Harvesting solar power in space and sending it back to Earth - <AUTHOR> http://scinotions.com/2013/08/harvesting-solar-power-in-space-and-sending-it-back-to-earth/ <comment><USER3> "Let me tell you one of my pet peeves: space solar power. Okay, the stupidest thing ever. If anyone should like space solar power, it should be me. I got a rocket company and a solar company. I should be really on it, ya know. But it's like, super obviously, not going to work because, ya know, if you have solar panels - first of all, it has to be better than having solar panels on Earth, so then you say, okay, solar panel is on-orbit, you get twice the solar energy - assuming that it is out of Earth's shadow - but you've gotta do a double conversion. You've gotta convert it from photon to electron to photon, back to electron. You've got to make this double conversion, so, okay, what's your conversion efficiency? Hmm. All in, you're going to have a real hard time even getting to 50%. [The solar cells are better.] It does not matter, put that cell on Earth then. See, that's the point I'm making. Take any given solar cell, is it better to have it on Earth, or is it better to have it on orbit? What do you get from being in orbit? You get twice as much sun - <USER2> case - but you've got to do a conversion. You've got to convert it the energy to photons - well, you have incoming photons that go to electrons, but you - you've gotta do two conversions that you don't have to do on Earth, which is you've got to turn those electrons into photons and turn those photons back into electrons on the ground, and that double conversion is going to get you back to where you started, basically. So why are you bothering sending them to bloody space. "I wish I could just stab that bloody thing through the heart." BTW - electron to photon converters are not free and nor is sending stuff to space. Then it obviously super doesn't work. Case closed. You'd think. You'd think case closed, but no. I guarantee it's gunna come up another ten times. I mean, for the love of God."

Elon Musk ([http://shitelonsays.com/transcript/elon-musk-panel- bta-2012-...](http://shitelonsays.com/transcript/elon-musk-panel- bta-2012-2013-01-28))

<comment><USER4> >solar panel is on-orbit, you get twice the solar energy - assuming that it is out of Earth's shadow

Not quite. When compared to stationary panels (which beat trackers economically, so they should be the baseline), space-based power harvests π (yes, pi) times as much sunlight due to lack of cosine loss, plus there's the bonus of reduced reflective loss. Atmospheric and weather loss is avoided entirely. I would estimate 4-5x the energy.

The big advantage of space-based solar imo is the ability to create giant collection areas defined by minutely pressurized helium structures. A giant parabolic mirror on Earth needs to fight gravity, winds, and the Earth's rotation (tracking). Similar concept: [https://tec.grc.nasa.gov/past- projects/solar-concentrators/a...](https://tec.grc.nasa.gov/past- projects/solar-concentrators/advanced-thin-film-inflatable-concentrators/)

Launch a 30,000 m^2 concentrating collector in a single launch? It's only 12 MW, but it's constant (unlike ground-based solar at ~18% capacity factor), and it's deliverable anywhere in the world, or even to other satellites. What if microsatellites could summon extra power by POSTing an ephemeris to an endpoint? Is there a market there?

It's an interesting niche tech, but spaceflight is just so expensive that I doubt it'll ever be viable.

<comment><USER5> Concentrators have problems.

If you use them with solar panels, then your panel will heat up and its efficiency will drop. Maybe lifetime as well. If you use a thermoelectric generator, you then have wearing mechanical low efficiency systems on board.

In both cases you need to reject heat, which is hard in space.

They also require precise pointing.

There's also the problem of beaming the power to earth. If you're in low orbit, there would have to be lots of receiving stations and the power would be intermittent unless you had a big constellation. And all the problems with inclination and the spinning earth... If you're in geostationary orbit, your sending and receiving antennas would need to grow huge.

What about beaming between satellites? You'd need a laser for that. Maybe they're becoming quite small and efficient with modern semiconductor technology developed for military uses. Still the receiving end might have low efficiency.

<comment><USER4> Yep, after writing all that I realized that heat rejection is going to be a problem. Dissipating 8.4 MW is no easy feat in orbit.

At that point the balance of system probably shifts to thin film PV. There would need to be a _lot_ of advancement in that area before such a project becomes practical.

>What about beaming between satellites? You'd need a laser for that.

I was picturing a microwave rectenna, actually.

<comment><USER5> If you use a laser, the receiving satellite wouldn't need extra hardware, it could use its ordinary solar panels, if they were pointed in the right direction.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Before the SimCity joke parade begins, remember that the frequencies that are useful are the same frequencies that won't interact with biological matter.

Why?

Because if you pick a frequency that, like a microwave oven, heats up water, then you are wasting energy. The atmosphere is well stocked with water at varying, often unpredictable levels. Wasting beam energy on heating up passing water molecules is kinda pointless, so the frequencies chosen pass through without interacting.

So no. A beam going off axis will not set your city on fire.

In terms of the actual concept, the original book to read is Gerard O'Neill's 1976 _The High Frontier_. O'Neill proposed to boostrap orbital colonies at L4 and L5. These colonies would build and maintain orbital solar stations.

I think that realistically, that window has passed. If solar power stations were built now, it'd all be done remotely. That's a pity, because as romantic engineering visions go, O'Neill colonies were amazing: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Spacecolony4.jpeg](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Spacecolony4.jpeg)

<comment><USER7> Powersats as basis for space colonies never added up for me -- couldn't the funders find work crews willing to live closer to spam-in-a-can style for higher wages, with overall much lower cost?

But I loved the space colony vision even so, and it was sad feeling it slip away over the decades. You can read Heppenheimer's book online: [http://www.nss.org/settlement/ColoniesInSpace/](http://www.nss.org/settlement/ColoniesInSpace/) (I remember it as better than O'Neill's, though of course O'Neill gets much more credit for the ideas.)

<comment><USER6> I reckon I might have read that book too. Certainly the art rings some bells.

<comment><USER8> I think Heppenheimer's book re-used much of the O'Neill art.

<comment><USER6> Some of it is distinct.

<comment><USER8> Not mutually exclusive statements ;-)

<comment><USER6> Sorry, I didn't see the "much of" qualifier.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This might make sense _if_ we had run out of real estate to plop down solar panels, but that's not the case. You can easily cover a few acres in static mounted solar panels, hose the dust off them every now and then, and they'll last 30+ years. A space based power plant, that crap will break down in a few years max.

</comment><comment><USER10> No. Bad idea, while everyone is trying to disintermediate and run the brokers out of every business, why get another centralized energy provider? This is like the oil con.

</comment><comment><USER8> Cost would be absolutely prohibitive.

The one benefit to space-based solar with some form of power beam (likely microwave based, look up Heppenheimer's book it's now online) is _reliability_. Solar presently only works when the Sun shines -- that's during daylight, and not under cloudy conditions.

Orbital solar would be 24/7/365, with the exception of a couple of brief outages each year at high noon on the equinox when your powersat was eclipsed by the Earth itself. Feed-ins from another location could glide you through this, or a reserve biomass-fed plant, or ... The point being it's an utterly predictable downtime.

The alternative is to build out a (vastly cheaper) ground-based solar infrastructure ... and find some viable way of storing energy for a period of time (possibly up to a couple of weeks). A hard problem, but ultimately less hard, I suspect, than trying to orbit megatons of material.

</comment><comment><USER11> This blog likes to crush various energy schemes with math and physics.

[http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2012/03/space-based- sola...](http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2012/03/space-based-solar-power/)

Honestly, reading through his stuff is almost depressing. But as long as he sticks to the physics stuff, it's pretty hard to argue - all the math and sources are there.

The planned proposal claims that they can use some nifty beamforming to get good microwave transmission. It appears that the proposed technology will reduce the weight to diameter size of the transmitter, but Do The Math's calculations should still more or less be in the right magnitude.

</comment><comment><USER12> SORRY WHAT? Send the energy back in the form of microwaves? I'm assuming this means lining something up on the ground to receive it? What if its goes off course or is knocked by a small meteorite? are all those waves going to just fry us instead?

</comment><comment><USER13> I'm reminded of Henry Tam's book "Kuan's Wonderland,"[1] where [SPOILERS] the government blocks out the sun with a disk in space, and then sells you the energy via a subscription. If you don't have one, you freeze to death.

[1] [http://www.amazon.co.uk/Kuans-Wonderland- ebook/dp/B008144G9I...](http://www.amazon.co.uk/Kuans-Wonderland- ebook/dp/B008144G9I/ref=sr_1_1_bnp_1_kin?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1377775573&sr=1-1&keywords=kuans+wonderland)

</comment><comment><USER14> Would it be possible to put something like a lens in space? Geosational so that a focuspoint would "draw" over the earth, where many solarpanels are put down.

</comment><comment><USER15> Keep the power in space. Use it to mine asteroids and convert water-ice to rocket fuel. With the asteroid as a heat-sink, your efficiency will be amazing!

</comment><comment><USER16> It would be nice if the article had some absolute minimal details on how about 10 terrawatts of power[1] is going to be beamed down, and if that's a no brainer, over what _area_ is it going to be beamed down.

[1] Based on energy consumption figures from [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_consumption](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_consumption)

</comment><comment><USER17> Taking aside feasibility of this, having a single source of power delivering 33% of world's energy is a terrible idea. Especially if it would not be quick to fix or replace if it'd had been completely destroyed. Such a single point of failure would become a single point of doom if the world suddenly would be cut off of third of its energy for weeks or months.

<comment><USER18> Except it's not a single source. It would be dozens of satellites, hundreds ground stations etc. This is like claiming that "coal power" is a single point of failure.

<comment><USER17> "According to his calculation, one such satellite is able to supply a third of total energy needed by humans."

I'm just commenting on what they wrote and I see nothing about a farm of satellites in the article. Perhaps the original source is more clear about it. Or maybe this technology doesn't scale down well and that's the reason they're writing about one powerful satellite?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Article is content free; here's the paper: [http://www.nasa.gov/pdf/716070main_Mankins_2011_PhI_SPS_Alph...](http://www.nasa.gov/pdf/716070main_Mankins_2011_PhI_SPS_Alpha.pdf)

11,800 tonnes in GEO for 500 MW. At Proton-M prices, that's $295/watt for the launch. Not great…

</comment><comment><USER19> They can just fill Energons and send those back to earth... [http://tfwiki.net/wiki/Energon](http://tfwiki.net/wiki/Energon)

</comment><comment><USER20> I'm confused. Is there an announcement or update of some sort associated with this project? It's unclear from the article.

</comment><comment><USER21> User has reached the maximum amount of processes while being limited, Webmaster: please contact support. (9)

</comment><comment><USER22> why convert from photon to electron back to photon? Why not just use mirrors to focus light on lasing material and create a laser directed to a solar panel/s on the Earth and then convert to electrons?

</comment><comment><USER23> Hmm, this can be used as a weapon of mass destruction?

</comment><comment><USER24> I get a 503</comment>


Startups in 12 months (multiple people) - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/gamwe6/12-startups-in-12-months <comment><AUTHOR> I found this link and posted it today and I was wondering if there is more people well known for following a 12s12m strategy in a similar fashion as Peter Levels did. I think it was a great inspiration for many of us.</comment>


What people use their Raspberry Pi's for - <AUTHOR> http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/1f607z/owners_of_a_raspberry_pi_what_do_you_use_it_for <comment><USER3> I see some complaints about the excessive creation of media projects on the pi.

Taking a step back, from the hardware point of view, the pi showcases VideoCore and not the ARM. This is the reason why the CPU is severly underpowered with respect to the GPU. The GPU is actually a total SoC - <USER2> doesn't need the CPU at all. The only reason the ARM CPU exists is to run traditional programs. VideoCore does kick ass media decoding and can output to HDMI. In case, you didn't know, the pi actually boots from the GPU and not the CPU. That's right, the VideoCore comes up first and then gets the CPU going unlike traditional systems. From Broadcom's point of view, the pis sole reason of existence is to showcase their GPU. To this end, it has served it's purpose really well. Unfortunately, they have been terrible in releasing proper image and video decoding drivers.

<comment><USER4> The Raspberry Pi is not a Broadcom project.

<comment><USER3> I didn't intend my post to mean that. The design of the pi was inspired by the bcm2835 (which is the same thing as the roku 1). What I meant was that the way broadcom designed BCM 2835 with showcasing the VideoCore in mind.

Thanks for all your work on the pi btw :) I have been using your debian images last year.

<comment><USER4> Ok, I get what you're saying. You're right that the VC4 is the main selling point of the chip. Regarding image and video decoding...well, we do have OpenMAX which is a Khronos standard. It's just pretty horrific for normal people to use. GStreamer 1.0 supports the Raspberry Pi, and v4l support is in development for the camera.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I've got a TON of music on my external harddrive, and I haven't felt like putting all of that music on my new computer or phone. It just takes up too much space. So I decided I'd set up a cloud radio player for it with an iPhone app to listen. So, I turned one of my Pi's into a lamp server with mysql and php and made it public facing. I then wrote a small PHP script that filled the database with 3 columns: the name of the song, the artist, and the path on the harddrive to the audio file. From there I just made a simple iOS app that queries my db and fills in a list of the songs, then streams from my Pi. It's pretty sweet right now, it shuffles the playback and retains the filtering options through the shuffling (so if I wanna' play Jimi Hendrix music, it'll shuffle Jimi). It plays in the background. The next step will be querying some online db of album artwork to put up/show in the background. Here's a screenshot of my app: <http://imgur.com/dQzHYSe>

I'm thinking of open sourcing the app and writing a really detailed tutorial of how I did it all on Github. Anybody want something like this?

<comment><USER6> I use gnump3d ( <http://www.gnu.org/software/gnump3d/> ) for this exact same purpose. It's quite an awesome piece of software and worth checking out.

<comment><USER5> Looks cool, I'll have to check that out in more detail. I pretty much just curated all of the bits and pieces of mine (php script to get metadata info on mp3s and then add to db, etc). Haha, so mine ends up as a mishmash of different things, a beautiful hack basically.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Ugh, I use mine as a paper-weight with a 64gb mem card that makes me feel guilty every time I see it because I'm not using it

<comment><USER8> Stick XBMC on it, link it to your speakers, and use it as a remote controlled air-play enabled media player

<comment><USER9> This is what I do with RaspBMC. It's fairly nice, except for times that XBMC locks up (like when indexing all of my music on my fileserver over UPnP). It appears that more than a few places in XBMC they aren't checking return values (eg, calls to malloc() and such). It's something I've been meaning to look into, but time is not always available.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Well, I didn't post there, but I will post here what I use mine for.

\- Cheap servers. Use them for a little business I own. Rather than rent a box on some datacenter, I ship out the Rpis ready to be used with my software.

\- Hydroponics controller. I have a small hydroponics cilantro crop. The board controls/monitors it.

\- Learning tool for my nieces. They are learning to program whilst using minecraft for the pi. Plus they are also learning a bit of Python along the way. This summer we have a 2 weeks programming "camp." The Rpi will be the center piece.

<comment><USER11> Do you use the SD card as storage for the software, or doesn't it need any? I considered using one for the same purpose, but the SD was both too slow and unreliable to use even to store just a few hundred MBs.

<comment><USER10> I don't store much data in them, but have an API that they talk to and pass data around as JSON. Like so:

request --[JSON]-- > | RPi magic | response --[JSON]--> DB

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> A jukebox that scrapes songs from the internet and from my own collection and pipes it to a small FM transmitter (from a Jameco kit). This is for my technophobic inlaws, who are used to radios.

</comment><comment><USER13> Testing stuff. I'm writing a stream processing server for monitoring distributed applications and I use a few pi's to send me streams of random/semi-random/garbage event messages and stuff.

</comment><comment><USER14> I use it to watch the air condition of Beijing urban area <http://madk.org/beijing-sky-photo.html>

<comment><USER5> This is a cool project idea. You should run some sort of automated "clarity" detection to get numbers/statistics on air quality in Beijing.

<comment><USER14> Thanks. I am thinking about the same thing on the "clarity" detection and numbers can be used to do some visualisation. Yes, I am going to try it out.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Built a fully automated media center for my mum using OpenElec (SickBeard + Couchpotato + SABnzbd + Usenet + XBMC). Had the setup running for a few years on my Mac Mini at my house, but was awesome to see it achieved for a fraction of the price.

Oh and at work we are using it to control a robot but can't say much more for another couple of weeks :D @sidgtl

<comment><USER16> I'm blown away that you can load up and run with this. Isn't SABnzbd pretty RAM intensive? Are you doing this with local storage or networked storage? Does this handle 1080p, or are you running mostly 480 media?

I'm full of questions on this subject mainly because I've been holding out on purchasing a Pi for this exact application until they come with a bit more power.

<comment><USER15> Yep runs 1080p absolutely fine! You need a very lightweight theme without many animations though.

I used one of my many old internal PC hard drives and bought a £10 case to convert it to USB.

<comment><USER16> Is there a good forum/site with information with notes on what does and doesn't work for different setups, settings, themes, etc.?

edit: Nevermind, I saw your post below and realized that OpenELEC is a full on media center distro. Thanks!!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> My brother and I are building an X/Y plotter with one, which is either going to turn into an etch-a-sketch printer, or a CNC/3D printer hybrid.

The other one is either going to become a quadrocopter, or an arcade table (cheap coffee table, cheap LCD, and some controllers).

<comment><USER18> I'd like to know more about the plotter. Any plans or links to share?

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I've got two that I plan on tinkering with this summer. Not exactly sure what I'm going to do with them, but considering my programming and building experience is pretty novice, if I can get them to do anything remotely useful will be a big win.

</comment><comment><USER20> I hooked one up to the intercom/door unlock system at the office. Most electronics with physical pushbuttons can be disassembled and wired in with a relay for control by the Pi.

As usual, be very careful if you're disassembling something using AC.

</comment><comment><USER21> Here's someone doing "bare metal MIDI" on their Pi. ([http://www.joebutton.co.uk/blog/baremetal-midi- lv2-raspberry...](http://www.joebutton.co.uk/blog/baremetal-midi- lv2-raspberrypi/))

</comment><comment><USER22> I just put XBMC on it, and use it to watch TV Shows and Movies occasionally using put.io service - Amazes every non technical person I know. No interesting projects yet.

</comment><comment><USER23> Early on I recall reading a lot of comments saying there were audio playback glitches with the rpi. Are these resolved now? I have built 3 or 4 Halloween- related audio projects on Arduino using Adafruit's wav shield and the somo-14d module but they sure are a pain to work with. I would love to do my next project on the pi but was sitting on the sidelines waiting for the early glitches to work themselves out.

<comment><USER24> My understanding is that the Pi lacks real audio hardware on the analog output. For audio heavy projects you should consider a USB sound card.

Edit:

This looks promising: [http://dbader.org/blog/crackle-free-audio-on-the- raspberry-p...](http://dbader.org/blog/crackle-free-audio-on-the-raspberry-pi- with-mpd-and-pulseaudio)

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> I use my Pi to control my sprinklers valves <https://github.com/pothibo/irrigation>

</comment><comment><USER26> I currently run node.js on the Pi, as part of a mobile device game controller. It works quite well, albeit just being a prototype.

</comment><comment><USER27> I just got my Pi yesterday.. now it replaced my mediacenter (a Boxee). Love it, it's such a great project! No problem at all playing FullHD DTS movies over WLAN at all, it's smooth! Even overclocked it to 1000 MHz and no problem. The UI could be a little bit smoother, though, but only a very very minor annoyance (it's smooth. just not every time)

</comment><comment><USER28> We're using Pi to drive the lights in <http://www.ma-brains.com/>

<comment><USER5> This sounds like an awesome project! The artist in me loves stuff like this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> I want one of those magazines like the old neckbeards talk about, full of BASIC programs that you had to type in one line at a time and compile to run. I know there's online tutorials and that, but the idea of having a paper magazine and pecking out characters is just so appealing. Can anyone point me the right way?

<comment><USER30> Unfortunately, I can't help you with finding dead tree magazines. However, you should probably be aware that, unless you're commenting negatively on the social skills of those older programmers, the word you were looking for is not "neckbeards" but "greybeards."

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> I have a static IP at home. I use my Pi to enforce IP-based access restrictions on most sites that allow it. I use ssh's built-on socks proxy (-D on command line or DynamicForward config option) to do this. Firefox and Chrome both support SOCKS proxies.

I also use it to deploy hobby web sites.

</comment><comment><USER32> I made this:

<http://www.whatcaniseefromtheshard.com>

</comment><comment><USER33> In case you haven't seen it, there's a new approach to Wayland/Weston on the Raspberry Pi.

[http://ppaalanen.blogspot.com/2013/05/weston-on-raspberry- pi...](http://ppaalanen.blogspot.com/2013/05/weston-on-raspberry-pi- accelerated.html)

</comment><comment><USER34> Here's a quadcopter with a raspberry pi and webcam for vision sensing. <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K_Cc3B4xG1c>

My team and I did this for a senior capstone project.

</comment><comment><USER35> M2M prototyping. Paperweight.

</comment><comment><USER36> mine is mainly an ornament. I think I got too worried about the shortage. After I got it I realised it could not do anything I wanted it too (e.g. image processing)

</comment><comment><USER37> I'd like to use it for transcoding - anyone working on that?

</comment><comment><USER36> an ornament

</comment><comment><USER38> an ornament

</comment><comment><USER39> ?reddit?

</comment><comment><USER40> But still no netflix support. Strange.

<comment><USER41> Streaming TV and movies has got to be the most boring thing you can do with a Raspberry Pi, at least after letting it sit in the box in a drawer.

<comment><USER42> I have two Pi's. One runs xbian and plays tv, movies and music. The other I use for random projects. The one running xbian gets used every day. The other one gets used every now and then. I love them both equally :)</comment></comment></comment>


The Aspect Ratios of the Grand Budapest Hotel - <AUTHOR> https://slate.com/culture/2014/03/grand-budapest-hotel-aspect-ratios-new-wes-anderson-movie-has-three-different-widths-here-s-why.html <comment><USER2> (Regarding the 2014 film)</comment>


Ask HN: What startup-focused online resources do you use? - <AUTHOR>

Other than HN of course :-) . More specifically, is there a community curated site where one can find peer recommended and ranked resources (books, tools, apps, advise) focused on startups and small businesses? Not that there is a shortage of blogs, books and news sites; on the contrary, there are so many. But which ones do people here use and trust the most? <comment><USER2> I am wondring if there could be a platform that can make people to involve in a real startup. Actually, some of people like to contribute a part of labor for trading exsperience, and for free. The point is how to collect those labor efficiently

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the reply jxiong. I think that many startups would be delighted to strike such a deal. Internships are the traditional way to go about this and some might even pay something little. In return, you get exposure and an early peak at how things work in a startup. In my company all of our interns end up leaving with very fond memories of their experience here. If I were you, I would find a company you are interested in and contact them to see if they have any internship positions. You never know until you ask. Make it clear that you are not looking for a paid position, just the experience.

So, what online resources do you use to learn more about startups? Do you find those resources useful?</comment></comment>


Changes to Models S and X allow them to travel longer without larger batteries - <AUTHOR> https://www.tesla.com/blog/longest-range-electric-vehicle-now-goes-even-farther <comment><USER2> They're re-introducing the lower cost model, interesting move right before quarterly earnings get announced. I have to assume this means sales have been poor.

> In addition to our Long Range and Performance variants, we're also re- > introducing a lower entry price for Model S and Model X by bringing back our > Standard Range option

<comment><USER3> In the autonomy presentation yesterday they said they could create more robotaxis if they ship smaller batteries. So I wouldn't assume it means sales are poor. They're focused now on building out a self driving fleet of customer cars, which they plan to activate as taxis in the future.

<comment><USER4> > In the autonomy presentation yesterday they said they could create more > robotaxis if they ship smaller batteries.

More? The challenge is not to ship more of them, the challenge is to ship _one_.

<comment><USER5> > _The challenge is not to ship more of them, the challenge is to ship one._

Of course, if you believe what Elon said two days ago, the fascinating thing is that every Tesla shipping _right now_ is already a robotaxi, it just needs a fee software OTA update at some point.

So in that regard the more Teslas they can get on the road in the next ~2 years, the more robotaxis there will be at "Autonomy Launch" (...whenever that happens to be)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> So it sounds like the range increase is for new cars? (Other comments made it sound like a software update to existing cars)

I still wish there was more focus on range over acceleration, obviously electric motors don't suffer from general efficiency impact as ICEs do (an ICE with superior acceleration seems to take an efficiency hit at all speeds), but how much of that "faster acceleration" impacts efficiency over the course of driving a few hundred miles.

<comment><USER7> Range and acceleration mostly go hand in hand. Much of the constraint on acceleration is how much power you can pull from the battery pack, and that gets better with larger batteries. It's not like a normal car where high acceleration means a big, inefficient engine.

<comment><USER6> Agreed, that was why I noted the efficiency model for an electric engine is superior to ICE. I'd just rather "normal"-ish acceleration in traffic with range improvements over high max acceleration. I'm sure you could also reduce engine weight if you don't have to rely on extreme acceleration.

<comment><USER8> You don't have to floor the pedal. The tradeoff is decided by the driver. Accelerate less aggressively, get better range.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is good. It's Tesla focusing on making better cars. More range is good. Faster charging is good. Those are real things. Yesterday's claims about Tesla operating a million self-driving taxis by 2020 were, well, not taken too seriously.

The new stuff is all at the high end, though. The $35,000 Model 3 is still absent from the product line.

<comment><USER10> 2020 is in 8 months. They currently produce about 400k cars per year...

<comment><USER5> Also note the new Gigafactory in China is going up at a lightning pace, and very likely will be churning out 10k Model 3's a week by the end of 2019.

So that factory alone will put ~ 500k Model 3's on the road by the end of 2020.

<comment><USER10> I certainly hope so. So far I'm not impressed with Tesla's manufacturing "prowess".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The competition just got more stiff. They are selling audi etrons for the same price with 200 mile ranges, and tesla is about to break 400.

</comment><comment><USER12> Question for Tesla owners: Is the recharge time ever a problem? Have you ever felt regret from not being able to just pull up to a gas station, refuel, and be on your way?

Part of me drools with child-like giddiness at the prospect of owning one, but part of me hesitates at the thought of taking roadtrips in one.

<comment><USER13> Question for ICE owners: Is having to regularly visit a fuel station ever a problem? Have you ever felt regret from not being able to wake up every morning with a "full tank" in the car?

Point is, it's not a compromise, it's replacing one set of compromises with another. Yes, you are limited to driving for 4-5 hours before taking a 30-45 minute break (assuming your route has fast chargers) but that's fairly consistent with the needs of humans anyway. (Muscles, stomachs, bladders etc.)

[Not an EV owner.]

<comment><USER14> > Is having to regularly visit a fuel station ever a problem? Have you ever > felt regret from not being able to wake up every morning with a "full tank" > in the car?

We just got an EV, and my gf loves this aspect.

She was terrible at remembering to fill gas before coming home, so would very often find herself in a situation where she had to fill up before getting on her way. Quite often this coincided with when she was already running a bit late in the morning, causing a lot of additional stress.

With the EV, plugging it in is a quick and natural part of parking in the garage and so the car is always ready to go in the morning.

<comment><USER15> Also, if you forget and then realise, there's no way that five minutes before bed you'll put proper clothes on, drive out to a fuel station, fill it up and drive home. Not going to happen. But popping down to plug the EV into the mains is something you might actually remember then go and do, like putting that cheese back in the fridge or running the dishwasher.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> It has been 7 years since initial release. Super excited that it got an update, right when competitors are somewhat catching up. Only took them that long to almost compete.

<comment><USER17> I always thought one of the big 3 US or German companies were betting on Tesla to fail. Once they failed they'd scoop up their tech at a discount. After the Model S's success I think they all realized they need to play catch up.

Meanwhile Japan is still going down the Hydrogen path...

<comment><USER16> I don't think they were hoping to buy, I think they were hoping they wouldn't have to compete.

<comment><USER18> They can't "compete" because the batteries in EVs cost more than entire ICEs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> It's funny how they put CA EV Rebate in the 'after savings' part. This rebate has income cap at $300k/household. If I made less than that, I would think really hard before purchasing a $90k car.

</comment><comment><USER20> For metric folks, this equates to nearly 600km.

That's about as much as I want to drive in the space of a single day. Conceivably however, automated driving could mean doing longer distances. And at a cost much less than an airfare - just a lot more in time.

<comment><USER21> If you factor in 4-5 hours in overhead in order to take a flight, you can go a lot of places for a lot less and just slightly longer ride. I'm guessing 1/10 of the price for NY to Miami if you take 2-3 people

<comment><USER22> Depreciation matters.

<comment><USER23> Depreciation for any given trip will never be anywhere near the price of a plane ticket or two, though.

<comment><USER2> Why not? These are really expensive cars (especially Model S and X). An $80,000 car that has a life of 500,000 miles is $.16 a mile. This hypothetical NY to Miami trip is 1,300 miles one way. If you do no driving in Miami that's 2600 miles or $416 in depreciation if all miles counted the same (they don't, the first miles depreciate things a lot more). You can easily get a plane ticket for that, two if you look around.

<comment><USER24> I flew Providence to Miami for $25 each way last year on Frontier. Even factoring in the cost of parking at the airport and the extra hour of driving time from Boston, I spent less than $100. So, yeah, flying can be super cheap.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> So they added the Switched Reluctance Motor technology used in the Model 3 for the front motor, improving efficiency.

<comment> TD-Linux It's a permanent magnet motor. It's an IPM design so some amount of the torque comes from reluctance, but the majority of the efficiency is from the permanent magnets providing the field rather than having to burn energy through the induction motor's copper bars to provide it.

<comment><USER26> Which is interesting. I wonder what the math looks like, since induction motors (without the heavy magnets) tend to be lighter. I can see why they'd avoid a rotor-coiled motor, since that comes with lifetime constraints.

<comment><USER27> Induction motors are worse at regeneration at low speeds, but as poster below said, their advantage is that they can be powered down and not impede coasting.

I think they hope to be able to match power requirements of highway cruising using a PM motor, so they don't take losses spinning AC motor way below its power rating.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> "Beginning today, Model S and Model X now come with an all-new drivetrain design that increases each vehicle's range substantially, achieving a landmark 370 miles and 325 miles on the EPA cycle for Model S and Model X Long Range, respectively. Using the same 100 kWh battery pack"

<comment><USER29> What were the corresponding ranges before? The article does not say (just states >10% increase)

<comment><USER30> 335 and 295

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> > _Model S and Model X are now capable of achieving 200 kW on V3 Superchargers > and 145 kW on V2 Superchargers. Together, these improvements enable our > customers to recharge their miles 50% faster._

What does that mean exactly? I'm sure there are sections of the charge curve where it is 50% faster, but you need to consider the entire charge curve to get a better sense of the improvement.

The Tesla Model 3's charge times were improved by the combination of battery preconditioning and the faster V3 Supercharger. A charge that used to take 60 minutes can now be done in 40 minutes:

[https://electrek.co/2019/03/07/tesla-v3-supercharger- action-...](https://electrek.co/2019/03/07/tesla-v3-supercharger-action-first- look/)

I'd call that 33% faster charging. So is the Model S and Model X charge time improvement across the entire charge curve or just sections of it?

<comment><USER32> Interestingly, the charge rate across the _entire_ curve sounds like an important metric but in practice it is nearly irrelevant.

If you drive an ICE car, you are used to filling your tank. Because once you've gone through the trouble of driving to a gas station and pulling out your credit card and unscrewing the cap, well you might as well top it off, right? Life is different with electric.

You might know, for example, that most Teslas operate day-to-day with their max battery charge limit set around 80% or below (it extends battery life). Charging at night is entirely effortless, so you put the charge into the battery that you'll need for the next day, or like me, you set it to give you 4x your daily commute and totally forget about it. Only before a particularly long road trip do you pop open the app and slide up the charge limit.

For Superchargers, the model is a bit different because this is charging that's happening on-demand while you wait in the car or are off getting a bite or whatever, during your trip. The best measure is to examine the portion of the curve that actual drivers spend actually charging their cars at an actual Supercharger. So here we have it;

"V3 Supercharging will ultimately cut the amount of time customers spend charging by an average of 50%, as modeled on our fleet data."

So this is truly an average of 50% faster, for actual Tesla drivers. ICE-age drivers who love to hate Tesla will insist you have to integrate the charge- rate curve, but as usual they will be entirely missing the point.

Tesla could spend an atrocious amount of time and money improving charging speed from 90 to 100%. That might be how you charge your phone, but it's actually not how Tesla drivers charge their cars (or how the onboard guidance computer will plan to charge your car when it sets the route for you), and would have almost zero benefit for the Fleet. Charging en-route is most efficiently done to boost the battery up to 70-80% and then you get going again.

Supercharger deployment, at least in the USA, is modeled such that there are almost no trips where you would benefit from, or need to, fully charge at a Supercharger, versus making two charging stops which would add up to less time charging, and driving out of your way to the charger, overall.

<comment><USER31> None of these justifications answer the question I've asked. Read the link I've provided. The Tesla Model 3 can get to 90% state of charge in 40 minutes in ideal conditions. How many minutes will it now take the Model S and Model X to do the same?

The amount of time spent at a charger to get decent range matters. Read this article for an example of someone who likes his Tesla Model 3 but is getting frustrated with the amount of time he's spending at chargers:

[https://www.detroitnews.com/story/business/autos/mobility/20...](https://www.detroitnews.com/story/business/autos/mobility/2019/03/05/fun- and-frustration-tesla-model-3-owner/3052876002/)

<comment><USER33> I generally don't charge to 90% when I supercharge, are you saying I'm doing it wrong? Seriously, the point of supercharging is to do the minimum, not 90%.

<comment><USER31> Do you have any information on the new charge curves of the Model S and Model X? That's the information I'm after.

<comment><USER33> You are saying a lot more than just that, so it's no surprise that the answers you're getting are not what you expect.

<comment><USER31> Good grief.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> For those that skipped the bottom paragraphs

>so as a thank you, all existing Model S and Model X owners who wish to purchase a new Model S or Model X Performance car _will get the Ludicrous Mode upgrade, a $20,000 value, at no additional charge._

Are they having trouble trying to get repeat business?

<comment><AUTHOR> Their cars are so good that there is no need to replace them!

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Former Model S, now Model 3 owner here. I can confirm this change won't mean much for Model S or X sales as the interiors of the S and X remain stuck in 2011.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> They also announced on Twitter: "As a thank you to our Tesla owners, all existing Model S and Model X owners who wish to purchase a new Model S or Model X Performance car will get the Ludicrous Mode upgrade, a $20,000 value, at no additional charge"

[https://twitter.com/Tesla/status/1120852649400623105](https://twitter.com/Tesla/status/1120852649400623105)

<comment><USER36> > Ludicrous Mode upgrade, a $20,000 value

I have a P85D. When Ludicrous Mode was announced, they offered it for $5000 as an upgrade.

I have no idea why it now supposedly costs $20,000.

Source: [https://www.teslarati.com/tesla-drops-price- of-p85d-ludicrou...](https://www.teslarati.com/tesla-drops-price- of-p85d-ludicrous-upgrade-will-not-have-the-same-performance-as- ludicrous-p90d/)

<comment><USER37> That $US20k seems to be purely marketing bullshit, aimed to sucker US buyers. :(

Easy seen as such too. Compare the "Ludicrous Mode" for the Model X on the US website (US$20k) to the same thing on the Australian website (AUS$8.5k):

[https://www.tesla.com/modelx/design?redirect=no#battery](https://www.tesla.com/modelx/design?redirect=no#battery)

[https://www.tesla.com/en_AU/modelx/design?redirect=no#batter...](https://www.tesla.com/en_AU/modelx/design?redirect=no#battery)

Note - you need to select "Performance" on the right side, for Ludicrous Mode to be shown.

Ludicrous mode is "20% faster acceleration" for both. So it very much seems like the extra cost on the US buyers is to match this marketing update.

That thing where Larry Ellison (Oracle) is now on the board of Tesla. This is the kind of crap he'd very much applaud. :(

[https://www.tesla.com/en_AU/modelx/design?redirect=no#batter...](https://www.tesla.com/en_AU/modelx/design?redirect=no#battery)

<comment><USER38> > _That $US20k seems to be purely marketing bullshit, aimed to sucker US > buyers. :(_

Why is this a problem? In all luxury cars there are some options priced much higher than the actual cost (e.g. fancy wheels). They exist to bolster the car maker's margins and help sell the lower end versions at lower prices, so you and the average buyers profit. Nobody actually needs Ludicrous, so pricing it like this is in no way immoral.

<comment><USER36> >Why is this a problem?

It's a problem because they are claiming it's a "$20,000 value" when it was sold for $5000 in the recent past and even right now, it costs far less than $20K in other countries.

I'm a huge Tesla fan (I have an S and an X already) but every time they distort the truth in such an obvious manner, it significantly erodes my trust in them. Case in point: I _really_ like the 2020 Roadster's specs but Tesla/Musk have stretched the truth one too many times for me to put down the $50K deposit until it ships and I've let others find the first bugs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> 3 miles short of Montreal-NYC!

</comment><comment><USER40> This is a nice upgrade for the Model S, however, I'm really curious what Tesla's design refresh roadmap looks like for their older models. The Model S has remained mostly the same since 2012, and while the design is pretty good, very few companies can get away without a major design refresh for 7+ years.

<comment><USER41> Does the 2016 refresh not count?

<comment><USER42> Not to me. I judge Tesla on the same metrics as any other car company. The Model S is getting long in the tooth.

<comment><USER33> As long as I can smoke that Maserati at a stoplight on Sand Hill Road, not a problem.

<comment> saiya-jin People in the luxury goods category expect much, much more than just straight line performance. Handling the corners or interior aesthetics and quality isn't something I would choose Tesla for for example.

<comment><USER43> I love how this is (was) down-voted but this is exactly kind of comment people on HN would use to poo poo the various ~700hp straight line rockets that FCA sells (which you can get with arguably better interiors than any Tesla). "It's not a true luxury car because it's only good in a straight line" is a perfectly valid (and widely held) opinion but if you invoke it against Tesla that's not ok.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> " _Paired with the new more efficient drivetrain design, Model S and Model X are now capable of achieving 200 kW on V3 Superchargers_ "

Not sure how this has anything to do with the new drivetrain, because last month they already announced " _[a V3 supercharger] supports peak rates of up to 250kW per car_ " (presumably without the new drivetrain as it had not been announced yet - [https://www.tesla.com/blog/introducing-v3-supercharging](https://www.tesla.com/blog/introducing-v3-supercharging))

Also why did Tesla claimed 250 kW in the blog post last month, but now lowered their figure to 200 kW ? I'm so confused.

Edit: found some answers: " _Model 3s will be able to take full advantage of the new Supercharger capacity [250 kW] thanks to the car's newer battery chemistry_ ". So the Model 3 can charge at up to 250 kW, while Model S and X are currently limited to 200 kW. Source: [https://www.theverge.com/2019/3/6/18253618/tesla- supercharge...](https://www.theverge.com/2019/3/6/18253618/tesla- supercharger-250kw-v3-specs-location)

<comment><USER25> Paired with, not as a result of.

The lower charge speed of 200 vs 250 is likely cell limited compared to the 2170 cells in the 3.

<comment><USER44> Ah, yes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> Can't wait to see new 0-60 numbers w/ludicrous

<comment><USER46> Theyre quoting 3 sec on the website

<comment><USER47> 2.4s with ludicrous mode on the website. 3s is the performance without ludicrous.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> I'm wondering what types of range extension methods could be easily added to an EV. Scenario: I'm going to drive 900km/560mi and it's -10 outside (I do this multiple times per year). I want a cosy room temperature inside the cabin.

\- How can I ensure I waste as little range as possible on heating, so that I don't risk having to make e.g. 2 stops instead of one?

\- More critically, if I get stuck in traffic for several hours because of an accident, I need some way to ensure I don't freeze to death in my EV as I'm standing still and the battery runs out.

It seems these two things should be solvable with a single solution: a plug-in space heater to be used in emergencies and for maximizing cold weather range. The space heater could be e.g. a kerosene burner or similar. But for best effect it should of course "plug in" to the car vents.

Is this a thing? Or is heating the passenger compartment such a trivial use of energy anyway if the car is insulated, that it doesn't make a difference? In a concrete scenario: If I drive a model 3 and have 100km battery left, and I have 20km to my planned charging stop half way through my journey. Suddenly traffic stands still because of an accident and it's freezing outside. How long will the "100km" charge maintain the 30K temperature difference while still having 20km left?

<comment><USER49> How is this problem specific to EV's?

<comment><USER50> Internal combustion engines throw off heat whether you want them to or not, plus the total amount of energy stored in a gas tank is vastly greater than a battery, so wasting some of it as heat is less likely to strand you. EVs only get similar range by being much more efficient, and efficiency means less energy lost to heat.

<comment><USER51> Depending on the car and the temperature you'd much rather be stranded in a Tesla (or another EV that works as well at low temperatures). A Tesla can run its heater on full blast for well over 12 hours. In ICE cars that don't have resistive heaters, the heat output is much lower at idle- think a civic or corolla. It can be risky to fall asleep in cars like this because you need to warm up the engine regularly or the cabin will become quite cold.

<comment><USER52> Having slept in quite cold temperatures in cars during longer trips quite a lot of times, just having the car idle over-night has _always_ been enough to keep the cabin warm enough to not even need a blanket. Not talking about luxury cars with huge engines either. It also uses very little fuel. After 8 hours, you can see that the fuel gauge has moved, but only very slightly. I'm pretty sure a ICE car with a full tank can idle for several days before running out of fuel.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> As a bit of a tangent but a note, this is a fantastic article. When I read it in a paper [1] by Alan Kay, I always assumed that most manufacturers would release a full battery that was twice longer than their current size (probably a little bit shorter because it would require a big recharge) in order to support these new models. [1] - [http://www.arxiv.org/abs/1509.0852](http://www.arxiv.org/abs/1509.0852)

<comment><USER54> It's been a while since I've read a paper abstract that made me feel completely out of my depth. Can you give a little more context here?

<comment><USER53> I am sorry about this, just wanted to have some fun. I posted the title in the hn comment generator[1] and copied one of the comments here. Guess it passed the Turing test.

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19694578](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19694578)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> What is super cool about Tesla is their laser sharp focus on creating a good electric vehicle. From the autonomy announcement and then this one, they are creating tools purpose built for cars, like new chips for self driving, battery tech etc. They have done so much in so little time, we have come to expect more from them. There is only so much a car company can innovate, Tesla has gone beyond it.

Edit: I am a Tesla fanboy but I don't condone their false advertising around FSD.

<comment><USER56> If you believe that they are doing false advertising around FSD, could they also be doing false advertising about this?

<comment><USER57> Unlikely about battery capacity and range. Tesla have consistently delivered in that side of things. The core of their car business is solid.

Their problem on the production side is not surprising. Missing deadlines and production targets is business as usual for "startups" (between quotes because they are massive, however still very much a new and small player in that field) "We will deliver million of widget in 2 years for $20" really means "we will deliver 100K widget in 5 years for $40" with the enthousiasm you expect of a company at that stage.

Every claim around autonomous driving have been bullshit and they have doubled down on their bullshit instead of owning up. The grandiose announcement, Trumpish tweeting and technical presentation that carefully avoid talking about the current technical issue they must have solved ? That smells like they are trippling down. They avoid false advertising by kicking the can down the road further. eg: they aggressively talk down LIDAR because their current car do not have it but they are bound by their claim that every car is fully autonomous ready.

<comment><USER58> Independent researchers have already proven Musk to be 100% right about LIDAR.

Pseudo-LiDAR from Visual Depth Estimation: Bridging the Gap in 3D Object Detection for Autonomous Driving [https://arxiv.org/abs/1812.07179](https://arxiv.org/abs/1812.07179)

3D object detection is an essential task in autonomous driving. Recent techniques excel with highly accurate detection rates, provided the 3D input data is obtained from precise but expensive LiDAR technology. Approaches based on cheaper monocular or stereo imagery data have, until now, resulted in drastically lower accuracies --- a gap that is commonly attributed to poor image-based depth estimation. However, in this paper we argue that data representation (rather than its quality) accounts for the majority of the difference. Taking the inner workings of convolutional neural networks into consideration, we propose to convert image-based depth maps to pseudo-LiDAR representations --- essentially mimicking LiDAR signal. With this representation we can apply different existing LiDAR-based detection algorithms. On the popular KITTI benchmark, our approach achieves impressive improvements over the existing state-of-the-art in image-based performance --- raising the detection accuracy of objects within 30m range from the previous state-of-the-art of 22% to an unprecedented 74%. At the time of submission our algorithm holds the highest entry on the KITTI 3D object detection leaderboard for stereo image based approaches.

Karpathy was also pointing to:

Depth from Videos in the Wild: Unsupervised Monocular Depth Learning from Unknown Cameras [https://arxiv.org/abs/1904.04998](https://arxiv.org/abs/1904.04998)

We present a novel method for simultaneous learning of depth, egomotion, object motion, and camera intrinsics from monocular videos, using only consistency across neighboring video frames as supervision signal. Similarly to prior work, our method learns by applying differentiable warping to frames and comparing the result to adjacent ones, but it provides several improvements: We address occlusions geometrically and differentiably, directly using the depth maps as predicted during training. We introduce randomized layer normalization, a novel powerful regularizer, and we account for object motion relative to the scene. To the best of our knowledge, our work is the first to learn the camera intrinsic parameters, including lens distortion, from video in an unsupervised manner, thereby allowing us to extract accurate depth and motion from arbitrary videos of unknown origin at scale. We evaluate our results on the Cityscapes, KITTI and EuRoC datasets, establishing new state of the art on depth prediction and odometry, and demonstrate qualitatively that depth prediction can be learned from a collection of YouTube videos.

Tesla has also advantage of having radars and is able to do supervised learning of depth estimates for moving objects from video.

I was also skeptical of Tesla self-driving capability, because they had some stupid ideas, like ignoring radar data based on GPS tagging from fleet behavior. But lack of LIDAR will not be the issue. Not even close.

It seems like they are focusing on building proper pipeline for training neural networks. The question is whether neural networks as a technology can handle self driving. Reasoning based on "human brain can do it, so artificial neural networks can do it" is wrong. Natural neural networks and artificial neural networks, besides name share only very, very rough low level conceptual ideas. Moreover, our ANN architectures are probably missing most of what brains do on high level. So, I think this is still an open question - can ANN do it? If not, then nobody will have full self driving capability widely deployed any time soon. Because, even tough neural networks are not perfect, everything else is super brittle in comparison.

LIDAR and hires maps are technologies that give working short-term solution, are sort of local minimum. LIDAR is super expensive and already proven to be not necessary. While, hires maps are super brittle and too capital intensive to be widely deployed.

But if neural networks are sufficient Tesla will leave everyone in dust. There will be literally no competition. They do not need to learn electric cars manufacturing in order to deploy their technology widely, they are doing that already. They will not need to backtrack on LIDAR and hires maps solutions. Also, their decision to deploy self driving hardware to every car means that they have access to stupidly big amount of real world data from all varieties of environments all around the world.

BTW - Extrapolating based what Tesla was doing before Karpathy joined is probably misguided. I was afraid that he will get lost in a big corporation, but he seems to be doing great job there. In my opinion technology that build with his supervision will be significantly better than what Tesla was doing before. But Karpathy is not a magician.

So, Tesla has the biggest potential and the big question is: Are neural networks sufficient for self driving?

<comment><USER59> > _Independent researchers have already proven Musk to be 100% right about > LIDAR._

Well, you better let all the other smart people doing this work know! They're all doomed!

Why do you think it's one or the other-neural nets and LIDAR-, and not both? The more sensors the better.

<comment><USER58> Look at the dates of the papers I linked. The quote:

Approaches based on cheaper monocular or stereo imagery data have, until now, resulted in drastically lower accuracies --- a gap that is commonly attributed to poor image-based depth estimation. However, in this paper we argue that data representation (rather than its quality) accounts for the majority of the difference.

Is from December 2018. Your knowledge of what smart people think is currently outdated, because the new results are so recent.

I also agree that Musk was making claims about no need for LIDAR based on his intuition. He could have been terribly wrong, because it was just his intuition. But he is not wrong.

BTW - Smart people were wrong about AI many times. They were wrong about ANN being dead end in eighties, they were wrong about symbolic AI. They were also wrong about necessity of LIDAR. In a year of two they will update their believes as more evidence will be piling up.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER60> Given the huge amount of truth stretching in the autonomy anouncment yesterday anyone here with relevant battery experience want to weigh in on this?

Yesterday completely burned through some of the goodwill and trust I had for Tesla to the point that I am sceptical of anything they announce now. Is this real?

<comment><USER25> The room was there to improve. Nothing about this is particularly implausible.

</comment></comment><comment><USER61> I wonder why the Model 3 isn't getting the new drivetrain.

<comment><USER25> It already has the new motor technology. The S and X used to have induction motors front and back, while they now have a switched reluctance motor in the front.

<comment><USER32> Indeed, the efficiency advances started in the Model 3 design stage and have now been adapted for use in the X/S.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER62> Tesla's cars are not especially energy efficient:

[https://cleantechnica.com/2018/06/30/what-are-the-most- effic...](https://cleantechnica.com/2018/06/30/what-are-the-most-efficient- electric-cars/)

<comment><USER63> The model X tesla before this upgrade was much more efficient than the latest tesla killers from europe. This article [1] showed the audi e-tron is 23% less efficient than a model x (the family truckster huge suv tesla), and the i-pace is 26% less efficient. That is before the 10% performance. Tesla has excellent efficiency, much better than these german cars.

The hundai is also a great, efficient car too. 1\. [https://electrek.co/2019/02/21/tesla-efficiency-range- test-a...](https://electrek.co/2019/02/21/tesla-efficiency-range-test-audi-e- tron-jaguar-i-pace/)

<comment><USER64> That test doesn't take into account increased battery buffers on the IPace or eTron, so it's strange to call it an efficiency test.

<comment><USER63> Okay, well another way to think of it is that tesla has proven their choices for amount of usable battery to offer succeeds with half a million + cars on the road and billions of miles driven. Their battery warranty is excellent and time proven. My S is 4 years old and approaching 50k miles and no appreciable degredation. If an S and an etron has about 85kwh there's something to compare there.

Comparing to these other 2 companies, they are being way more conservative, or more likely they don't have as good a battery managment system and they are afraid of big costs down the line if the batteries do degrade. Either way, Tesla has a time tested much better system that provides much longer range with similar overall battery capacities.

It's not that audi can't do better. Just at this time Audi & Jaguar suffer tremendously in comparison.

<comment><USER64> Yes, that's a fair way of looking at it. Will be interesting to see what happens with the MEB cars, you'd think there would be a lot of effort there to work on a really solid thermal management system, and much easier to extrapolate data from one model to another.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER65> Those are great numbers, I'm really looking forward to the rivian though. It will have 410 miles for the SUV [https://www.autonews.com/article/20181127/OEM04/181129763/ri...](https://www.autonews.com/article/20181127/OEM04/181129763/rivian- begins-to-build-out-portfolio-with-electric-r1s-suv)

<comment><USER66> Rivian has yet to make a single Truck. It is vaporware until they have more than just numbers.

<comment><USER65> Are Tesla owners really this sensitive? I mean they do have prototypes out there, it's not like they're making up what the mileage is, they clearly have demoed that it works, it's just about producing the vehicles now.

<comment><USER67> > it's just about producing the vehicles now.

That is the hardest part, and all that matters. Anyone can make one concept car. Not everyone can make hundreds of thousands of them per year.

<comment><USER68> > Not everyone can make hundreds of thousands of them per year.

Neither can Tesla.

<comment><USER67> > Tesla's global sales since 2012 totaled over 532,000 units at the end of > 2018, of which, over 245,000 were delivered in 2018, up almost 138% from > 2017. Year over year Tesla U.S. vehicle sales from 2017 to 2018 increased by > 280% from 48,000 to 182,400.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla,_Inc](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla,_Inc).

> Our best estimate is that Tesla has manufactured 239,844 Model 3s so far—or > 21,231 in the current quarter—and is now building approximately 5,884 a > week. Those figures, and the charts below, represent Bloomberg's latest > estimates and will automatically update to reflect changes in the data. > (Last update: April 23rd, 2019)

Assuming a conservative build rate of 5k units per week, that's 260k Model 3 units being built per year. This does not include S and X units.

[https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2018-tesla- tracker/](https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2018-tesla-tracker/)

<comment><USER68> That _IS_ my bad. I remembered the 5k rate, but for some reason I thought it was _per month_.

Duly corrected!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER69> The longest range electric vehicle, at 380 miles EPA, remains Hyundai's fuel cell SUV.

<comment><USER70> Technically it's a hybrid. Just not an internal combustion hybrid.

<comment><USER69> No, it runs only on hydrogen (to EV direct drive). [https://m.hyundaiusa.com/nexo/](https://m.hyundaiusa.com/nexo/). Zero emissions, refuels in five minutes at one of California's 40 stations. Soon all hydrogen production will be renewable from solar and wind electrolysis. Exciting times.

<comment><USER7> How much does that fill up cost? That, and the relative scarcity of filling stations, seem to make hydrogen vehicles supremely unattractive.

<comment><USER71> It's like $8 per gallon of gasoline distance equivalent last I checked.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER72> This "continuous deployment" for cars must be a logistical nightmare. To do repairs for a given vehicle, keeping track of what parts are backward compatible would be challenging. What if it's a compatibility breaking change? Then keeping inventory for older cars would become problematic.

Unless they do design with maximum compatibility. Then it gets interesting as upgrades are possible.

While B.EV cars maintenance is low, my car 7 months into ownership revealed bad battery cells that needed replacing. If the car was say five years old, would this replacement have been possible?

<comment><USER73> Is it any worse than what other manufacturers deal with? The 2019 Honda Accord shares some parts with the 2018 Honda Accord which shares some parts with the 2017 model... when something breaks in my Honda the first question is "do they still make/use this part or did they change it in newer models?"

<comment><USER74> Gee, I hope they have some kind of system to track that. Maybe software even?

<comment><USER75> You jest, but years ago I worked for one of the largest auto parts places. You have no idea how many times you'd input year, make, model, and trim, just to be presented with multiple choice questions. Nobody knew how big their drums were, in inches, or the number of blades on their fan, the length of their belts, etc. Apparently a lot of mixing and matching happens. Some folks legitimately had to give us a prior year for us to find the right part.

<comment> nevi-me The dealerships use VIN numbers, which end up getting you the exact part you want, even if the same car model of the same year has different parts. I suppose some of the retailers don't have this privilege.

<comment><USER76> "Vehicle Identification Number numbers"?

<comment><USER77> Just like PIN number, ATM machine, CAC card, and "is that a work PC or personal?"

It's a very typical construction, for whatever reason.

<comment><USER78> At least you use LED as a noun. In Poland, I constantly hear people saying "LED diode". I keep correcting this and "PIN number" indiscriminately.

<comment><USER79> See also, "-gate" for scandals.

<comment><USER80> Mitchell & Webb on "Watergategate"

* [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vB9JgxhXW5w](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vB9JgxhXW5w)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER81> Compare to the Audi e-Tron, which has a fairly massive 95kWH battery but only scores 204 miles of EPA range. They claim they're only using 88% of the battery capacity so that charging is faster and battery longevity is preserved, but thats a really weird engineering decision that belies the fact they have made a terribly inefficient (and perhaps rapidly degrading?) battery pack/drivetrain.

Meanwhile the base Model S, for $4k more, has 285 miles of EPA range, and charges faster when below 50%, although not as fast as the e-Tron when above 50%.

The smaller Kia Niro EV (if you can get one, they aren't making many because they can't source the batteries) squeezes 258 miles of range from a 65 kWH battery. Much better, but terribly production constrained. It won What Car of the Year in the UK but they can only deliver 900 to the UK for the whole of 2019. Not sure what the global Kia production rate is, but presumably far far less than Tesla which has sustained 4000+ Model 3's per week since last October (although not yet delivering to the RHD countries like the UK, alas)

Turns out making EVs is harder than everyone thought. We were told the traditional automakers would just wade in and obliterate Tesla, who were just putting 'wheels on batteries'. That hasn't happened.

<comment><USER82> A few observations, before I derail

I do not want to dismiss the efforts of Audi or Jaguar but I think their initial focus was being good examples for their respective brands with regards to their packaging. Their interior quality of a different generation and caliber than Tesla. The EV part was an important concern but secondary. They can still rack up significant ZEV credits in California letting them off the hook of buying them from others.

Tesla needs to refresh the S and X to improve interior fit and finish but also concentrate on making them quieter, an issue I have with my 3. without the drone of a motor every sound stands out and EVs tend to ride on stiffer, noisier, tires.

As for difficulty, other than i3 and Tesla cars I do not believe any other EV was a clean sheet design. Even the Leaf appears based on traditional cars. the Bolt is simply a spark when a new motor cradle and battery back pushed under it. The Hyundai/Kia models are all adaptions. Not 100% sure about the iPace but Jaguar even contracted out assembly.

\--

The manufacturing difficulty is probably secondary to the seismic shift crossing the auto industry and associated industries. EVs don't need the large established dealership base and their included maintenance facilities. Secondary market means little use for parts stores and their suppliers. Gas stations will be right out with most charging done at destination points. Manufacturing of the autos themselves will implode the number of employees and that will lead to union difficulty in some countries; where they sit on boards and can stymie the move to EVs and loss of production jobs.

The Kia Niro EV numbers you mention are not EPA which was 258. I mention this because your other numbers were EPA.

<comment><USER83> > EVs don't need the large established dealership base and their included > maintenance facilities

I never understood that. Why does power source matter in the context of dealership base and maintenance? EVs still break.

<comment><USER84> They break at much much lower rates, because they have many fewer parts. EVs don't have the pistons, valves, belts, fans, compressors, alternators, spark plugs, etc that gasoline engines have. There's probably order of magnitude fewer parts to break.

Having seen the interior of an automatic gearbox, the surprising thing to me is that conventional automobiles are as reliable as they are.

<comment><USER85> > EVs don't have the pistons, valves, belts, fans, compressors, alternators, > spark plugs, etc that gasoline engines have. There's probably order of > magnitude fewer parts to break.

If you buy a new ICE powered vehicle, how many of any of the parts you mention would one expect to replace in - for instance - the first three years of the vehicles' life?

Our experience is that the first few years of a ICE vehicle's life involves changing oil and oil filters and most likely not a whole lot else:

[https://owners.vwmodels.ca/maintenance/timeline/](https://owners.vwmodels.ca/maintenance/timeline/)

<comment><USER86> The average age of the vehicle on the road in the US is about 10 years. Not everyone buys brand new cars, and after a few years things start to break.

Although from my experience things not related to drivetrain break:

* Suspension

* Brakes

* Steering rack.

As these components handle the most peak force.

<comment><USER87> Brakes in an EV pretty much never need to be replaced, because most of the braking is regenerative and doesn't wear the pads at all.

<comment><USER85> If you live in a place with a decent winter, and hence a decent quantity of salt on the roads, you may have to replace your brakes due to corrosion long before the pads "wear out".

Does this kind of stuff not happen to EVs?

[http://www.safercar.gov/staticfiles/safercar/pdf/EA11-001_cl...](http://www.safercar.gov/staticfiles/safercar/pdf/EA11-001_closing_rpt.pdf)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Why strong UK employment growth could be really bad news - <AUTHOR> http://mainlymacro.blogspot.com/2014/07/why-strong-uk-employment-growth-could.html

<comment><AUTHOR> Those of us who work with computers tend to think it is natural that labor productivity should always increase. Therefore, we owe to ourselves, to our integrity and intellectual honesty, to confront the possibility, now on view in the UK, that labor productivity can stagnate for a long period, or perhaps even decline.</comment>


Botworld: A cellular automaton for studying self-modifying agents - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/machine-intelligence/Botworld <comment><USER2> LW discussion: [http://lesswrong.com/lw/k1o/botworld_a_cellular_automaton_fo...](http://lesswrong.com/lw/k1o/botworld_a_cellular_automaton_for_studying/)

</comment><comment><USER3> So I cloned and installed it... And I'm running the example. However, I'm really not sure what I'm looking at here. [http://i.imgur.com/xMkV1Qg.png](http://i.imgur.com/xMkV1Qg.png)

Can anyone explain?

<comment><USER4> Author here. The display library has recently been updated -- try updating and running again, it should make a bit more sense.

Also, refer to this post: [http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/k5u/exploring_botworld/](http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/k5u/exploring_botworld/) for both an explanation of what we find Botworld useful for and some documentation for how to write Botworld programs and interpret displayed Botworld grids.

<comment><USER5> Including a screenshot in the readme would be nice btw.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It's a good step in the right direction. I can't wait to see the robot parts broken down further.</comment>


Is your site Apple Watch responsive? - <AUTHOR> http://www.ultimateresponsive.com/

<comment><USER2> i personally would avoid making any website apple watch responsive, just so i can laugh at people trying to browse on their watch...</comment>


How To Mine Bitcoins - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2013/04/08/how-to-mine-bitcoins/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Techcrunch+%28TechCrunch%29 <comment><USER2> As pointed out in the comments on the article, this would have been a handy article to have 3 years ago when it was possible to profitably mine Bitcoins. It has got to the point where the costs of generating a Bitcoin far outweigh the costs of just buying a Bitcoin. Sure you can enter a mining pool and split the profits based on your efforts, but still works out to cost more in energy than what you get in return.

<comment><USER3> Depends on how much your energy costs. I generate 2.7Gh/s with 4x7970 GPUs, which costs about $2.40 per 24 hours, and yields ~$35-40 in BTC at the time of writing.

<comment><USER2> You make a good point here. The cost of a HD7970 here in Australia is still about $400, so that's a $1600 outlay how long would it take to make back the initial outlay and then you have other factors to take into account like cooling as well and geographical location and price of energy.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: how do i move 5 GB of photos? - <AUTHOR>

my friends all have digital SLRs and when we get together for a holiday each of us can rack up 5 GB of photos then head back to our respective countries.  any ideas on how a bunch of non-IT people can easily send/download 5 GB from each other?  flickr etc won't work since each photo is 3-5 MB and 5 GB is a fair chunk o' space.  this seems like a page 1, paragraph 1 use of the net yet i can't seem to find a simple solution on-line - any advice? <comment><USER2> _Flickr etc won't work since.._ \- actually, Flickr is a great solution. Just get an Pro account for $25/yr which comes with unlimited uploads and unlimited sets. You can even set up Flickr uploading to upload lower res files right from your DSLR biggies and get the whole upload done much much faster. You can tag each others photos and pick the best by favoriting etc. add comments, ask questions etc. There's much you can do with Flickr - I'd definitely look into that option.

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks for the tip, i'll spend some time investigating this but still 25$/year...

<comment><USER3> Problem with the tip is flickr favoriting doesn't work so well for letting a group pick a good subset of a large batch of photos. Favorites are more for letting your friends know great individual photos you've discovered as you wander flickr.

More apropos to what you're doing is ourdoings.com's option (on by default) to let anybody move a photo between the "featured" and "more photos" sections for a given entry. Make an unlisted site just for your friends, tell them to click on the "Edit" tab and volunteer. Once you approve them, everybody can upload, etc., so it's a nice group site.

It's integrated with Clickpass (a YC startup), so registration is trivial. You can edit photos after uploading thanks to integration with Snipshot (another YC startup). If $25 is a lot of money, maybe you should make your site public rather than unlisted. That way you could collect tips with tipjoy (another YC startup). Public sites are also the only ones that can use Disqus integration, until such time as Disqus supports private comments. OurDoings is the only photo-sharing site with Disqus comments.

<comment><USER2> Hey, you forgot to say that Disqus is also a YC startup ;-)

<comment><USER3> Caught! ;-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> <http://streamfile.com> lets you "stream" a file like a movie, so you don't have to wait for an upload to finish. Just zip up the 5GB into 3 packs (browsers won't let you upload more than 2GB), and stream it. Then let it stream until the other party receives it.

P.S. Streamfile is written in Erlang, which is kind of cool.

<comment><USER5> You mean like netcat? (Not to say that it's what they should use, but the idea is the same, right?)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Hmm... Good question... Bit torrent might be worth looking into. It will probably take forever, but once it gets going you can just leave it for a couple days and it's easy to resume a transfer if anyone gets disconnected.

It might even be easier and faster to go low tech. A few DVD-Rs or Flash drives and stamps would do the trick.

<comment><USER7> Agreed. I work on recording projects with musicians all over the U.S. For huge data files, a DVD in the mail is way more convenient than the internet, and possibly even faster, if you factor in next-day delivery and less-than-robust network transfers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Why non burn to DVD and drop in the mail box?

<comment><AUTHOR> um yeah, we're doing that now but i thought with the whole interweb tube thing there'd be something a little more point-to-point sitting in the mac or xp os's ;-)

<comment><USER8> What about using MobileMe:

"Keep your visitors in sync. A mere click in your Gallery allows visitors to subscribe to your online photos, creating an album in their own iPhoto libraries with your full-resolution photos. When you update your Gallery, the albums on their computers update as well."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'm with the whole DVD thing. Never underestimate the bandwidth of a box of discs in a postal van. The ping time on the other hand...

<comment><USER10> There's a photo in our office of a couple employees handing hard drives down a chain like a fire brigade. The caption: "The bandwidth is great. It's the latency that kills you."

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Here's an idea, make a gmail account that you all have access to and use the gmail hard drive (<http://en.seguridadpc.net/gmail_hard_disk.htm>) to share between yourselves.

</comment><comment><USER12> One byte at a time! lol

I would sign up a gmail account and upload the photos to it. Then give access to all your friends so that they can download and archive what you all want. It won't be pretty but you will be able to send the account.

<comment><USER5> On that note, Dropbox streamlines exactly the process you describe (I'm whoring it out now as it's pretty darn good... now that I finally got an invite. I have a few of my own, too, if you're curious.)

<comment><USER13> ooh! yes please, email@example.com

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> 1) Use an embedded bittorrent tracker inside Azureus/uTorrent

2) Sneakernet! <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sneakernet>

</comment><comment><USER15> Flickr and Smugmug both have unlimited uploading for their photos. Both services are user friendly, even to non-technical users. Flickr's pro service is $25/yr and Smugmug's entry level service is $40/year. I personally host over 50 GB of photos at Smugmug.

My only other piece of advice: upload from somewhere with high upload bandwidth.

</comment><comment><USER16> _i can't seem to find a simple solution on-line_

Even in this day and age, the off-line solutions are better. Get a DVD or flash drive and send it by mail or FedEx. Even on a moderately fast connection 5 GB is no joke to download.

<comment><AUTHOR> i'm starting to get that idea - seems sad huh?

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I have excess capacity on ourdoings.com and no limits yet. I've made a lot of UI improvements lately. Let me know if you encounter anything difficult for non-IT people.

</comment><comment><USER17> Microsoft Mesh (in P2P mode, without storing data on server)?

</comment><comment><USER18> Why not swap photos before you leave and you're all local to each other?

Otherwise, I'd say find a $5/mo web server account. Everyone zips up their images, ftp's them to the server, and you download each persons image bundle as a simple link.

You'd probably have no more than 100GB of aggregate monthly transfers, lots of options in that range. Plus you'd get email accounts and maybe make your own private forum to stay in touch.

</comment><comment><USER19> Do you all need _all 5GB_ of photos? Probably not. I'd venture that:

\-- the total number of shots can be edited down to the 'keepers'

\-- web-resolution is sufficient for 95% of the photos being traded

Have everyone edit out the losers, batch process down to 800px jpegs, upload to a flickr group, and then transmit the ones you need higher-res versions of individually via email or mediafire or similar.

<comment><USER20> I guess they probably include videos too.

<comment><USER19> OP said DSLRs, but for video the same thing applies. Downres to something reasonable for sharing, and limit the output-quality transfers to the ones you _know_ you want.

This is how even professionals shooting 50-200GB/day do things-- nobody delivers a HD with _every single outtake_ , but instead they just post a web gallery of the candidates and then deliver the high-res files of the just the final selects.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> 1\. install eMule (from emule-project.net) or aMule (for mac users)

2\. put pics in your shared folder (do not share or download ANY other files)

3\. go to shared files screen, select all, right click and select 'copy ED2K links' iirc.

4\. send links by email

5\. tell all the others to not share or download ANY other files.

</comment><comment><USER22> Get a .info domain really cheap for $1.99, get the cheapest unlimited hosting service, upload pics via ftp, get an open source photo manager.

See? less than $5 a month splitted among 5 guys for your own personal photo sharing site, easier impossible.

</comment><comment><USER23> Are there any companies where they will send you a 16gb flash drive, you fill it up and send it back, then they host the files (or upload them to flickr, smugmug, etc)?

I'd pay $25 for that service.

</comment><comment><USER24> <http://getdropbox.com>

(granted, we don't let people buy additional space yet, but ping firstname.lastname@example.com and we can hook you up :P)

<comment><USER25> need a dropbox please thanks

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Get an Amazon S3 account and use an S3-compatible client to upload/download the files.

You can also set permissions on the files so that people can download them directly.

</comment><comment><USER27> Curious why you head out before you share pictures? If you did it right there, you could burn x numbers of DVDs.

<comment><AUTHOR> khatmandu is not known for it's blistering high tech hub - at least not in the district i was in. besides, my last couple days after hiking everest with friends from around the world and i spend it burning dvd's? i don't think so! ;-)

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> thanks for all the tips everyone. i'm glad that the answer wasn't obvious but still it seems strange to me that we're all connected yet for non-ITers to move anything large a usb stick and a postage stamp is still one of the top contenders!!

</comment><comment><USER28> try: <http://share.memeo.com>

1\. install the desktop client

2\. drop all the pictures there

3\. invite everybody you know.

everybody will sync all the photos (no limit). And it is FREE.

<comment><AUTHOR> so close!!! this is exactly what i'm looking for but no mac version yet ;-(

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> It'll cost you a little bit of cash, but why not Amazon Web Services?

</comment><comment><USER30> you should try out syncplicity. they do backup and syncing like dropbox, but you can sync any folder(s). you can also share what you've synced with other people.

</comment><comment><USER31> Wuala, a distributed filesystem, make a group.

<comment><AUTHOR> that's not downloadable till 14 Aug... but it looks very close to what i'm looking for. i'll bookmark it and check it out in a few weeks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> www.pando.com

</comment><comment><USER33> rapidshare

</comment><comment><USER34> fedex?

</comment><comment><USER35> Don't understimate the bandwidth of of a truckload of hard drives. I.e. fedexing hard drives is the easiest and fastest.

[There is a file sharing society in Japan, by invitation only, whose members ship encrypted hard drives to each other. Not just for bandwidth reasons.]

</comment><comment><USER36> Um... Since nobody has suggested it yet, open up an ssh port on a computer and use sftp.

<comment><USER37> he said that they were a "bunch of non-IT people"

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> jgamman can you email me at ycseattle (-at-) gmail.com? I am working on this exact idea.</comment>


Increasing Productivity is a Load of Bullshit - <AUTHOR> http://www.techdisruptive.com/2012/10/07/increasing-productivity-is-a-load-of-bullshit/

<comment><USER2> From the article: Link Bait – Articles with catchy titles, but no relevance to the purpose of the article, severely detriment our ability

<comment><USER3> If I had a penny for every linkbait title with profanity included...

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The claims that productivity maxes out at 40 hours are extremely weak empirically.

[http://www.overcomingbias.com/2011/12/work-hour- skepticism.h...](http://www.overcomingbias.com/2011/12/work-hour- skepticism.html)

The most current evidence I've seen suggests 60 hours is optimal for productivity, not 40.

[http://www.overcomingbias.com/2011/12/construction- peak-60hr...](http://www.overcomingbias.com/2011/12/construction- peak-60hrwk.html)

[edit: let me clarify that there is basically no data on knowledge workers. Anyone making claims about them, whether the magic # is 40 or 60 hours, is extrapolating from manufacturing and/or construction work.]

<comment><USER5> I realize this is orthogonal to your point, but when it comes to knowledge work, _especially_ startup work, I'm highly skeptical of any prescriptive approach to hours worked.

Optimal hours is of scientific interest, but I think someone in a startup even thinking about this is a bad signal. Instead ultimate productivity is more closely related to how focused they are when they are actually working. It's easy to spend 16 hours a day in the office and fritter it away with a million small but unimportant tasks. Likewise, if you come in and get in the zone for 6 solid hours, you might be able to create something of much larger value than anything the multitasker achieved in a frenzied and overworked 80-hour week.

Of course the holy grail is combining a high degree of focus with extended hours, but you can't manufacture this. This is probably the best argument for hiring young idealistic people over seasoned veterans it that they are more likely to naturally put in a lot more hours. However, even unspoken peer pressure to stay in the office is going to be counterproductive, ideally you want people to work as long as they are productive and then unplug completely to recharge quickly. If you get it right and create the right kind of excitement and intrinsic motivation then you can get large gains of subconscious problem-solving as well.

<comment><USER4> I don't think it's necessarily a bad signal. Some people are more productive when they force themselves to devote N hours of time to a particular topic.

I do it myself sometimes - I decide I'll devote at least 4 hours to $BORING_BUT_NECESSARY_AND_UNENDING_TASK, and then do it and get it done. At my current job, this was (until very recently) searching our logs for slow queries and fixing them.

Different people have different productivity strategies. Being "in the zone" is an effective one, but it's hardly the only one.

<comment><USER5> Let me clarify. I meant startup management thinking, "what should our work hour policy be?"

Personally yes, I have become much more efficient since having a kid and add hard timeboxing to my schedule.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> My productivity actually took a measurable hit after I switched from one platform/framework to another. The first one was a dream to work with, everything was documented, the framework and 3rd party APIs were well maintained and the whole community was very serious about maintaining a certain standard of quality.

The second platform (the one I have to work with now) is crappy, slow, most IDEs are shit, nothing is documented properly, the community is in the state of total disarray etc. You probably know what platform I'm talking about.

Just going back to my old platform (if my workplace allowed me to) would probably increase my productivity by at least 50%.

</comment><comment><USER7> Did I miss the part where this article gets around to saying anything?

</comment><comment> d--b Increasing productivity is the main point of Information Technology. Of course, everything you can do with a computer, you could do with file cabinets and multiplication tables, but the only goal of information technology is to increasing the speed at which you can process your information, ie. increasing the productivity of your users. That's why sales pitch put this forward. Yes, sometimes it's bullshit, and yet, sometimes it's not. Overall, productivity has increased since 1950, so that must have come out of somewhere...</comment>


In India Not Enough Engineers - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/26/business/global/26engineer.html?_r=1&hp

<comment><USER2> Or rather, not any will to pay civil engineers enough money to keep them in the field.</comment>


Show HN: an infographic about Google's Nexus phones - <AUTHOR> http://blog.getinch.com/evolution-nexus-devices-infographic/

<comment><USER2> Very nice. My only complaint was that white text on a yellow or light green background was especially hard to read.

</comment><comment><USER3> What did you use to create it?

<comment><AUTHOR> We used Sketch.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Looking good!</comment>