstract states. But it's exciting to have a framework to talk about it quantitatively.

</comment><comment><USER13> I'm foreseeing impending downvotes but I have to rant somewhere. There should be a name for this kind of ridiculous hubris. Unfalsifiable non-insights by people trying to apply arbitrary deep learning algorithms to a brain which is definitely not using any of them. DLcentrism? We don't even know how the brain does almost _anything_ and you think you can use trendy AI topics to explain something as complex and mysterious as dreams?

This reminds me of Matt Walker's terrible book on sleep, which, as with almost all neuroscience research recently, tries to explain "why" we have some behavioral pattern or experience, but literally never offers an explanation at all, opting to say "this region lights up in an fMRI machine", as if that answers anything at all. It's like if you asked "why does the heart pump blood?" and a cardiologist answered, "well, the heart is very important for exercise, and people with healthy hearts live longer, and when we attach electrodes to it we see these interesting patterns associated with pulse and breathing...". That's Matt Walker's book applied to the brain. This allows "neuroscience" to get away these ridiculously overextended papers, because you can't disprove anything about something so hard to understand in the first place.

<comment><USER14> The answer I got from Matt Walker's "Why We Sleep?" was a list of benefits that we get from sleep and a list of negatives that we avoid. That is a sufficient answer for me. To ask why we need those benefits is a different question and eventually goes down a philosophical path.

<comment><USER15> 'Why We Sleep' has some, uh, issues on the benefits-and-negatives front too.

[https://guzey.com/books/why-we-sleep](https://guzey.com/books/why-we-sleep)

<comment><USER14> Thanks for posting - it's always good to see all views. It's disappointing because the book helped me a lot. It helped me understand sleep and how I should change my lifestyle to get more of it. I feel (no measure) that it has benefited me.

I will not regard it as scientifically accurate now though.

Does anyone have any other books about sleep that they could recommend?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> "Notably, all DNNs face the issue of overfitting as they learn, which is when performance on one data set increases but the network's performance fails to generalize (often measured by the divergence of performance on training vs testing data sets)."

Not really. For example, "Gradient Methods Never Overfit On Separable Data" [https://arxiv.org/abs/2007.00028](https://arxiv.org/abs/2007.00028)

<comment><USER3> "In this paper, we consider the implicit bias in a well-known and simple setting, namely learning linear predictors (x->x'w) for binary classification with respect to linearly-separable data"

Hoping that this applies to deep neural networks is a huge leap of faith to be honest.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Wow. Never before has an abstract felt so mind blowing to read

<comment><USER18> Came here to say the same.

At least personally, it's the insight into human brain mechanics and new abilities to test hypotheses in this field that gets me most excited about deep learning developments, rather than the improvements in performance on various tasks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> If you're on a phone, here's an HTML version: [https://www.arxiv- vanity.com/papers/2007.09560/](https://www.arxiv- vanity.com/papers/2007.09560/)

</comment><comment><USER20> "The goal of this paper is to argue that the brain faces a similar challenge of overfitting, and that nightly dreams evolved to combat the brain's overfitting during its daily learning....Sleep loss, specifically dream loss, leads to an overfitted brain that can still memorize and learn but fails to generalize appropriately."

This is a beautiful idea. Will have to read the whole paper to understand how they support this claim.

</comment><comment><USER21> While an interesting hypothesis, we should always be careful with research that tries to derive biological understanding from AI research. AI is, by necessity, a simplification of how our brains work. For example, current neural networks really only have one definition of neuron. But biological neurons can be very different...there are hundreds of types of neurons. Even if we limit the definition of neuron type to just describe variation in switching behavior, mice have been found to have 19 distinct neuron types with distinct switching behavior, and humans likely have dozens more.

</comment><comment><USER22> I wonder what psychology as a discipline will look like in twenty years? I feel like what we're learning now about the human mind through our study of neural networks is similar to the early work in cellular biology that eventually replaced metaphor-based models in medicine (e.g. 'humors') with more ontological ones. Freud's Ego, Superego and Id are gone. So are 'complexes'. Our model of the human mind currently seems to be limited to 'conscious and subconscious'. I'm excited at the prospect of something much better.

</comment><comment><USER23> To the best of my knowledge, I have ever dreamed. The abstract speaks of the dangers of not dreaming from lack of sleep and I wonder if the same thing applies to naturally not dreaming at all?

<comment><USER24> It's far more likely that you just don't remember your dreams.

<comment><USER25> What's a dream then?

<comment><USER26> A dream is the brain coming back online after being shut down for maintenance.

That's my supposition. It's an artifact, not a feature.

<comment><USER25> But that's a model of how you think it works. It's not what a dream is.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I love it when two disciplines come together to find new solutions to scientific problems, but something seems off here. An artificial neural network is incredibly simplistic compared the the messy complexity of the brain. Generalization seems to happen in some places and for some dreams, but is that really the only function of dreams? I somehow doubt it.

</comment><comment><USER28> If we're going down this road of theorizing about the human brain based on DNNs, what is the deal with dropout? Could we help human brains with generalization by randomly removing 10% of our newly created connections at the end of each day to improve long term learning? :)

<comment><USER29> That's called synaptic pruning and, while it most happens as a human matures, there's evidence indicating that it occurs during sleep in adults to help consolidate the most important connections and remove the unimportant ones. It's not exactly like dropout, but at a high level it kind of looks like it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Skimmed the paper so couldn't possibly give it a fair review but I always feel there's something off when people make comparisons of ANNs to actual biological brains. Even more so when it's the other way about.

</comment><comment><USER31> Is this a form of mechanomorphism, where we try to reason about how human cognition might work by drawing an analogy from how computers work (specifically, overfitting in ANNs) and try to apply it back to humans?

</comment><comment><USER32> Seems like a testable hypothesis: Prepare a "training" deck of cards with an A side and B side. Each side has a simple symbol on it. Create a second "test" deck of cards which is identical, expect each A symbol is slightly shifted in meaning (e.g. horse -> donkey). The task is to predict side B from side A.

If less dreaming leads to overfitting, we would expect REM sleep deprived probands to do better on the "training" set after learning with them and do worse on the "test" set, compared to probands without sleep deprivation.

<comment><USER21> This paper isn't about sleep deprivation, it's about dreams.

<comment><USER32> Right, REM phase interruption would be sufficient (according to this theory). There are also a bunch of additional variables that one likely cannot (easily) control for. Still, this theory should make predictions of the sort that more overfitting occurs in absence of dreaming.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> I recall this being essentially the inspiration for the naming of the Wake- Sleep algorithm of Boltzmann machines.

<comment><USER34> In the paper: "It is worth noting that the proposal of a "wake/sleep" specific algorithm for unsupervised learning of generative models based on feedback from stochastic stimulation goes back 25 years (Hinton et al., 1995)"

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> how about daydreaming? does that work too?</comment>


Mark Zuckerberg says Facebook will allow users to turn off political ads - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnbc.com/2020/06/17/facebook-will-allow-users-to-turn-off-political-ads-mark-zuckerberg.html <comment><USER2> Even if this worked, it would just mean that smarter people don't see the ads, but they're not the ones who are most affected by them either.

<comment><USER3> Do you think the less smart people should lose their right to vote? If not, why do you think they should lose the right to decide for themselves what to believe?

<comment><USER4> Why are you putting words in their mouth? The parent commenter is saying that only the folks more susceptible to potentially misleading political ads will be the subject to them.

<comment><USER2> Thank you, this is exactly what I meant. Not sure what that other commenter is on about.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> He's being deliberately obtuse, by offering a "solution" that doesn't address the problem.

</comment><comment><USER6> My only use for Facebook nowadays is a community message board. My building and my neighborhood's only real online presence is on Facebook. Totally non- toxic, mostly people curious about restaurant recommendations, buying or selling things, and posting pictures.

</comment><comment><USER7> Can they also allow users to turn off political posts?

<comment><USER8> That's what I want -- I want all political anything, left right and center, expunged from my FaceBook.

There's a browser plugin "Social Fixer" that can do this really well by all accounts, but alas, almost all my facebooking is on my phone, which it doesn't support.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Can I turn off political posts from my relatives?

<comment><USER10> There's an option in the settings somewhere that allows you to delete your account. That's the only way I could get away from it. Other than family dinners and the like. For those you may just have to suffer. :D</comment></comment>


Earth's magnetic field could flip within one lifetime - <AUTHOR> https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/10/141014170841.htm <comment><AUTHOR> Am imagining all compasses would suddenly flip, how would it affect our GPS systems built to work in AI environments? Is it possible that nothing will be much affected a la the millennium 2000 craze or will it be impactful?

</comment><comment><USER2> 2014</comment>


Google under scrutiny over lobbying influence on Congress and White House - <AUTHOR> http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/dec/18/google-political-donations-congress <comment><USER2> The real problem is Congress takes quasi "bribes" from lobbyists but the EU can't go after them and neither can the FBI post congressional protection laws they made after the ABSCAM scandal.

FROM 1982: [https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1982/07/15/t...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1982/07/15/the- real-issues-in-abscam/b55efd57-fc33-431f-8be7-99a50b14161d/)

So, politicians are paid to vote left and paid to vote right and the ones that can't be bought can be leased.

</comment><comment><USER3> 'Don't be evil'

</comment><comment><USER4> if you break up google you would need to go after apple, facebook, microsoft too. what about uber? how would you break them up with out making things worse?</comment>


Disney Streamers Hit 100M - <AUTHOR> https://www.theinformation.com/articles/disney-streamers-hit-100-million-the-informations-tech-briefing <comment><AUTHOR> In spite of soaring subscription numbers, shutdowns resulting from the coronavirus contributed to a $4.7 billion quarterly loss.</comment>


Ask HN: Any long-term wager sites? - <AUTHOR>

My roommate and I wanted to make a wager about what would last longer: his RAID-5 setup or Flickr going out of business. (This was precipitated by my signing up for a pro account on Flickr today.)
I did a quick search for a site that would let us record the wager and would periodically email us to remind us about it but I didn't really find anything that filled this niche.
Any suggestions? <comment><USER2> He should set up a cron job to read Flickr's home page from his machine and send emails with the reply. If you stop getting emails, he lost. If the emails show that Flickr is out, you lost.</comment>


15 Apps and Gadgets Guy Kawasaki Is Using - <AUTHOR> https://myhelpster.com/guy-kawasakis-top-15-tech-apps-gadgets/

<comment><USER2> Took me quite a while to realize that to see the entire list, you have to like or share the page.

At the bottom of the 1st of 15 items it states "Please like or share us to get the whole list. Thanks!"

No thanks.</comment>


Ask HN: How to deal with a founder that won't leave his job (maybe)? - <AUTHOR> We're 3 founders with an initial cap table of a) 40% - b) 30% - c) 30%. Founder c is working as a researcher and initially dedicates 15h per week to the project with the idea to go fulltime in the future. Founders a and b are working fulltime since day 1. 6 months in and he didn't decide what to do yet. We're preparing a funding round and we want to fix this before talking to investors. How would you deal with it? Founders a and b think this proposal is fair:

    -Scenario 1. Founder c starts fulltime now and keeps his initial 30%.

    -Scenario 2. Founder c leaves the company and he keeps 3%.

    -Scenario 3. The situation continues the same but founder c shares will start decreasing now (month 6) until we reach month 18 to a minimum of 5%. For example, if he joins at month 10 he'd keep around 20%, at month 14 10%, at month 18 5%...
 Founder c thinks this is unfair.
Some considerations:

    -Founder c is very good and we want him in.

    -Founder c has not take any salary from our company during this time and he'd continue working without salary in scenario 3.

    -All founders put the same small amount of money at the beginning.

    -Founders a and c have been working on the project for a long time as a side project (more than a year). Founder b joins the project later when the first pre-seed round is being cooked (hopefully this explains the initial shares)

    -This is not a fight, we're close friends and we're discussing this issue in a friendly way to get the best outcome for everyone and the company.
 We know we shouldn't have gotten into this situation in the first place. We learned the lesson, but this is the situation right now and we'd like to get constructive answers. Thanks. <comment><USER2> Does C actually control 30% of the legal entity (c-corp or LLC I assume), or was the agreement an up front verbal commitment of 30%?

Is there a vesting schedule in place?

The most reasonable thing, I think, it to treat the situation as a well-formed c-corp would. 30% of shares allocated but vesting over a four year period. There's a one year cliff for 25% of allocated shares then 1/36th of remaining shares per month for the next 36 months. Depending on when you consider the venture to have started, six months ago when A and B went full time or when it was a side project, C may have between 0 (because they haven't hit the one year cliff) and 1 year and N months worth of shares (between 7.5% and 15% ownership).

Based on what you've written, I assume that:

You don't want to completely wipe this person off the cap table by asserting that they aren't legally entitled to anything because of not meeting their one year cliff. However, You also don't feel that they should get 7.5-15% ownership.

If both of those are true, it's a negotiation. Having two people whose entire livelihood is dedicated to something but a third who is not but is earning equity at the same rate sounds like the sort of thing that will only ratchet up in pressure over time.

"Founder c thinks this is unfair." That's the most interesting thing that you wrote. All of the options that you laid out seem reasonable given the situation that's described.

</comment><comment><USER3> All founders should be full-time to keep the incentives to drive the company forward the same is what I've heard from a couple VC's I've talked too. They also mentioned something called the golden handcuffs.</comment>


Mathematics in the Age of the Turing Machine (2013) - <AUTHOR> http://arxiv.org/abs/1302.2898

<comment><USER2> I'm more interested in mathematical theorems that can be proved using _techniques_ that were invented for computer science. I am not aware of any major theorems, but for example I can point to CS techniques that have been used to automate proofs of certain families of inequalities and incidence theorems in geometry.</comment>


The Regex Tutorial Challenge - <AUTHOR> https://www.jeffwofford.com/regex/ <comment><USER2> There is no tutorial, only tests. If you know nothing about regex and are hoping to learn, this is not the place to do it. You'll most likely end up stopped around level 5.

<comment><USER2> After playing some more, the challenge portion is pretty fun. I had to use some web searching to fill in the tutorial part, though, but I've definitely learned about regex from this.</comment></comment>


Best Practices for ML Engineering (2017) - <AUTHOR> https://developers.google.com/machine-learning/rules-of-ml/ <comment><USER2> My favorite part is what so many people seem to forget:

Rule #1: Don't be afraid to launch a product without machine learning.

Just because you can use machine learning doesn't mean you should.

<comment><USER3> Also, should be said. Just because you can use the framework and it produces what you expect the first time: Doesn't mean that you're using the technique correctly.

(AI has some very advanced techniques in it and require attention to detail and background knowledge to use them correctly)

<comment><USER4> Sounds like a disclaimer for any programming. Just because the happy path works doesn't mean you have a finished system.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The part about a solid pipeline is very important. Recently I talked to someone who had a bad experience detecting phrases using gensim. I always have had a good experience so I was curious. Turns out they were doing OCR on PDFs and feeding the result directly into gensim. As anyone with OCR experience knows, there is often a lot of noise which is definitely going to screw up gensim or any other NLP tool. The quality of your preprocessing is important!

</comment><comment><USER6> Might be worth noting that this is old [1]. I think either in 2016 or 2017, the same document was posted in PDF form.

[1] [http://martin.zinkevich.org/rules_of_ml/rules_of_ml.pdf](http://martin.zinkevich.org/rules_of_ml/rules_of_ml.pdf)

<comment><USER7> Discussed in 2017: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13414776](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13414776).

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I want to highlight #1 and #2 especially. Machine learning is not necessarily the correct tool to use to solve a problem. You won't even understand whether it _might be_ unless you've done at least some of the work for Rule #2. If the data you've collected and the metrics you think you can nudge with a machine learning product support it, make sure you have as complete a set of metrics as possible to measure whether your ML product is useful.

It's easy for data scientists and machine learning engineers see P/R, AUC, or whatever as the goal, especially if there isn't much support in the organization for measuring product performance. It's often not the end goal. Measurements of a model's performance in this context indicate some measure of statistical performance with respect to training and test data. Real, live measurements from "in the wild" application are the true fitness test.

</comment><comment><USER9> "Track as much as possible in your current system."

<comment><USER10> But... "don't be evil" now!

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> woah i had no idea zinkevich worked at google. that guy is really legit.</comment>


New Tesla 70D all-wheel drive, 240 mile range car for ~$75k - <AUTHOR> http://my.teslamotors.com/models/design <comment><USER2> The price listed in the title is "after incentives & gas savings" and before taxes.

For example: the 70kWh battery has the 'pitch' price at $56,895... except that the actual cash price to the right is $76,200 delivered.

Edit: The main difference in this new edition is 70kWh battery and AWD vs the previous 60kWh battery and RWD.

second edit: the HN title has been changed to more accurately reflect the cash price of the car.

<comment><USER3> Prices in other countries:

      US: ~$75k
      Canada: ~C$86k = ~$68k
      UK: ~£55k = ~$80k
      France: ~€70k = ~$74k
      Australia (varies with territory): ~A$115k = ~$88k

<comment><USER4> 76240 Euro in Germany. There are no listed tax credits. For company cars it's 500 Euro/kWh maxing out at 10k in 2013 then -50/kWh and -500 total each year so this year we'd be at 400 Euro/kWh maxing at 9k. For Teslas the max is the only thing that matters because the battery easily outpaces the max (28k for the 70D). +20 Euro/month in tax credit = 9240 Euro less for an even 67k. You can also get a 42 Euro/month credit if you use the car at home so that's an extra ~500/year.

I've recently read about a consulting company that switched to Tesla company cars. The standard seems to be around Audi A6 level Diesels and the Tesla There was also some talk about image ramifications both positive (especially for IT consulting) and negative (especially for cost cutting consultants in rough times). Pretty sure they said the standard cars would have been quite a bit less expensive but they did it anyway because it's a net+ for the image (+really cool :P). Interestingly they briefly mentioned that the move was a huge plus in recruiting talent. Only anecdotal evidence but they added it as a perk in the adds and it got talked about in every interview and was seen as a good driver for talent acquisition.

Lol consultants and all but I could see the same reasoning helping with recruiting programmers (we do love our tech toys after all)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It bugs me that they deduct the gas savings but don't include cost of charging the car without access to superchargers.

That being said, it's good to see the prices coming down.

<comment><USER6> It's about $4 per charge, at 7cents per kWh... Comes out to $250/yr. I guess they should include it if you live in HI or somewhere else with high-priced electricity, but realistically it is much, much less than, say, sales tax, which they also don't include.

<comment><USER7> Where do you live that electricity is actually 7c/kWh? I didn't really pay attention to my power bills until I moved to Florida, but down here, the real price is 14-17c/kWh; the actual kWhs are quoted as something like 7c but then they add a 7c/kWh fuel surcharge and additional fees after you cross certain usage thresholds.

<comment> ryan-c I'm pretty sure my marginal rate for power is 35c/kWh here in the bay area. I think PG&E may have special rate plans for EV charging though.

Edit: Oh, this is handy: [http://www.pge.com/cgi- bin/pevcalculator/PEV/](http://www.pge.com/cgi-bin/pevcalculator/PEV/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The rule of thumb in the car business is that you have to sell 40000 of the things to get the economies of scale needed to be viable. I am very for Tesla and I would buy an 'S' the moment my lottery winnings come through, however, is it an uncomfortable fact that despite the hype and hoopla they are not hitting the numbers needed for economy of scale that the rest of the mass- market auto industry lives by?

<comment><USER9> Before posting a question like this, please bother to look into the logistics involving the company (for example, their actual plans for scaling). They are a new car company. They do not yet have the capacity to manufacture at high scale, but they are working on it. Whether or not they hit their plans, 40k cars/year is well beyond their stated expectations for the year 2015.

I mean, are you supposed to be able to just wake up in the morning and say "hi, I am a car company" and manufacture 50k cars?

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> It is a very reasonable price for a fully electric luxury sedan with these features.

<comment><USER11> I would strongly disagree there. The interior quality e.g. leather, door/dash finishings are very poor compared to other cars at this price point. It feels far more like a basic Mazda than a Mercedes, LandRover etc.

I know you are paying a premium for electric but it is a luxury car none the less.

<comment><USER12> Nah, it does feel more premium than a Mazda, more like the entry-mid level offerings from German luxury manufacturers (CLA, C-class, 2xx series, 3xx/4xx series, A3, A4/A5) than their offering at those price points (E-class, 5xx/6xx series, A6/A7).

<comment><USER11> I still stand by my assertion. When I took it for a test drive it felt very similar to the Mazda I drive for work. Maybe the models in the US differ quite a lot from what we have in Australia.

It definitely doesn't feel like a $100K car (which is very expensive here in Australia).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Did they move the date on the X again :-(

[http://www.teslamotors.com/modelx](http://www.teslamotors.com/modelx)

If I am going to have a fantasy tesla, I want the X

<comment><USER14> It says "The delivery estimate for _new_ reservations is early 2016".

That probably doesn't mean they start shipping first reservations later.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> And it looks like supercharging is included as well! That base model just got a lot more attractive...

But I'll still stick with my 12000€ car for now :)

</comment><comment><USER16> Relay cool that one can actually order the thing online :)

</comment><comment><USER17> Should the title be altered to reflect the actual price of the car? It starts at $75k (+$1200 in fees)

<comment><USER18> I agree, subtracting the price of gasoline in a conventional car isn't what most people understand "price" to mean. Title changed from $55k to $75k.

<comment><USER19> Wait, the price of petrol over the life-time of a car (10+ years) is _only $20k_? Man, that's the best pitch I've ever heard to buy a nice sexy gas guzzler with great engine/exhaust noise.

<comment><USER20> Act now since big V8s are kind of going out of style. BMW is dropping the V8 from its new M3 and going to a turbo I6, Cadillac's new full-size will have a twin turbo V6 instead of a V8, Mercedes is shrinking the size of its turbo V8 for AMG cars, and even the Mustang will have a turbo 4 cylinder option. In a few years it wouldn't surprise me to only see stuff like the Corvette, Camaro, Mustang, etc. have big 5+ liter V8s.

<comment><USER11> They aren't kind of going out of style they absolutely are.

Buyers are very conscious of petrol pricing and being seen to be environmentally friendly. Being "that guy" with the V8 is no longer cool like it was in the 90s.

It's why F1 moved to 1.6L turbo V6 with lots of talk about moving to 4 cylinders in the future. It's all being pushed by the car manufacturers who want R&D in those types of engines.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Is it ok to use adsense in a widget? - <AUTHOR>

Any ideas? <comment><USER2> You need to define 'widget'. Then you need to ask Google's AdSense help/support resources.</comment>


Visualizing Usage of the Firefox Menu Bar - <AUTHOR> http://blog.mozilla.com/faaborg/2010/03/23/visualizing-usage-of-the-firefox-menu-bar/

<comment><USER2> I really love how they're challenging a lot of the accepted norms and trying to improve, but in an open and transparent way. This is open source at its finest. Even if I don't like every single decision they make, they're trying, and I think they'll have a better browser for the effort. Breaking UI conventions should always be done with care and deliberation, but it can bring a lot of benefits.</comment>


Gaming company Ouya is reportedly putting itself up for sale - <AUTHOR> http://www.theverge.com/2015/4/28/8509005/ouya-android-microconsole-reportedly-seeking-buyer-debt <comment><USER2> This was never going to end well. When you have a small form-factor platform with a large reach, and you attempt to introduce a larger form-factor with a small reach, it becomes impossible to convince developers to spend the disproportionate amount of money necessary to generate higher-resolution assets to accommodate it. It's just not worth it.</comment>