Erlang: An introduction to gen_server by creating a banking system - <AUTHOR> http://spawnlink.com/articles/an-introduction-to-gen_server-erlybank/

<comment><USER2> We had the bank account example so many times at University that I started to question that if they let any of us design a banking system, we'd just install a backdoor.

<comment><AUTHOR> Haha really? And I thought I was being unique, not doing a blog! Darn! Hah.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I like the exercise for the reader. It's rare that a blog post is actually trying to teach me to the extent that it would ask me to participate.</comment>


Rejected by a recruiter for not knowing jQuery, I know JS - <AUTHOR> https://www.reddit.com/r/javascript/comments/3qlkaj/i_was_just_rejected_via_email_by_a_recruiter/?utm_medium=twitter&utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_campaign=linkplug&utm_content=linkplug&utm_term=linkplug <comment><USER2> I don't get why this is a surprise.</comment>


CloudFlare is ruining Stack Overflow for me with its recaptcha - <AUTHOR> http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/323537/cloudflare-is-ruining-stack-overflow-for-me-with-its-recaptcha?cb=1 <comment><USER2> having the same problem with every cloudflare site as a Tor user. I hesitate to read the link if presentented with the "Attention Required" page.</comment>


Gosl – Go scientific library - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/cpmech/gosl <comment><USER2> Not sure Go is such a great fit for scientific computing. On the one hand, with garbage collection and other things, it won't be as fast as C++. On the other hand, it's less flexible than Python.

That said, it's always useful to have a good scientific library in every language.

<comment><USER3> I don't think the speed is the problem here. Plenty of sci stuff is done in Python. Go's poor type system is a bigger issue.

<comment><USER4> Python with Numpy/Scipy. The Python there is just calling high performance fortran libraries.

<comment><USER5> It's not quite that simple. The core packages wrap fortran or C code but then additional packages are built on that. Going by the github breakdowns Pandas, SymPy or Jupyter are pretty much pure Python, matplotlib is 90% Python 10% C++ (though the Python ratio is probably skewed up by the in-repo examples).

And that high-performance Fortran or C code is at the root of so much scientific computing is an issue in Go considering the overhead of cgo calls.

<comment><USER6> Jupyter and matplotlib aren't designed to actually do any calculation (they are just for communicating results) so it doesn't make sense for them to be written in C. Pandas has a ton of pure Python code, but if you dig through the layers of abstraction, all of the core algorithms are implemented in cython or make calls to numpy (which is calling C code).

Bottom line, when you're using an established Python scientific computing library to do numerical calculations, you're calling C (or maybe Fortran) routines.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Wow! That's a ton of stuff. I wish you were working with us at gonum. Can we work together?

<comment><USER8> Is there a reason why every component of gonum is scattered across different repositories. For me, it makes it extremely hard to browse through the stuff and try to find anything that might be useful to me.

<comment><USER9> I find it quite legit. Having a singe repo would hinder progress as more and more implementations are added.

Even JuliaStats followed a similar distribution ([https://github.com/JuliaStats](https://github.com/JuliaStats)), and it looks neat and organized.

<comment><USER10> > Having a singe repo would hinder progress as more and more implementations > are added.

Why?

<comment><USER11> You're more likely to touch more files if they are all in the same repository. All of the issues are going to be in the same issue tracker (tags can help, but only if you know how to use them well, and that causes overhead for the maintainers), and all of the Pull Requests are going to notify everyone who is watching the repository, whether it's relevant to the part you care about or not.

There are clear drawbacks, but there are clear advantages as well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Wow, that's a lot of good work.

I asked recently about go wrappers for the Cuda Runtime or Driver API's and didn't get much response, I don't see a lot happening with openCL either, is there anything like that in the prospects?

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12528206](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12528206)

</comment><comment><USER13> While this looks like great stuff and there is no way I will discourage anyone from developing tools for scientific computing in any programming language, the vast majority of users of these tools IMO are scientists and engineers who are not programmers. Or to put it another way, most of them don't have a degree in CS, they are usually Mathematicians, Physicists etc. When I hung out in that community about 3 years ago, there was already a wholesale movement going on in moving from MATLAB and/or Fortran to Python... and I don't think the vast majority of that community (which is generally conservative when it comes to tooling) will adopt yet another tool unless it offers some significant benefit. (MATLAB was easy to write and use but proprietary. Python was easier and free. Both make use of high performance libraries written in C/Fortran).

<comment><USER14> Yup. I'm one of those people. Well, partially at least. I do a lot of distributed computing. But my PhD was in a statistical area.

I used Octave for a while (matlab clone). But then as my data sets got larger and I mean really large (non-linear equation solving on 11m points on my puny desktop), I went full force on Python (NumPy, SciPy, Matplotlib). The reason - its is super easily scriptable, the libraries are great and easy to use and python allows me to use multi-processor capabilities to distribute my work to all my cpu cores.

Keep in mind I could have used GSL. But Numpy/Scipy & matplotlib were just faster and more productive for me.

That being said, I'd rather have one source of truth - i.e. GSL and have this be a wrapper around it as opposed to re-creating all the logic.

Either way - its a fantastic effort. If at anytime I create systems that need numerical computation (as opposed to the hacks that I did for my thesis) I will definitely look into this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> The excitement and libraries around Go remind me of Python around 2009.

<comment><USER16> So, like that totally irrelevant time for Python when nothing special was going on?

(Edit: not that Python was itself irrelevant, but 2009 was an irrelevant time for Python, when nothing special news/projects/etc wise for Python. I've been using the language since 1998, and the most "hyped" period was in the early 00s. Mid 00's Ruby/Rails caught on).

<comment><USER15> This was around when Numpy and Scipy were taking off. Pandas, scikit learn, theano, started development soon after.

<comment><USER16> That was more of a slow adoption and consolidation that some dramatic spike.

Numpy (renamed as such around 2006) has been around for like 20 years, and has been quite popular in the noughties too for those doing numeric stuff in Python.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Row over AI that 'identifies gay faces' - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-41188560 <comment><USER2> The press release from GLAAD and HRC is ridiculously misleading. One of their repeated claims - that the paper has not been peer-reviewed - is directly contradicted by the first sentence of the first page of the manuscript, and their other criticisms are similarly baseless. Mistakes that obvious imply to me that their goal is not an honest debate but rather to stir the pot and promote misinformation. The alternative is that no one from either organization read the pre-print with any scrutiny. In my opinion, it's especially telling that visiting GLAAD's site (including the press release) prompts an immediate pop-over asking for donations. Who is the unethical actor here, I wonder...?

Edit: Can anyone downvoting me please stand up and tell me why?

<comment><USER3> The other criticisms seemed perfectly cogent to me. A lot of people just don't know what "peer reviewed" actually means. I think that is the most likely cause of the error, rather than malice.

It's pretty normal for charities to encourage donations, so I'm not sure what your problem is with that. You seem to be hinting at the idea that they have deliberately released an inaccurate press release to encourage donations, but there's no reason for them to bother doing that when there are many uncontroversial instances of homophobia that they could refer to.

<comment><USER2> Thank you for responding. You're right about the donations; I'm sure this pop- over exists across their site and is not inherently sinister, but including a call for donations specifically over this divisive, misleading press release irks me, because it seems to encourage people to wage scientific debate via lobbying rather than more research, which is the opposite of what the world needs right now (see: climate change). However, you're right that it's irrelevant to the actual debate here.

On a more specific note, claims like "The study assumed there were only two sexual orientations -- gay and straight -- and does not address bisexual individuals." (without mention that this is addressed in the paper and that better labels would likely improve results) and repeated hand-waving about hairstyles (without mention of the sections of the paper devoted to feature analysis which point to structural facial features giving the strongest signal to the model) do not present methodological flaws with the study and/or are misleading. Prof. Kosinski and Yilun Wang have issued a very polite rebuttal (here)[[https://docs.google.com/document/d/1UuEcSNFMduIaf0cOWdWbOV3N...](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1UuEcSNFMduIaf0cOWdWbOV3NORLoKWdz3big4xuk7Z4/edit)] which details these and many other weaknesses with the press release. I don't think it's unreasonable to expect someone at GLAAD or HRC to understand what peer review means, and in fact, I'm sure they do.

<comment><USER4> Science isn't about debate, you either falsify the null hypothesis or you don't.

The last thing an issue like climate change needs is a falsifiable hypothesis which is why the IPCC never puts one forward.

If we want people to stop driving cars, take shorter showers and do other progressive things than the last thing we should do is propose something that could be falsified. It would be as devastating to climate change as the catholic church putting forth a testable hypothesis for the existence of God.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm inclined to believe that an ML algorithm can do what the authors claim- but maybe only for the data set they're using.

The inputs are self-submitted photos to a dating website. Can we be certain that how people pose, smile, look, etc, isn't influenced by their intention- to find a mate of a specific gender? What if those same people were each asked to submit a second photo when they're told to 'act gay/straight' in order to fool the algorithm?

It could be that this ML algorithm is picking up on very different cues than intended. But I wouldn't discourage the researchers over it- try it again with a better data set, one built for this purpose, and discover just what the algorithm is picking up.

<comment><USER6> This particular algorithm is being talked about heavily in the gayer parts of the internet, and I keep telling everyone precisely this. This is interesting in as far as it shows that, in the context of trying to attract a partner, gay and straight people present themselves in quantifiably different ways, which I suspect most people sufficiently familiar with app dating culture would have already known.

<comment><USER7> Again, I hate to keep parroting what another HN said, but I hate to see misinformation repeated:

The paper states that they used an existing net, VGG-Face, to exact facial features: [https://osf.io/fk3xr/](https://osf.io/fk3xr/) (page 13) >VGG-Face aims at representing a given face as a vector of scores that are as unaffected as possible by facial expression, background, lighting, head orientation, image properties such as brightness or contrast, and other factors that can vary across different images of the same person. All the heavy lifting for this paper was done by logistic regression on the facial features reported by VGG-Face, they didn't train a DNN specifically for identifying sexuality. The algo wouldn't have seen clothing at all.

Basically, it's not as simple as "All the gay participants had rainbow flags in the background of their photo so let's ignore this study"

<comment><USER6> This is very interesting thanks for sharing, but I am not sure if it totally kills my point. I assumed face was isolated from clothing/hairstyle/background already, but believed facial expression (etc) was the main thing being looked at. If this VGG-Face tool is sufficiently good at making expression (etc) not be a factor, this is potentially a huge deal and some of the worries in the gay community may be justified. Excuse my generic HN skepticism but I will need to look into how legit VGG-Face is before I start thinking about what this means.

<comment><USER8> I don't think it does kill your point. The set of images used in the sample are obviously biased. They are by people posting pictures they hope to use to attract others of a certain gender (or genders). Even if it is specifically taking dimensional measurements surely some facial expressions bias the dimensions. This could still be the equivalent of a duck-face detector.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> What disturbs me is the potential for a government, like in Iran or Russia, to use this technology to automatically screen and label people, as a precursor to mass-scale systematic repression.

I get that this study is problematic, but there is no reason to automatically assume it's not possible. What evidence do we have that there is no correlation between ML consumable physical characteristics and our sexuality?

<comment><USER10> Doesn't that risk exist for many emergent AI scenarios?

"Bad actors" using AI to influence debate, or writing "fake news" then promoting it with social media ads, etc?

<comment><USER11> > Doesn't that risk exist for many emergent AI scenarios?

Yes, and it is actually the bigger problem. Facial recognition and license plate scanners are already producing a "papers, please" situation.

The gay community, however, is more activist and more likely to _fight back_. Which is why this is getting such traction.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I posted this as a reply elsewhere, but I think anyone inclined to believe this model/study supports the prenatal hormone theory should read this from Calling Bullshit: [http://callingbullshit.org/case_studies/case_study_ml_sexual...](http://callingbullshit.org/case_studies/case_study_ml_sexual_orientation.html)

The setup and modeling may be perfectly sound, but the conclusions are a big stretch: they didn't control for intentional differences in presentation (the data was dating site photos), nor did they appropriately test for significance of the supposedly subtle facial differences picked up by the model (gay men having more feminine faces, gay women more masculine ones).

<comment><USER7> People keep saying this, but as another HN pointed out:

The paper states that they used an existing net, VGG-Face, to exact facial features: [https://osf.io/fk3xr/](https://osf.io/fk3xr/) (page 13) >VGG-Face aims at representing a given face as a vector of scores that are as unaffected as possible by facial expression, background, lighting, head orientation, image properties such as brightness or contrast, and other factors that can vary across different images of the same person. All the heavy lifting for this paper by was done logistic regression on the facial features reported by VGG-Face, they didn't train a DNN specifically for identifying sexuality. The algo wouldn't have seen clothing at all.

It's pretty disturbing how quick people are to dismiss papers that make them uncomfortable, latching onto the first excuse to dismiss it without even confirming if the excuse is valid or not. Clear Cognitive Dissonance in action.

<comment><USER12> That's a really important point about this not being a novel DNN, but I'm not sure how it addresses either of the main criticisms from the link I posted.

The first is that claiming this methodology outperforms humans is unfair; there's no expectation that Turkers are particularly good at identifying sexuality from photographs, they haven't been able to train in a remotely analogous way, and there's no comparison to "experts" in orientation recognition (if those exist).

The second is that the authors of this study use the differences extracted by VGG-Face to claim support for PHT, despite not applying an appropriate statistical test to the differences in the features between groups. This is the bigger scientific misstep in my mind, the willingness to make a strong, apparently controversial claim (I'm not too familiar with PHT or its history) without properly validating it.

<comment><USER13> For your second point, what in your opinion would be the right statistical test to apply?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I think the signal that the AI bot has identified is very likely to be related to the effects of differing hormonal exchanges and releases over long periods of time.

We know that hormonal derivatives like steroids can influence appearance, and also that ambient secretions offer signaling at a distance among humans, in circumstances not limited to the synchronization of menstrual cycles, at a minimum.

Take these factors together, and exclusive close proximity to gender concentrations based on preference likely results in mild changes in appearance that automated analysis can determine as a non-zero signal, and hazard an informed guess with. People are not wrong in claiming that this is a form of stereotyping, and that sometimes the stereotype will be incorrect.

People may not like it, but just because you can't see it, doesn't mean it's not there.

<comment><USER15> Or their dataset is a dating site and they are training a neural net to see features that are not there. 70-80% accuracy for a neural net is pretty bad if you have taken a neural networks course. The fact that Stanford students are publishing this is probably not because it's sound scientifically, but because ostentatiously riotous subject matter will increase the number of citations dramatically. Frankly, I don't think it makes sense to infer sexual orientation based on facial recognition, and I don't think it is sound science behind any of these findings. Yes, there may be features that imply correlation one way or the other, but the fact that these features would be "undetectable by the naked eye but still visually present" leads to all sorts of murky science that is "based" on neural networks. Also, this sort of "science" will no doubt be used wrongly to classify people who have not even investigated their own sexual leanings at all. People will be saying that their 7 year old has a propensity to be gay or straight based on the length of their nose? Come now, this is just balderdash and it's no surprise that it's contentious. Trying to provide some sort of defense for what is clearly just the Academia version of Clickbait is also a waste of time.

<comment><USER16> It's not clear to me -- your comment seems to contain conflicting statements -- do you think no correlation could exist between facial characteristics and sexuality? If you think there might be, do you think no program could ever detect it?

<comment><USER15> To answer your first question: Correlation could exist, but the idea that they are correlated implies that my physical features will change when my sexual preference changes. Ponder that for a minute.

Sexuality is not a boolean value, it's not a yes or no, it's not a this or that, even for people who are attracted to females they are not attracted to every female, and people who are attracted to males are not attracted to every male. It's such a silly thing to try and hone in on, because it removes the primary deciding component of human sexuality from the study: personal, intimate, real human preference. It's like attempting to discover one's favorite flavor of bagel shmear based on high school portraits.

You may find some surprising results, realize neural nets are trainable phenomena, and then run around giving everyone plastic surgery because more pronounced cheek bones tend to prefer Strawberry Shmear, and if peoples' cheek bones were adjusted their flavor preference would change.

<comment><USER16> > _To answer your first question: Correlation could exist, but the idea that > they are correlated implies that my physical features will change when my > sexual preference changes. Ponder that for a minute._

Why couldn't physical features change?

I believe hormone changes can affect appearances, so it doesn't seem beyond the realm of possibility.

> _Sexuality is not a boolean value, it 's not a yes or no, it's not a this or > that_

Did it occur to you that possibly the correlation with facial characteristics could be a matter of degree?

Consider the correlation between facial characteristics and racial background. I'm half European, half Asian. There's going to be a stronger correlation between people with near 100% European ancestry and "European facial characteristics" than people with 50% European ancestry, than people with 25% European ancestry, etc

<comment><USER15> My point is that Sexuality is not classifiable like Eye Color is classifiable, and we should not treat it as such.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> There was an interesting comment by hn user aub3bhat a while back about the political pitfalls of facial recognition tech:

"But face recognition is a sensitive/politically-charged topic, I know several grad students (including me) who inspite of having ready-to-deploy scalable software and datasets (~10M instagram images) stay away from doing this type of a demo because reputational risks are enormous. Consider the controversy around geofeedia etc. The last thing you want as a PhD student is press interpreting your research incorrectly and blaming you for causing widespread harm. It happened to a student/professor in my department and even then the infamous study in question was in collaboration with the social network."

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14580985](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14580985)

</comment><comment><USER18> Worth considering:

I think the reason this topic is so hot is not because of the study, but the "What if other people use this as a justification for X?" fear.

For example, if it turns out that there are certain physical traits that predict sexuality, does this imply a physiological component (rather than a purely psychological one)? If there is a physiological component, I think some people worry this can be used to "pathologize" alternative sexualities.

However, what if all the endocrine disrupters we're exposed to daily [1] that act as estrogens play some role in this? What if we make the topic so unspeakable that we fail to recognize environmental contamination causes both physical differences [2] and sexual differentiation differences [3]?

This is part of the reason I think we can't reject information that may allow some socially-backward conclusion. Because we don't know all the other good things (i.e. medical) that information may be necessary for.

1\. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bisphenol_A#Uses](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bisphenol_A#Uses) 2\. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anogenital_distance#In_humans](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anogenital_distance#In_humans) 3\. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diethylstilbestrol#DES_sons](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diethylstilbestrol#DES_sons)

</comment><comment><USER19> If homosexuality is genetic, which I firmly believe it is, then it's an interesting question as to whether or not this genetic trait brings with it other physical manifestations. From a purely scientific point of view, it would be an interesting test of ML to see if some sort of relationship could be discovered. It's dangerous though to jump to conclusions that there is a physical manifestation without reams and reams of scientific study, including gene sequencing, etc.

However, it's both interesting and dangerous, as the GLAAD press release states, because of the repercussions to gays in countries where it's not nearly as accepted. It probably won't stop Russia and other very homophobic countries from conducting the same experiments using their own datasets.

In addition, very deep research including gene sequencing might inadvertently turn up the "gay" gene, which would then lead to it's own Pandora's box of issues.

This might be one of those situations where we might not want to study too hard because of the repercussions associated with it.

</comment><comment><USER20> Anti-gay stigma is useful to those wishing to exert control over a group via establishing in-group / out-group dynamics. One can remove a social competitor from a group by outing them as gay (even if they are not). The fact that it is capricious and the accusation unfalsifiable is an essential component. A 3rd party tool that can objective establish gayness would take away the subjectively. Society will have to move on to other mechanisms of group control just like we moved on from witchery and heresy.

<comment><USER21> We moved on from witchery and heresy by establishing objective criteria for determining witches and heretics?

(I know you didn't claim we did, just pointing out that your examples don't seem to support your argument.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Its possible that due to the hormonal and genetic differences in gay vs straight people, they have slightly different facial structures on average. Just like people of different genders, despite having very similar genetics, generally have different faces on average. Whether using this tech on a mass scale is for good or ill remains to be seen. The tech could be used to oppress, or it could be used for good.

</comment><comment><USER23> Phrenological Neural Networks</comment>


The Cash For Clunkers program may have spent a 3 month budget in a week - <AUTHOR> http://www.economixt.com/2009/07/cash-for-clunkers-part-ii I can't help but shake the thought that even if the $1 billion budget is running on fumes at the moment (ok,  I lied!) it will not have the necessary quality impact to offset the taxpayers' investments. <comment><USER2> Brilliant analysis in there of how getting people to buy new more fuel- efficient cars could have no effect on emissions.</comment>


Get Your Ass To Metro (Windows 8) - TechCrunch - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2012/11/03/get-your-ass-to-metro-windows-8/

<comment><USER2> _tl;dr_

\- "Steam may well be doomed"

\- "Steam is just the wrong side of geeky"

\- "Microsoft sold _at least 4 million copies_ of Windows 8"

\- "Microsoft is poised to apply a Wal-Mart Effect to PC software"

Metro is indeed where asses are told to go.</comment>


Tesla fatal car crash prompts NTSB investigation - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2018/03/27/tesla-fatal-car-crash-prompts-ntsb-investigation/ <comment><USER2> There's excellent discussion about the accident at the Tesla forum. [1]

The big take-away from their research is that particular exit-only left-lane (which is one of two side by side carpool lanes) is poorly marked, has been consistently gotten worse as changes have been made to the road over the last several years, does not have proper lane markings (missing chevrons in the non-lane), _routinely_ has cars cutting right across the gore point (to the point where there are dash cam videos of almost accidents at that exact point linked in the forum) and, most damning of all, the resettable safety cushion device [2] which protects the gore point had already been hit just recently and there's evidence it _had not been reset_ when it was hit again by the Model X, which meant the X suffered a direct impact with a narrow slice of concrete.

If anything I think NTSB should be investigating _Caltrans_ for this one.

[1] - [https://teslamotorsclub.com/tmc/threads/model-x-crash-on- us-...](https://teslamotorsclub.com/tmc/threads/model-x-crash-on- us-101-mountain-view-ca.111505/)

[2] - [https://teslamotorsclub.com/tmc/posts/2636752/](https://teslamotorsclub.com/tmc/posts/2636752/)

<comment><USER3> I think what's being massively overlooked in many crashes that involved Tesla is the insane inferno caused by the impact on the batteries. I mean, the guy died from the burns from the inferno, not from the actual impact of the crash.

The picture shows the front side of the car completely incinerated. Not to mention, the cleanup of the crash took much longer than it should've because of the EMS had serious concerns about the melted batteries.

Tesla cars are great until you get trapped inside a battery-fueled inferno. Youtube it, those batteries literally create a meteoric fireball.

<comment><USER2> > ...the guy died from the burns from the inferno, not from the actual impact > of the crash.

Incorrect.

"Witnesses were able to extract the driver before the flames posed any threat to him."

Here is VIDEO of the Tesla immediately after the crash, taken by one of the guys who helped pull the driver out of the car:

[https://youtu.be/RlQTeF45aIE](https://youtu.be/RlQTeF45aIE)

The battery is only just starting to ignite at this point after suffering catastrophic damage. (You can see individual cells torn apart). I would say this is significantly safer than a dozen gallons of gas which surely would have exploded in the same scenario.

What IS true is that the aftermath is harder to cleanup because the damaged cells can pose a threat for reigniting.

<comment><USER4> Gasoline under normal conditions doesn't explode, it burns. I'm not denying that a fire was the likely outcome in either case, but neither gasoline nor batteries detonate, they deflagrate. Gasoline in particular, despite what Hollywood would have you believe, isn't like nitroglycerin.

<comment><USER5> Actually I'd sooner blame video games, which often assert that a single bullet to the gas tank door will cause an instant car-flipping fireball.

<comment><USER6> That's not video games; that's Hollywood

<comment><USER5> I sincerely can't remember the last time I saw a hollywood movie where a single bullet could cause a car to fireball.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Looks like TSLA dropped nearly 10% today (including after hours). [https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/TSLA?p=TSLA](https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/TSLA?p=TSLA)

With the Uber accident, I think the public is going to be very wary about over-hyped self driving claims. Tesla is a big offender in that regards where the marketing is that its collision avoidance and lane assistance technology is "Autopilot".

<comment><USER8> This isn't the only thing that has happened, a major hedge fund guy apparently predicted that they'll be bankrupt within four months unless something really big changes because they're spending is totally unsustainable.

<comment><USER9> Their corporate debt also got downgraded to B3 by Moody's today.

<comment><USER10> What's frustrating for me is I don't know how much to trust the ratings agencies any more after their involvement in the 2008 financial crisis. Moody's in particular was fined over $800 million. Admittedly part of that is ignorance of how the agencies have performed overall, but that is such a strong black mark. Trust is one of those things that once lost is hard to regain.

<comment><USER11> Maybe we can trust the bad ratings but not the good ones :P

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> FWIW, previous discussion (17 comments) from several days ago, back when news of the fatal accident was first known: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16669241](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16669241)

edit: Worth pointing out that in the previous Tesla fatality investigated by the NTSB for Autopilot-related issues, the victim was well known as someone who posted videos that showed off his Tesla's Autopilot capability. [0] I don't think anything like that is known about the 38-year-old victim in this week's incident. More details of that accident are here, from the San Jose Merc:

[https://www.mercurynews.com/2018/03/27/ntsb-investigating- fa...](https://www.mercurynews.com/2018/03/27/ntsb-investigating-fatal-crash- on-highway-101-involving-a-tesla/)

> _Friday morning, a San Mateo man died when his Tesla Model X crashed at the > Highway 101 and Highway 85 connector, authorities said. Wei Huang, 38, was > traveling in the carpool lane of southbound 101 around 9:30 a.m. that > morning when he collided with the barrier separating his lane from the > Highway 85 flyover carpool lane, according to the California Highway > Patrol._

[0] [https://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/02/business/joshua-brown- tec...](https://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/02/business/joshua-brown-technology- enthusiast-tested-the-limits-of-his-tesla.html)

</comment><comment><USER13> A post on Tesla's blog about this incident - "What We Know About Last Week's Accident" [https://www.tesla.com/blog/what-we-know-about-last-weeks- acc...](https://www.tesla.com/blog/what-we-know-about-last-weeks-accident)

</comment><comment><USER14> Now with discussion being a lot about the safety of this lane and barrier, here's a thought that could improve road safety for everyone:

With more and more auto-piloting cars on the road calculating the road and make decisions on what's the safest way to continue, wouldn't be it rather easy for this data to flow back? Spots that are often causing trouble for the brains of the autopilot could then be identified easily and be the road, markings, signage, etc improved much quicker. Today's method are most likely a mix of experience and looking at the fatality and accident statistics for last year.

<comment><USER15> It may be a bit of a political problem. "Hey, why are the potholes on my road not getting fixed, but Tesla gets the government to paint new chevrons on some fancy highway"

<comment><USER14> With almost everyone in a SUV potholes become a feature...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> How many other car manufacturers have had accidents investigated by the NTSB?

<comment><USER17> They usually investigate companies whose products have a major impact on safety on the roadways [firestone for the Explorer rollovers, for example]. Anyhow, if there's an extra-ordinary vehicular/transport accident of note, they will likely investigate.

<comment><USER18> NTSB also investigates failures of highway safety equipment, such as the crash barrier in that location. Which may or may not have been missing after a recent crash.

<comment><USER17> Good point as it appears the impact attenuator had not been replaced after having been compressed by what appears to have been a previous accident, if the photos and timelines by witness are correct.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Have we seen similar levels of damage in other cars that carry large battery packs and have been in head-on-collisions?

I dont really have any commentary one way or another about autopilot or the safety of batteries, I'm just thinking there are probably other accidents that have happened in the industry in similar conditions to this.

For example, the Prius and Volt have been on the road for quite some time, and both cars carry relatively large batteries (though certainly not as large as that on a Model X). When involved in head-on collisions do they see such drastic damage/fires?

Just curious. I don't know that its even fair to compare those types of vehicles given the difference in the size of battery.

<comment><USER20> I think the old prius used lead-acid batteries, IE conventional automotive batteries. This significantly reduced the risk of fire, though I don't think that was the main reason for choosing them

<comment><USER21> No, all Prius prior to model year 2017 used NiMh batteries. Some in 2017 were starting to ship with Li-ion batteries.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Why is this a story? Are Tesla cars not allowed to get into accidents?

<comment><USER23> Why are comment about Uber accident different than about Tesla accident. Why are many so biased about the subject. In Uber case everyone was levelheaded about the news and waited for official answer . When Tesla maked an accident there are 50% of post questioning about if it happend , why report and useless armchair reporting about conditions of the road.

<comment> rm_-rf_slash The difference is that the Uber accident was the first _pedestrian_ fatality of an autonomous vehicle, whereas fatal crashes of _drivers_ have been happening for a few years now.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> So, is the NTSB staffed/staffing up to accommodate the massive increase in these types of investigations that are likely to crop up over the next few years?

<comment><USER25> Why would there be a massive increase in these kinds of accidents?

<comment><USER26> I imagine the point the parent was trying to make is that the NTSB will be more interested in autonomy-related accidents than common car crashes, and as more cars with autonomous features are sold there will be more such accidents to investigate, regardless of how good the systems may be.

So today the NTSB probably investigates very, very few car crashes, but that should rise quite a bit.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Perhaps I missed it but can someone explain why the NTSB is getting involved? Was it at the request of some official?

<comment><USER28> The NTSB gets to pick its highway investigations. No one has to call them in. (49 CFR 831.30)

They don't investigate many per year though, so this is something special. I'm guessing they will be investigating these new technology crashes.

<comment><USER29> They might have been waiting for a severe EV battery fire to investigate.

After all, EVs are becoming increasingly common; if fire departments need special training or equipment, now's the time to issue recommendations.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> You know it's something to do with the autopilot when NTSB invokes itself to do a car crash investigation.

<comment><USER18> People are assuming that all over this discussion, but it's not necessarily the case. I drive past that location on a regular basis, usually in the carpool lane and into the left exit. I've seen many drivers cut over from the exiting left lane to the main road, often dangerously. So no, I wouldn't assume autopilot is involved at all.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> If one more incident happens like this within another week, it will be an epidemic and self-driving cars are finished.

<comment><USER32> While I don't disagree that continued bad press could set back consumer confidence in this new technology, I think the wheels are already in motion - self driving vehicles (in some form) are coming, like it or not.

<comment><USER33> Setting back consumer confidence is a good thing: Anyone who thinks automated cars will be ready before 2030 is delusional.

2030 is coming soon, and people have short memories.

<comment><USER34> Waymo is already operating self driving cars without a safety driver moving people around Chandler. So I guess that self driving cars are already here.

<comment><USER35> "The future is already here — it's just not very evenly distributed." -William Gibson

In other words, yes, you will have high-tech enclaves ("works around Chandler because we already know how to drive there"); they will be minor compared to the rest of the world still living in 20th century (if even that). Try driving a SDC outside the population centers - this is literally uncharted territory. "But but but cities are hard, everything else is EASY!" Oh yeah? Once SDVs venture out in the open, we'll see another wave of deaths (beyond the one that begins now): "car drove itself off badly marked road", "car stranded itself and did something profoundly stupid" etc.

Driving with exact maps takes off one of the hard parts; having a point cloud of the entire continent sounds improbable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> This might sound a bit retroactive, but why not require that systems which allow for even temporary autonomous mode have road-embedded systems and real- time comms with neighbors in order to be activational?

That is, do not allow autonomous mode, unless there is an old-school road- embedded autonav system and if there are other vehicles on the road, it be able to realtime comm with at least xx% of its directional and radial neighbors (to add predictability and reduce misinformation.) This in addition to all current guidance systems.

Obvs road-embedded systems do not account for debris, accidents, etc., but know the ideal path and would be backup-of last resort (incapacitated operator, other systems down). Real-time comms with neighbors surfaces good information and buries stale or inaccurate info.

<comment><USER36> Because then we would never have autonomous cars

<comment><USER17> I would contend that. Dissemination (even distribution) might be slower, but it could evolve in specialized local areas (large campuses, special transit corridors, etc.) and slowly but safely expand outside those areas.

<comment><USER18> Given that you don't have any idea if autopilot was involved in this accident, why are you calling for anything to change? Shouldn't you wait until a few more facts are known?

<comment><USER17> That's true with regard to this incident. But there are the incidents by other developers of the technologies where the systems have proven at fault.

What I'm saying is that given that the technology has not yet proven itself in demanding scenarios, we may ask for more rigorous requirements if this is to become the default navigation mode of the future (no human intervention).

Do we have data on how many times people have had to avert an incident that wasn't reported (my autonav almost crashed me, but I took over)? If we had public data, we could make some kind of assessment but even then, if they proved good, we could make them even better yet with the additional support/failsafe systems.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Inside the group chats where people pump and dump cryptocurrency - <AUTHOR> https://theoutline.com/post/3074/inside-the-group-chats-where-people-pump-and-dump-cryptocurrency <comment><USER2> This is not legal, right? I hope these guys are using secure chat-rooms because all you need is the SEC to start knocking on their door.

([https://www.barrons.com/articles/touts-used-seekingalpha- oth...](https://www.barrons.com/articles/touts-used-seekingalpha-other-sites- to-pump-and-dump-stocks-sec-1491933629))</comment>


Straighter Teeth by Mail - <AUTHOR> http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/02/01/a-trip-to-the-mail-box-not-the-orthodontist/ <comment><USER2> The thing that bothers me is things like this: "the American Association of Orthodontists, a trade group, warned consumers against moving teeth without an initial exam and continuing supervision by an orthodontist. "Our concern is that patients who don't see an orthodontist for regular checkups and/or for a complete diagnosis are more likely to be harmed," said Dr. Rolf Behrents, a spokesman for the association"

Everyone knows that visiting a dentist is better than not visiting a dentist. Same thing for doctors. Industry groups insisting that people visit health professionals seem oblivious to the reasons that people don't (or haven't) visited the professionals: cost.

If someone doesn't have complete dental coverage and must front the cost out of pocket, the 6k for braces can be catastrophic. Thank goodness there are cheaper alternatives. Even if they aren't a complete solution (can't twist teeth, or whatever) the fact that some people can get their problems fixed without going deep into debt is a good thing.

<comment><USER3> The other reason people don't see these professionals is time, and under the Australian medicare system at least, there's a problematic time/cost tradeoff system.

My last visit to a doctor went like something like this (it's been a while, excuse any slight irregularities):

1\. Take a day off at your own expense to see the doctor

2\. Submit a claim to medicare

3\. Get called into medicare office because my medicare card has expired (???). Medicare is only open 9:30-4:30 weekdays

4\. Take a day off to see Medicare and get issued a new card with exactly the same number on it.

5\. Resubmit claim

6\. Receive a cheque in the mail several weeks later addressed to the doctor, along with instructions to give it to the doctor before tomorrow

7\. Have to take a day off to get it to the doctor because the post won't be that fast.

Three days of lost time and money, it would have been cheaper not to claim the value of the consult.

I don't see doctors often.

<comment><USER4> Go to a doctor which bulk bills and you wont have to pay anything.

My experience: Call doctor at 9am to book appointment. Walk into medical center at 1pm. See doctor. Sign form on my way out to say I received treatment.

I didn't have to open my wallet once.

Edit: Also, why didn't you use sick leave?

<comment><USER3> Contractor.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I would NOT recommend these or invisalign to anyone. I had invisalign and while it's great at pushing teeth closer or further apart, the aligners cannot twist or pull teeth into position, and it's unnecessarily painful. You can get traditional braces for the same cost and get your "perfect smile" results with less pain.

Why are they painful? Because every time you "conveniently" take them off to "eat or brush your teeth" your teeth are loose and moving them around hurts like hell when brushing or eating. Snapping the braces back on and they'll hurt like hell again for about an hour until the braces stabilize them and they start settling again.

It was a huge waste of money, and now I'm saving up to get traditional braces. My teeth aren't even all that crooked, traditional braces can straighten mine out in less than a year.

<comment><USER6> Just so you know, traditional braces hurt like hell for a day or two after each appointment, sometimes longer. They are also uncomfortable the entire time.

<comment><USER7> I'm 29 and got standard metal braces 5 months ago (top and bottom teeth). My bottom teeth are particularly messed up

Maybe it's different for others, but I strongly disagree about the pain. It's only painful up to a few days after having wires adjusted or installed, and even then I wouldn't call it painful -- just soreness. My dentist recommended Tylenol but I never had to take it, because the pain wasn't that bad. Currently day to day I barely notice I have braces on. The only real annoyance is eating food, as food easily becomes stuck in your braces. Investment in a water flosser, like the Waterpik, is highly recommended, as well brushing after every meal -- including lunch.

My braces cost $5k (my own pocket) and I pay monthly. I have to wear braces for two years, but I foresee no issues because it's been a breeze so far wearing them. I do wish I got them earlier, and suggest anyone thinking about it to get them sooner than later.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Something I've chatted to about with fellow UK folk occasionally (insert joke about "English teeth" here) is how, from our perspective some USA folk's teeth seem to cross the uncanny valley in the wrong direction.

They're _so_ white and _so_ even they look false to our eyes.

<comment><USER9> The whitening can be over the top, but have you seen a young person with crooked teeth? I feel my 'characteristic' smile really ages me :).

<comment><USER8> Define 'crooked" ;) I certainly see kids in the EU with teeth that would be "corrected" in the US. I get the impression that the aesthetics vs clinical need / risk line is drawn differently.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I had braces for six years, and if I had to get my teeth straightened today, I would probably go this route.

Don't forget, braces mean:

\- More cost \- Monthly trips to the orthodontist

The physical act of having to go to the orthodontist every month for years costs you time and money in terms of gas, parking, etc, not to mention the time cost. Think of your schedule today. Can you fit in another 2-3 hour monthly appointment? You probably can, but it will probably be at the expense of another activity you'd probably rather be doing.

Emergency maintenance is sometimes needed (the braces can get damaged from accidents, sports, etc.)

Also, braces are UGLY.

Wow, I wish this was around when I needed braces.

<comment><USER11> It astounds me that in all the years of braces being in use they haven't found a way to make them less ugly. It's like they're frozen in time.

<comment><USER12> Virtually everybody I know who's had braces on their teeth had them when they were 13, 14, 15 years old - presumably at that point your adult teeth are through but they (and you!) are still new enough to be flexible.

So there's probably not, historically, been much demand. The parents don't want to spend extra on making the stuff look nice, so they just tell their children to put up with it. And their children don't really have another option, so they put up with it. "Character-building" was the stock phrase my school teachers and parents would use for stuff like this.

I'm sure I've seen people with whitened fixed braces (perhaps made out of plastic rather than metal?), so clearly there have been at least some attempts to make them look less ugly - but I'm not sure it represents a huge improvement. If that costs extra, it's not great value.

<comment><USER13> Not sure about the flexible thing. Every month after seeing the orthodontist I spent two or three days laying in bed for hours crying, unable to eat. The pressure was awful, but mostly only when I had the time to focus on it.

<comment><USER14> Yep. My dentist keeps mentioning the need for braces for my children, despite one being age 8 at the time. I hated having my braces, and my teeth ended up shifting at a later age anyways. The pain was terrific, and the idea of putting my kids through that when they don't even have all their adult teeth seems like the worst of scams. Makes me wonder if my dentist gets a referral fee from the orthodontist.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> My dad's an orthodontist. He's seen good results with Invisalign (and bad) but says that it has a relatively small sweet spot. He's skeptical of the braces- by-mail approach for anything other than the simplest cases and the most conscientious patients.

> Dr. Son Tran, the creator of CrystalBraces and a Dallas dentist who is the > sole reviewer

Many people don't know that in the US general dentists (GPs) can practice most specialties without advanced training, while specialists (orthodontists, oral surgeons, prosthodontists, etc.) must complete an accredited program/residency after dental school and limit their practice to their chosen specialty.

Invisalign/Align Tech is in San Jose, btw.

</comment><comment><USER16> Would rather that society stop obsessing over having perfectly straight teeth. If they are otherwise healthy, why spend that money and go through the painful experience of straightening your teeth. It's entirely cultural (learned) to expect them to be perfect. Some cultures don't care (though in this globalized world, every culture is gradually expecting it).

<comment><USER17> Symmetry is not cultural but part of our genetics, some cultures care less because they have more important issues when looking at attractiveness like food and shelter security.

Should burns victim who are healthy be able to get plastic surgery. Most people would think so.

Genetic issues is no different to anything else that cause unusual looks.

Where does it go from acceptable i.e. burns to the face, to it really shouldn't matter i.e. perhaps breast enlargement from average to larger than average, is hard to say.

But I have no problem with a society where no one has looks that make them stand out in a negative way that they don't wish to have.

<comment><USER16> I don't know if symmetry is really that ingrained in our dna as necessary for beauty. Most people part their hair to a side (rather than down the middle). There are few things cuter than a kid who smiles to reveal a missing tooth on one side. And what about dimples? A dimple on one side is nice but having them on both sides would look odd.

A lot of that is just what we are used to seeing. And as others have commented, people in places like the UK often see teeth that are too perfect as artificial looking.

<comment><USER18> There's a clear difference between sexual attraction and the cuteness of a kid.

<comment><USER16> What? We're not talking about sexual attraction. What do you think beauty means?

<comment><USER18> In context of people it means sexual attraction.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I had a friend in high school who was kind of gung-ho and claimed to have fixed a misaligned tooth by applying pressure with his finger in the desired direction for an hour every night before going to bed. According to him, this worked. I wonder if that is possible or if the teeth would undo the progress in the other 23 hours.

</comment><comment><USER20> A few months ago, I was thinking about the opportunity to use 3d printing/imaging to drastically lower the cost of these types of devices. Ultimately the biggest hurdle is going to be getting an extremely accurate scan (not sure if you could do some combination of using dental x-rays, along with 3d imaging tech from mobile cameras to build the mouth model for each customer).

Part of the solution could be in home try-on (similar to Warby Parker). Ie send 10-20 sets of 3d printed retainers, all slightly different but potential fits. The customer selects which one fits best & the full set is based on that starting model. Since you're not actually creating molds to base the retainers on, the cost of each slightly different model should be pennies.

Anyway, that's about as far as I got... then I went back to building enterprise software.

<comment><USER21> I made an entire workflow with open source tools and materials that cost less than $100.

Here it is: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OfjuUN0E5yc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OfjuUN0E5yc)

Like you said, the limiting factor is the extremely accurate scan. My workflow is not rigorous, just a proof-of-concept until the printing and scanning tech comes around.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Optometrists aren't too happy about Warby Parker either. This seems like the Internet being the Internet for the benefit of the consumer.

<comment><USER23> Optometrists derive significant revenue from the sales of lenses and frames. If the eye exam is accurate, where you buy your glasses is interchangeable.

Orthodontics, on the other hand, seem very much to me to require a different relationship with the dental professional. I'm not so sure the "Warby Parker for teeth" notion is accurate here, nor desirable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Before braces, I had to undergo two upper jaw surgeries (1st was a SARPE, 2nd was a Lefort I Osteotomy). Needed to widen my upper bite, then detach and pull the entire upper jaw (maxilla) forward 5mm. Only then could the braces align my teeth.

The surgeries were under my medical insurance, the braces were dental.

Search YouTube for SARPE...it's not for the squeamish.

</comment><comment><USER25> I'm going to an orthodontist tomorrow for a consultation. The extra few thousand are well worth it in my opinion to get it done right without potentially damaging my teeth.

</comment><comment><USER26> What is needed is more orthodontists, increase supply.

</comment><comment><USER27> sleepmedx inc

</comment><comment><USER28> I would try this product for one simple reason: I care about my health more than anyone else possibly could. Frankly, I don't trust that a dentist would do a better job at casting the mold than me.

<comment><USER29> This is absurd. I think you really underestimate the intensity of training that dentists must undergo, at least in the US. Dental school is just as rigorous and all-consuming as medical school.

There are reasons to advocate for the sort of DIY kit discussed in the article -- cost and time being the main ones. But thinking that you are somehow going to be more proficient at this sort of thing than a _very_ extensively trained orthodontist is not one of them.</comment></comment>


Show HN: OpenAPT first release – Automate your APT repositories layouts - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/ALLOcloud/OpenAPT <comment><USER2> This looks awesome. I'll need to try this out. I've used aptly to create repos before. Here are my ansible scripts:

[https://github.com/BigSense/vSense/blob/master/ansible/roles...](https://github.com/BigSense/vSense/blob/master/ansible/roles/repo/tasks/apt.yml)

[https://github.com/BigSense/vSense/blob/master/ansible/roles...](https://github.com/BigSense/vSense/blob/master/ansible/roles/repo/templates/aptly.conf.j2)

Publishing was kinda a nightmare:

[https://github.com/BigSense/vSense/blob/master/ansible/roles...](https://github.com/BigSense/vSense/blob/master/ansible/roles/build/templates/ltsense.jenkins.xml.j2#L53)

It's still using the very old Jenkins pipelines (the server is gone now so none of that even works) and a config management system that's long dead. I desperately need to rewrite it and this looks like a good starting point for at least the deb repos!

<comment><AUTHOR> Managing, organising and publishing APT repositories became a nightmare for us as well. That's why OpenAPT is alive.

It moves APT management from script paradigm to state description paradigm. Indeed with OpenAPT, you don't have to write command lines anymore but instead you describe the state you want to achieve. Just like Ansible does.

Btw, it's a brand-new project. If documentation is lacking, feel free to open issue(s). We will be happy to help you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Nice!

A few years ago a coworker wrote a similar thing ([https://github.com/queeno/aptlify](https://github.com/queeno/aptlify)).

Unfortunately it seems to be abandoned at this point, so I do hope your project gets the tracktion it needs!

</comment><comment><USER4> My brain parses all caps 'APT' as 'advanced persistent threat'.

In regards to the package manager, doesn't OpenAPT imply a closed apt? Is that a thing?

<comment><AUTHOR> What do you mean by "closed apt" ?

<comment><USER4> Exactly.

What is meant by "OpenAPT?"?

<comment><AUTHOR> Understood! The name is inspired by "Open __* " projects. For instance OpenAPI. The goal of this project is first to design a specification format for APT repositories like OpenAPI is doing for HTTP APIs.

I have to admit that it is not the best name ever. I'm "open" to any better proposal. Feel free to open an issue with the best meaningful name idea you have!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I think most people would be better off abandoning Apt or RPM and use containers, Snap, AppImage or switch to a distro like Arch/Alpine.

<comment><USER6> This notion is completely upside-down.

Distro packaging means that global teams of developers are backporting bug and security fixes all day, every day, and running them through massive CI systems that have been in existence for decades.

Containers are great for scaling, and terrible for software distribution. Done right, they need to be rebuilt daily to pick up the latest fixes in the underlying OS.

Snap and AppImage mean you're on the hook for care and feeding of every library you bring in, yourself.

Rolling distros mean that you need a staff to integrate all the changes that are happening with no cadence other than "apparently today's update broke X". More likely, it would be a team dedicated to "apparently Y has been broken for a week, we found the problem, we're trying to upstream it, but now service X relies on the new functionality, so we're doing a conference call with them tomorrow to find out if they can roll back that change."

<comment><USER5> > Distro packaging means that global teams of developers are backporting bug > and security fixes all day, every day, and running them through massive CI > systems that have been in existence for decades.

I said nothing against distros, but I said I preferred Alpine/Arch. If you look for these massive CI systems, they don't exist for any retail-based distro like Ubuntu/RHEL. Why would you even need to backport fixes if you have a CI system that builds from source? The only systems doing massive CI are distros like Arch/Alpine/Void/etc because there package manager is designed with it in mind. Apt is better than RPM, but it still has shortfalls when it comes to creating and maintaining packages.

> Containers are great for scaling, and terrible for software distribution. > Done right, they need to be rebuilt daily to pick up the latest fixes in the > underlying OS.

That isn't called building right. If your package has that many dependencies, then you could just bind mount the tool. No need to rebuild the container at all, however most of the time you don't need to rebuild that often, especially for Go.

> Snap and AppImage mean you're on the hook for care and feeding of every > library you bring in, yourself.

They have a simple YAML setting that does this for you

> Rolling distros mean that you need a staff to integrate all the changes that > are happening with no cadence other than "apparently today's update broke > X". More likely, it would be a team dedicated to "apparently Y has been > broken for a week, we found the problem, we're trying to upstream it, but > now service X relies on the new functionality, so we're doing a conference > call with them tomorrow to find out if they can roll back that change."

Rolling distros doesn't require that you upgrade a package, and I've never had a problem rolling back using my cached repo or one of the mirrors that caches packages daily.

<comment><USER6> Whoosh.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Blackberry Classic and Blackberry Passport, Fly or Die? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> What?</comment>


PG on Y Combinator - <AUTHOR> http://dondodge.typepad.com/the_next_big_thing/2007/08/paul-graham-on-.html aul is a great guy and has built a huge following in the startup community. I have a lot of respect for him and what he has done. Y Combinator is a great story. Paul agreed to share some details with me. Here it is live and uncut. <comment><USER2> Other one you can't talk about == Parakey?

<comment><USER3> Wasn't there some article somewhere that mentioned a rumor about textpayme getting bought by amazon?

<comment><USER4> I haven't heard that, but it would make sense, considering Amazon's release of the Flexible Payment Service.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> hmmm? PG's a serial entrepreneur? really? no disrespect meant but really?

EDIT:saw speling mistakes

<comment><USER6> Depends whether you count YC as a startup. It is in some ways, isn't in others.

<comment><USER4> Why does it matter? I don't think entrepreneur implies startup. Someone who starts a restaurant and then a dry cleaner and then a hair salon is still a serial entrepreneur.

<comment><USER7> Entrepreneur implies starting a business. All startups are businesses. But not all businesses are startups.

A start-up differs from a business because it is intended to scale really quickly. That's what the 5 million in VC cash is for.

<comment><USER4> Yes, I thought an understanding of all of the above was implicit in my post. Did you mean to dispute something I said, or just clarify my point?

<comment><USER7> I'm sorry, I misread your post ... so you can take my post as a clarification. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> "We have no idea if it will work." Those are always the most exciting ventures.</comment>


'I don't even know HOW': Some Oregonians panic about new self-service gas law - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2018/01/03/i-dont-even-know-how-some-oregonians-panic-about-new-self-service-gas-law/?tid=pm_pop&utm_term=.59a05b36e011 <comment><USER2> When visiting cousins or friends in the Portland area I always found myself having to slink back into my car, closing my half-cocked door in the process, so I could uncomfortably wait for my tank to be filled for me. I could never remember that "in Oregon, I legally shall need help at the gas pump". I sometimes wondered at what point of forgetfulness I'd get cited or fined. Once I fancied that there was a union of gas pumpers ready for action at the slightest provocation, held in check only by the State's tourism department.

I'd be interested in learning why//how such things came into place.</comment>


Macros That Work Together: Comp-Time Bindings, Partial Expansion (2012) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://www.cs.utah.edu/plt/publications/jfp12-draft-fcdf.pdf <comment><USER2> Perfect timing. Scheme macros is one of the things I'm currently interested in :)

<comment><USER3> Syntax case is nice and all that, but having implemented a looping system very inspired (as in "mostly compatible) by racket's for loops I can say that the racket-specific syntax-parse is probably my favourite invention since the washing machine.

You get so much for free, and it makes hard things in syntax case a lot easier.</comment></comment>


Ask YC: Is this a bug in hacker news? Half rendered pages - <AUTHOR> http://omgponi.es/img/47c2247427f64c472051fa7a7585b044.png

<comment><USER2> news.yc gets slower and flakier all the time. i suppose it's not up to the ever-increasing load.

i've seen pg post about some process he's got that automatically restarts the server after it crashes. not to be snarky or anything, but wouldn't it be a better solution to deploy a server that doesn't crash?

i've always worried that the quality of this site would gradually decline to the point where it would be unusable. now it looks like the more likely outcome is that the server will get so overloaded that it's unusable.

i know this is a free site, and you get what you pay for, etc, but i'd hate to see it die because it really needs a rewrite in some language more robust than arc/lisp. i'm just guessing, but i think pg would rather see the site die than have that happen.

</comment><comment><USER3> If you'll recall PG made his money writing what became Yahoo Shops, one of the largest retailers for individual vendors before Amazon and Ebay. He knows how to program.

The server is dealing with increasing pageloads and processing as it calculates karma and ranking of stories.

I think it is unlikely an issue with Arc rather than an issue due to server load. Were it an issue with the coding we would have seen this issue in the past year, perhaps not as frequently but it still would have been noticed.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I've had item pages render "half" the content - eg, to the line below the subtext table row for the story heading.

Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.5; en-GB; rv:126.96.36.199) Gecko/2008120121 Firefox/3.0.5 I've disabled Adblocker Pro & I can't believe it'd be my greasemonkey script. Reloading does nada.

When I view the story in another browser (eg, 10.5.6 Leopard) it just loads the top menu bar.

This story: <http://is.gd/hmZX>

<comment><USER4> I've had this problem too - maybe arc isn't quite ready for primetime :-)</comment></comment>


Hillary Clinton almost ran for president on a universal basic income - <AUTHOR> https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/9/12/16296532/hillary-clinton-universal-basic-income-alaska-for-america-peter-barnes <comment><USER2> Key passage: _" Unfortunately, we couldn't make the numbers work. To provide a meaningful dividend each year to every citizen, you'd have to raise enormous sums of money, and that would either mean a lot of new taxes or cannibalizing other important programs. We decided it was exciting but not realistic, and left it on the shelf."_

<comment><USER3> Don't most of the advocates of Universal Basic Income agree with the premise of "cannibilizing other important programs"? I tend to associate UBI with "what you get if you challenge a Libertarian to provide welfare", as it is a single primitive that for some level of squinting replaces large numbers of more specific programs.

<comment><USER4> I'm running out of things that the progressives want the government to pay for without any logic and mathematics behind it:

1.) College 2.) Healthcare 3.) Abortion 4.) UBI

Why not just throw the entire enchilada out there and just have them pay for everything? If giving people money allows for economic growth, then wouldn't it make sense to just give everyone unlimited amount of money. Why stop at X when you can go for Y.

<comment><USER5> 1,2& 3 is already free is most countries and even in developing countries like India. Why are Americans so averse to universal health coverage?

<comment><USER4> They aren't against it, they are against the incompetent government that will oversee it.

<comment><USER6> You've just moved the goalposts. Your original comment said:

> I'm running out of things that the progressives want the government to pay > for without any logic and mathematics behind it

The logic behind the first three as presented is "most countries already do this," along with the implication (justified, in my opinion) that it works out well for their citizens.

So why wouldn't it be the same in the USA? Is our government uniquely incapable of this? Is it that the model of these other countries is unsustainable? Is it that we have a huge propaganda machine in place that is convincing many of our citizens to conclude without serious and informed consideration that it shouldn't be the role of our government to provide these things? Or is it some other option?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I like how the Swiss National Bank gives dividends to the cantons.

Its shares are also publicly traded.

I really like that kind of interaction with the government and could support something like that in the United States, more so than illiquid municipal bonds or boring treasuries.

The Federal Reserve makes a great profit with its unprecedented position and influence in the global markets, and should be able to do this with greater efficacy than the Swiss National Bank. It could result in an avenue to accomplish universal basic income at state or municipal levels or through a variety of other programs that are recipients of FRB payouts.

</comment><comment><USER8> Sounds to me like they weren't willing to really commit to the idea of basic income. For a country the size of America, you can't have any meaningful basic income just by taxing a few specific activities. If you really believe in the idea, you have to go whole-hog and fund it with taxes on the top 1%, 10% and 25%.

There are numerous policies which we've pursued in the past few decades which have paid enormous dividends for the top 1% and 10%, policies such as free trade, immigration and the transition away from manufacturing and towards specialized services. These policies have certainly boosted aggregate GDP and average incomes, but most of the benefits have not trickled down to the median/lower-middle-class Americans.

Unless we take more forceful action soon, reactionary populists like Trump are only going to keep getting more power, and before long, we're going to see a clampdown on free-trade, immigration and technological innovation. We desperately need a program like basic income, that taxes the winners in the economy and provides for those being left behind, so that everyone has a reason to cheer for and participate in national GDP growth. Yes, this means more taxes on people like you and me, but it's well worth it to prevent a populist revolt.

<comment><USER9> 60% of Democrats voting on a defense budget increase [1] more than double the amount Trump proposed? Of course, insta approval, zero public interest.

You want to lift Americans out of poverty or provide education? Ridiculous pie in the sky.

[1] [https://www.forbes.com/sites/eriksherman/2017/07/14/most- hou...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/eriksherman/2017/07/14/most-house- democrats-just-voted-for-a-defense-budget-far-bigger-than- trumps/#e7df7db6ea0e)

<comment><USER8> > _" For the 2017 fiscal year that ends on September 30, the Obama budget > called for $582.7 billion, which included a base budget of $523.9 billion > and the "overseas contingency operations (OCO) budget" of $58.8 billion. The > Trump administration ... requested $574.5 billion in base budget and $64.6 > billion in OCO for a total of $639.1 billion... Today, the House passed a > $696.5 billion defense bill that makes Trump's look positively reasonable in > comparison"_

The budget increase was ~$110B. Which comes out to ~$360/year for each American citizen. I'm all in favor of cutting military funding, but that's not going to generate nearly enough revenue to fund a meaningful basic-income program.

<comment><USER9> Sorry, it was an overly snarky comment.

I don't think any basic income proponents are suggesting that it be funded as a purely net-additive expense on the budget. I wasn't necessarily suggesting that we can get basic income while keeping all existing social welfare by cutting other non social welfare related expenses.

I'm just saying that a more equitable amount of public interest in a Pentagon that 'lost' 6.5 trillion in funny accounting would be helpful to basic income too, in a supplemental way. I didn't mean to let it exclude discussions on a 'primary' way of funding basic income on the budget.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Instead Hillary Clinton ran on a platform of "it's not realistic" in the primaries, and I don't even know what in the general. "I'm with her" is the most egocentric slogan anyone could have come up with...

<comment><USER11> Apparently she revealed in her book that she was frustrated by Bernie's one- upping her at every turn. We'll do what she said, but have more of it, or make even better. Offer more.

She didn't want to go down the rabbit hole cuz soon as you say I'll match their ideas, they'd just come back with "now with more and improved [promise].

<comment><USER12> I did not see that at all, I did see Sanders focused on income and wealth inequality. IDK what HRC focused on her campaign was a cluster of womans stuff and race stuff

<comment><USER11> Basically this:

>Hillary Clinton complains that her chief opponent in the primaries, Bernie Sanders, consistently undercut her by one-upping her "bold" and "ambitious" proposals without explaining how his policies would work.<

[http://reason.com/blog/2017/09/05/hillary-clinton- complains-...](http://reason.com/blog/2017/09/05/hillary-clinton-complains- about-bernie-s)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Swipe-li a three pane swipeable list element (angularJS directive) - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/winkerVSbecks/swipe-li

<comment><USER2> Very cool, but a bit dependency-heavy. Is it possible to include only parts of Modernizr, for example?

<comment><AUTHOR> Modernizr is just for older browsers. If you don't care about supporting older browsers or are building for mobile then you can get rid of it.</comment></comment>


YC Meetup in SF next week? - <AUTHOR>

I'm a New York based Rails hacker in town to talk to a bunch of startups and to check out the scene in SF/Mountain View and was wondering if like minded folks wanted to get together for a meetup next week (I'm there between 2/20 - 2/27)<p>I'm completely new to the west coast so ideas on where and when would be greatly appreciated! A bar or some equally social setting should work. <comment><USER2> You're more then welcome to stop by the Engine Yard offices if you wanted to. We will be having a hack night on tuesday ~8:30pm. We're located at 82 South Park St.</comment>


How to Program a Quantum Computer [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4fDAswMwU28 <comment><USER2> If you want to know the current (or at least 2016) state of actually running an algorithm on a real quantum computer then this video is great [https://vimeo.com/180284417](https://vimeo.com/180284417) It's about using a quantum computer to perform supersampling / anti-aliasing

</comment><comment><USER3> Nice little intro. Spends a lot of time on the poor kid that died :( The mention of pyQuil is a great jumping-off-point—It was great to see specific examples of real-world implementations, however simple.</comment>


Justices Weigh Issue of Patents on Human Genes - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/15/business/as-court-considers-gene-patents-case-may-overlook-relevant-issues.html

<comment><AUTHOR> More discussion of the same topic is here [1], but I felt the New York Times version gave a more thorough treatment. (The rt.com version appears to have been cobbled together secondarily by a person reading a few different sources.)

1 = <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5548048></comment>


Ask HN: Why not harness Gym energy? - <AUTHOR> Why not make machines through which workout is converted to electricity and enters the grid?<p>It seems it will help balance the renewable energy on grid. <comment><USER2> Humans don't produce a lot of usable energy that way. Let's say you burn 300 Cal riding that stationary bike for 30 minutes. That's barely 0.3 kWh. Most of that energy you burned is just heat. The rest is minuscule. After subtracting inefficiencies of the alternator, and transformers, and all the rest of the hardware required to convert human power into electrical power... you're not left with much. It would take far, far longer than the lifespan of the exercise equipment to pay for the operation.

And, most modern cardio equipment _consumes_ more energy as electricity than the user of the equipment is producing.

</comment><comment><USER3> There is a gym chain in the Chicago named Eco Gym[0] that uses solar and human power to power their gyms.

[0] [https://www.ecogymworldwide.com/](https://www.ecogymworldwide.com/)

<comment><USER4> At that point it is more a PR play than really reusing the energy.

<comment><USER5> Having not read anything about it. Why is it just PR? What energy does a gym need? Solar and Homan power should be more then enough to power a few LED lights and a fridge or something.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Because we are talking about a negligible amount of energy.

It would take more energy to build, install and maintain the equipment that would be able to do that.

</comment><comment><USER6> I've always wondered why we can't do more with the kinetic energy of the ocean. I know there are many projects and tidal energy companies. But considering the scale of the ocean, waves, and so on, I've always been interested to know why we haven't cracked it at a large scale.

<comment><USER7> The huge amount of energy in ocean waves and currents, compared to air (water is about 800 times as heavy as air) also is a challenge. It destroys anything that isn't built extremely sturdy.

And that's just water. Sea water is salty. It destroys steel and electronics even if it isn't hitting it.

<comment><USER6> Ah yes makes sense, it seems solar, then wind, would be easier to harness. I just look at the ocean and see all that potential in the waves...!</comment></comment></comment>


Valve-Based 3-D Printer for Human Embryonic Stem Cells - <AUTHOR> http://iopscience.iop.org/1758-5090/5/1/015013/article

<comment><AUTHOR> This link is to the (non-paywall) original peer-reviewed article, which isn't cited in any of the pop-sci blurbs I've seen on this.</comment>


Envolve's (YCS11) first year: surviving arson attacks and a 7.0 earthquake - <AUTHOR> https://www.envolve.com/blog/2011/01/were-glad-2010-is-over-hello-2011/

<comment><USER2> Here we just posted our 2011 story and Anand shares our 2010 one. I guess it is a little more out-of-the-ordinary : )

<comment><AUTHOR> Just shows how far you came before making it to YC! Makes your stunning success in 2011 all the sweeter.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> This story blew my mind. Love the perseverance!</comment>


Elon Musk: "Why Owen Thomas Is Silicon Valley's Jayson Blair" - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2010/07/11/elon-musk-why-owen-thomas-is-silicon-valleys-jayson-blair/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Techcrunch+%28TechCrunch%29 <comment><USER2> Elon, it's lonely at the top but it's jam-packed at the bottom. I would recommend that now that you've set the record straight, you no longer publicly respond to this individual, even if his continued insults and biased reporting negatively impact you or your company. Your performance speaks for itself.

This individual thrives on your energy and your attention. Let him rot. I'm sure he wasn't the first and he won't be the last.</comment>


Ask HN: Decided to start a business and regret later. Share your story. - <AUTHOR>

There is a lot of stories about employed professinals that quit stable job to start a business. Most of these stories are told by successful enterpreners so survivorship bias takes place. It would be nice to get more balanced view. Whould you share not so successful stories. Not about failed first idea or ideas but have got a lot of experience and don't regret anything but rather "decided to start a business lost a lot a lot of money/health have got family problems and could not find decent job after that" <comment><USER2> Not a startup. No bankruptcy or anything. Wife & I liked this company Goth Gift Baskets that used to advertise in Gothic Beauty magazine. One issue had an ad saying they were selling the business. We bought the name, website, inventory, and customer list for around $5000, with the intent of starting a side business & maybe growing it into something larger. We expected higher- quality merchandise, but ended up with boxes of plastic spiders and cheap closeout Halloween jewelry. The boxes were piled up in our spare bedroom and were soon joined by boxes of higher-end merchandise so our baskets were more appealing.

We over-estimated the appeal of "goth" in the mid-2000s. There was still a good turnout at goth events in Chicago, but it was mostly adults who liked to dress up on the weekends for old-time's sake, but didn't identify as goths in everyday life anymore. We paid for tables at concerts, hearse shows, and fan conventions, and usually didn't make enough to cover the table. At least the music was good. At one point we pulled up the Seattle Goth site hoping to do a sponsorship deal with them, and their home page was just a picture of Fonzie on waterskis.

There was still a decent-sized market of younger goths & "emos", but they didn't have the money for a $25 gift basket of jewelry, incense, candles, and such…and THEN shipping on top of that. We were told to offer something closer to $10 shipped, but that barely covered the cost of an empty basket, shipping materials, and postage with a tiny profit.

Twilight was pretty big, but our vampires didn't sparkle. We put together a Browncoat basket with a complete set of Firefly action figures and assorted other stuff…even had custom marketing materials made to distribute at fan conventions for it. Didn't sell a single one.

Magazine advertising was expensive, and resulted in zero orders. Emailing our customer list a 20% discount code every couple months resulted in 2 orders in three years. We were flooded with emails from events & meetups wanting us to donate baskets for raffle prizes, which we could at least write-off on our taxes & get some publicity for. No sales ever came of these sponsorship deals, but we did get some sweet thank-you letters.

The last year we were in business, we were hit with a $200 chargeback. We asked Paypal if they could validate the address or something on that big of an order, and they said there was nothing they could do. We took the risk, and lost the money, merchandise, and shipping. That one incident cancelled out our entire profit for the year.

We donated all the remaining merchandise to charity & took a write-off just so we could get our spare bedroom back (it became my "man cave"/computer museum). Our time is better spent volunteering if we're not going to make any money anyway.

Again, no huge crisis, no health problems. But, a lot of extra stress, a couple thousand bucks wasted on top of what we paid for the company, and an entire room our our house tied up for 3 years and nothing to show for it.

Edit: Oh yeah, let's not forget the month I got a bill from my hosting company for extra bandwidth because a picture of me from the site ranked high for "goth" in Google Images and people were hot-linking it in forum posts all over the place going "goths are so stupid. look at this guy he thinks he's spooky ooooh".

<comment><USER3> You should have added some text point to your website in that hot linked image. If they are hotlinking your stuff its ok to put some advertisment in it. Probably would not have saved the business. Thanks for your honest story

<comment><USER2> I actually did just that. Gave it a custom discount code for 20% off and got zero orders. The kind of people who get their fun from making fun of other people's pictures on a gaming forum aren't the kind of people with $25-40 to spend on a gift basket for a friend or family member.

In fact, I think that was the biggest flaw in the business. "Goths" in general had no problem spending $200 on a new black dress from the vendor next to us, but balked at a $45 gift arrangement with etched goblets and candle holders. Expensive gifts are their own niche, and really need to be more general- purpose. $10-15 really was the sweet spot for a gift, but the quality would have suffered.

Another issue was payment processing. Our margins were thinner than we were comfortable with, so we didn't want the added expense of a proper merchant account & something like authorize.net. There wasn't anything like Square yet, so we used Paypal Checkout. Our analytics showed something like a quarter of checkouts were abandoned at the point where we redirected to Paypal.

My goal was to grow this into the "CafePress of gifting" where people could build their own gift arrangements from a selection of general & niche items: balloons, teddy bears, whips & chains...a bunch of things to choose from. And then they could sell their creations in their own branded store for a percentage of the price. I should have accelerated that plan, but it might have required outside funding which I wasn't ready for.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Free.TV

I created the world's first DVR in 1998. I was so excited about it, I convinced my friends to join my startup. It was basically Tivo plus the Free PC and internet model.

I was able to raise some funds from friends and family, but we all agreed to take less salary and have stock instead. We all worked hard, but the dot com bomb came along and killed all advertising partnerships.

I was lucky enough that I was able to wind down gently - the company did not go bankrupt. It took years, but I was able to pay back all my friends that invested in Free.TV, but I personally lost hundereds of thousands of dollars.

I learned a lot, but this set me back 10 years in my career and retirement. However, it did help me get the next level working for other companies. It was very stressful and hurt my marriage, but my wife stood by me and I know she is the one for me.

I still love startups for today but now that I am older, I wonder if I am now in the famous "ageism" problem in SV. I still have great ideas and want to change the world - just need another VC to take another chance in me.

</comment><comment><USER5> Failed 3 times at some of your more traditional ideas (think social media B2B or the like), relatively successful with freelancing. This was in the midwest,

That being said, I started the freelancing after dropping out of college in my 3rd year. After that, I metaphorically fell down some steps, through a concrete floor, got back up and decided to do stuff with data.

3 years later I'm backpacking in the valley doing sales AND implementing crazy deep learning data tech.

It seriously just takes persistence. Screw the naysayers. You SHOULD listen to criticism and consider it objectively though. Making money is a good guiding compass.

Most people just to expect VC to fall in to their lap. I don't understand the mentality of these consumer startups that are hoping for these instagram exits.

They'll spend years with no revenue, no freedom if they get funding, because they realize that they have responsibilities now. Not to mention the engineers they hire with the allure of a tennis table and beer on tap. What does that do for you? Now I'm doing more by myself than many teams could dream of.

I'm hoping to find the right cofounder if one comes along, but really the only thing that's missing to scale is a designer/hustler (yes both) .

<comment><USER6> getting a hustler designer is pretty difficult. but I think with the right product bootstrapped you got a chance, problem is that you are hitting saturated markets if I were to analyse your ventures. Data companies are hitting, meaning you are doing nothing great. SV needs new stuff.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is a great question and I'm grateful to see such honest answers. At the same time, the other question that I'd love to see answer is the opposite: "Decided NOT to start a business and regret later. Share your story". If there's enough interest, perhaps it is worth a separate thread.</comment>


MakerBot is pioneering distributed manufacturing - <AUTHOR> http://blog.makerbot.com/2009/08/06/makerbot-is-pioneering-distributed-manufacturing-get-paid-to-make-parts-for-future-makerbots/ <comment><USER2> How does one maintain quality? To go beyond a single part, they will probably need to do geometric tolerancing to account for all the component variations. Also, distributed manufacturing may not be as efficient.

Mao actually experimented with "crowdsourced" manufacturing in his Great Leap Forward. To boost steel production:

 _Mao encouraged the establishment of small backyard steel furnaces in every commune and in each urban neighborhood_

The results were low quality steel and probably lots of environmental damage.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Leap_Forward>

<comment><USER3> They know the capabilities of the machine that will produce the part.

It is a misunderstanding of the process to think that slapping geometric tolerances on a drawing will change the part. If the process specified produces the desired part within tolerance then there is no need to specify it further. If the process can not produce the part reliably then adding tolerances to a drawing is not going to help. They do mention the one functional specification they need -a press fit into a bearing

<comment><USER2> Although they do a press-fit test, what about the outside dimensions? What about material quality? The purpose of geometric tolerancing a design is so that when you assemble all the pieces together with varying tolerances, you have a good chance that it will all fit together.

I've worked with machines with stepper motors in the past and they can get out of alignment.

Don't get me wrong. I think the whole maker movement is really cool. I'm just saying that manufacturing a quality product is not easy.

I'm even thinking about buying one, however, if I bought a kit and the pieces didn't fit together very well, that would be frustrating.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> If you think this is cool check these guys out: <http://reprap.org/>

<comment><USER5> MakerBot and RepRap have a lot of overlap in ideas and people. MakerBot founder Zach Smith is a long-time RepRap contributor and also runs the RepRap Research Foundation (<http://www.rrrf.org/>). MakerBot's "Cupcake CNC" fabricator is based on RepRap hardware and software. MakerBot also sells RepRap parts in their store.

The two projects are both contributing to each other, for example just today: [http://blog.reprap.org/2009/08/one-of-my-partners-at- makerbo...](http://blog.reprap.org/2009/08/one-of-my-partners-at-makerbot- adam.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm amazed these guys haven't got more press for what they're doing.

It's one of the most futuristic things I've seen. Crazy.

</comment><comment><USER7> I love the MakerBot guys and I can't wait to grab one of these machines for myself. As soon as I can justify the price ;)

<comment><USER8> I'm in the same boat. I'd love to have one of these, but the price is pretty high for a recreational gadget.</comment></comment>