Tim Berners-Lee: Long Live The Web - <AUTHOR> http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=long-live-the-web

<comment><USER3> The openness of the web, just as the openness of the Americas (when first discovered), will inevitably turn into a demarcation of borders and "property" dispute. The first settlers here had free reign, the land was truly "open" just as the Internet was truly "open".

When it is so open that eventually the masses adopt it - it goes from being an open entity to a closed entity because diversity of opinion is so wide amongst the masses that it [the public as an entity] seeks to control it and manage it (movement from expansion/openness to contraction/closedness). An interesting example of social entropy.

Where will open, free, and innovative grounds be then? On the leading edge. <http://gnunet.org>, FreeNet, VPNs, and even privately wired LANs are the best examples I can think of right now but who know what the future will bring? Maybe the next wave of open and neutral communications will be in the growth of the DSN (Deep Space Network) as humans slowly take to the stars? I see true open horizons less and less on the web now and a resurgence of the explorer taking to places untouched by the majority; I see that most in privatized space, space tourism, and hopefully space colonization.

You will rarely ever find true "open" or "neutral" proclivities amongst the many - you can only find it amongst _Individuals_ of whom the hacker community is largely made up of. Politicians serve the masses and not the Individual, you will never get the politicians to embody leading edge ideas because they will never be elected since mass-consciousness by definition _cannot_ be leading edge.

I'm repeating myself now. I just wanted to say: I do wish the web could stay as open as it has been or was even ten years ago but as more people adopt it and use it the less open it becomes; look for the ability to share knowledge and information anonymously through software like GNUnet and FreeNet or VPN or LAN networks. Look for the next wave of revolutionary ideas, platforms, and social change to occur through leading edge spaces. The Internet is no longer leading edge to those that have been riding this wave - look for the next one! (for me, the next one is (again) privatized space)

<comment><USER4> Land is ultimately a bounded resource, and staking out property is a zero-sum game. the web is, for all intents and purposes, unbounded.

<comment><USER5> I agree what you said. But the total time spent on Internet of all human being will be bounded, not infinite. You can only have 7 x 18 billion person-hours a day to use different services. What you have to compete is the time that users uses your service.

Of course I maybe wrong in above statement. The statement doesn't include all automated computing processes. Then the limit may be much larger to be considered as unlimited.

<comment><USER6> so... Governments will restrict the web to steal market share from various web apps? I think you may have misinterpreted what they're talking about. :P

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> pretty sad to see this article split onto six pages and surrounded by adverts.

In fact the more at look at the site, the more principles it violates - <USER2> page 2 Tim's talking about using good URL structures.... unlike [http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=long- live-t...](http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=long-live-the- web&page=2)

It really is worth the read though. Excellent submission.

<comment><USER8> I did some URL hacking and came up with a full-page non-ad version here:

[http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=long- live-t...](http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=long-live-the- web&print=yes)

<comment><USER9> there is also a print button :)

not for nothing of course; i usually look for these first.

<comment><USER8> Me too, unfortunately it doesn't work on this article for me though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Open standards are nice, and Javascript is in many ways better than Java or C# (but not better than F#, for example). But I am a professional programmer, and from my point of view Javascript is still a boring mess. Heterogeneity is the key, and native apps will rule. After all, that's what protocols are for, to mediate between different entities. I want to be able to create content that is not limited to technologies imposed by the W3C.

<comment><USER11> it's definitely a mess (i distinctly recall recoiling from my keyboard when i realized an array of numbers was being sorted lexically), but what do you mean by boring?

<comment><USER10> For example, I continuously found myself often type stuff like var me = this ...some local function body that uses me...

Probably "boring" is the wrong word. "Tiring" is more to the point.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I can't help getting shocked by the fact that "the father of the Web" is a 55 year old guy.

<comment><USER13> Given that he created the original proposal to create web technology in 1990 it's hardly surprising.

<comment><USER12> The fact that this shit is just 20 years old is _precisely_ what shocks me, at times.

<comment><USER13> Indeed, the fact that I've been using it since late '92 shocks me even more!

<comment><USER14> Well, internet has numbed my ability to be shocked any more.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Great as always, but Tim says: _Open Standards Drive Innovation_

These standards aren't really that open because of the committees, large companies, and bureaucracy surrounding them. And major languages we use like PhP, Python, Ruby, Java, etc. (with exception of ANSI C#, Javascript (ECMAScript) and some others) weren't successful because they were based on standards. I use FF (which was touted as standards compliant all during its transition from Mozilla from Netscape) all the time, but if it weren't for Netscape folding and IE sucking, it probably would have had much less market share than it does. I think standards are good, but the red tape slows us down. Put the specs and their reference implementations on Github (if it doesn't go down) and fork them at will, then maybe we'll see some real progress. Successful viruses mutate frequently.

</comment><comment><USER16> Would a form of protest against internet filtering take the shape of misinformation?

For example, it has been argued that the label of Sex Offender has been so misused, that the lists comprised are becoming of little value. Same for No Fly lists. This data may be from my (admittedly) very narrow list of sources, but for the sake of argument, please bear with me.

Using this same idea, adding government websites and commercial company websites to the COICA blacklists would help devalue such filtering, just as adding legislature's households to the Hadopi/Digital Economy Act's lists would devalue them...

If internet access can be moved to the power lines, would it be easier to have a non-throttled, non-filtered net? No, I guess that would likewise be subject to legislation-induced choking...

Sigh.

</comment><comment><USER17> In the article he states, "today, at its 20th anniversary". This caused me to double-check the date of publication, which is November 22nd. Ignoring for a second that TBL has transcended space and time to the point that he can publish from the future, this is the only place I can find a reference to the exact day the web went live. Wikipedia's best date is, "by Christmas 1990, Berners-Lee had built all the tools necessary for a working Web." [1] The next date it mentions is August 6, 1991, which is when he posted a public summary of the project.

Does anyone have any good information on a more precise day we could say the web went live? I want to know when best to have a party.

1\. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Wide_Web>

<comment><USER4> Scientific American is a monthly print serial. I assume "today" means the official December publication date.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> For whatever it's worth, the print button didn't work for me in Chrome and Safari on OSX 10.6.5.

I was, however, able to get a clean read/printout using Safari's built-in Reader and then printing from there.

</comment><comment><USER19> The web did not spread quickly from the grassroots up. TBL worked hard selling it. Eventually it had its own momentum, but he makes it sound easy.</comment>


I tried to make Facebook's news feed random and fun - <AUTHOR> https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/06/facebook-news-feed-hack/588043/ <comment><USER2> This is why I mostly gave up on FB, I hate how the same article you commented on, circles back up every time someone else comments on it...I tend to like to give my two cents, then mostly forget about if someone replies and I catch it in notifications and want to respond I'll do it, I don't need it in my feed to do that, they also should have some toggle to avoide seeing the same thing twice duplicate content gets so fucking annoying.

Reddit, there's some duplicates w/ cross-posting, but for the most part you click /r/all or even /r/frontpage it's a much funner experience for input seekers.

Multireddits are my favorite, if I'm in a tech mood I've got one for tech / startups or one for just webdev/programming, etc... It's also a lot less 'look at me' and more 'look at this cool thing', plus there's a snippy/witty attitude that most comments on reddit seem to have.

Honestly I feel depressed, moody, and mind-drained when I browse fb, reddit I feel more relaxed, and enriched. I also keep my frontpage on reddit less political, facebook is way too political.

</comment><comment><USER3> One thing I occasionally do in my free time: Wikipedia has a Random Article feature: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random)

Just click and you will be redirected to a random article. Most of the time the article will not be very interesting to me, but occasionally I discover interesting things I never knew about.

<comment><USER4> Here's a few wikis I like to randomize sometimes:

[https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Special:Random](https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Special:Random)

[https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Special:Random](https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Special:Random)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> A little randomness is fun and enjoyable. Not to mention, it can throw off those ad targeting algorithms a bit by injecting a little disinformation into the mix.

One of my favorite (now, sadly defunct) links was [http://random.yahoo.com/bin/ryl](http://random.yahoo.com/bin/ryl) to give you a random link from the Yahoo! directory.

<comment><USER6> A little randomness is what made StumbleUpon so enjoyable, too. But, like the link you've shared, it too is defunct.

I spent an afternoon writing a python script that picks a random word, searches sites where weird/creative folks gather (instructables? tumblr? hacker news? are.na? i need more ideas!), and opens a random link from the search results. The word list it draws from needs some pruning, but it was a decent way to return to the feeling that SU used to give me. I was thinking of turning it into a single serving site, but my dev skills really aren't up to par yet. I don't know where I'd even start to get a basic page up and running.

It's nifty to read about a collection of services from people who had similar feelings!</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How does News.YC work? - <AUTHOR>

Just curious <comment><USER2> it looks to me like your submission starts at one point, and anyone can give you +1. I think front page is determined by points-per-time-since-submission calculation. So if you can get a very early +1, you can generally make the front page right away. On a busy day, it's pretty hard, because your post doesn't stay on the "new submissions" page very long.

anyone know if that's right?

<comment><USER3> <http://arclanguage.org/item?id=3426>

Not sure, but you could always check the source code in Arc =)

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> ?

<comment><AUTHOR> by that I mean what is karma and how do they choose what pages make it to the main page

<comment><USER5> <http://ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html></comment></comment></comment>


Skype Qik launched - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.skype.com/2014/10/14/skype-qik-keeps-you-connected-between-calls/

<comment><USER2> So this is not really anything like the old Qik? Shame, as that was a nice idea with the web streaming side.</comment>


Silicon Valley-Driven Hype for Self-Driving Cars - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/10/opinion/sunday/silicon-valley-driven-hype-for-self-driving-cars.html <comment><USER2> It's not Silicon Valley hype that's the problem. It's Tesla hype. Tesla's "autopilot" is way under-sensored. One TV camera, a bumper-level radar, and some ultrasonic range sensors. That's just not enough. (Tesla is supposedly adding more cameras in later models. They still need windshield-height radar.) It's also not clear how much redundancy Tesla has in the control system? Backup processors? Redundant steering motors? Redundant brake actuators. Google has all of those. Does Tesla?

The Tesla crash and rollover on the Pennsylvania Turnpike is troublesome.[1] That's the situation Tesla's "autopilot" is supposed to handle. Here's the crash location - Penna Turnpike mile marker 160, eastbound.[2] Concrete center divider, metal guard rail on the right, clear pavement markings, summer driving conditions. There's no excuse for a crash in that situation. That may have been an outright system failure. NHTSA and the Pennsylvania State Police are investigating.

Autopilot bug reports are written in customers blood. Musk seems to be in denial about that.

Denial isn't going to work. Look how much trouble General Motors got into over ignition switches with weak detent springs.[3] Keyrings with too many keys could under some circumstances move the switch and turn off the vehicle. (It wasn't just loss of propulsion; power steering, power brakes, and airbag power were also lost.) GM has paid out $3 billion so far, recalled 800,000 cars, and fired 15 people.

[1] [http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/07/business/us-safety- agency-...](http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/07/business/us-safety-agency- investigates-another-tesla-crash-involving-autopilot.html) [2] [https://goo.gl/maps/TfcuZR67oXr](https://goo.gl/maps/TfcuZR67oXr) [3] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_ignition_switch...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_ignition_switch_recalls)

<comment><USER3> Tesla has now reviewed the logs and says that there's "no data to suggest that Autopilot was engaged at the time of the incident."

[http://electrek.co/2016/07/06/tesla-model-x-rollover- acciden...](http://electrek.co/2016/07/06/tesla-model-x-rollover-accident- tesla-says-autopilot-not-engaged/)

<comment><USER4> > _Tesla has now reviewed the logs_

This is an extremely misleading interpretation of the article. The article says Tesla has only reviewed the basic crash logs, which don't contain information about autopilot state. The detailed crash logs, which have this information, have not been received because the antenna was damaged in the crash.

So Tesla has only reviewed cursory information that says nothing about autopilot state; therefore, they can state they have "no data [suggesting] autopilot was engaged". But you cannot conclude autopilot was not engaged, because there is critical data missing.

Very misleading.

<comment><USER3> > Tesla has now reviewed the logs and says that there's "no data to suggest > that Autopilot was engaged at the time of the incident."

is a quoted directly from the article. It is also the title of the story.

<comment><USER4> Quoted from the part of the article the author crossed out and rewrote because it's inaccurate. And the title is a quote taken out of context.

<comment><USER3> I had not seen that edit. Agreed that the title is inaccurate.

The trend on these Telsa / EV blogs has been to take Tesla's logs as gospel and discount human observation.

There have been other reports of users claiming autopilot being engaged when it was not and reports of not noticing that summon was enabled even though one can't really miss that (that has subsequently been redesigned).

Human factors for these systems is incredibly challenging since such a wide audience of users useses them.

<comment><USER4> For the record, the crossed out and updated section was added two days before you posted your comment. At that time, the author added a link right at the top to a newer, more accurate article. The author also added the word "[Updated]" to the title so people would notice this change.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The thing that strikes me as more than a little off-key about the hive mind- like push for fully autonomous cars is that most drivers don't want them: [http://www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/blog/techflash/2016/...](http://www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/blog/techflash/2016/05/drivers- dont-want-self-driving-cars-uber-google.html)

"...only 15 percent of respondents would want a fully self-driving vehicle as their next purchase. Meanwhile, 39 percent said they would prefer a vehicle that has some self-driving features. Nearly all respondents (95 percent) said they would want access to a steering wheel, gas and pedal controls even if a vehicle were self-driving, suggesting a wariness toward the technology. Brandon Schoettle, the study's author, noted that public attitudes toward self-driving vehicles haven't shifted much over the past couple of years, despite well-publicized developments in the space."

This sort of reminds me of Google Glass- the tech early adopters were praising it highly and worked the hype up to a thick lather, but "normal" people wouldn't be caught dead using it and the product belly flopped badly. The entire exercise seems like the self driving technology is being built for its own sake, as though the coolness of the engineering challenge will stimulate sufficient demand to justify the endeavor.

<comment><USER6> That really means nothing. If you asked people "do you want a machine that dries your clothes" or "do you want a computer you carry in your pocket" a long time ago you probably would have received tepid interest.

<comment><USER5> It most certainly doesn't mean nothing. It means that that there are significant trust issues that must be overcome before autonomous driving technology can get widespread acceptance. This is not a pure engineering problem that must be solved. Technologists can endlessly repeat "autonomous driving is inevitable" but that alone won't make it so.

<comment><USER7> How can you trust a thing that doesn't exist? It's certainly understandable why people might hedge their bets. It's a lot to ask to get commitment to something sight-unseen. I have faith that the trust will arrive soon after the technology does.

In the article, they state that Google thinks it will be 30 years before cars will be fully capable without steering wheels. If I were a survey respondent, I wouldn't want to wait that long to get my next car either.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Something that annoys me about all this self-driving focus is that they are not targeting the obvious low-hanging fruit:

1) Focus on perfecting low speed bumper-to-bumper traffic fully autonomous driving on freeways.

2) Focus on passing legislation to allow zero driver liability and awareness when using the low speed bumper-to-bumper traffic self-driving mode.

The speeds are low and so the risk factor is reduced by orders of magnitude. Even if an accident happens, it won't be fatal because of the low speeds. And that should also help with the legislation issues. Also, this feature would be very popular. Imagine a commercial with typical bumper-to-bumper traffic. Then the camera zooms in and the driver is sleeping. When the car detects that bumper-to-bumper traffic is going to end soon, it triggers a loud alert which wakes the driver.

And yet all the car companies are ignoring this. I remember reading about early lane keeping and automatic speed cruise control and it would not activate under slow speeds. I was incredulous when I read it. They made this not work for exactly the most useful scenario? I don't care about self-driving for road trips, they don't happen often. And door-to-door self driving is the ultimate goal, but it's going to take a long time to get there. But helping to alleviate the horrible bumper-to-bumper driving by allowing drivers to do something else can be done with current technology. The whole self-driving effort feels like no one has done any market research to see how to make it help with real world situations.

<comment><USER9> Volvo XC90 has this feature. It's basically lane keeping with automatic cruise control that works between 0 mph and 30. It also requires you to keep hands on the wheel (that's not a problem, imho).

The only drawback to me is that if the car stops completely, the autopilot shuts down and has to be manually restarted (click button) to resume.

<comment><USER10>
        > It also requires you to keep
        > hands on the wheel (that's
        > not a problem, imho).

That stops you from reclaiming the time, so is probably nowhere near as valuable/desirable as one that allows you to repost cat gifs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> There was a recent story about a self-driving long haul trucking caravan across Europe touting the success of such. It was done in the spring and lots of high-fives around it...The route was in Sweden, Denmark, and Germany...aside from perpetual autobahn construction...each of those have very good roads and it was done in the spring.

"Self driving cars" still can't distinguish all driving hazards. The recent Tesla fatality, many stories made it a point to point out the driver was watching a movie.

So, let's move self driving cars to California roads. They will deal well with traffic in places like 880, etc. But, can they deal with poor road conditions, the overall shitty level of driver competence here, etc? I think that is many years off and not yet proven.

Another area to consider - uptake in new cars. I just bought a 2016 Tacoma in the last year. These trucks are known for lasting decades. I don't commute. I don't see replacing it anytime soon, let alone, ever having a self driving car for taking me places in the back country/forrest roads/etc.

It is hype and maybe it will happen for some fleet situations, but I don't see autonomous cars being the mainstay for private individuals in my lifetime.

<comment><USER12> Uptake in new cars will be a non-issue when Uber and Lyft make self-driving taxis.

The movers in industries are never the end consumers, but the large corporations.

Cities will replace HOV lanes with Autonomously Driven Vehicle lanes, and that will include the buses.

<comment><USER11> I've seen lots of stories about "cities" and their plans.

In the bay area, Morgan Hill to Mill Valley, keeping things to 101, are part of the same suburban gridlock. Do I see that area changing by "autonomously driven vehicle lanes"? No. And you are an idiot if you think it will happen. Why?

HOV lanes aren't only used by long distance commuters. You aren't going to get HOV/Autonomous lanes through SF. Sorry, After the 89 quake they tore down freeway infrastructure. 880 -> Richmond-San Rafael, yeah no.

Please provide me with a valid scenario where I can get from any of the bay area communities a commute over 30 miles where an autonomous vehicle would work. This is the norm. If you assume anything about future plans, you lose.

Hwy 85 was supposed to help south bay commutes, 2 months after opening, it was still faster to go 17 -> 280 -> Page Mill to get to Stanford from Santa Cruz. Oh yeah, that was still in the 90s.

I have no idea where you live, but, at least in the bay area, maybe you need a commute history lesson.

<comment><USER11> And as someone who lived near what is now Almaden and 85 before 85 went in (amd my parents were well aware of road plans, 85 was on the book for decades) the freeway turned upper middle class neighborhoods into problem areas when it went in.

"Autonomous lanes" much like light rail or Bart lines, have a community effect beyond the "making it easier to move people" effect.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> "Aware of the conventional wisdom that robotic cars are about to cause an epochal "disruption," automakers are eager to demonstrate that they are fully engaged. A result has been a drumbeat of announcements auguring the imminent arrival of robotic cars, almost as though they were the next generation of iPhones. The breathless statements are especially beguiling for members of the public without the engineering background required to understand the challenges that remain. In other words, most people."

I'm glad we have a "former technology reporter" to tell us this.

<comment><USER14> This is strangely similar to "flying cars". Those have been "just around the corner" for, I don't know, the last 30 years probably, if not more.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Related thread on the front page right now: "Simple questions to help reduce AI hype (smerity.com)"

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12062294](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12062294)

Excerpt:

> _...good performance on a dataset also doesn 't necessarily imply good > performance in the real world. I'd wager that even trivial self-driving car > models, given reasonable data, would be able to score in the high 90s if we > decided on a reasonable notion of accuracy. The real stickler is the last > few percent. When we make a mistake at high speed on a road, potentially > under questionable conditions, the results can be disastrous. If the cost of > a mistake is high, accuracy really doesn't mean anything, especially over a > dataset that might not be representative in the first place._

<comment><USER10>
        > When we make a mistake at
        > high speed on a road,
        > potentially under
        > questionable conditions, the
        > results can be disastrous

Given that that's no less true for humans, why do we require 100% accuracy from cars, rather than just "on average better than humans"?

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I found this article to be on the mark.

It's interesting that Google's project director estimates full autopilot will arrive between 3 and 30 years incrementally. Up to this point, most news and my friends seem to think it'll be here within 5 years.

<comment><USER17> When Google says "incrementally" they mean where it will arrive, not level of autonomy. They'll be driving in sunny California long before snowy Minnesota.

<comment><USER18> The idea of having a "summer car" and. "winter car" is pretty common in Minnesota. Summer car being a nice one, perhaps fun to drive, that gets stored in the winter so that "road cancer" doesn't eat the body. A "winter car" has a good heater, a good battery, and good tires.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> There is also the problem of analyzing why certain AI actions where taken when investigating accidents: [https://www.technologyreview.com/s/601860/if-a- driverless-ca...](https://www.technologyreview.com/s/601860/if-a-driverless- car-goes-bad-we-may-never-know-why/)

</comment><comment><USER20> What surprises me is that last-mile and local transportation of non-living cargo hasn't gotten more attention. I can't wait to get cheap delivery from practically anywhere in town and nearly on demand.

</comment><comment><USER16> I don't think Musk really understands the AI tech that he's managing. He thought Open AI would be the path to true AI, and he can't accept that a current flaw in Tesla's autopilot may be material to the company.

Musk has done a ton of great stuff. To be better, he could use someone who he trusts and is an expert in the field, like LeCunn, to simmer Musk's expectations of AI. Right now he seems brimming with confidence about AI to the point he (1) is claiming we're already living in a simulated world, (2) has started his own true AI venture, and (3) is ignoring the relevance of his own product's failures. I can only imagine this is because he is surrounded by Yes men.

I could be 100% wrong.</comment>


Show HN: Glow, a smart energy tracker for your home - <AUTHOR> https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1178650747/glow-the-smart-energy-tracker-for-your-home <comment><USER2> This is great. I manually monitor usage quite regularly at my meter (unfortunately not easy to get a smart meter in my country yet...) but it's just a number and you need to work out the current instantaneous usage. This just gives an intuitive sense. I really like interfaces that have this 'always-on-ness' and such a low barrier to insight.

I've actually considered making a glowing light in my office to link to the conversion rate of my SaaS app. For emergency & binary type alerts I get an immediate text alert. But for slightly softer & less urgent metrics a variable color glowing light could be a good way to get across how fast I should look into things ('this week, tomorrow, or maybe this afternoon since it's looking quite orange!').

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Hello HN! I'm one of the creators of Glow.

Glow is the first full home energy monitor that you can install without calling an electrician or taking your life in your hands. In addition to providing a detailed web interface & mobile app, Glow changes color in real- time based on how much power you're using. Our findings have been that this information slowly improves how you use power, much like how the Prius's introduction of a real-time MPG display causes people to drive more efficiently. Glow also has goal setting, IoT integrations, and alerts if your energy usage is unusually high, for example when an electric oven has been left on by accident.

One of the things I'm most proud of about Glow is how we found a way to use the magnetic field sensors commoditized by cell phones and a clever calibration technique to measure your power usage non-invasively.

We've been working on Glow for over two years and testing it in real world homes for over 9 months. We'd love your feedback and support if it interests you.

<comment><USER3> Congrats on the launch!

However, why should I use this instead of a smart meter coupled with load profile disaggregation (i.e. no additional devices necessary)?

Disclosure: I work for a smart metering company in Germany that offers that.

<comment><USER4> Does your smart meter provide real time output? In the US, they're usually only hourly samples.

<comment><USER3> Almost. We get updates every two seconds.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Scientists plan huge European AI hub to compete with US - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/science/2018/apr/23/scientists-plan-huge-european-ai-hub-to-compete-with-us <comment><USER2> I believe that a contributing factor to the pay gap in Europe is the fact that we have so many languages, that we are too segregated to create the same level of competitiveness as seen in the US. This means that each country is fairly protective of its people, and even though EU has free movement of labour, the language and culture barrier is strong, and internationals have a harder time to get hired, unless the speak the local language.

So the end results is that talent is spread across, and no single country has ability to become the place to be.

<comment><USER3> It also means that despite being a single market you can't realistically launch a product across the EU. A SV startup can immediately address the whole US (if they don't have a physical presence), but an EU startup has to go country by country. That means growth is slower, and talent is less competed for.

After brexit I'd like to see business & gov across the EU standardize on english as lingua franca to enable faster growth.

<comment><USER4> >After brexit I'd like to see business & gov across the EU standardize on english as lingua franca to enable faster growth.

Do you imply that brexit might make it easier for that to happen? That sounds counter-intuitive to me, once the UK leaves I believe that the only country in the EU who has English as an official language will be Ireland and even there it's cohabiting with Irish Gaelic.

Beyond that I've always been torn on this issue, on one hand having a lingua franca across the EU would be amazing and English is probably closest to achieving that, on the other hand English is effectively the language of American imperialism and its cultural hegemony. In an ideal world I'd prefer something less politically loaded and tied to a foreign superpower, like Spanish, Swedish or Romanian for instance (I'm picking random European languages who cannot be suspected of having any kind of cultural overreach in present day Europe).

Of course in this case maybe practicality trumps ideology and we should just accept our English speaking overlords for the sake of convenience.

<comment><USER5> Esperanto is surprisingly easy to learn and is meant to be a secondary language. Realistically, it's probably going to be English. Some say Mandarin in 20 years, but there are a lot of practical reasons why I find that hard to believe.

<comment><USER6> > Some say Mandarin in 20 years, but there are a lot of practical reasons why > I find that hard to believe

English has been taught in European schools for decades and most European citizens still don't use it much or know it that well (the biggest reason is that it's not the official language of the countries).

Virtually nobody teaches Chinese in European schools _now_ , so I find it very hard to believe that Mandarin will be anywhere close to the language of the internet in 20 years. It's really only the Asian countries (except India) where a larger percentage of their populations can speak or understand Mandarin, but that's always been the case anyway, so I don't think that's going to change much.

<comment><USER7> Except singapore and taiwan no other country has mandarin as its national language. Infact more countries have tamil and hindi (ex british colonies) than mandarin. Food for thought

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Our big problem in Europe is not basic research, it's systems research. We have a European platform for Big Data and AI - Hops. It's open-source. It has nice properties, but it is harder to bootstrap an ecosystem outside the valley:

(1) HDFS compatible FS with distributed metadata

(2) GPU support in HopsYARN

(3) UI to develop Keras/TensorFlow apps in jupyter, deploy on tensorflow serving. Spark support, too.

However, getting it 'out there' is still a challenge from Europe. Here is a talk on the platform at CERN last week:

[https://indico.cern.ch/event/716743/](https://indico.cern.ch/event/716743/)

More talks here:

[http://www.logicalclocks.com/eventscustom/](http://www.logicalclocks.com/eventscustom/)

<comment><USER9> > Our big problem in Europe is not basic research, it's systems research.

Hmm maybe we mean different things by 'systems research', but I'm in systems research and we're relatively strong in this area in Europe! Notable systems groups at Cambridge, Kent, Oxford, Glasgow, Manchester, EPFL, ETH, Linz, lots of smaller ones. Major influential systems projects started in Europe like Graal. Conferences which attract Americans to fly over like ECOOP and Curry On.

<comment><USER10> Except ETH and EPFL, other names you mention do not seem to be very competitive in CS systems research with top departments in the US and even some in Asia. I am not in systems so please let us know if the ranking based on conference publications skews American or it is a fair reflection of reality.

[http://csrankings.org/#/fromyear/2012/toyear/2018/index?arch...](http://csrankings.org/#/fromyear/2012/toyear/2018/index?arch&comm&sec&mod&hpc&mobile&metrics&ops&plan&soft&da&bed&world)

<comment><USER9> Three in the top ten when I select programming languages which is my sub- field. That's really not bad for Europe. I said it was _relatively_ good. Compare it to something like AI and it's good.

And this website does seem to exclude the major European conferences like ECOOP... which obviously doesn't help European institutions.

<comment><USER10> You noted about programming languages I see. Several names you mentioned are in the top 10 or 20 in the subfield.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The headline seems misleading. They're not planning one "huge hub" in one location. Instead, they're planning a bunch of mid-sized institutes spread across different countries, each with "hundreds of computer engineers, mathematicians and other scientists".

That approach is understandable politically, but it seems much less likely to have the intended effect. If the goal is to kick-start a knowledge cluster in Europe that can compete with the Bay Area, then it seems much more likely to succeed if the funding and talent is concentrated in a single site. "Hundreds of computer engineers" is equivalent to a mid-size remote office of a major tech company.

That's just an observation, though. I realize that the choice probably isn't this plan vs. one mega-site. More realistically it's this plan vs. nothing at all, or vs. competing piecemeal efforts by various EU member states.

<comment><USER12> I think a hundred researchers/engineers is well beyond a midsize company remote office, because the caliber of people and mission will be very different. DeepMind is less than a thousand people, and was probably on the order of a few hundred when it became famous.

<comment><USER11> For comparison, the Fraunhofer Society has 72 institutes in Germany, all focused on applied research. Collectively, these institutes employ ~25,000 scientists and engineers[1], which gives us an average of ~350 scientists and engineers per office. This seems very comparable to what's being proposed, both in mission and in scale of individual institute.

This seems to be an effective model for applied R&D, but I haven't seen anyone argue that a Fraunhofer Institute is sufficient to be a seed for a major tech cluster. The scale just isn't big enough.

[1] [https://www.fraunhofer.de/en/about-fraunhofer/profile- struct...](https://www.fraunhofer.de/en/about-fraunhofer/profile- structure/facts-and-figures.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> _the scientists say the proposed Ellis institute is essential to avoid brain drain to big tech firms_

They don't say tho' the mechanism by which it will accomplish this. What's in it for the individual researchers who choose this path over an industry job? ITER only exists because there is no well-funded private-sector fusion research. If Musk or Bezos or Gates entered that game it and CERN would evaporate overnight.

I'm no AI guru but I'm a pretty decent infra engineer who can wrangle storage and compute at scale, and they'll need people like that too, why would someone like me choose this path? What's the offer?

Genuinely curious.

<comment><USER14> Well, a nice office in a "culturally rich city with dozen of events, museums and world-class cuisine"?! Like it's done for all other industries. Some nice polished marketing and the fear of missing out if you don't go to the place where all the "exciting things happen".

<comment><USER13> _Well, a nice office in a "culturally rich city with dozen of events, museums and world-class cuisine"?!_

I have been thinking about this today, and I'd take a cut in pay of say 25% in exchange for a private office in which to do interesting work, and absolute job security followed by a final salary pension. The way it used to be.

But that actual deal would be a pay cut _to_ 25%, crammed into a office too dingy for Civil Servants, at risk of being TUPE'd at the drop of a hat. No thanks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Question for people knowledgeable on the topic: are there many examples of planned efforts like this actually working, where some group is able to attract top talent in some industry and keep it for the long term? The article mentions CERN; are there others?

I would guess that most concentrations of talent are an unpredictable side- effect of some environmental factor.

<comment><USER16> I don't even think CERN, Higgs boson included, is worth the man hours or cash invested...

HBP doesn't seem worth it. ITER is a huge failure that is scheduled to receive billions more euros for more than 25 more years. I don't know... Europe seems to fall victim to these sort of things very readily.

<comment><USER17> Are you defining "worth it" as whether there is a profit to be made at some point? How much would you have paid for the higgs? Are some pieces of science best left in the dark because they cost too much?

<comment><USER16> YES. There is no limit to the cost of modern science, but resources are still scarce in the real world and we cannot afford to spend unlimited funds on projects that will not pay off in human flourishing in the near future. To answer your first question that is the profit to be made and it absolutely is necessary to consider when directing tax dollars which could otherwise be spent feeding starving people or curing dying people. I would have paid $80 for the Higgs.

<comment><USER18> While you are correct to say that scarce resources means we can't do everything, pure/fundamental research like the LHC tends to have extremely high payoffs several decades after it is completed. Nobody knows what exactly, if we did we could focus on that stuff in particular, but its one of the best things we can do to grow the economy.

(Also, if everyone in the EU paid $80 for the Higgs, that's about three LHCs depending on where in its history you take the exchange rate).

<comment><USER16> Actually, good basic research has a much quicker payoff scale, like 10-20 years. Transistors, fiber optics, lasers, paid off almost immediately- and were invented ON PURPOSE by the way, in order to facilitate better communication for AT&T. And I would pay $80 because I'm personally interested, but I'm the 1%, and I don't think you should force people to pay for it, therefore you should revise your estimate to .03 LHCs.

<comment><USER18> You're taking a bunch of things deliberately invented to solve an existing problem as an example of fundamental research paying off quickly?

Counterexamples: one of the early prime number researchers was proud that his work had no use at all, and now it's the foundation of a major class of encryption. That was a century or two.

Or, Maxwell published "A Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism" in 1873, and it took another 30 years to become voice radio.

Of course, as the LHC only discovered the Higgs in 2012, even your 10 year lowball would be four years in the future.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> If you had any idea what scientists make in the EU, you'd see

1) why this is happening

2) why this effort won't change a thing

They could, you know, pay competitive wages. Ridiculous suggestion, I know, at this point that'd be a 5x and more (500% and more) raise.

<comment><USER20> I fully agree.

German media constantly complains about "IT expert shortage" yet salaries grow like 3% per year. So IMO it's either not a shortage or the German industry doesn't know how to attract good people.

To put some data points there (in EUR)

1\. Germany Uni Doctorate Position: 32k, 22k after deductions

2\. Germany AI / Data Scientist Position: 80k, 50k after deductions

3\. Luxembourg Uni Doctorate Position: 32k, 26k after deductions

4\. Luxembourg AI / Data Scientist Position: 80k, 60k after deductions

Source: Friends and family and me

The above two countries belong arguably to the economical top tier, yet they can hardly compete with a US Senior Software developer (>= 100k$?)

Now imagine how the non-top tier countries fare (i.e., 80% of the EU population)

I was an AI researcher and now work as ML/AI/Data Scientist consultant (mostly for non-European companies) and I yet have to see that European job offer of 120k€ per year, hell, make that 100k€.

<comment><USER18> I'm in the UK, intending to move out for obvious reasons (would've gone a year ago but relative got an Alzheimer's diagnosis early 2017). Considering Berlin, Silicon Valley, or a PhD just about anywhere if the cost is in my range.

Once healthcare (at NHS level) and rent are accounted for, $100k in Silicon Valley isn't as good as £37k in the UK. Germany has more expensive healthcare than the UK's NHS, but significantly lower rent and overall is only slightly more expensive than the UK… unless you intend to eventually buy a house, in which case it's suddenly much cheaper.

<comment><USER21> > I'm in the UK, intending to move out for obvious reasons

I thought you meant pay by this, but then you include Berlin in your list of potential places... Is there other reasons I'm missing out on? Genuinely curious

<comment><USER18> Brexit. I could go on for ages about specifics, but experience says that nobody outside the UK really cares (it's _so_ 2016), and nobody inside the UK is changing their minds.

<comment><USER21> Haha! Oh right. I'm an immigrant in the UK myself. Curious as to why the natives would leave :)

<comment><USER18> Ah! Partly the total incompetence of the people who are in charge of making Brexit happen, partly because I don't trust the UK government with human rights unless bound by international convention (a bind which looks like it will be a lot weaker after Brexit).

It's unfortunate, really, there's a lot of nice stuff in the UK too. And I know I'll miss it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Doesn't this happen to US universities as well? I bet Mercedes et al could do the same as Google if they didn't require you to move to company towns in the middle of nowhere.

<comment><USER23> I think you're thinking of Audi (Ingolstadt, Neckarsulm) or Volkswagen (Wolfsburg) middle of nowhere towns with a severe lack of estrogen. Mercedes/Daimler and Porsche are in Stuttgart, a major city (for Germany at least). BMW is in Munich, doesn't get much more major city than that.

The bigger problem I see is German company's unwillingness to pay engineers more for performance. You basically get the same salary whether you're pulling the whole team or slacking off.

<comment><USER22> Stuttgart is not a world-class city and Munich is filled with Bavarians (I.e. conservative, burgeois). Cologne is too small, Hamburg has no tech scene. Germany only really has Berlin for the kind of tech and city that I imagine the HN audience is interested in.

>Munich, doesn't get much more major city than that

San Francisco, Shenzhen, Paris, London, Berlin? Because the competition is international. Regional/National thinking is part of the problem.

<comment><USER24> The cities you listed are 3 times older than even the idea of an American continent. They are culturally rich and unique in their own way. They have survived several countries around them and are historically significant regardless of their size today. Cologne for example is the 4th biggest city in Germany and 2000 years old. They have traditions the rest of Germany finds odd and a strange beverage they seem to think of as beer. If that isn't enough for you culturally, than Germany really cannot compete. I don't see any reason to create some artificially big city for the sake of competing world-wide.

Also you forgot that those cities are often very close to each other. The Rhein-Neckar (Mannheim, Heidelberg, Ludwigshafen), Rhein-Main (Frankfurt, Darmstadt, Wiesbaden, Mainz etc.) or Ruhr (too many to count really) area do form hubs, which can compete worldwide and are economically MUCH stronger than Berlin ever will be.

<comment><USER25> Berlin is the only true international city of Germany, and with its active startup and IT culture - ~20 hackerspaces, countless IT MeetUps, startup events, well-known STEM research labs spread across 3 full and several applied universities and research institutes like MPI or Fraunhofer; industry research (Amazon) - the only place in Germany and one of the few places in Europe that is interesting for the HN audience.

The areas you mention are only places to go if your startup wants to tap into the (indeed very established) mechanical engineering industry, or very specific areas of research. But definitely no place for people who have a more international view on things.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> > Meanwhile, some universities had been hit so hard that they > had lost an > entire generation of talented young researchers.

The schadenfreude is strong with this one. Maybe next time try treating your researchers less like cattle and start paying them market value salaries.

<comment><USER27> Trouble is, it's not really a "market". EU universities are (mostly) subsidized from other people's taxes, so calling for "market salaries" is essentially calling for increased taxation. A tough sell, especially given the distant, lukewarm connection between the people paying and the people being paid.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> I want to thank everyone who contributed to this thread. The variety of experiences and viewpoints provided an incredible insight to someone who's been mostly in the USA for the last 2 decades. My conclusions:

a) There's not a snowball's chance in Hell that a European AI hub compete with the US,

b) Europe remains far more fragmented than I thought it was; even more fragmented than it appeared when I was in high school. "Brexit" may actually increase Europe's (and Britain's) organization.

c) Britain and Europe have tons of good people but a lack of organization suitable for pure research, be it by governments, corporations, "hubs", or non-governmental organizations.

d) China is similarly SNAFU'd but worse in some respects (unsettled markets, lack of transparency & property rights). Luckily, there doesn't appear to be a ghost of a chance of having one of China's many languages adopted as a scientific "lingua franca". [Note to self: cross the (formerly) relevant item off my "bucket list".]

e) Perhaps restoring near-universal use of the character encoding UTF-16 or even US-ASCII is not a completely dead idea but merely one to be delayed until the adoption of English as the "lingua franca" of the Internet and Europe, salvaging much-needed bandwidth. Time will tell.

</comment><comment><USER29> SV has always been heavily subsidized. A lot of the fundamental tech comes from government research projects. Startups have access to easy capital and there is no transparency of the 10/1 or 100/1 failures, how this is sustained and where all the money is coming from.

There is definitely govt money including from the CIA, NSA at work here. So there is no reason the EU cannot do the same, infact they are late.

The open source movement has also played a key role in most of the SV success stories in the recent past. Zuckerberg, Page and others are the celebrated 'free market' 'wealth creators' but the work of Stallman, Torvalds, Rasmus and thousands of others have undeniably added billions of dollars of value.

Our currently ideological narrative of 'wealth creators' and 'free markets' completely fails to account and value these and other critical social investments. We make the narratives we want.

All the SV money further subsidizes companies like Uber and other startups hungry for market share, who can under price and run out competition in other markets which is dumping. Its just that no one is going after them in Europe and elsewhere yet but the rules are there and can be enforced when needed.

</comment><comment><USER30> This reminds me of the European attempt at competing with the American BRAIN Initiative [1]:

"The key difference between Europe's HBP and the U.S.'s BRAIN Initiative is that the latter does not depend on a single scientific vision. Instead many teams will compete for grants and lead innovation into different, unplanned directions. Competition is happening via the nimh's traditional peer-review process, which prevents the conflicts of interest that plagued decision making at the HBP. Peer review is not perfect—it tends to favor known scientific paradigms—and American science funding has plenty of problems of its own. But the BRAIN Initiative's more competitive and transparent decision making is far removed from the political black box in Brussels that produced the HBP."

[1] [https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-the-human- bra...](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-the-human-brain- project-went-wrong-and-how-to-fix-it/)

<comment><USER25> The BRAIN initiative started after the proposal of the Human Brain Project. The Human Brain Project also followed the Blue Brain Project, which was started in 2005. Leaving criticism of the HBP aside - it would be wrong to put it as if the HBP is the "European answer" to the BRAIN initiative.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> The question is really if Europe can compete with the whole US ecosystem without protectionist policies (and there justified). Nowhere is the US domination more visible than in the tech sector, where Europe essentially is a tech vassal state. The European countries need to build not only an AI hubs, but also an competitive business ecosystem that attracts top talent through salaries, opportunities, challenges and benefits. I don't think there is much appetite in the European population for competing on lavish salaries and raw capitalistic incentiments (both categories in which US leads).

European leaders can just look at China and see successful protectionist policies. It makes sense to have some policies not only in US-EU relationship, but also inside EU that spreads the talent on a regional level so regions don't just get drained. This is also a big issue for East- and Central- european countries.

<comment><USER32> There's actually something fascinating about the dominance / vassal premise: it applies within the US, and it applies within Europe as well.

Silicon Valley, Boston, NY, Seattle, and a few others dominate the US on tech, with the rest of the US mostly fitting into your tech vassal state premise.

The exact same thing is true within Europe for industry and tech. Germany overwhelmingly dominates Europe on auto manufacturing for example. What kind of cars are Russia, Spain, Portugal, UK, Poland, Ukraine, Greece, etc producing? The Germans are out selling and out producing the rest of Europe to an epic degree.

How many Airbus planes - and or what share of components - are manufactured in Romania, Czech, Greece or Poland? In Europe these are industrial vassal states to France or Germany.

<comment><USER33> The headquarters are in Germany, but tiny Slovakia, for example, has huge car production facilities.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> US hardly has a monopoly on AI. Canada and China are also leading countries. It's great that the EU wants to invest too, the more the better! Science doesn't hold allegiance to any country and never should.

<comment> Al-Khwarizmi The open letter does talk about North America in general (not only the US) and China. The Guardian summarized all that to "the US" in their headline.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> This is great news. We need more tech hubs and more competition in the tech industry. I'm still confused as to why europe decided to cede the entire tech industry to the US. Do europeans love us this much? That they want us to have all money/technology?

But this doesn't go far enough. Europe has 600 million people. They should have 2 or 3 tech hubs.

Look at what china is doing. They are developing their own tech industry. That is what europe should do. Foster their own tech industry.

</comment><comment><USER36> Where this is shown up starkly is in Self-driving startups. This list of startups [0] only has 1 or 2 in Europe out of 33.

Mercedes does most of it's self-driving research in the US.

[0]: [https://angel.co/job-collections/top-self-driving-cars- start...](https://angel.co/job-collections/top-self-driving-cars-startups)

</comment><comment><USER37> is it just me or does the guardian symbol in the browser tab (white G on a black disc) always look like the pirate party symbol (black flag on white background in a black circle)?

</comment><comment><USER38> Ahem ....to compete with China.

</comment><comment><USER39> Unless it is supported by capitalist intent, it cannot compete with us.

<comment><USER26> You have already lost. Because 'us' almost certainly does not include you.

<comment><USER39> Not sure i get you. Us=the us, and it does include me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> I don;t know about AI, but when it comes to using formal methods to nail down software development and make it reliable, the EU is already outpacing the US.

<comment><USER41> This is an assertion without data to back it up. Care to elaborate?

<comment><USER40> INRIA, where Coq development takes place.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Symatem – An Ontology Engine, Visualizer, and Editor Using WebAssembly - <AUTHOR> http://symatem.github.io/ <comment><USER2> This is awesome!

I'm working on a neural network project using c++17 and wanted to compile it into wasm. I searched how to support c++17 with emscripten and my finding seemed to be that it's not trivial. It's great to see that you have achieved it.

For neural network visualization, I also thought about using node graph, this is certainly a project I can learn from!

</comment><comment><USER3> This is great! I'm actually building something kinda similar right now.. I love the webassembly demo though!

</comment><comment><USER4> A screenshot would help those of us trying to explore the page on mobile phones that don't support (enough?) WebAssembly to see the live demo.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's an excellent idea. I will add a static SVG as fallback right away.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> interesting. so it stores everything as triples, much like RDF?

I wonder what he means by 'blobs'. if he just means every element of the triple can be an arbitrary binary blob, that's kind of cool.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, that is exactly what it means. Every symbol (vertex of the graph or element of a triple) has its own bitstream, which is used to implement all the literals.</comment></comment>


Chinese young lady got racist discrimination on Virgin Atlantic flight VS250 - <AUTHOR> https://www.zhihu.com/question/41033519 <comment><AUTHOR> Original text in Chinese, translated summary:

"The young lady took a flight Virgin Atlantic VS250 from London to Shanghai on March 1st, 2016. The insult occurred when she just boarded on the plane and was looking for her earphone under her seat. A white male around 50s, stood up from his seat 64C, walked towards her, pointing at her and said "You f _cking Chinese pig. Get the f_ ck of here." She was shocked first and then felt angry, and inquired:" what did u say to me?" The old man repeated his words. At this time, she tried to turn to the crew for help while the man kept abusing her with F words. During the time, there was a couple trying to stop him however was even threatened by him. Soon after, a male crew came over and talked with that old guy and then came to the young lady, asking her to stop arguing with the old man otherwise she would be expelled.

She explained to the crew that it is that old man who started insulting her and he should apologize but the crew did not give a shit. When the couple told the crew what happened, the crew came over to tell the lady that he would later try to move the old man to another section while he added that the old man seemed to have mental problems.

Almost after 30mins, there was no further action and that old man was still there. The young lady tried to ask any crew members when a Chinese female crew came over and told her better not to continue because she might be expelled according to that male crew's words.

Thus, this young lady who got no help from the crew, was in fear for further possible insult or threat from that guy, suffering as much as 11 hours on the plane, as well as being angry that how this well-known international airline can behave like this. When she finally got off the plane, she asked many times about the male crew's real name and he is called "Nathan Smith", according to his colleagues."</comment>


Show HN: And then... - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/askabt/andthen

<comment><USER2> There seems to be a large number of new users (a few of which were created within 5 minutes of this submission) who've only commented on this, and very vacuously.

<comment><AUTHOR> This went out on FB and Twitter. I guess people who came from there weren't HN users. Hopefully they are now.

I agree about the comment quality though, I was hoping for a discussion about the idea itself.

<comment><USER3> The idea is good, but I can't see why I would switch to this from Q.js. The latter is:

* pretty lightweight (9.8KB)

* well-supported, with very active development (10 commits in the last month)

* good documentation

You need to explain the benefits of .andthen() in comparison to Q.js, because at the moment it just looks like another promises JS framework.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think the benefit is primarily a simpler API and nicer syntax for most of the things you'd want to do.

For instance with Q.all, you'd do with:

return Q.all([ eventualAdd(2, 2), eventualAdd(10, 20) ]).then(function(values) { console.log(values[0], values[1]); });

can instead be

eventualAdd(2, 2). and(eventualAdd(10,20)). then(function(a, b) { console.log(a, b); });

which I feel reads nicer and gives you the results in a more usable form (something that would require another call, Q.spread, in Q). This also allows complex composition. Say you want to run 4 functions A, B, C and D, such that A and B are called together, C is called when A returns, then D is called when B and C both return. This is clumsy to do on Q, requiring packing promises into an array, etc.

The other big thing is error handling. In Q, if you forget to set an error handler at the end of the chain or explicitly set the default handler with .done(), errors go unhandled. This is clumsy; in fact the Q documentation says:

"This is a stopgap. We are exploring ways to make unhandled errors visible without any explicit handling."

We've implemented this in andthen. If there's no error handler and execution reached the end of the chain, it will be thrown so Node or the browser will print it.

There's fulfilment as well, but I get your point about putting this better in the README.

<comment><USER4> This behaviour is not promise/a compatible. Make it optional and you become promise/a compatible.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4>
      p1.and( p2 ).then( function( p1_result, p2_result ){...});

I believe this is equivalent to:

      Q.all( p1, p2 ).spread( function( p1_result, p2_result ){ ... } );

There are other good reasons, at this point, to switch from Q to another promise lib, speed for example, as was virulently signaled recently: <http://jsperf.com/wqfwewefewrw/4>

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> If you have any questions, I'm hanging out on <http://askabt.com/andthen> (realtime chat).

</comment><comment><USER5> I like the idea, but am I the only one who feels that having a method 'and' feels a little too... cute?

I mean, it's not at all obvious that 'and' is related to parallel execution, and it could very easily clash with another library that uses the same name.

</comment><comment><USER6> How does it compare with Q.js ?

</comment><comment><USER7> I also like this: <http://askabt.com/andthen> I think its kinda forum, who's running this?

<comment><USER8> Its chat blended in forum and you can embed it any where :)

<comment><USER7> I like its integration with Gtalk.

<comment><USER3> I don't like all the suspiciously positive comments by new users appearing on this thread. @Mehul981, are you affiliated with askabt by any chance?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> its simple and small

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, barely 1.3 kb minified if you're using it on the client side. It's also compatible with JQuery deferred's.

<comment><USER4> Compatible with jQuery deferred?

Only if you consider that it is compatible to miss P.Deferred(), P.promise(), P.when(), parole.state(), parole.progress(), parole.done(), parole.fail() and parole.always()

I tend to know about that because I am currently writing a lib that is going to be both Q and jQuery compatible: <https://github.com/JeanHuguesRobert/l8/wiki/ParoleReference>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> looks awesome</comment>


Attackers might be trying to steal your information from ups.com - <AUTHOR> https://ups.com/ <comment><USER2> Looks like they just have a poor cert setup - www.ups.com is fine</comment>


Ask HN: What langauges to learn if I wanted to build a site like nomadlist.com - <AUTHOR> I subscribe to the sentiment that a good way to learn development is by taking on a project. I have a few projects in mind for online directories similar to nomadlist.com.
So far I've been building them in Wordpress and hiring freelancers to do the bits that the plugin does not allow natively. But I cant seem to get the right kind of filters and cutomisation that I would like and have contemplated what it would take to learn to build it myself.
If my desired outcome was a directory site such as nomadlist.com with lots of filters, good performance, and a CMS, and assuming I was willing to take on a few months worth of learning, what would be a good learning path?
One option I suppose is to learn PHP and Wordpress so that I can take on the customisation of my wordpress site.
But I would prefer to give myself options outside of Worpdress and to learn to build a site from scratch.. Would love to hear some thoughts from the dev community.
The wordpress option is probably more realistic given my timeline, but I do know CSS and HTML already so maybe it is possible to learn something more advance? You tell me
Note: I could have asked what languages were used to build nomadlist, but I purposefully phrased the question differently because I presume that the languages he chose might night be the best/recommended languages for a newbee trying to reach the same outcome. <comment><USER2> Hi! I made Nomad List so maybe I can tell you more. I wrote it in plain JS with only jQuery. The backend is PHP. They communicate through simple POST requests (see the Network tab when you filter). The database is SQLite for simplicity sake.

I'd recommend building something with a language that is easy for you to learn and that gives you freedom to make it complex or not. That's PHP for me. A big reason why I say this is because you don't want to spend too much time coding while validating your website/app idea.

You can always switch language/stack later.

I decided to go framework-less, which was a great decision early on. And I still like it although once you get more traffic and features, everything inevitably turns into spaghetti and you need to stay very knowledgable about your code to keep being able to work on it. Stuff like user sign up and login I'd love to have outsourced to a framework (for example this week login broke for no reason).

Also some parts of the site run on off the shelf software. The forum runs on Discourse, the chat runs on Slack etc.

I was obsessed with which tools to use before I made Nomad List, but then when it went viral I had to work with whatever I knew and I hear that from a lot of people. You work with what you know at that time.

Good luck :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Oh wow, great to get such direct feedback, thanks! Interesting to hear that you use PHP. Although I'm not a developer I lurk on forums a lot and it seems PHP gets a bad rap so interesting to see a site that is well known in HN circles using it.

While I've got you on the line I have to give my 2 cents about your scores for Johannesburg. firstly, our weather is sublime, secondly I would say that freedom of speech, racial tolerance and female freindliness, is at least good if not great. Air quality I think is at least okay if not good.

But I'm a bit biased, and I guess its all subjective :)

Happy to provide any other Joburg info if you need.

<comment><USER2> Sure :)

PHP 7 is very improved and can stand up to most other langauges now I think.

Facebook and Slack are also built on PHP.

I think asking what tools people use is probably the wrong question though. You can build successful projects with most modern languages. It's more about your style of coding I think. My style is extremely minimalistic in effort and pragmatic. Not a lot of testing either.

Thanks for the feedback on Johannesburg! You can click some of the values as they're editable. Others are from international data sets (like racial tolerance and free speech).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> It's not language related -- you could build a simple webservice with any language and db. You could take a course on basics of building web- applications in any popular language (Ruby on rails, nodejs or php) and start out there.

Of course if you just want to get a directory out there, you're on the right track of maybe using wordpress with a theme, and some plugins. The language doesn't have much to do with how popular something will be.</comment>


SensorTape: Sensor network in the form factor of a tape - <AUTHOR> https://www.fastcodesign.com/3057157/mit-has-invented-the-crazy-sensor-loaded-duct-tape-of-the-future <comment><USER2> That's cute. Now to make it a mass-produced product. LED strips [1] are very similar; they're long strips with LEDs and a simple ASIC in one package, wired end to end in long rolls. You plug power and a bitstream into one end and can control each LED independently. Cheap, and popular at Burning Man. If someone can find a volume market for this, it should be easy to get it made.

[1] [https://www.adafruit.com/products/1138?gclid=CMnogdfklssCFU9...](https://www.adafruit.com/products/1138?gclid=CMnogdfklssCFU9cfgodvhQJhQ)</comment>


Why write a 3D engine from scratch? - <AUTHOR> http://alainrichardt.info/splash.sys <comment><USER2> I used to do this kind of stuff for fun in my high school days. Now I don't have the time =( Kill to be able to get into game dev professionally (without winding up in a sweatshop, lol)

</comment><comment><USER3> Why not?

<comment><USER4> 2 cents :) maybe for learning purposes we should start from scratch or reinvent the wheel. else use existing wheels.</comment></comment>


European Parliament set to end EU-wide daylight savings - <AUTHOR> https://www.dw.com/en/european-parliament-set-to-end-eu-wide-daylight-savings/a-47775317 <comment><USER2> I work in energy trading in Europe and for us this is a blessing. Of course we store our time series TZ aware, but many less professional small utilities or other market participants (incl. Grid operators) who e.g. Order power on hourly resolution with tz-unaware excel spreadsheets via email are a nightmare as each participants treatment of double or missing hours is different and requires manual processing.

<comment><USER3> Why don't you just make a system that the clients must enter data through? Instead of accepting spreadsheets...

But, yes, I can imagine this is a nightmare..

<comment><USER4> Supply and demand. I would guess the clients can just go "no" and you either loose the electricity they provide or allow spreadsheets.

<comment><USER5> Working in the same sector, I can confirm this. We try to offer pretty much any half-way reasonable interface to our clients for that exact reason, be it spreadsheets or csv via mail or SFTP, REST APIs or a web interface.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> So many people, including a lot of comments here, seem to think that it's designed around the winter. It's not, it's to move an hour of sunlight from the start of the day (say, 4am) to the end of the day (say, 9pm) so that you use less energy in the summer (hence the 'savings'), and then you can enjoy that rather than being asleep.

Moving to summer time year-round means that the mornings in the winter will be darker. I like having a bit of daylight in the mornings in the winter, and I'll miss it when it's gone. As I'm sure a lot of people will when they realise that getting 'rid' of it makes the winter worse, not the summer better.

<comment><USER7> So just change the hours you work during the Winter! Why do you have to modify the actual clock that everyone else uses to do that?

<comment><USER8> That would be great but convincing School Boards of that would be a non- trivial task.

<comment><USER7> DST causes trauma for people with bipolar disorder, heart attacks go up, etc. Also, on a selfish note, it's irritating to program around.

DST is a legislative solution to the problem of getting everyone to change scheduling. So why not use legislation to get those school boards to change scheduling directly?

<comment><USER7> downvotes instead of rational arguments? On HN? Either pigs are flying or it's Wednesday again.

<comment><USER9> Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments to Hacker News?

Also, going on about downvoting breaks the site guidelines: [https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The graphic would seem to indicate that the UK and Portugal observe a time zone of Coordinated Universal Time (UTC±0). This is nonsense, of course; UTC is not a time zone. I believe the UK observes GMT (UTC±0) and Portugal uses Western European Time (UTC±0).

It's also worth looking up the story of why Coordinated Universal Time is abbreviated UTC and not CUT, if you haven't heard it. Time zones are great.

<comment><USER11> > I believe the UK observes GMT (UTC±0)

That's correct, with BST in the Summer. It can get confusing when working with people from different countries who aren't aware of BST and who schedule meetings explicitly in GMT, thinking that it automatically includes daylight saving.

<comment><USER12> In my experience, it gets more confusing for English people who schedule meetings in GMT in the summer and then are an hour late.

<comment><USER13> It's also a problem for software engineers in the UK, for whom 6 months of the year utc and local time are the same, resulting in people not knowing the difference. In the rest of the world it's bleedin obvious.

A downside to inventing time I guess ;)

<comment><USER14> The two times a year when you find out which new tests were written to use local time instead of UTC.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> The `daylight saving` purpose is intriguing.

I'm very curious why people long time ago, decided to change clocks, instead of work/school start and finish times. Like we start in April at 8:00 am, and in November, at 9:00.

<comment><USER16> I believe the reason is that it costs less to move the hands of a clock than to print and distribute new timetables for trains, buses, etc.

That could cost less today because we use much less paper, but updating web sites and databases is still a large amount of work. It's far easier to communicate to all the country when to move the clock and keep everything else the same.

<comment><USER17> It actually costs in an entirely different way, when you screw with everybody's sleeping schedules, cause accidents with wildlife getting surprised by brisk changes in traffic peaks. Personally, I never dealt well with the change, either, so this means I have one less thing to worry about in pollinosis season. Good riddance.

<comment><USER18> Do you have any credible sources that say wildlife is affected in any way by daylight savings?

<comment><USER19> I don't have a source, but my understanding was that deer tend to learn when it's safe to cross the road. When all of a sudden people change their driving habits by an hour, deer start to get hit by cars that they didn't expect to be there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Lets also try and spread working times from (mostly) 9-5 to 6-2, 7-3, 8-4, 9-5 and 10-6 so we can solve the traffic congestion problem, all while enabling people to work when they work best.

<comment><USER8> I would love this. But it seems what pegs everyone to the same schedule is uniform school hours for K-12.

<comment><USER21> There's a lot of research lately indicating that the current school hours are harmful and should be adjusted.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Someday US will get this too! Right after the metric system.

Seriously speaking: I wish US gets rid of the clock change (one way or the other).

<comment><USER23> It's pretty much up to individual states.

<comment><USER24> Except there is federal law on this that affects their decisions. [0]

I wish we would at least call it "summer time" instead of the lie "daylight savings time." There's no daylight "saved."

[0] [http://www.webexhibits.org/daylightsaving/usc.html](http://www.webexhibits.org/daylightsaving/usc.html)

<comment><USER25> It affects their decisions in some nominal capacity, but it is still up to the states and territories. Federal laws don't have the authority to supersede local laws whenever they want.

"As of 2014, the following states and territories are not observing DST: Arizona, Hawaii, American Samoa, Puerto Rico, and the Virgin Islands.[7]"

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daylight_saving_time_in_the_Un...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daylight_saving_time_in_the_United_States#1966%E2%80%931972:_Federal_standard_established)

<comment><USER26> I thought that winter time was the default and summer time was opt-in by the states. But that both California and Florida when seeking to change to summer time all year round had to get approval from congress.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> > mandated EU-wide summer time has only existed since 2002

and this repeal only repeals the mandatory adherence to daylight savings. Their next problem is consistency and coordination of the removal of DST among member states. And the Germans seem to be dominating the vote as well, so the really hard work in negotiating with others to remove their DST is the real barrier.

<comment><USER28> " _And the Germans seem to be dominating the vote..._ "

On what basis are Germany dominating the vote? They cannot. No EU member state can dominate a vote. Germany could at best lobby other member states, as other member states can (and do) lobby Germany.

<comment><USER29> _> On what basis are Germany dominating the vote?_

The initial EU online public vote was dominated by German voters. There were 4.6 Million votes, of which 3 Million came from Germany [1]:

 _" More than 80 percent of respondents to the largest online survey in EU history are in favor of abolishing changing the clocks in summer and winter, EU sources reported Wednesday. Around 4.6 million people took part in the survey, which ran between July 4 and August 16. Three million of the respondents were from Germany._

And from the EU Commission report [2]:

 _" It should be noted that the largest amount of responses came from Germany (70% of all replies), which has a statistical influence on the average results._"

That said, from section 3.2 of the EU Commission report, Cyprus & Greece were the only two countries where citizens voted to keep daylight saving.

[1] [https://www.dw.com/en/eu-citizens-feel-times-up-for- changing...](https://www.dw.com/en/eu-citizens-feel-times-up-for-changing- clocks/a-45263664)

[2] [https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal- content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX:52...](https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal- content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX:52018SC0406)

<comment><USER30> Edit: I think I misunderstood your comment. I thought you meant Greece and Cyprus prefer to keep summer time for ever. Whereas you probably meant that Greece and Cyprus wanted to keep changing the clocks.

Anyway I leave my initial comment below.

I think you read that wrong. You should look at section 3.5.

"The highest share of respondents in favour of "permanent summertime" is in Portugal (79%), Cyprus (73%) and Poland (72%)."

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Frankly, I like daylight savings. It contributes to reduce the difference between the sun time and my time.

I wake up more or less when the sun raises and then go to work. Now if I keep doing that I'm going to show up either too late in the winter or too early in the summer.

<comment><USER32> So you do you- just don't force the complexity of your life on the rest of us.

We can contribute a measurable number of deaths every year to DST. It's a disaster.

<comment><USER31> I say it's natural to wake up when the sun raises, you say it's natural to stick to the same hour all year long.

I'm not forcing anything anymore than you do.

<comment><USER33> No one is forcing you to wake up at any particular time. If you want to wake up when the sun rises, you can do that. You don't need to control everyone's clock to do that.

<comment><USER31> Employers do force their employees to show up at a particular time.

<comment><USER33> No, they don't force that at all. You're free to find another job with hours you prefer, or try to get your boss to let you work different hours. If all your coworkers don't like the hours, you have a better chance of getting the management to change the working hours. If you're the one weirdo who wants different hours, then maybe you shouldn't be trying to get everyone else to do things to your liking.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> The road to hell is paved with good intentions. Getting rid of DST sounds like a good thing. Not messing time is patently good. But a bunch of countries on the western side of the EU ought to be on GMT instead of GMT+1. And appparently a majority of people want to make that worse, by making a permanent switch to GMT+2.

This will make for fun winters, with the sun rising long after rush hour. This is stupid.

<comment><USER35> There is no natural law stipulating when rush hour happens or when buissness hours should be though.

Shops will just start to open at 10 instead of 9 and workdays will start at 9 instead of 8 in those areas where this is a problem.

<comment><USER36> You're forgetting some "laws". Let me list them in order of priority:

1\. Business hours must be kept in sync with the important countries next to them. This is important for communications between companies. When business hours are off by 1 hour, there is 1 hour less to communicate with your neighbour countries at business hours. That is 12.5% of the business day you cannot reliably contact another company in another country.

2\. The clock must be equal to these important countries to not make mistakes when setting appointments.

3\. Business people with kids have to bring their kids to school before business hours start. Schools start before business hours, about 30 minutes up to an hour earlier.

4\. Shops open relative to business hours.

The reality is that north-west EU will do whatever Germany does. Germany wants GMT+2. That means that all countries west of Germany that follow Germany will have post 10 o'clock sunrises in winter, 2 hours after people get out to bring their kids to school & go to work.

<comment><USER37> > The reality is that north-west EU will do whatever Germany does. Germany > wants GMT+2. That means that all countries west of Germany that follow > Germany will have post 10 o'clock sunrises in winter, 2 hours after people > get out to bring their kids to school & go to work.

As a french I don't see the problem with that, I'd much rather have more sunlight in the evening when I can actually go out and do stuff

<comment><USER36> Maybe you don't, but it really messes with your biological rhythm to get up before dark. If you get up, go to work and start your job all while it's dark outside, it is really hard to get going and not getting depressed in the long term.

Maybe not for you, but for many it will be.

The only daylight people will experience is when they leave their job. That's rough.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> In before "Let's all switch to UTC to solve this problem once and for all!"

Anyway, it's so weird to me that daylight savings is such a new concept, it didn't exist where I was born when I was born, but it feels like a thing that ought to have existed for a hundred years at least.

And yet, despite it being so new, people are actually defending it? Mindboggling.

<comment><USER39> Whenever someone advocates for UTC being the wall clock time all over the world, I think of Jason Mendoza from _The Good Place_ :

> Anytime I had a problem and I threw a Molotov cocktail, boom! Right away, I > had a different problem!

<comment><USER40> By why is UTC a Molotov cocktail?

<comment><USER39> This site does a good job of explaining:

[https://qntm.org/abolish](https://qntm.org/abolish)

For me the biggest headache would be the date changing in th middle of the day.

<comment><USER38> "Excuse me, does your workweek start on Sunday/Monday or on Monday/Tuesday?"

Yay, everyone is now on the same time, too bad the concept of weekdays got completely broken in the process...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> I really hope this doesn't happen. I don't want to have darker mornings than they already are. Daylight in the morning is important to wake you up and to adjust your circadian rhythm.

<comment><USER42> Sorry, but this so much differs depending on which month/day it is. My "biological clock" is reliably and wakes me up more or less the same time, however comparing winter/summer has a huge difference - having total darkness or sun heating your room. Regardless of DST.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> I have a side project that displays French radios' schedules that is basically wrong two days per year because of DST so I guess thanks the EU for fixing it.

As a citizen though I don't really have an opinion, except that I want the longest sun possible during the summer evenings ...

</comment><comment><USER44> A change which may be rational closer to the equator, but which makes less sense in Edinburgh or further north surely?

<comment><USER16> Actually the closer you get to the poles the less you benefit from DST. At the poles you get 6 months of daylight and 6 months of night no matter what. The same at the equator, 12 hours of daylight and 12 hours of night (this doesn't take into account the inclination of Earth's axis, but you got the idea.) The places that benefit most from DST are the ones in between, especially around 45 degrees latitude.

Then there are cultural factors, like those countries that like to spend their day time between 9 AM to midnight. It's easier to change the time on the clock than the minds of millions of people. For example, in my country there is a saying that only hens have dinner at 6 PM. It's not socially acceptable to get into a restaurant before 8 PM, friends will laugh at you if you suggest doing so. It's best to have dinner 9 or 10 PM, unless you're a tourist with different habits.

<comment><USER44> In Edinburgh, during the miners strike in the seventies we went to double summer time. In winter when it's bloody dark in the morning I found it credible a time shift helps. In summer when it's 11pm and bright outsides I find it credible a time shift helps.

I think your 'less useful the further to the pole you are' line may be the inside the arctic circle story. I definitely think summertime made sense in the Edinburgh from personal experience. I now live in Brisbane around 600k of the tropic of Capricorn and it makes no sense at all, except economically because the southern state neighbour (NSW) does summertime, as does Victoria and Tasmania both significantly further towards the pole.

<comment><USER45> I grew up in northern Sweden. I always found that summers are so bright it doesn't matter either way.

> In winter when it's bloody dark in the morning I found it credible a time > shift helps.

Winter time is standard time anyway, and wouldn't be affected by this change.

> In summer when it's 11pm and bright outsides I find it credible a time shift > helps.

DST pushes the clock ahead of the sun and makes it bright _longer_ into the night.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> Here in Morocco, it was made permanent starting this year, so instead of being GMT we are GMT+1 all year round,

Except, this decision was made brutally without any prior discussion or vote,

<comment><USER47> Huh, that means Iceland can no longer set our timezones to Casablanca. A few years back, Atlantic/Reykjavík was never an option when selecting timezone, so we would always go with Casablanca.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> Whatever we do I hope it syncs with the US, because 9 AM SF/5 PM Dublin meetings are a LOT nicer than 8AM SF/5PM Dublin or 9 AM SF/6PM Dublin

</comment><comment><USER49> Is the full colorization of Cyprus a result of a political statement or just ignorance?

<comment><USER50> EU does not officially recognize Northern Cyprus.

<comment><USER51> Nobody recognizes Northern Cyprus.

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

> No nation other than Turkey has officially recognised Northern Cyprus as a > sovereign state. The United Nations recognises it as territory of the > Republic of Cyprus under Turkish occupation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> Most of the people that I hear complaining about it are old people and by that I mean people who are retired and time only tells them if it's the time for their favorite TV drama or medicine. IMHO daylight saving time helps both mentally (less gloomy dark winter) and energy-wise.

<comment><USER53> If I observe regular office hours, it's dark when I go to work, and it's dark again when I get out of work. One hour either way would make barely any difference. Don't see the point. And in the middle of the summer the sun raises around 4:00. So, yeah.

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> Time for NL to detach from Germany then if they go to permanent summertime. That time is the natural time for St Petersburg. It'll be weird to have different time between us but otherwise it's just too off for us.

</comment><comment><USER55> UK's insistence on keeping daylight savings is disappointing to say the least

</comment><comment><USER56> I FEEL BAD FOR YOU TIME LIB MAINTAINERS

</comment><comment><USER57> Finally!

Let more people see the light!

</comment><comment><USER58> Title improvement suggestion: EU Parliament set to end EU-wide daylight savings

IMHO, EU institutions should always be referred as such instead as related to a continent, i.e., "EU Parliament" is more correct than "European Parliament"

<comment><USER59> Except there is no such thing as the EU Parliament. It is called the European Parliament:

[https://europa.eu/european-union/about-eu/institutions- bodie...](https://europa.eu/european-union/about-eu/institutions- bodies/european-parliament_en)

<comment><USER60> It's called 'European Parliament' but it's not the Parliament of Europe because EU is not Europe.

Like the MLB 'World Series' ... not quite.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER61> All of that because of a stupid survey in which the ones who wanted to abolish daylight saving time were overrepresented because it gave them a platform while the majority who doesn't, didn't bother to make themselves heard.

That's not quite _Brexit-level_ but maybe _Swiss immigration referendum_ -stupidity.

<comment><USER62> Why do you think abolishing the daylight savings change is bad?

Personally I think it's a super awesome move.

And note that no matter what you have against it, disrupting the sleep of billions of people twice per year has caused depression and cardiovascular issues which shouldn't be taken lightly.

So what's the issue in everyone switching to the summer time for the whole year?

<comment><USER63> Because in the UK and Spain (the countries I have lived in) the sun would not rise until nearly 10am in winter.

Lots of people think this change is a good idea simply because they assume they would stick to the time zone that they think is best. When the millions of people who want permanent summertime realise their government will most likely choose permanent winter time then it might not seem like such a great idea any more.

This decision has been made way too fast and without proper investigation. Yes, there may be side effects of changing clocks twice per year, but how do they compare to the effects of having less light in the morning in winter or less light in the evening in summer?

<comment><USER62> > _Yes, there may be side effects of changing clocks twice per year, but how > do they compare to the effects of having less light in the morning in winter > or less light in the evening in summer?_

In think the effects you're mentioning are insignificant compared with having your sleep schedule disrupted twice per year. People have literally died due to it.

Getting rid of DST also simplifies business. Did you know that European countries do not switch at the same time as the US?

Daylight saving times are a clusterfuck.

<comment><USER63> > In think the effects you're mentioning are insignificant compared with > having your sleep schedule disrupted twice per year. People have literally > died due to it.

That's quite the claim to make. If changing the clocks has a negative effect, it last at most a few days. Getting the timezone wrong for the whole of winter / summer is an effect that lasts months.

<comment><USER62> You're underestimating the effect.

Do some reading on the body's circadian rhythm. Every cell in our body is tuned to it and disrupting it has serious consequences.

You may not feel it because you're probably young and healthy. Give it another decade or two.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>