Zuckenberg Sued - <AUTHOR> http://www.webpronews.com/mark-zuckerberg-sued-for-unloading-facebook-stock-2012-06

<comment><USER2> Seemed pretty inevitable something like this was going to come down. Whole IPO process felt pretty hush-hush and kinda suspect. Pretty thrilled I didn't sink any money in it.</comment>


Dear Paul Buchheit, may I officially request playback a la Etherpad in Gmail and Gdocs? - <AUTHOR>

Just want to make sure the request is made, and I didn't see a better way to do it. If I could sell  my karma points back to move this to the top, I would. <comment><USER2> I left Google almost 3 years ago. Keith is the person you want to bug about Gmail now: <http://friendfeed.com/keith>

Why would you want keystroke playback in Gmail though? I'd rather have "undo send", among other things. (yes it's doable, just add a small delay to the actual delivery -- I usually realize my mistake within a few seconds)

<comment><USER3> Agreed. What practical use is it?

While they are at it, they could do the same with email (delayed send for certain tags) that you could easily cancel the sending. Also, "did you mean to cc everyone on your list, this is frowned upon" type prevention :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Actually I think the more interesting suggestion in your post is being able to "sell back" karma points to move a submission up.

</comment><comment><USER5> He doesn't work at google anymore.

<comment><AUTHOR> damn. Who does? Forgive my ignorance. I'm a med student in New Orleans. The Valley is somewhere vaguely near a port city where I had dim sum once.

<comment><USER6> This is as good as requesting it. ;-)

The thing is - decisions at Google are all made in a data-driven fashion. So "this random person I met on the Internet wants us to implement keystroke playback" doesn't carry much weight. "Someone on Hacker News suggested GMail and GDocs implement keystroke playback, and then 900 people upvoted it, and then it got picked up by Reddit and Del.icio.us, and then the NY Times wrote a story about how it's the next big innovation" would probably be pretty convincing, though. So if you want it, convince other people it's a good idea, and convince them to express their support of it. Somebody at Google will see it eventually.</comment></comment></comment>


AWS Direct Connect - <AUTHOR> http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2011/08/aws-direct-connect.html

<comment><USER2> Interesting. At 2 cts/GB (as opposed to the usual 14 or so) I wonder if there is a market setting up a service reselling this traffic. Let's say I do all my hosting on AWS, but host a proxy (or a network of proxies) on the end of a direct connect line (or lines). This way you could lower your traffic costs. Would this work?

<comment><USER3> You are going to pay for the bandwidth again coming out of the DC - so it all depends on how cheap you can get it from Equinix for your other dedicated boxes.

<comment><USER4> If they're in the US they probably have access to a HE feed. That's $1/mbit. You'll probably get higher quality transit for < $20/mbit. That's stupidly cheap compared to ec2 prices.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Very niche. At least you didn't put "elastic", "cloud" or a digit in the product name.</comment>


How to Instantly Share Your Blogposts Across the Web – Without Code - <AUTHOR> https://www.jibranelbazi.com/blog/how-to-instantly-share-your-blogposts-across-the-web-without-code <comment><AUTHOR> TLDR: How I use Integromat + Zapier + Airtable to distribute my blog posts (on Webflow) across different channels effortlessly.

Airtable is my 'Database' in this case.

You can adapt it for your own channels/communities.

Cheers!</comment>


The Space Elevator - <AUTHOR> http://io9.com/this-huge-engineering-project-may-be-our-best-chance-at-5832012 <comment><AUTHOR> tl;dr -> I've always scoffed at the _elevator into space_ idea, but NASA scientists are actually quite intrigued by it and looking for feasible solutions. They are even offering a price of over $1 million to people who can come up with materials to make it happen. So far, the biggest obstacle seems to be the quality of the cable. The project is divided into 3 basic components:

\- the robotic climber, or elevator car;

\- power beaming propulsion;

\- carbon nanotube ribbon, or elevator cable.

There's even an annual conference on the subject! [http://www.isec.org/sec/](http://www.isec.org/sec/)</comment>


A/B testing gun control laws. - <AUTHOR>

I personally don't care for guns, I don't own one and never used one. I come from a country where gun ownership is rare and very regulated.
Today I read lots of arguments in favor or against further regulation but none of them were very convincing. In most cases correlation is confused with causality. For example, most developed countries have much tighter rules on gun control and significantly less violence. This only shows correlation and doesn't prove or disprove that more gun controls will reduce violence. One could simply argue that there are many other variables that correlates with violence and COULD explain higher crime rates in the US compared to other developed nations.
How about we run a large scale A/B test instead. We pick two states with very similar characteristics, percentage of gun ownership, crime, poverty, income distribution, similar gun control laws, etc... We completely ban guns in one state and measure how crime evolves over a long period of time : 1 or 2 years. If we observe a significant drop in violence in the test state compared to the control (where gun laws will remain the same during the test) then we can start arguing that banning guns will reduce violence and less violence means less needs to own a gun for self defense. A less emotional/more data driven approach to policy making. <comment><USER2> It's a hard experiment to pull off.

First - because being surrounded by states where access to guns is easier will mean it's likely that they'll be significant illegal traffic in guns. You already see that between areas with tight gun controls like NYC and other states.

Second because I think one or two years is unlikely to be enough time for affects to show. I'd bet you'd see a drop in male suicide - but the culture of crime and violence will take longer to change.

</comment><comment><USER3> People without guns = (subjects as in the UK) People with guns = (citizens as in the USA)

Also said people with guns used said guns to kill people in the oppressing countries army. They then used their new found freedom to create a constitution that said that the RKBA 'shall not be infringed'. Of course it was over 200 years ago, but it is still relevant as the Constitution is still the source of law in the USA.

I don't trust the government to protect, and it is important for society to have access to the same infantry weapons that the military does, but without the obligation to any certain individual. This was the point of RKBA.

</comment><comment><USER4> The 2nd amendment is 2nd for a reason. banning guns will strip you freedom more than anything else. Every once in a while there is a horrible incident that the government can use to blame the 2nd amendment. A guy in china just stabbed 20 people yesterday so let's ban knifes. Is this logical to you?. Just imagine the power grab that will happen when you won't have access to weapons in order to protect yourself.

<comment><USER5> Cars are dangerous! You can run people over with cars, so we should ban them!

As you point out, what many people don't know is that the purpose of the second amendment was to provide the people with a means to rebel against a tyrannical government. Not for hunting, not for home defense.

Now, the A/B test thing sounds like a perfectly great idea. The problem? Doing such a test would mean placing authority over our right to self-determination to a faceless bureaucratic government. That's exactly the opposite of what pro-gun people want.

I don't personally own a gun, but I am not against the responsible ownership of firearms for self defense or even defense against a tyrannical state. As long as the police and military are allowed to have guns, you should have them too. You trust someone to power, just because they wear a uniform, or are more financially well endowed than yourself?

In NYC, the only people who have guns are the private security details of the elites, and of course, those who possess illegal guns.

As it is, violent crime is higher in the areas with the more restrictive gun laws. Chicago, for example!

Shootings, we have had a problem with. But honestly, it's not the gun that killed those people. He could have looked up bomb recipes on the internet, ran people over with a car, or slashed people up with a machete, furthermore, he could have obtained an illegal gun, since he was going to break the law anyway, why would he care?

Kennesaw, Georgia, has a MANDATORY firearm posession law. All adult heads of household must own a gun, unless disabled. Crime rate there is < 1/2 the US average.

BTW, this is why our system is great. If you don't like the gun laws in your state, move to a state that is more suited to your tastes.

<comment><USER6> "the purpose of the second amendment was to provide the people with a means to rebel against a tyrannical government"

by this logic, shouldn't you be able to buy IEDs and RPGs (and launchers) at walmart? I understand these weren't available at the time of The War of American Independence, but going by the spirit of the Second Amendment, one would want people fighting tyranny to have the most effective weapons possible to do said fighting. Those(IEDs etc) seem to be the most effective weapons for a guerilla force fighting a tyrannical government (vs Glocks or whatever).

And if you are considering _non_ guerilla forces facing off with government forces, you probably need artillery and heavy machine guns (to start with).

<comment><USER5> >by this logic, shouldn't you be able to buy IEDs and RPGs (and launchers) at walmart?

Yes, that was the thinking of the time. However, RPGs did not yet exist. Notice what you quoted me saying. "The purpose of the second amendment _was_..." That is past-tense.

Obviously in today's age the original scope of it must be limited. I don't even support the idea that everyone should have an absolute right to a gun. There should be some regulation, but outright outlawing guns? I am glad that I can say I'm confident that it won't happen across the entire US any time soon.

I believe they should have about the same level of regulation as automobiles. Both are deadly. Yet, with proper training and mental clarity, they are both useful and safe.

<comment><USER6> just to be clear, I am not saying you should ban handguns. Or saying that the constitution writers should have foreseen all weapons of the futue.

Just saying that _if_ the purpose of the Second Amendment were to promote the ability of the populace to fight tyranny, then citizens should probably be able to access all military grade weapons short of nukes or other WMD (maybe those too?).

I am not taking a stance against that position,just pointing out that it takes some weird mental contortions to be have citizens be have a constitutional right to buy a high magazine hand gun, but not (say) a mortar, or RPG, a grenade launcher, or even an HMG. The former provides defence against tyranny, but the latter don't?

<comment><USER5> The latter do, and I think there are quite a few people who probably believe they should have a right to those items. I'm personally not aligned with their beliefs.

Obviously we can go uphill with this until the argument caps out at nuclear power. I believe that personal small-arms are probably at least enough to make an escape if troops were sent out to capture you and take you to an internment camp or something (which by the way, they are trained to do) -- it should be considered that if the government really did become tyrannical, that a lot of the military would rebel as well.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Startup is a "rent any physical good" platform. Discuss challenges, pros and cons - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> -very few people want to rent their stuff out

-delivery is a problem, cost as much as rental

\- small commission

\- very general so CAC would be huge.

<comment><AUTHOR> >> Very few people want to rent their stuff out.

How far true is this? Do you have any evidence for this claim? I'd think, at least, for things like tools that people keep for a rainy day, they'd rather put them to good use. No?

<comment><USER2> I read an article about a guy that tried do a sports equipment rental site. didn't work. Turned out when he talked to retail businesses about %1 of their sales was rental.</comment></comment></comment>


How to win state fair games - <AUTHOR> http://artofmanliness.com/2011/09/26/how-to-win-state-fair-games/

<comment><USER2> > _Shoot a circle around the star._

Expressly prohibited at every fair I've ever been at.

<comment><USER3> It's a dumb strategy, anyway. You should go for the convex hull. It has a smaller circumference. Or is that prohibited, too?</comment></comment>


The Invention of the Ford V8 Engine (2015) [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3RB3z1er9Sw <comment><USER2> Almost all of these old automobile advertisements are worth a watch. My favorite are some of the old Chevy information/ads especially this one:

[https://youtu.be/uoA-2TlZY5I](https://youtu.be/uoA-2TlZY5I)

Useful because a lot of the basics explained give a good idea of the technology in modern cars, and it is also entertaining to see how far we have come over the many years.

<comment><USER3> My favorite: "How Differential Gear works" (1930s)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K4JhruinbWc&t=1m50s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K4JhruinbWc&t=1m50s)</comment></comment>


New law proposal makes The Netherlands privacy-unfriendly - <AUTHOR> https://www.voys.nl/weblog/startups-stay-away-netherlands-if-you-value-privacy <comment><USER2> I know that this is a tricky question to engage with on HN, but is there a major-market country in Europe --- say, from the list of Germany, France, the UK, Italy, Spain, Netherlands, Switzerland, Poland, Norway, Sweden, Belgium, Austria, Denmark, and Finland --- that is _fundamentally_ more privacy- friendly than the US, in black-letter terms?

US privacy laws have loopholes you can drive a truck through. But the limited research I've done suggest to me that that's true of virtually all western democracies, and that the loopholes in other countries can be even larger and less transparent. My impression of France for instance, is that there isn't a major distinction between what the French government can do on its own soil to combat terrorism versus what it can do abroad; that's probably not true of the US.

I'm interested in facts and non-emotional analysis; the "interesting" discussion we can have about this topic. Obviously a lot of people bring priors to it about the evils of the NSA or NSA/USG's corrupting influence on other countries. I'm prepared to stipulate that (believe it or not, I'm not that far from most HN readers on these topics, ideologically!) if we can boil things down to the raw facts.

<comment><USER3> I believe that on paper, the United States is the freest and most privacy friendly place on the planet (well the paper that isn't classified). In practice not so much. Things wealthy people care about are very high privacy (financial transactions, private offshore holdings, medical records, etc) things not so wealthy people care about are basically wide open (criminal records, books you rent in a library, phone calls). We stomp all over the constitution.

Take the gay marriage debate, not once did I see someone question if the government even has a right to determine who is allowed to be married, and why is should be involved at all. "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion" marriage is a religious institution, seems pretty clear.

All we really have to do is fire judges (and those that appoint them) who do not uphold the constitution. This has to be for all violations, not just the ones you disagree with. Don't like guns? Pass an amendment. Don't think that 'Hate Speech' should be legal? Pass an amendment. Scared of terrorists? Pass an amendment. Until then the lawmakers and judiciary will just run roughshod over our "certain unalienable rights".

<comment><USER4> Financial transactions are not necessarily "very high privacy" in the U.S. Financial transactions over $10,000 are required to be reported to the government, as well as transactions that a banker believes are part of a cumulative transaction over $10,000.

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

In addition, banks are not allowed to open accounts without verifying the customer's identity.

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

I don't think it's clear how well credit card transaction data is protected against subpoenas, and there is a rumor that one or more of the many undisclosed §215 bulk collection programs relate to financial transactions. There are statutory protections for financial transaction records, but the Supreme Court has held that a bank account holder has no constitutional expectation of privacy in the bank's records. U.S. v. Miller, 425 U.S. 435 (1976).

<comment><USER3> To the government is one thing, you have to report all income to the government over a certain threshold. If you are a corporation trying to buy votes, then your finical dealings are highly private.*

*Citizens United v. FEC

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It's odd to see the Netherlands referred to as previously being privacy conscious.

Back in the mid 2000's I recall looking in the CIA Factbook and noting that the Netherlands intercepted more telephone calls and did more internet monitoring than just about any other country, per capita (of course "Fact" was used rather loosely in the title of that book).

Hackers in the Netherlands were introducing regular pulses into their daily internet activity and then using Fourier analysis to detect this signal in the server load of apparently well known Government buildings, believed to belong to the Dutch secret service (to what extent these rumours were true, I can't say -- I wasn't involved).

For historical reasons, the Dutch people also developed a habit of "spying" on neighbours to "make sure they were ok". This is still included in some guides for foreigners living in the Netherlands, so they don't become concerned when their neighbours begin looking in their windows.

In my stay in the Nethelands, I however learned that just about every spy agency in Europe was spying on just about everyone else in Europe. So it became clear in the end that the Dutch weren't necessarily any worse at it than everyone else. Of course, that threat seems to be greater in larger states with bigger economies. If you live anywhere else, you at least know everyone else is probably spying on you, even if your own Government is not.

<comment><USER6> I wrote about this at length:

[http://jacquesmattheij.com/wholesale-privacy-violations- in-t...](http://jacquesmattheij.com/wholesale-privacy-violations-in-the- european-union)

We're definitely not doing well at all on this front and it is getting worse rather than better.

<comment><USER5> In my opinion, all that is happening with these "anti-privacy laws" is that very old spying practices are becoming codified in law. Nothing will actually change. The spying is already happening, and has been for a long time.

<comment><USER6> Yes, the crimes are simply being retro-actively whitewashed and for the future you can expect a lot more of the same especially because it is now legal.

Never mind that these laws are in conflict with just about every right that we as citizens are supposed to have and which we all learn in school should be important to us.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> So does Dutch law actually recognize the UN's International Covenant[1] ? While a country can be a signatory to the covenant, it is just a popularity stunt until there are locally enacted laws which provide for enforcement of its provisions. It isn't like UN Peacekeepers are going to come parachuting in to your rescue.

Also the comment about Mass surveillance is incorrect. While it may not have found any terrorism suspects there is ample evidence that it has impacted drug smuggling (as implemented in the US) where the DEA was fed information that it had to lie about where it got it. While I find the whole parallel construction thing a huge violation of civil liberties (and generally should be illegal) it is pretty clear that mass surveillance did identify a number of drug operations. So in that regard it "works". It might be better to say that it hasn't been shown to be an effective tool against terrorism.

[1] [http://www.ohchr.org/en/professionalinterest/pages/ccpr.aspx](http://www.ohchr.org/en/professionalinterest/pages/ccpr.aspx)

<comment><USER2> Parallel construction should be unlawful. The point of the exclusionary rule for evidence is to address the _incentives_ of law enforcement. It's not a recognition that specific pieces of evidence are somehow tainted and untrustworthy. That's a broken premise parallel construction seems to rely on.

But then a follow-on question: for the big 3 EU countries, what are the exclusionary principle rules? From a little research last year, I know that the exclusionary rule in the UK is more complicated than it is in the US.

<comment><USER8> Germany: none at all (barring extreme cases), and that's really the overwhelming mainstream opinion of German scholars. Only defenders lament it.

The idea is that much harm comes from letting people walk, just because the police did an honest mistake. Or even a willful, outrageous thing.

Punishing the police officer should be enough to deter such behavior.

I think that it's a reasonable stance, but I'm not invested into it much.

I tend to see it as another example where we try to find a reasoned and weighted position, whereas America usually takes a very black and white approach.

I don't mean that disparagingly, it's a valid position. Just an observation.

<comment><USER9> Do the police officers actually get punished in Germany?

<comment><USER8> At least every prosecutor's office has a whole department dealing only with crimes committed by officials, and I guess they're not just sitting around. :-)

I believe it's just like you would expect if you knew nothing about Germany: many crimes are punished, many aren't.

For whatever reason, and yes, cronyism and a certain reluctance to prosecute does happen. But that's a null statement.

I won't claim that reality is great, I just have no reason to believe that police officers regularly get away with major infractions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> It's a fair criticism. However I think it's too early to be telling startups to stay away from the Netherlands. Both because the new law may be prevented yet, and these types of laws are occurring simultaneously across most of the developed world. I'm not sure where a startup would flee to, to avoid them.

I might take the opposite tact here. I'd argue instead that startups should feel perfectly comfortable making the Netherlands their home, for all the positive reasons, and they should all focus on slaying these bad qualities. The Netherlands only has 17 million people, it's still very possible to have your voice heard. A focused group of startups can probably still make a difference.

<comment><USER11> I'm dutch and I agree that a decision not to go there shouldn't be rushed but a bill like this being even considered makes the choice very flaky.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> So they're doing exactly what the NSA and GCHQ are doing but they're actually being transparent about the fact that they're doing it?

<comment><USER2> That's not a fair assessment. The problem with NSA isn't that their authority is opaque. The problem is that their authority, dating back to the cold war, is so broad that it's difficult to cabin what their doing into public policy objectives.

In other words: once you pass a law that gives the government authority to dragnet communications, no matter how specific and overt the law is, the authority you've delegated does grave and _intrinsic_ harm to transparency.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Without getting specific to particular startups - obviously the best country is the one where you have a large market -which are the best countries for startups?

In terms of availability of funding, legal ability to onboard foreign workers, IP rights, general digital-friendly legislation, and so on? I'm only really aware of the US & larger EU countries, presumably there are also great opportunities further afield?</comment>


9 New API Consoles: Stuff Geeks Love for Your Holiday Hacking - <AUTHOR> http://blog.apigee.com/detail/9_new_api_consoles/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+ApigeeBlog+%28Apigee+Blog%29

<comment><USER2> Really excited for the FitBit console - I just got one, and hacking my health this winter should be a blast.</comment>


Amazon and Apple are building rival networks that know where everything is - <AUTHOR> https://www.wired.co.uk/article/amazon-sidewalk-apple-u1-networks <comment><USER2> Interesting bit:

"In its testing, though, [Amazon] sent out 700 gateway devices to Amazon employees in the Los Angeles basin, and because each one has a range of between 500m and up to a mile, Amazon was able to "basically cover where everyone lives in LA"

Whoa! Article also mentions the Ring ecosystem but this may have major impact on Amazon's home delivery bottleneck. I would totally buy a (cheap, small) personal lockerbox for my condo if it interfaces with Ring Bridge. AFAIK, they tested the apartment complex lockerbox idea some time ago but didn't take on. Maybe time for a retrial.

For Apple's ultrawideband, article focuses on in-home consumer but this has _huge_ impact for enterprise, too. Many warehouse customers are looking into cheap ways for indoor locationing/tracking of assets, e.g. forklifts.

<comment><USER3> Couldn't you buy a regular lockbox for your condo that doesn't involve being constantly surveilled by Jeff Bezos?

<comment><USER4> We have lockboxes in my building in Japan. They're just part of the infrastructure of a high-end condo here. You tap your key to get in the lobby door. A chime and recorded voice tells you that a package is waiting. You tap your key again inside and the locker with your stuff pops open. The lockers range in size from small to quite large boxes.

These work with any delivery carrier, but I'm not sure how the delivery person enters the apartment number.

<comment><USER5> If you walk around to the back side, which is generally exposed and doesn't need a key to get to, there should be a bunch of doors that are either unlocked or locked, and a keypad. I wondered the same thing myself about 7 years ago and, when I saw the Yamato guy, asked him to show me how he did it. :)

<comment><USER6> I moved out of an apartment building in the US which had a system similar to this. Ours had no empty doors on the back -- carriers had to use the same entry pads we did to deliver packages. Each carrier got a code which gave them access to the initial room, and entered the name/apt number of intended recipient.

Annoyingly, it was a subscription service with no other way of getting package delivery securely to the building.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Going on kind of a tangent here, but a thought has been creeping up on me that I can't wait to talk about:

I'm a major Apple fan, with several Apple devices that I use all the time, and while they have a strong pro-privacy stance for now (though we only have their word), Apple's _ability_ to spy on me, should they ever want to, probably goes far beyond any other company.

Besides the usual "boring" methods like keylogging and microphone eavesdropping, which any company can do to the users of their OSes if they wanted to, the iPhone sees my face a hundred times a day, the Mac has my fingerprints, and the Watch knows how I'm moving and feeling (sitting, walking, excited, lethargic), and they can use that to infer what I'm doing or even _about_ to do...

Has anyone thoroughly monitored and logged what these devices are sending out?

<comment><USER8> The problem is that they deal themselves into the equation too much.

You can turn off bluetooth, but if you turn it on to talk to your headphones or car, you get opted-in to ibeacon location services.

You can turn off wifi, but if you turn it on to talk to your home router, yeah, more location services opt-in.

If you follow links in email or safari, with deep links apps on your phone that have registered can intercept them. there's no opt-out of this added functionality.

You text a link to someone, you also load a preview in imessage and therefore contact the site.

It's like normal functionality have all these built-in compromises you can't turn off.

Now with the UWB stuff, there isn't even an off switch.

I think their standard way of dealing with things is that they just shut up and don't advertise this stuff.

<comment><USER9> > You can turn off bluetooth, but if you turn it on to talk to your headphones > or car, you get opted-in to ibeacon location services.

> You can turn off wifi, but if you turn it on to talk to your home router, > yeah, more location services opt-in.

Are these true? Bluetooth iBeacons, from what I understand, are now restricted by each app's Bluetooth access in iOS 13. And for Wifi, can't you just disable location services in Privacy settings?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I hope Apple's is better than what they have now. I lost my AirPods and used Find My to find them, and the "last location" wasn't even the last time I used them! It can't even keep track of a device _actively connected to my phone_. I only found them because I happen to sit on them.

<comment><USER11> Whenever I lose my AirPods, they're always in the charging case. In this state, you cannot trigger them to play a sound. Can't wait for tech to roll out that will help me find them in seconds instead of days.

<comment><USER12> My current solution is to get a case for the charging case with a keyring and attach a Tile--but I'd much prefer something integrated and slimmer.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> And Google with their Visual Positioning System:

[https://ai.googleblog.com/2019/02/using-global- localization-...](https://ai.googleblog.com/2019/02/using-global-localization- to-improve.html)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-8mfQFGNdr8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-8mfQFGNdr8)

<comment><USER14> My prediction from 2008 finally came true: [https://nomel- blog.tumblr.com/post/47669161/idea-picture-bas...](https://nomel- blog.tumblr.com/post/47669161/idea-picture-based-cps-city-positioning-system)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Apples approach seems far superior. Medium range stuff tech is already out there. See z wave and zigbee. You can hack that stuff together without much cost.

Precise location indoors has no real equivalent currently

<comment><USER16> Man I use the heck out of Z wave. Basically after buying my first home not too long ago I noticed the alarm system could update the weather without wifi... It intrigued me so I looked into it and sure enough its all z wave.

I bought a USB adapter for my Raspberry Pi 3 and installed OpenHAB on it. I can now control my thermostats (I have 2 AC units) from a web UI. Who needs a NEST? And its in other things too.

As for tracking... It depends on what I want to track but with a couple Raspberry Pi Zero Ws you can probably hunt down specific devices around the home if they have bluetooth / wifi. Whatever Pi has it closest to it is the one you wanna search near. Not sure if bluetooth can tell you signal strength but I am pretty sure wifi does since you see the signal bars. Those come from somewhere.

<comment><USER17> for what it's worth, signal strength is not usually a great indicator of distance. I would think some sort of beacon/latency measurement would be far more robust way to measure relative distance?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Time to start making tin foil hats. They will sell like crazy. _(looking for investors)_

<comment><USER19> Also time to make those shape-shifting suits from A Scanner Darkly (reference being from the movie version - it actually isn't too bad if you have not seen it).

<comment><USER20> The scramble suits were straight out of the book.

<comment><USER21> I think Philip K Dick would deeply be into the surveillance aspect of what we're discussing.

Any well written fiction published over the last few months that tries to tie recent events together (ignoring the deepstate chemtrail anti crowd?).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Find my iPhone, find my friends and Tile provide a lot value to our family every day.

Really waiting for the Apple branded products. While I'm quite happy with the tile, it would be convenient to have all i devices scanning for my lost stuff. Also being able to see the more exact location inside house would be great.

</comment><comment><USER23> Can anyone explain what the next play is here? Is it tracking of devices without being able to turn it off?

<comment><USER24> It's location accuracy improvements in urban and indoor areas, which is notoriously poor.

UWB is supposed to let you know how far away other devices are, and in what direction. This will let you e.g. find your device if you left it somewhere in your house, or give you an UI to Airdrop to someone next to you (rather than just showing everyone in range), etc. Other location services are supposed to let you navigate indoors.

I don't think there's really "the next play" as much as there's a bunch of marginal improvements, and a bunch of people who hope that there will be some killer app for location services that they can dominate.

<comment><USER25> I can see a lot of value for big brands / retail, where location tracking via bluetooth etc already exists. Same with FB offline conversion tracking, walk into store after seeing an ad analytics etc.

And I think Apple envisions value when combined with AR

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> What? No Microsoft? They could call it "the internet of Bing"

</comment><comment><USER27> iOS13 update... now Facebook messenger, G Maps, various others all requesting access to Bluetooth so they can "look for devices near to me".

This is the map that they are all building.

</comment><comment><USER28> Of course Apple's "unlicensed 900MHz band" doesn't exist in ITU region 3 (here in NZ, and I suspect China too) the ISM band is used by cell companies ....

<comment><USER29> Isn't it _Amazon's_ unlicensed 900MHz band?

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> I guess "quiet" is "Jeff Bezos bringing it up in an interview with reporters". Whereas "secretive" is "Google CEO confirms leaked documents are genuine in interview with reporters".

So "loud" must be buying ads in every TV slot, radio, and billboard so that nobody could possibly miss it.

I don't think it's fair to apply terms humans use to corporations.

<comment><USER31> > I don't think it's fair to apply terms humans use to corporations.

... but corporations are people, according to the law.

(ie: you can't say someone said something just because someone else said it.)

<comment><USER29> Unfortunately the context of this conversation isn't a courtroom.

<comment><USER31> why unfortunately?

<comment><USER32> Its peace is fortunate, conflict is unfortunate. Pointing out that someone is wrong is unfortunate. The fact being states is unfortunate because it contradicts the above post, implying a conflict. This is a fairly common use of the word unfortunate.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Passionately despise Android and am spending my next 365 days with one. - <AUTHOR> http://android365days.tumblr.com/

<comment><AUTHOR> Any great time-saving or productivity tips for the Android?</comment>


New community for devs to rant about their gripes with code/technology - <AUTHOR> https://www.producthunt.com/tech/devrant <comment><USER2> As an enterprise developer I have come to rely on devRant. The insight from other experienced developers has saved me time and money on three projects I am currently working on. As an example, posts in the past week have helped me identify two technologies I never would have thought of. Both are already paying dividends - made me look smart. Just as important devRant enabled me to avoid a technology with waning vendor support that would have been a 'black hole' \- developers know what I mean. I then read posts about a trending alternative the looks promising. The conversations the past few weeks have really amped up.

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


Show HN: Buttercoin trade engine - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/buttercoin/engine

<comment><AUTHOR> This is code derived from the Buttercoin.com codebase for performing order matching. It's MIT licensed and written in Scala.

We're starting to let people in from the wait list. If you're interested in playing with our API send us a mail at email@example.com</comment>


MongoDB 3.0 is now available - <AUTHOR> http://docs.mongodb.org/manual/release-notes/3.0/

<comment><USER2> The improved performance numbers are mind-boggling. Write performance improved an order of magnitude? Up to 95% less overhead?

Does this mean the previous versions weren't very good, or have they done something exceptionally smart?

<comment><USER3> I believe the former one is more likely. Wen MongoDB was compared against other databases it was failing in pretty much every metric.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Release notes: [http://docs.mongodb.org/v3.0/release- notes/3.0/](http://docs.mongodb.org/v3.0/release-notes/3.0/)

</comment><comment><USER5> Still no joins...sad. Well, back to ArangoDB :).</comment>


Stealth Key: Type on iPhone without looking - <AUTHOR> https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/stealth-key/id936518615?ls=1&mt=8

<comment><AUTHOR> Stealth Key: Type on iPhone without looking

Tap text messages on the iPhone - without looking - using a unique 3-finger tap code of simple sequences.

FEATURES \- Create your own tap sequences to designate message recipients \- Send SMS via stealth key \- Alternatively, save messages as journal entries \- View reference sheet in background for help early on \- Low light, efficient, incognito interface \- STEALTH mode: All black interface for typing on

It took about a cumulative hour of practice before I was able to type about half as fast as normal phone speed. Surprisingly fun to use. May take some getting used to to type a message while looking professor in the eye.

Best typing posture I've found is holding phone with thumb and pinky with other fingers outstretched over phone screen. You can also rest phone upside down on pocket crease while tapping.

Promo Codes: [http://codehookup.com/96b96ac0](http://codehookup.com/96b96ac0)

Any advice/feedback is much appreciated!

</comment><comment><USER2> When I put credit card PIN code, I intentionally make mistake or false tap to confuse possible attacker. It looks requires exercise to input seamlessly anyway ?</comment>


An Email got us $5k in AWS Credits - <AUTHOR> https://formcake.com/blog/how-an-email-got-us-five-thousand-aws-credits <comment><USER2> An important takeaway is to "send out any email at all".

Like the time with our first startup in YC W06. Our first client was the result of me just cold emailing a CEO of a startup I saw featured in Wired magazine. "Hey I like what you're doing. Maybe we can find something to do together." Short. Not expecting much. No pitch. Just genuine appreciation and interest in brainstorming a collaboration. And it unexpectedly lead to them signing a 5 figure deal with us which was everything to a tiny startup not making anything :)

Over and over in my career I was amazed at what happened when I just bothered showing up.

<comment><USER3> Cannot agree more with the concept of just showing up. It's remarkable what you can get done by being, friendly, open, honest, just asking, and then delivering.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> In case anyone doesn't know this, for just about any venture-backed company that has gone through YC or another incubator or raised from an early-stage VC, you can pretty much automatically get $100k of credits from Google or AWS.

Good on Stripe and Atlas for making this more available to more bootstrapped companies like the one in this post, but there's certainly a huge difference between $1k or $5k and $100k.

On the one hand I understand why cloud providers have to limit this, they're trying to buy lock-in and have to choose startups that they think have a larger chance of growing big enough for this to be profitable. Even a successful bootstrapped company will normally not grow as large as a successful VC-backed company, and will probably be smarter with their money as well and not rack up enormous AWS bills so quickly.

But on the other hand, this is an almost invisible example of the kind of gatekeeping that helps those who are starting from a position of privilege (i.e. have the connections to raise a large seed round) and gives them a leg up over everyone else. If as a tech community we're striving to make starting a company more meritocratic and make sure there is a low barrier to entry for everyone, I wonder if there's a better way to distribute these kinds of perks?

<comment><USER5> > In case anyone doesn't know this, for just about any venture-backed company > that has gone through YC or another incubator or raised from an early-stage > VC, you can pretty much automatically get $100k of credits from Google or > AWS.

This seems very backward, because you also don't really need those credits anymore at that point.

<comment><USER6> $100k is another employee for free. That's a significant sum for an early stage startup.

<comment><USER7> Why should startups backed by powerful institutional capital get more credits from AWS than ones that are bootstrapped and hurting for cash much more?

<comment><USER8> Because they're more likely to succeed and spend real cash with AWS later.

Amazon's a business, not a charity.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This type of infrastructure credits can really accelerate a bootstrapped startup, unfortunately almost every major provider of such freebies have now moved on to 'Contact your nearest Accelerator/VC' type model.

Google was the first to move that way, now Microsoft has cancelled its Bootstrap program and even Facebook has done away with its Startup Accelerator program in favour of 'Contact your nearest Accelerator/VC we approve of' model.

I was personally benefitted by Facebook's aforementioned Accelerator program. I applied for my previous startup's privacy focused chat-app-network dating platform for their bootstrap phase, but they directly approved it for their Accelerator phase through which I received $80,000 worth benefits incl. $15,000 AWS credits on which I ran my product; these kind of help makes life or death difference for a disabled soloprenuer from a village in India running bootstrapped startup(Facebook doesn't know this).

Now anyone in my position is at the mercy of some Accelerator or VC.

<comment><USER10> Dude. WHAT are you doing.

I understand that your situation mandates a bit of pragmatism in order to survive.

If that is the case, why are you painting a target on your back?

Do you seriously think nobody at Facebook reads this?

You just admitted, with your REAL NAME, that you basically lied to Facebook about information that actively poses a liability to them and took their money.

I am seriously baffled as to why you think this comment was a good idea.

I am not trying to antagonize you, but highlighting the fact that you are vulnerable while publicizing information that exacerbates the situation does not align here.

<comment><USER9> I told Facebook doesn't know "I'm disabled" that's all, To imply I got selected meritoriously.

Obviously everything about my Startup was part of my application details, since my application was hosted on Facebook platform(messenger app) it knew the statistics as well and I believe that's the reason it got selected.

Then again, its Facebook we are talking about here, it might even know what I had for breakfast the day I applied.

But I believe you made that comment out of concern of my well-being, I appreciate that and I apologise if my sentence formation caused unnecessary confusion.

P.S. I use my real name here to own accountability of the things I write here and to ensure I don't compromise my integrity in the lure of anonymity/pseudo- anonymity(No offence to anyone who don't use their real name, I understand).

<comment><USER10> Understood. Definitely an overreaction on my part. Just a little weary from how exclusive these applications can be and what the consequences can look like.

No need to apologize.

Wish you well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> > Send that one last email. Even if it seems like a bit much, or things are > settled, just be sure you ask and give the other person a chance to help you > in ways you can't predict

Good lesson for budding founders or indie devs.

Shows you the power of "Just ask". If you don't ask, the answer is always no.

</comment><comment><USER12> Nice to hear Stripe actually caring for their customers.

Besides that, I think your product serves a wonderful niche. Had the exact problem of hosting a static site for a customer and actually needed to host a full Python backend eventually to receive form submissions. In the future I'll just use formcake.

</comment><comment><USER13> when I worked for a startup, an email got us $250K in credits. That was enough to run the compute for the company for at least a year. Now, we had a nice deal with our VCs, and AWS really liked us, but it really was a "asking made the difference".

</comment><comment><USER14> > Stripe monitored the developer community enough to see our initial posts

If I can't trust that I'll get the benefits promised by a service unless my complaint about not getting the benefits reaches a certain threshold of virality in the community, I have to assume I'm not getting them. I'm glad that they did. Maybe I'll get lucky as they did with "an email" and maybe I won't, but I certainly can't rely on it.

<comment><USER15> I can't think of any other company that bends over backwards to please engineers who use their platform (and, by extension, the people who visit this site) more than Stripe. Back in 2013, when my co-founder and I started a company and later got into YC, my co-founder went thru every circle of hell in order to fix all the mistakes we made when we incorporated. If Stripe Atlas had existed back then and we'd used it, this would just be a non-issue. Unless you're an expert in the technicalities of startup incorporation/bylaws/etc, the value Stripe Atlas provides is huge and it just doesn't make sense to me why someone would pass on it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Good old email and persistence.

</comment><comment><USER17> Wonder how much bitcoin an unscrupulous person could mine with that $5k of credits.

<comment><USER18> Less than $5k

<comment><USER19> But 5k in credits is worthless to someone who doesn't need them, so even if it's 1c, that's something. (Or really, so long as it's more than you can sell the account for.)

<comment><USER20> Interesting point. What's the going rate on AWS accounts that come with credits? Is there a marketplace for this?

<comment><USER21> IIRC credits are non-transferable for exactly this reason, and also why billing information is required (even if you have credit). "Selling" a full account with credits (or access to that account to use the credits) would be super risky since it's still tied back to you, you will definitely be selling for less than the credit amount, and you would be on the hook if AWS invalidated those credits after-the-fact.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Google Publisher Plugin for Wordpress - <AUTHOR> http://wordpress.org/plugins/google-publisher/

<comment><USER2> Damn you Google! :)

It's just _days_ ahead of our product beta launch - AdPushup.com - which lets you optimize your Adsense earnings. Our MVP is focused on WordPress, and one of the components is the Visual Editor through which multiple ads (locations, designs, size etc.) can be placed on the WordPress website. I feel our editor is more flexible in terms of ad placement and settings, but this news is definitely a threat, or a validation in disguise.

Note to team: launch the beta even faster!

<comment><USER3> Nice! I think our customers would love to use this tool - is there a way we can work together? firstname.lastname@example.com

<comment><USER2> Hi Ned,

Thanks for the note, just sent you an email!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Getting webmaster tools data right in the article editor would be interesting. Or warnings/alerts from the webmaster tools entity directly in the wp dashboard.

</comment><comment><USER5> Cool to see official Google PHP code (this may be a first?). The code looks well-structured, documented and secure.

>Use of the Google Publisher Plugin is governed by Google's Terms of Service and Privacy Policy.

This is also a first for me. Anyone know of other Wordpress plug-ins which enforce their own Terms of Service and Privacy Policy?

<comment><USER6> I thought the same thing. I won't be using Adsense and there are many, many ways to verify your Webmaster Tools account, but am curious at taking a look at the code.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Can someone name the type of wordpress theme used in the google plugin screen shots? Looks like a nice theme!

<comment><USER8> BoldR [http://demo.iceable.com/boldr/](http://demo.iceable.com/boldr/)

<comment><USER7> wow thanks! going to try this theme.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Interesting. I use two plugins to handle adsense and sitemaps for Google. This will handle the adsense and maybe sitemap generation.

Why would Google do this?

<comment><USER10> It's in their best interest for (more) publishers to publish (more) ads in order to generate (more) revenue? This plugin may help them "optimize" (a.k.a. increase revenue).</comment></comment>


Does ad blocking herald the end of the free internet? - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-34268416 <comment><USER2> There might be a good side to this in the form of more interesting content at major company web sites. Companies like IKEA, Safeway, Walmarts, Michaels Art Supplies, etc. might start paying content producers to make interesting content on their own web sites and draw people in.

This might work for individuals and small companies also if they support narrow niches.

The goal is some model where content creators pay their bills and consumers get good material. It will probably work out just fine.

</comment><comment><USER3> > "Ad blocking is a threat to the whole advertising industry," says David > Frew, senior programmes manager for the Internet Advertising Bureau trade > body.

And cars were a threat to the whole horsing industry. Figure something out and move on.

EDIT:

> In his view, publishers and content producers will have to have a "hard > conversation" with consumers and persuade them not to use ad blockers.

I'm listening, but I've heard nothing so far that persuades me.

> "When you visit a site with an ad blocker on there should be no option where > you can get the content for free."

I'm waiting, and look forward to the resultant lack of whining from publishers. I only look because you let me. And, probably, because you haven't yet bribed Congress to make blocking illegal.

</comment><comment><USER3> > Imagine you had to start paying to view content on all your favourite > websites.

> Would you give up on the internet completely or happily stump up for good > journalism and entertainment?

I used to read a lot of books, but the Web is constantly available and mostly free. Very low barrier to start reading something, and little consequence to stopping something.

So I suppose I'd go back to reading books.

I already subscribe to NYT online, been thinking about The Economist. There might be room in there for one more subscription to something. Maybe two. But I really can't see myself subscribing to _anything_ more focused than general news, since I don't visit anything focused at any regular rate now, while it's _free_.

<comment><USER4> I think the solution might be something along the lines of spotify for web content. There are probably 100+ sites out there that occasionally produce content good enough that I'd pay for it, and I'd probably be happy to pay $10/month to access the content, but I'm certainly not paying $10/month to each site.

<comment><USER3> I've thought about the likelihood of subscription aggregators recently, in the context of the ad blocking wars.

I think there will come an evolution beyond that. Eventually writers and other content workers will come to work for the larger aggregators themselves. The aggregators will become the publishers.</comment></comment></comment>


CSS Minesweeper : Game written in HTML/CSS - no Javascript - <AUTHOR> http://jsdo.it/No_1026/urFs

<comment><USER2> Really clever demo of how to html/css3 the hell out of something. Also hilarious to include the blank index.js just for fun. :)</comment>


Global wave discovery ends 220-year search - <AUTHOR> https://www.quantamagazine.org/weather-data-reveals-long-predicted-pressure-waves-20200813/ <comment><USER4> Laplace had an amazing mind. He connected so many dots, and everything I've done in the last four years with respect to digital signal processing ends up rooted in something he discovered or postulated or analyzed. Fascinating, but not too surprising, that he shows up in the weather as well.

<comment><USER5> What's more amazing is that all his math was done with pen and paper - <USER2> computer assistance of any kind. Log tables were available, but all the analysis was done by hand. And brain.

<comment><USER6> Most of the time people are impressed by analytical skills, it's not really justified in my view. Those skills aren't taught as much as they used to be. You can still pick them up, but it's mostly on your own now. (Probably still easier than Laplace had it, though.)

Anyway, just skimming the article, it sounds like Laplace simply applied standard normal mode analysis for the wave equation in the atmosphere. This is rather basic stuff that you can learn in an undergraduate partial differential equations class.

In my Master's (8 years ago), I took a class on perturbation methods and asymptotic expansions (e.g., "method of matched asymptotic expansions"). These are approximation methods that were very common before computers became mainstream and can be very accurate. These methods are becoming rarer and rarer in fluid dynamics. I think they're still used extensively in theoretical quantum mechanics.

<comment><USER7> > These methods are becoming rarer and rarer in fluid dynamics.

Why are they becoming rarer is the question. Have all the tractable asymptotic problems been solved?

<comment><USER6> > Have all the tractable asymptotic problems been solved?

Definitely not. I think it's more that these approaches are _viewed_ as not necessary as numerical approximations (implemented on a computer) are more accurate, often easier, and allow one to consider complications that would be impossible to handle analytically.

Though analytical methods do have major advantages. Computations are made only for special cases. You'll need a lot of computations to see functional dependencies clearly, for instance. If the computations are expensive (and they often are), people are unlikely to do the parametric studies needed to see functional dependencies clearly. Ultimately an analytical expression contains much more information than an array of numbers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is not really a "discovery" so much as a reaffirmation of what was previously known. The original paper is more insightful [1]. The Quanta magazine article is interesting but the title overstates the original citation.

[1] [https://journals.ametsoc.org/jas/article/77/7/2519/347483/An...](https://journals.ametsoc.org/jas/article/77/7/2519/347483/An- Array-of-Ringing-Global-Free-Modes-Discovered)

</comment><comment><USER9> Not sure if it's completely related, but I found the phenomena of the North Atlantic Oscillation [1] to be particulary useful in predicting long-term weather around the South of Norway. This time around, in December 2019, I predicted a rather cold summer in Norway. I made that prediction because the winter was particularly warm and snow-less in the South East between late 2019 and early 2020. For the most part I've been correct. Except a few heat waves this summer has been pretty cold. But the effects of global warming persists, and it would seem the Autumn will be pretty nice here in Oslo.

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

<comment> CtrlD-me Oslo! I'm looking for a job, there. Think it's doable without speaking Norwegian?

<comment><USER10> Quite a few tech companies in Norway have an international staff and speak English in the office. I worked for a small Norway-based open source consultancy for a while. We spoke English in the office as most of us were not Norwegian and most Norwegian customers were happy to work with us in English. I spent some time working with QT Software (then part of Nokia) and their office was also English speaking IIRC.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Is there any scientific discovery with a longer gap between prediction and validation?

<comment><USER12> Do you want to count Democritus and indivisible constituents of matter?

<comment><USER13> Holy cow, he predicted _way_ more than just indivisible constituents of matter [1]:

> The theory of Democritus held that everything is composed of "atoms", which > are physically, but not geometrically, indivisible; that between atoms, > there lies empty space; that atoms are indestructible, and have always been > and always will be in motion; that there is an infinite number of atoms and > of kinds of atoms, which differ in shape and size.

The accuracy is uncanny.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democritus#Atomic_hypothesis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democritus#Atomic_hypothesis)

<comment><USER14> > that there is an infinite number of atoms and of kinds of atoms

Well, that bit is wrong. Especially if you take the fundamental constituents of what are now called atoms: 6 quarks, 6 antiquarks, 6 leptons (counting neutrinos), 6 antileptons, 5 gauge bosons, 1 scalar boson. Only 30, possibly + whatever dark matter and dark energy are.

<comment><USER13> We don't know how many kinds of atoms there are, and infinite is pretty damn accurate all things considered. And it's pretty disingenuous to go out of your way to take quarks to mean what he called atoms just so you can claim he's wrong.

<comment><USER15> Are you seriously suggesting that when Democritus referred to "uncuttable things", he meant to describe particles that would in the future be named after his work rather than to describe particles that were indivisible?

<comment><USER13> If you genuinely find that interpretation of my statement plausible then I don't really have anything to add.

<comment><USER15> Here's your statement:

> And it's pretty disingenuous to go out of your way to take quarks to mean > what he called atoms just so you can claim he's wrong.

You can try to identify atoms by his description of them, in which case you'd have to choose fundamental particles. But you've already explicitly chosen to interpret Democritus' "atoms" as identical with our "atoms", despite the fact that they do not exhibit any of the characteristics Democritus described. What can I conclude except that you think Democritus, in the past, named his concept after ours, in the future?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> A friend of mine wondered what the RATIO between the four modes of pressure waves are. Waves are essentially a frequency (like pitch), and he was wondering if the ratio between these "frequencies" constitute a similar ratio between the pitches in a chord.

<comment><USER5> Kind of. Technically these are _spherical harmonics_ , which are the generalisation of the harmonic series on a sphere instead of a line - <USER3> used in quantum theory to calculate orbitals.

The math is a bit more complex than the simple harmonic series.

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

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Pythagoros and Plato, while not making a direct proposal like Laplace, had some similar intuitions.

</comment><comment><USER17> What a great discovery. Is this going to have some kind of impact on weather models?

</comment><comment><USER18> I thought for a second it was related to the recent '26-Second Pulse' XKCD [https://xkcd.com/2344/](https://xkcd.com/2344/) but that is about seismic waves while this is about atmospheric pressure.</comment>


1,2,3,4 shall we declare Information War? (#RememberLitvinenko) - <AUTHOR> Are there any Russian speakers reading Hacker News wanting a pathway to influence the 2018 Russian Election? This is about honest, research-integrity Russian speakers worldwide, and Russian citizens in particular, taking back joint control over the neutral "Point-of-View" of Russian Wikipedia. Specifically, aligning these two Wikipedia articles with BBC Coverage:
BBC Coverage: http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-19647226
English Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Litvinenko
Russian Wikipedia: https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Литвиненко,_Александр_Вальтерович
The key to this is an accurate, neutral point-of-view over the Litvinenko Polonium poisoning. Not Putin's or Project Lakhta's or Russian Politicians' false rendering of the facts... the facts according to Russian-speaking neutral fact-finders taking back control over Russian Wikipedia. <comment><AUTHOR> If you look at the Russian Wikipedia Entry side-by-side, you'll see major discrepancies: concerted efforts to bury, hide, or add FUD (fear, uncertainty, doubt) into FSB and Putin's personal culpability for the Polonium-210 poisoning of Litvinenko.

If you want to "hit Putin where it hurts", isn't this where you would start, establishing the "incontrovertible facts" (see: General McMaster's description of IRA 2016 US election hacking) of Litvinenko's murder on Russian language Wikipedia, and pinning that crime, as per the evidence, on the primary conspirator?

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Заблокировать его? Заблокировать его? Заблокировать его?</comment>


Which Shellshock logo should be used? - <AUTHOR>

Lets get a feel from the community on which Shellshock logo should be the official one. Did I miss any?<p>Vote here: http://goo.gl/forms/Hul5NdbRUk <comment><USER2> Threw my hat in the ring also: [https://d324imu86q1bqn.cloudfront.net/uploads/asset/attachme...](https://d324imu86q1bqn.cloudfront.net/uploads/asset/attachment/57150/optimized.jpg)

<comment><AUTHOR> Added to the list.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Vote here: [http://goo.gl/forms/Hul5NdbRUk](http://goo.gl/forms/Hul5NdbRUk)</comment>


Atomgrads - <AUTHOR> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomgrads

<comment><USER2> Most of these cities (e.g. Zheleznogorsk [1]) seem to have a stylized atom as part of their coat of arms. I wonder if it was common practice in the USSR to incorporate similar symbols into the coat of arms of other newly founded industrial cities?

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zheleznogorsk,_Krasnoyarsk_Krai](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zheleznogorsk,_Krasnoyarsk_Krai)

<comment> a-nikolaev Yeah, it was quite common:

[http://bit.ly/14HIT5f](http://bit.ly/14HIT5f)

I think, it was really fun. Sadly, it seems that nowdays, our (Russian) government favors religiouis symols over indistrial/sientific ones..

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> They're commonly known as "closed cities". You can read up more here: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Closed_city](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Closed_city)

<comment> a-nikolaev Yeah, I have never heard the Atomgrad word, though some people can probably use it.

Btw, cities like that are also commonly called "scinetific cities" ("naukograds"), though "naukograds" are not necessarily closed and don't have to do nuclear physics research.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The page the original link pointed to was just redirected to the "closed cities". Original page this post linked to: [http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Atomgrad&oldid=545...](http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Atomgrad&oldid=545560153)

<comment><USER5> I merged the two pages, mainly because of znowi's comment: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5843809](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5843809)

The "Closed City" article has significantly more information that the Atomgrad article did, and is a more useful resource.

<comment><USER6> Was that really necessary?

This results in actual information loss, since the closed cities page does not have the same detail about this particular part. And also, now the original post makes no sense, since the word "atomgrad" is not even present on the closed cities page.

<comment><USER5> > _This results in actual information loss_

The "History" subsection of the "Closed city" article acutally contains more information on such cities that the "Atomgrad" article did. The list of "atomgrads" in the original article were already included in the list of Russian closed cities.

If there are additional important details that you feel are missing from the "Closed city" article, please feel free to add them.

> _now the original post makes no sense_

I make edits on Wikipedia in order to make Wikipedia a better resource, not to make it more consistent with Hacker News posts. I am not a HN editor, so I cannot edit this post's title to "Closed Cities". I think the added information from the "Closed city" article more than makes up for any confusion that people who click on the link from HN but fail to read this comment thread, the notification at the top of the "Closed city" article that they have been redirected from the "Atomgrads" article, or the edit history of either article.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Fascinating. Any idea what the suffix numbers stand for for these cities?

<comment><USER8> I followed a chain of linked articles from OP and eventually found an explanation on an article for Ozyorsk[1]:

> Until 1994, it was known as Chelyabinsk-65, and even earlier, as > Chelyabinsk-40 (the digits are the last digits of the postal code, and the > name is that of the nearest big city; which was a common practice of giving > names to closed towns).

[1]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ozyorsk,_Chelyabinsk_Oblast](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ozyorsk,_Chelyabinsk_Oblast)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> grad means town/city</comment>


How Split-Testing Our Opt-In Form Increased Our Conversion Rate by 102.2% - <AUTHOR> http://diythemes.com/thesis/increase-conversions-split-testing/ <comment><USER2> I'm wondering if merely displaying a number is really "social proof" in the Cialdinian sense.

Possibly at one time, but now I think the "proof" part of social proof must be demonstrably not BS for it to work. In the same way that testimonials by "J.S., Ohio" have no real meaning anymore, but "Jared Sanderson, CEO of Whatever.com" would probably be taken seriously.

An interesting experiment would be to get permission from some of your better- known users to say something like "Join Bill Gates, Dalai Lama, and 14,152 others...". Possibly even better to use little avatars or pics of a bunch of people, ala Facebook Like or the old BlogLog widget. Who knows? I feel like that'd be a better thumbs up/down on social proof than just the number.

</comment><comment><USER3> I wish I knew more about statistics. Punching just the two variants that made it to the end into a Chi square calculator gave me a 90% confidence, not the 95% he cited.

I also wonder about stopping the variation early, and even the conditions under which he stopped the test. <http://www.evanmiller.org/how-not-to-run-an- ab-test.html> talks about pitfalls when "testing until you reach confidence".

Are there any better references for these types of questions?

<comment><USER4> I cited 95% confidence, which was calculated by Visual Website Optimizer. I wonder how they calculate their confidence level.

<comment><USER5> Never used Visual Website Optimizer, but chances are, whatever they do leaves you vulnerable to the flaw mentioned in the article that swalberg linked.

Basically, every time you peek at the results of a split test to see if the confidence level is high enough, you make your split test more prone to error.

There are ways to adjust for this which allow you to continuously monitor the test and stop if it hits a threshold, but it's much easier just to set a known number of samples to take and accept the confidence level that comes out then.

<comment><USER4> Actually, I had planned to test 2,000 views from the outset. It went a little over because I didn't stop it fast enough. I do agree that you are vulnerable to influencing results if you stop the test as soon as you hit your confidence level

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Not sure if it's significant yet. What he really got was: 9 people click on the default form, 5 people on variation one, and 14 people on variation two. These are very low numbers no matter what way you look at them.

<comment><USER4> Yes, those numbers are "lowish" but remember, it was only on 2,068 uniques. We plan on running the test again soon with another 2,000 uniques to see if timing had anything to do with it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Not only is it a distraction. I see that and think "You are going to send me email that will be sent to 15,000 other people? That would just be spam for me! Why should I sign up if you are going to spam me?"

</comment><comment><USER8> The devil's in the details, but the angels are there, too.

Amazing how much impact these "minor" changes can have on the bottom line.

Thanks for the reminder to split test all things great and small.

<comment><USER4> It's funny how that works. I suspect social proof was a distraction on that optin form.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I found it very amusing that after the long post demonstrating that the "social proof" line was cutting his sign-ups in half, there was a box asking me to sign up which included the social proof.

<comment><USER4> That's because I haven't split-tested that form yet. I'm currently preparing to run that one right now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> It looks to me as though they should try the original headline without the social proof. Since the Control beat Variation 1, but Variation 2 beat both, that would seem to be a logical next step.

<comment><USER11> Agreed. I feel the majority of the science behind this is simply keep things clean and minimal. I would hypothesise 'Get Email Updates' would do better than 'Get Free Email Updates', too.

I don't believe a statistic offers any significant social proof. Lots of faceless people i don't know have signed up. So what?</comment></comment>


Visualizing sorting algorithms with Hilbert curve - <AUTHOR> http://corte.si/posts/code/sortvis-fruitsalad/index.html

<comment><USER2> What's the reasoning for not just using points from a continuous spectrum? His approach tries to both make adjacent colors distinct while also making them blend well with nearby colors, which he admits are contradictory goals.

<comment><USER3> The reason is one wouldn't be able to distinguish, at least as easily as in his visualizations, single data points.

It's a clever way to automatically create visual classifications of random- sized collections of data points. The goals are not contradictory, they just constraint each other.

<comment><USER2> I understand that it helps separate colours from their neighbours, but I don't understand why that helps this particular visualisation. Particularly if there's no obvious way to determine at a glance whether the colour is 'higher' or 'lower' than the one next to it.

For the sorting diagrams these colours start out random and end up sorted, in neither case, nor in the transition period in-between, do I see an obvious benefit to this method of choosing colors.

<comment><USER4> Hey, as I say in the post - I make no claims whatsoever for the visualisations. They were strictly for fun, and I'm a bit surprised to find them on HN. However... choosing colours along the Hilbert traversal of the RGB cube is good if you want a sequence of many colours that are maximally distinct, where similar colours (here "similarity" is their distance from each other in the RGB cube) are as close as possible to each other in the sequence. In fact, the Hilbert curve's properties guarantee that this sequence will be near optimal - we don't know how to do better without restricting ourselves to some subset of the RGB cube.

<comment><USER2> That's cool. I'm interested, but totally unschooled, when it comes to visualisation stuff so I just thought I was missing something that would be obvious to others.

I'm now wondering if this could be applied to choosing colours for auto- generated pie charts, bar charts or map keys and similar.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Upvoted for "Mallory-Chicken Impetus."</comment>


Oracle: How it all began, by Larry Ellison - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zRY3Z0f0A04&feature=related <comment><USER2> Is that Larry Ellison? He looks different than this: <http://www.google.com/images?q=larry+ellison>

<comment><USER3> It takes a while to get to the interview part. The intro is by someone but I don't know then he start talking with Larry.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> My favorite part: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W0PTeTVI8p0></comment>


Show HN: Blur – Data privacy through pseudonymization - <AUTHOR> http://www.blur.solutions <comment><USER2> You have a typo in the overview (exsiting), [1]and another in Features (psudeu).

I can see how this could be useful though. Might be nice to have a single endpoint for encryption-at-rest of logs, database fields, etc.

[1]Edited to add

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for pointing those out.</comment></comment>


A shuffled deck of cards is unique in all human history - <AUTHOR> http://www.matthewweathers.com/year2006/shuffling_cards.htm <comment><USER2> Makes a good hide-in-plain sight crypto key. I could see James Bond using this and destroying the key as the bad guys approach with a little 52 pickup.

<comment><USER3> Done!

<http://www.schneier.com/solitaire.html>

<comment><USER4> In particular,

        If the secret police starts breaking down your door, just calmly shuffle the deck. (Don't throw it up in the air; you'd be surprised how much of the deck ordering is maintained during a game of 52-Pickup.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> See also <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solitaire_(cipher)> which uses a deck as an innocent-looking keystream having a lot of entropy.

<comment><USER6> It should be noted Solitaire is not secure for long messages.

<http://www.ciphergoth.org/crypto/solitaire/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Nice. But of course, shuffling a deck of cards does not even come close to completely randomizing the sequence compared to the previous ordering (especially if you are a crappy shuffler like me). Thus the sequences are correlated, so it's much more complicated to determine how likely it is to get a repeated configuration.

<comment><USER8> Actually, a deck of card is random after 7 shuffles.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shuffling#Randomization>

<comment><USER9> Actually, I think lutorn's point is that most people (including him) do not do a full riffle shuffle when they set out to shuffle cards, thus preserving the order of segments of the cards.

<comment><USER10> even if you're preserving blocks of 3, 17! is a big number. it's not 10^44, but still, 10^14 is pretty big.

<comment><USER11> It's a 10 letter password in [a-z]. 8 letter in [A-Za-z]. It's 47 fair coin flips.

<comment><USER12> I do use the cards metaphor for passwords: <http://github.com/gaiustech/MkPasswd>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I'd amend this to say "A PROPERLY shuffled deck of cards is unique in all human history".

Without proper shuffling, a card deck is like an encryption key with a poor initialization vector -- it's more predictable.

Card decks ship in order, and playing solitaire will potentially put it back in order. Many people don't shuffle properly, so I would hypothesize that the actual set of decks that most people run into are less random.

<comment><USER14> I concur. Another question to think over is...lets say you hand out a brand new pack of cards which come arranged in a certain order. Now you hand them out to one million people and ask them to rifle shuffle it 'N' times. What are the chances that two of them have it stacked in the same way after they do so? My guess is for low values of 'N', it would not be that uncommon.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Doesn't the birthday paradox also come into play here, significantly increasing the chances of a duplicated shuffle?

<comment><USER16> The birthday paradox applies if you are asking about the probability that any two shuffled decks throughout history have matched each other, not the probability that a shuffled deck throughout history matches the exact deck you have in your hands today.

<comment><USER17> The title of this article as posted on hacker news is "A shuffled deck of cards is unique in all human history".

Note that it does not say "If you shuffle a deck of cards, it will be unique in all of human history," which is the argument that the actual article is making.

The article title here is logically equivalent to "Any shuffled deck of cards is unique in all of human history" which is logically equivalent to "No two shuffled decks of cards in human history are equivalent". Therefore, the title of the article as it appears on hacker news needs to be changed

<comment><USER18> I don't think it's that important, really

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> This is also a retort to those who try to say that a universe that supports human life is too unlikely to happen without a creator.

Ignoring the sovereign debt sized hole in the creationist's argument, made obvious by the question "who/what created the creator", my shuffling of a deck of card also results in an almost infinitely unlikely configuration. Despite this, shuffling a deck of card does not make me a god and is quite possible to do without divine intervention.

</comment><comment><USER20> Neil Stephenson's excellent book cryptonomicon used this as a means to facilitate encrypted communication.

</comment><comment><USER21> Also makes for a great interview question why a pseudo-random generator initialized with a 64 bit seed will not produce all possible shuffles of a card deck.

<comment><USER22> That depends on whether you use the first 52 values after the seed as the shuffle or are allowed to produce multiple shuffles from the same seed. In the latter case it also depends on the, unspecified, period of the PRNG.

<comment><USER23> If the generator memory size is equal to seed size (64 bits), then period can't be larger than 2^64, and that's probably what grand-parent meant.

But generator can have states that are not possible to be set directly by seeding (like when generator has for example 1024 bits of state, but can be seeded from 64 bit int). Then period is larger than 2^64, and grand-parent thesis don't hold.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I work in the gaming (betting) industry and came across this for the first time recently. The customer _demanded_ uniform distribution which meant getting our RNG server to churn out 8 32bit random numbers just to shuffle one deck. Fun.

</comment><comment><USER25> "When I shuffled the cards this afternoon, and came up with the order you see in the picture, that is one of 8.0658X1067 different possible orders that cards can be in. However, in the past 700 years since playing cards were invented, cards have been shuffled less than 1.546X1023 times. So the chances that one of those times they got shuffled into the same exact order you see here are less than 1 in 100000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 (1 in 1044)." I'm too tired to do the math but isn't this wrong?

As in, is it taking the birthday paradox into account?

<comment><USER26> No, this is one fixed example : Akin to someone in the room having exactly your own birthday.

The birthday paradox is the observation that it's much more likely than you'd think that two people in a room share a birthday - which is equivalent to two decks ever having been shuffled into the same order anywhere.

It doesn't make much sense to calculate out that probability on the figures used in the article, since the author has purposefully over-estimated the number of shuffles ever made.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> An even stronger result takes into account the birthday problem (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birthday_problem>).

Claim: _No two properly shuffled decks have ever been the same._

Proof: For convenience, set _upper bound on # of shuffles_ = _n_ = 10^23 and _number of possible shuffles_ = _N_ = 10^68. Then the probability that all shuffles are _not_ unique is

 _q_ = 1 X (1 - 1/ _N_ ) X (1 - 2/ _N_ ) X ... X (1 - ( _n_ -1)/ _N_ ).

Since _n_ << _N_ , even ( _n_ -1)/ _N_ is small, so we can approximate _q_ as

 _q_ = 1 X _e_ ^(-1/ _N_ ) X _e_ ^(-2/ _N_ ) X ... X _e_ ^(-( _n_ -1)/ _N_ ) = _e_ ^(- _n_ ^2/(2 _N_ ))

using the series expansion _e_ ^ _x_ = 1 + _x_ for _x_ << 1.

Then the probability that any two decks have ever matched is

 _p_ = 1 - _q_ = 1 - e^(-n^2/(2N)).

Now,

 _q_ = _e_ ^(-5 * 10^(-22)) = 1 - 5 * 10^(-22),

to good approximation, so

 _p_ = 1 - _q_ = 5 * 10^(-22)

which is zero for all practical purposes. Thus, no two properly shuffled decks have ever been the same. QED

</comment><comment><USER28> The real world card shuffling is very different. You move multiple cards together, a few times. I have seen the same pattern of card shuffling being followed by so many people. Sometimes you arrange the cards in your last game, and in the next game you exactly know what card is coming up next in case it didn't change position.

</comment><comment><USER29> Just wondering but could you say that the more you use a pack of cards, the less random it is?

For example the cards will get wear and tear from constantly being shuffled (especially if you are like me and can't do it well). As the cards get more damaged, they become harder to handle and so becomes harder to shuffle. So less random.. anyone?

<comment><USER30> Well, the weak point seems to be "harder to handle = harder to shuffle". I do not see why that necessarily is the case. My grandmother used to stubbonly prefer old cards, as newer ones would glide out of her hands.

The increased grip older cards had, actually improved her ability to shuffle.

<comment><USER29> I think if you bent the corner of several cards, depending on how you shuffle the cards it might affect how random they are.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Reminds me of a previous thread. Stacking decks in your Texas Hold'em favor:

        http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=113299

</comment><comment><USER32> The analysis presented here assumes proper randomisation of the deck. In reality this is extremely unlikely as most people are pretty bad shufflers. Coupled with the fact that decks are manufactured with cards ordered, I bet a number of card sequences _have_ occurred more than once, and maybe many times.

</comment><comment><USER33> Readers may also enjoy this discussion of how many moves a chess player has to make before he is playing a game unique in human history:

<http://www.radiolab.org/2011/aug/23/rules-set-you-free/>

</comment><comment><USER34> This just in: properly chosen random numbers with lots of bits are probably unique

</comment><comment><USER35> Though the number of distinct bridge deals is much smaller, the same is probably true even for bridge deals. If my math's ok then there's about 2^107 distinct bridge deals, assuming identifiable players.

</comment><comment><USER36> I am Matthew Weathers, the author of the paged referenced here. Thanks for all the comments and insightful ideas. I've added an update to the page to include some of the ideas you all have mentioned.

</comment><comment><USER37> Very nice approach for explaining the randomization! We can conclude one thing about the article, and the thing is that the perfect shuffle does not matter that much!

</comment><comment><USER38> nothing like a little combinatorics nostalgia to brighten up your day, best post today! 52!</comment>


The Twilight of Combustion Comes for Germany's Empire of Engines - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2019-bmw-electric-car-german-engines/ <comment><USER2> It is very interesting to see the waxing and waning of technical skills and regions over long timescales. Both the Germans and the Japanese are renowned for mechanical ingeniousness, probably because mechanical knowledge was increasing rapidly at the time they began to industrialize. Now that mechanical systems are being replaced by mechatronic systems and software, these regions are experiencing relative decline.

I have always thought the US as the center of the global software industry was a bit incongruous given that this industry took root when the US was itself experiencing relative decline, but it's probably due to the invention of that other IC technology here, integrated circuits, more than anything else. For the same reason aerospace is still concentrated in the US.

It really shows how the first mover advantage in R&D can confer advantages that last for over a century.

<comment><USER3> Aren't Germany and Japan still by far the largest exporters of machine tools - i.e. the machines that make our machines?

<comment><USER4> Depends what kind of machine tools you're buying and whether you're counting units or dollars and whether you're including tooling in there. Like every other industry the cheap stuff at the bottom of the market moves way more units than the fancy stuff at the top (and as usual, a certain country in the far east makes most of the cheapest stuff).

Yeah, central Europe and Japan/Korea are big players but pretty much every "industrialized" nation has a noteworthy share of the industry.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> What a sad day for driving enthusiasts everywhere. Went to the BMW dealer last fall to test drive a 2 series and was told there are no manual 2 series cars in all of North America and I would have to get one shipped in.

But progress is progress I guess and if people want rechargeable, self- driving, ugly crossovers they'll get them.

<comment><USER6> Are you prepared to cover the full costs of your "driving enthusiam"? Or do you wish for society to subsidize your personal enjoyment, comfort and lazyness at the cost of great financial, environmental and health costs to everyone else?

<comment><USER7> That's a lot of hyperboles and ad-hominem going on there.

<comment><USER6> There's no hyperboles there. Cars, and ICE cars in particular, cause extreme health concerns from particles both exhausted and rubbed of from the tires. The vast majority of deaths in transportation are due to cars, and speeding ICE cars in particular. A primary cause of climate change (which in turn threatens the existence and/or sustenance of billions of people) is again the use of cars, in particular ICE cars, for personal transportation. Without those and the associated need for large amounts of otherwise unused spaces, many things could be done much more efficiently.

Given that the GP personally regretted the end of ICE cars, it seems not unreasonable to ask about their other feelings as well?

<comment> frosted-flakes > Cars, and ICE cars in particular, cause extreme health concerns from > particles both exhausted and rubbed of from the tires. The vast majority of > deaths in transportation are due to cars, and speeding ICE cars in > particular.

Except for tailpipe exhaust, electric cars are no different in this regard, so I'm not sure why you've singled out cars with internal combustion engines.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> We need better road pricing mechanisms for electric vehicles. If roads can no longer be funded at least by fuel taxes, that leaves an immediate revenue shortfall. Simply increasing registration fees does not consider variable levels and times of car use.

Ideally we would have an open standard used by all vehicles to communicate position in real time to the Government. This could be used for road pricing and integrated into the display panel of the vehicle.

<comment><USER9> Roads in the US are already >50% not funded by fuel taxes. What's wrong with tolls and other means, or say _primarily_ taxing large trucks, which _primarily_ do most of the wear, if you're concerned about fairness?

> Ideally [...] all vehicles to communicate position in real time to the > Government

It is not often that one man's "ideally" is another man's "dystopia" so succinctly.

<comment><USER8> That still fails to address congestion. The problem is similar to the electricity sector - we spend a lot of money creating capacity to handle peak- loads. If we simply time-shifted some road demand, or generally reduced the peak levels of road use, it would have a non-linearly positive benefit.

A rough example: people often decide to buy lunch from cafe's at the arbitrary time of 12:00 midday onwards, forming large queues. If more people bought at 11:30am, the actual time difference is minor, but demand can be handled a lot more effectively. Same thing with people arbitrarily deciding to leave work and drive home simultaneously at an arbitrary 5:00pm. If using the road at that time cost $2, and 30 minutes earlier $0.50, you can very effectively shift demand and improve overall efficiency substantially.

This is speaking from the POV of road use in cities. Its also very transparent to road users how to best optimise their road usage, since travel times, congestion levels etc. can be monitored and forecast centrally and effectively, and then signalled with road pricing, instead of individual drivers needing to do all that themselves.

The other problem is that by simply restricting axle weight for highway use, we ignore potential economic efficiencies. For example, a single super-heavy truck might create $100 of road damage, but deliver $1000 on economic benefits (eg. replacing two trucks). The user should be able to pay for the damage that they cause. This could be integrated into a smart road-pricing system that considers vehicle axle weight.

Singapore has such a system which works very well - but it relies on a large box on the dashboard and AFAIK doesn't considered axle weight.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> village-idiot BMW, the focus of the article, is also in a lot of danger as a brand. For a very long time they had the position as one of the best driving everyday cars because of their mechanical skill in the engine, chassis, and suspension parts of the car.

There appear to be two problems with that going forward.

First, other makes now have good suspension and chassis. This is a mature area of development, so the gains that BMW can make over their competitors is going to be small and expensive.

Second, what will differentiate one EV from another will be more software than hardware, and it's not clear to me if companies like BMW will be able to dominate in that area.

<comment><USER10> I am not familiar with EV internals, but do modern EVs have an electric drive train:ie, are there drive shafts and differentials and clutches in the modern EV or is it just independent motors coupled to the wheels?

What about breaking? Is done on the wheel or on the motor?

<comment><USER11> No drive shafts, no clutches. I always thought it should be a motor for each wheel, but nobody seems to be doing that now. Both physical brakes and regenerative braking exist.

(One real surprise with our new Bolt is that you can't do regenerative braking when the battery is full - there's no place to dump the energy. Makes sense once you think about it).

The simplicity of electric cars is one of their big advantages, but also one of the reasons that US dealers (other than Tesla, obviously) aren't enthusiastic about selling them. There's almost no periodic maintenance to be done, and little to break, so little in the way of post-sale revenue.

<comment><USER12> There are some companies working on "1 motor 1 wheel", it's still very early on though...

<comment><USER3> Doesn't that cause problems with relatively high unsprung mass - which causes its own problems?

<comment><USER13> Usually the motors are still mounted to the chassis with some type of halfshaft interface in those cars rather than being directly mounted to try wheels; there's just more of them

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> It does make the electric car seem attractive.

Waiting for the flood of affordable electric cars that are supposed to arrive soon.</comment>


AOP and Dynamic Languages: Contradiction in Terms or Match Made in Heaven? - b-man http://blog.objectmentor.com/articles/2007/03/21/aop-and-dynamic-languages-contradiction-in-terms-or-match-made-in-heaven

<comment><AUTHOR> Note that the article is from 2007.</comment>