Email a Dumpster Fire

https://hey.science/dumpster-fire/

by bschne • 6 years ago

1049 326 6 years ago

hey.science

das_keyboard2• 6 years ago

Somehow the Stream-Window just kept black with Firefox.

But I dug up the direct link for the stream: https://video.ibm.com/embed/23996224

sp332• 6 years ago

Firefox's "Enhanced Tracking Protection" blocks video.ibm.com by default. Not sure why.

das_keyboard2• 6 years ago

Yeah. You are right. That fixed my problem.

arthurcolle2• 6 years ago

Does Hey.com use IBM Cloud?

gibspaulding• 6 years ago

It's working for me right now on Firefox / Windows.

Still waiting on my email to show up though. Apparently it's awaiting review.

smexxymoose• 6 years ago

This idea is cool! How long do you plan to run the project?

thatdetroitandy42• 6 years ago

TBD! as long as it's fun

mburns• 6 years ago

Tom Scott did a similar stunt, where Youtube comments were printed in real time and fed directly into a paper shredder.

https://youtu.be/SpNlp6AtTOE

Derek_MK• 6 years ago

And that one wasn't also an ad for an email service.

https://twitter.com/jasonfried/status/1331340041281437696

convolvatron• 6 years ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PQ00x2zzXys

not connected to the internet, but same general idea

kowlo• 6 years ago

Fun idea! Would be nice to get an email back with "You are position x in the queue, ETA y minutes".

Patiently waiting to see my attachment meet its maker...

I did just get an email letting me know you will send a video of my submission though, that's nice!

Paul-ish2• 6 years ago

How long did the wait end up being?

jb_s• 6 years ago

oh - thats what the guy is doing with his phone.

nice!

thatdetroitandy42• 6 years ago

We actually built that and had it implemented but decided to take it out. There are so many variables it would be hard to estimate.

But we're working on speeding up the whole contraption overall.

fishtoaster4• 6 years ago

This reminds me of a Burning Code celebration my team once had at ocean beach in SF.

We'd been slowly migrating from Angular 1.X to React (internally: the Angularpocalypse) for a few years and we'd finally migrated over our last few pages. The result was about 100k lines of JS and Rails code that could be safely deleted in a single PR. It had been such a long slog, though, that we felt the team deserved some catharsis.

We took a team-offsite day to gather on a nearby beach and burn the deleted code. In the interest of not wasting that much paper, we burnt a complete list of the deleted files in super-tiny font on a couple pages. We also each grabbed our least-favorite areas of the codebase to print out, including several dramatic readings. My selection was a section of code from about 4 years prior with a comment like //TODO: replace this asap.

I highly recommend it to anyone facing a long, clearly-delineated migration. Gift your old, shameful code to the flame.

thedanbob2• 6 years ago

This reminds me of one time when I finally got to shut down a particularly hated internal web app. For a few hours before the PHP server was taken offline, visiting the site would only return this image: https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-6OWKZqvvPh8/UjBJ6xPxwjI/AAAAAAAAO...

justin_oaks• 6 years ago

That's awesome. What made the app so hated?

Forgeties79• 6 years ago

Brilliant

markdown3• 6 years ago

Every since The Crown S4, I've lots of references flying around. I must say that she was superbly played by Gillian Anderson.

8ytecoder• 6 years ago

We made a cake and stabbed it to death and then ate it.

colordrops2• 6 years ago

Have you started on the Reactocalypse effort yet?

hajhatten2• 6 years ago

Everything needs to be rewritten in phoenix live view now.

fishtoaster4• 6 years ago

Not gonna lie, I've been waiting for that to start to seem like a good idea. :) React seems to have more staying power than previous trends, though. Off the top of my head, the frontend library supremacy* went something like:

- 2008 to 2012: Jquery

- 2012 to 2014: Backbone

- 2014 to 2016: Angular

- 2016 to present: React

And although there are serious contenders, React still seems like it has a solid lead over all others. If it lasts another couple years, it's been the dominant tool for longer than most.

* Based entirely on "what I was hearing the most about at that time," not on any rigorous methodology. There was still plenty of Jquery code being written last year and there are large, mature codebases out there in Backbone and Angular.

quickthrower2• 6 years ago

I think this sort of thing, while cheesy in some respects is great for the team morale. A lot of companies do social things, which is great, but they are disconnected from the work. It's like stop work, do something social, and back to work. But with this ritual it's connected and a real celebration.

I hope React is better for you and you don't need to burn again in 5 years! Luckily hooks and non-hooks code works together nicely enough.

eru2• 6 years ago

Employees of the Chinese company Hayer famously smashed really dodgy and low quality fridges their company had produced in the 1980s as the symbolic start to a new dedication to quality.

See https://www.channelnewsasia.com/news/cnainsider/how-china-fr... for one write-up.

Teetering on the brink of collapse, the collective enterprise had gone through three managing directors in 1984 when Mr Zhang, a 35-year-old city manager, was appointed as the fourth.
No one expected much of him, since a revolving door of directors had failed to stop the rot. He put it thus:
People didn’t have faith in the factory.
But he grabbed the national headlines a year later, upon discovering from a check on the inventory that a fifth of the fridges were faulty.
Each fridge was worth two years of a worker’s pay, but Mr Zhang ordered the workers to destroy those 76 fridges – with a sledgehammer.

The CEO joined in the smashing as well for extra symbolism.

0x445442• 6 years ago

Agreed. I've always found the group social stuff to be contrived because the work is the only thing I have in common with most folks at work. That's not to say I haven't made friends through work but it's always been isolated and organic.

sethammons2• 6 years ago

We’ve done code burnings before. Throughout the year, any tech debt fixed or code repos removed could be printed out and burned in a bon fire at an annual gathering. Burning old chef code that made life pain every day? Put a smile on many faces haha.

robbyking• 6 years ago

I'm curious, how many people got the reference to the first Burning Man, held on Ocean Beach in 1986?

mbertschler• 6 years ago

When my team at a previous company finished a multi month migration of a large PHP app to the cloud we held a large deploy party where everyone gathered in a room and the CEO pressed a space bar labeled DEPLOY. A script ran, the load balancer config was upgraded and the whole team cheered for something ungraspable like this website in the cloud.

fouc• 6 years ago

I think it'd be hard for me to identify my "least favorite" area of codebase because I don't tend to get overly emotional about code.

If I did get emotional it'd only be due to some sort of bikeshedding (style complaints) that I would have forgotten about by the next morning anyways.

therealx• 6 years ago

Congrats, robot human. Rejoice! You may exempt yourself from this extracorricular activity!

a3n• 6 years ago

In the interest of not wasting that much paper, we burnt a complete list of the deleted files in super-tiny font on a couple pages.

Pretty cool.

Did anyone beat the printer to death with a baseball bat?

AnonC• 6 years ago

I got your (Office Space) reference, but I’m thinking that beating older keyboards, mice and monitors to death may be more appropriate in this instance. Those monsters facilitated the creation of the code. They should die with the code.

Chris2048• 6 years ago

I heard of a team that did a similar thing;

Their app had some Norse name (something like Ragnarok or Valhalla etc) so the put it on an RC boat and torched it on a lake :-)

thatdetroitandy42• 6 years ago

Pretty similar! Fire and catharsis go hand in hand.

jtchang• 6 years ago

This is fantastic! I just saw one paper sheet stayed in the printer tray. But the next one pushed it out.

This is the kind of automation I can get behind.

ljnelson• 6 years ago

Part of what I love about this is that periodically it doesn't work and a dude comes in from off camera and manually makes sure your email is torched. Very 2020.

SteveNuts• 6 years ago

An allegory to all those deployments with just one manual step.

sixstringtheory• 6 years ago

Or AI (with some human intervention required)

felideon• 6 years ago

It seems like this is the dude: https://twitter.com/thatdetroitandy/status/13313143780969717...

thatdetroitandy42• 6 years ago

guilty

grishka3• 6 years ago

And cameras sometimes go out of focus.

aresant2• 6 years ago

After submitting a note I got a marketing email eg "PS: We made this experiment for fun, but we made HEY to make email better. Give it a try at HEY.com."

Just in case not obvious this is a marketing campaign by Hey.com (I was 90% sure) and they've got my email now :)

natchy• 6 years ago

oh! i thought it was merely trying to create buzz but I didn't think about building up an email list. pretty smart.

t3rabytes3• 6 years ago

Not the case, we're not keeping any of the email addresses/data. We'll add a note.

csomar• 6 years ago

I think they need Terms/Privacy Policy and your consent if they are collecting emails. There is none of that.

gfody• 6 years ago

hey.com claims to have "fixed" email - I tried to find out what exactly they do to justify the claim but hit my timeout at about 5 minutes wading through vague testimonials. there's a 37min video that supposedly breaks it all down, I bailed about 5min in, afaict it's a just polished client.

crispyporkbites• 6 years ago

It’s not an email client- it’s a gateway to a proprietary messaging service that happens to support email

bogwog2• 6 years ago

I've learned to distrust services with rare/valuable domain names by default.

11235813212• 6 years ago

In case you're serious about not understanding it, the essence of hey is getting an effective email triage workflow out of the box so you only see what you're interested in and don't spend any more time managing your email (inbox zero, filter rules, etc.)

switz• 6 years ago

Could one turn it into an infinite loop by sending an email with a reply-to at the same address?

iandanforth• 6 years ago

The fire got blown out by the wind as I watched. Now it's email a gas leak!

thatdetroitandy42• 6 years ago

nah, it turns off on its own. the igniters run full time. there's no way for it to go out while gas is flowing unless both igniters fail.

Supermancho• 6 years ago

Doesn't work all the time. Saw one get stuck on the conveyor. Oh well.

thatdetroitandy42• 6 years ago

show me your perfect dumpster.

crb• 6 years ago

One just went past that said "everything is fine". It was committed to the fire, flew up, and landed back on the conveyor belt. A guy in a mask ran into the frame and picked it up and put it in the fire by hand.

I found it very in keeping with the theme.

arthurcolle2• 6 years ago

I saw that one too. Hilarious.

poorman• 6 years ago

Paper looks like it's sticking. They should just have the guy sitting next to a printer and a dumpster and then moving the paper from the printer to the dumpster.

tomphoolery• 6 years ago

Most of them are not going into the flames automatically.

johnwyles• 6 years ago

everyone is coming up with more complicated systems to usher it to the flames (e.g. vacuum it up and robotic arm drop it in, hook up a fan on low speed, etc) when it's really as simple as steepening the angle it drops in. also about 2 hours ago they didn't have a spot light on the subject to be torched so maybe they will get there.

it certainly re-energized the creative side of me to think up some similar live stream rube goldberg device so i like where their head is at

ultrarunner• 6 years ago

It rained earlier and it looked like papers were getting stuck on the damp slide into the dumpster. Later on things were going a little more smoothly, except for one that caught fire but then made it out of the dumpster. I don't remember what it said, but it was my favorite.

Anyway, this is basically the epitome of 2020 development work for me. I wrote a whole bunch of well-tested code ahead of an event last weekend. At the last moment, a director changed the layout of the event in about the only way I hadn't foreseen. All my careful tests passing didn't make my code work during the event, which led to a bunch of manual correction the code was meant to avoid. I imagine the Hey team feels a little similar when tests work great and then the humidity ramps up.

Both are working now, though, so all's well that ends well :)

thatdetroitandy42• 6 years ago

Glad to be of service.

geocrasher4• 6 years ago

I built an email > print gateway once using procmail and an OpenOffice library that would convert anything into PDF. It worked well, and I could print to it just by sending an attachment of most any document or image kind. It ran on a cron job, and worked really well. The difference? I didn't publish the email address, and there were no flames invovled.

odiroot• 6 years ago

I wonder if the content is escaped at all. Could be fun to do some PJL injection to spook the operator.

thatdetroitandy42• 6 years ago

you try. others have

thatdetroitandy42• 6 years ago

btw: this isn't really an invite to the dark army or anything. i'm sure the right person could break our toy easily.

asimjalis• 6 years ago

Emails torched count is not updating.

recursive• 6 years ago

If you reload the page, it will increase.

crad• 6 years ago

Wasn't part of the MVP, will be in the next sprint.

Edit: should clarify, was making a joke.

driantembulg• 6 years ago

Somebody just burned "TRUMP"

mr_ndrsn7• 6 years ago

It's not the first time, and it won't be the last time that gets sent thru.

Fiveplus• 6 years ago

Is someone handpicking the ones to be printed or is this automated?

t3rabytes3• 6 years ago

They're screened for content, but there is a pretty deep queue currently.

grishka3• 6 years ago

Hm. I sent one 20 minutes ago and it still hasn't appeared. I thought that if there would be a queue, there won't be this much of a delay between them. It would just print them enough time apart so they don't pile up on the belt.

koolba• 6 years ago

Is the font for this fixed width?

One could have a lot of fun with ASCII art or even some good ol' fashioned figlet.

sdmike1• 6 years ago

Just tried ASCII art and it doesn't work, I'll have to try playing with the width.

bogwog2• 6 years ago

You could just send an actual image as an attachment.

boogies• 6 years ago

  figlet -f banner 'foo' | sed 'y/# //'

(should work with `tr '# ' ''` too, but I only have the busybox version which only works with ASCII)

EDIT: and I forgot what a pain Unicode can be on HN as well. Unbutchered here: https://pastebin.com/jVSUwVCS

ve552• 6 years ago

I actually am really enjoying the music, any chance anyone has a source for it?

scrooched_moose• 6 years ago

I've checked a couple with Soundhound and they seem to be on "Healin' in the City Night, Vol 3" now

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=OLAK5uy_nqWGydjKlLOvGr...

Edit: Hm, seems to be some chillhop playlist. "Stan Forebee & Kyle McEvoy - Kensington" now.

ve552• 6 years ago

Didn't think I'd get a response, but thank you! Appreciate it, it was chill and relaxing enough I kept it open for several hours this morning.

thatdetroitandy42• 6 years ago

royalty free chillhop on spotify

joering2• 6 years ago

- The printer prints out paper and it goes on a belt, but the printout is on the other side! Now we need to engineer how to reverse a page. Oh, screw it! We are hackers, after all! Just print the same thing on both sides.

mlyle• 6 years ago

Is it on both sides, or is it just on the "back"? I thought using the duplexer was a clever hack. It heightens the drama, too.

mr_ndrsn7• 6 years ago

Just the back, you are correct!

mr_ndrsn7• 6 years ago

Yes, that's a simple way to handle it! As it is, I just make sure it's a 2-pager, and have the first page be blank.

The thought there was to reduce toner usage, but printing the same thing reduces issues due to wind flipping the sheets over. +1

brundolf• 6 years ago

As an aside: the web design for this page is super novel and cool. And I love the (somewhat random) ability to "close" the different windows and open them back up, as if it were a desktop environment. I wouldn't want this on every website I visit but it's certainly neat.

philshem• 6 years ago

have you seen https://poolside.fm/ ?

12ian34• 6 years ago

thanks for sharing this

thatdetroitandy42• 6 years ago

that's all Adam Stoddard. He's our marketing designer + a total genius.

Alupis5• 6 years ago

P.P.S. We're offsetting by 3x every bit of CO2 this creates via Cool Effect.

Is this really how this carbon offset thing works?

You release a bunch of greenhouse gases - but it's "OK" because you pay money to some organization that might eventually plant some trees (or use your money to buy/rent fossil-fuel-burning machinery to orchestrate the planting of trees)?

Seems like guilt-avoidance to me.

zacmps• 6 years ago

Something like https://teamtrees.org/ or https://trees.org/ seems like a more direct approach to me.

Alupis5• 6 years ago

Seems exactly the same to me. You pay some other organization some amount of money, and now you get a free pass to do whatever you want.

I had no idea this was really what everyone was talking about with carbon offsets.

boston_sre87• 6 years ago

Yep, it is.

eat_veggies• 6 years ago

Yes, it's more than a bit like paying indulgences to the church to absolve yourself of sins. That's how a lot of companies can be "carbon neutral" by purchasing offsets and credits. I believe Tesla makes a significant amount of its money by selling these offsets to other companies.

Alupis5• 6 years ago

Really? Even though the lithium for Tesla batteries is incredibly damaging to the environment to mine?

Are we all buying into 21st Century Snake Oil here?

jackdeansmith2• 6 years ago

If sin were a globally distributed problem where:

1. the aggregate amount of sin in the world caused suffering

2. indulgences actually reduced the aggregate amount of sin in the world

then the indulgence system would make perfect sense. I agree there are problems with offsets and many of them aren't credible, but this indulgences metaphor has never made sense to me.

core-questions• 6 years ago

That's the gist of carbon credits and taxation, yes. The idea is that the finances work as a disincentive at scale, but in reality if your business has no other way to operate, you're just going to pay the tax and live with it.

The airshed is, of course, indifferent to our financial games...

Now, if it actually works to change your behaviour so that you don't emit as much carbon because you can profit on the difference, well, hey! That's a good thing! But I don't think most industries can just stop on a dime and pivot like that.... it may provide incentives in the long term, or it just might end up with all the costs passed back to the consumer, who may or may not actually have a choice where to spend their money. This is basically the worst case scenario, where it just ends up being a financial game and doesn't improve anything. I hear that the solution in this case is just to ramp it up higher so that it eventually forces people to demand change; but they might just demand a change to the tax if no other options are forthcoming.

There's also the matter of catabolic processes, i.e. where something that emits less carbon is only financially feasible because of subsidies / taxes / etc. and in reality does not make economic sense to do. Any energy-generating technology that is not actually profitable without this is arguably taking in more energy than it produces, in the form of the externalities needed to enable it (i.e. fossil fuels that go into the building and maintenance of green energy projects).

Minor49er• 6 years ago

Penn and Teller came to the same conclusion on their show "Bullshit" back in 2008:

https://ptbs.typepad.com/penn_teller_bullshit/ep_606_being_g...

It's basically this millennium's version of the Catholic Church's indulgences.

dwaltrip2• 6 years ago

From your link:

There is evidence for global warming, though there's considerable reason to believe this is simply part of a natural cycle. There is some evidence that humans may contribute at least a bit to the change (though many sources suggest that human pollution is insignificant compared with forest fires, volcanos, etc.).

This is underhanded, weasel-word denialism. "Many sources suggest" my ass... Let's not give any credibility to this kind of bullshit.

UncleMeat• 6 years ago

Penn is at least a partial climate change denialist. He is an entertainer, not an expert.

MCOfficer• 6 years ago

Yes, it is. But it's still a LOT better than silently ignoring it, which is the standard today.

read_if_gay_• 6 years ago

Ignoring burning a few sheets of paper. The horror.

smarx007• 6 years ago

Carbon Offsetting is a practice frequently applied to go Carbon Neutral or Carbon Negative. For some reason, Net Zero is considered "more comprehensive" than Carbon Neutral according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_neutrality. What you are expecting is what many call Zero Carbon (and obviously the right path to aim for).

danans3• 6 years ago

You release a bunch of greenhouse gases - but it's "OK" because you pay money to some organization

It's about cleaning up after yourself. Clearly in the case of this machine, whose carbon impact is tiny compared to nearly every other combustion based machinery we use, the intent is symbolic.

...that might eventually plant some trees (or use your money to buy/rent fossil-fuel-burning machinery to orchestrate the planting of trees)?

For a reputable carbon offset, those carbon costs are accounted for in the offset, so even with them, it's a net-negative carbon transaction.

Seems like guilt-avoidance to me.

That's besides the point. If it offsets the carbon produced, then it works, and it doesn't matter what the psychological motivation is.

But I agree that there is a problem with offsets: In a saner world we'd be imposing carbon taxes instead of this, but this is where we are today, with CO2 mitigation effectively taking the form of "donations".

Alupis5• 6 years ago

Many organizations with good intent and survive on donations end up astray - see Red Cross and Haiti.

Donating money to some organization that claims they will plant trees to offset some amount of greenhouse gas emissions is a lot like trusting the American Red Cross to build houses and schools after a disaster. You're hoping they do what they promise (and instead of doing that, the American Red Cross billed majority of the donations as "Administrative Fees"[1]).

So, in reality you may or may not be "cleaning up after yourself". Actually, you're not cleaning up after yourself... you're outsourcing that job (and don't actually care if it gets done) so you can feel free to release more greenhouse gases.

[1] https://www.npr.org/2015/06/03/411524156/in-search-of-the-re...

TedDoesntTalk2• 6 years ago

In a saner world we'd be imposing carbon taxes

In my saner world, we wouldn’t have people knowingly create greenhouse gases for a PR stunt (whose only beneficiary is a corporation called Hey).

teraflop• 6 years ago

You could apply the same logic to any economic activity.

You mean I can just take a book from a bookstore, depriving others of the chance to read it, and it's somehow "OK" because I paid money to some organization that might eventually use it to print another copy?

beachy• 6 years ago

Not the same.

Stealing books from a bookshop - ILLEGAL.

Pumping CO2 into the air and contributing to the global ecosystem's destruction - LEGAL.

landryraccoon• 6 years ago

This is a counterproductive attitude.

If you pit climate responsibility against people living their lives, climate responsibility will lose, full stop. In the short term, human beings are the way they are, and you won't be able to change human nature before the climate is destroyed.

People offsetting their consumption is way, way better than people saying "If you just want me to suffer, fuck it. I'm going to embrace being an asshole and do what I want."

For example, I'm going to throw some logs on the fireplace over Christmas. I can either find a way to offset my emissions elsewhere, or just say fuck it, those environmentalists are assholes so screw them. It's probably better for both of us if I donate, because not having a fire is off the table.

Razengan• 6 years ago

At some point someone with more money than you is saying fuck it, their comfort is more important than yours, and you’re just going to have to suck it up.

TedDoesntTalk2• 6 years ago

I can either find a way to offset my emissions elsewhere, or just say fuck it,

You could also, you know, not burn firewood? There’s a reason no home built in the last 20 years in many states do not have wood-burning fireplaces.

amscanne3• 6 years ago

There’s significant evidence of a “rebound effect” when people are given the chance to signal their virtue or pay off their guilt somehow. That is, they feel justified in behaving worse than they otherwise would have (in this case, burning more logs than you would have without the offsets). This is a well established physiological phenomenon, though I’m not sure to the extent it has been studied with respect to carbon offsets.

So if carbon offsets don’t work well (which I think there is also significant skepticism about), then the net effect here is negative. On balance, it’s probably positive but I don’t think you can make a blanket assertion that skepticism here is counterproductive — it seems quite warranted.

jacobwilliamroy• 6 years ago

Carbon offsetting is different from indulgences, because the offset is actually calculated and verifiable. You pay some money to cover some materials and labor, that labor will result in x amount of carbon-dioxide being sequestered over a certain amount of time. You can actually go and research this stuff if you're so skeptical. There are actual explanations for how everything works, so it is in absolutely no way like a catholic indulgence, where you never actually know if the money you're spending is doing anything. You can actually go on the web and find answers to all your questions. Yes, I mean you, specifically.

young_unixer• 6 years ago

Seems like guilt-avoidance to me.

Isn't that what 99% of people, companies and governments are doing anyway? Doing things that look or sound green, while (voluntarily or not) ignoring the actual damage we're doing.

For example, my country banned plastic bags on the supermarket and everyone rejoiced, but no one has any intention to talk seriously about environmental problems. It's all a bunch of empty slogans and feel-good discourse.

dwaltrip2• 6 years ago

You are implying that carbon-offsetting is some sort of sham that doesn't do what it says it does. Can you please provide sources to backup your claims?

greenshackle2• 6 years ago

It is basically self-imposed carbon credits, since carbon credits are not politically viable or something.

savanaly4• 6 years ago

I see this comment all the time and I'm never sure which of the two stances (or a third? don't want to pigeonhole you) people hold:

a) Offsets don't do what they claim to do, as in the earth in the universe where you give the offset has the same carbon problem as the one in the universe where you don't make the offset, or

b) Offsets are bad even if they do work. There's something morally repugnant about them even if logically they are moral.

From your wording and most of the responses I assume you hold a, but the tone and comparisons to indulgences, etc. make me think you actually (also?) hold b?

I personally hold the contrary opinion to b, but I'm not sure about a) so I'm always a little skeptical of the companies claiming to use carbon offsets. But the problem is definitely one of technology (measuring and holding people accountable to the offsetting) rather than an inherent philosophical contradiction in the concept of offsets.

btilly• 6 years ago

I hold a third opinion.

Offsets are a promise to get rid of carbon for a price. There is a strong incentive to cheat and make the promise, collect the money, then do less than you promised to do. No matter what accountability mechanisms you create, eventually someone will fail to be completely honest, and will deliver cheap offsets as a result. The result is good prices. Eventually the failures of the market to actually deliver on their promise will become a scandal, but those scandals take a long time to materialize so we won't hear about it for a long time.

Which means it might or might not work, and we probably won't hear much about it if it doesn't.

Making this less hypothetical, go read https://features.propublica.org/brazil-carbon-offsets/inconv... for some investigative reporting on how often carbon offsets aren't actually doing what is promised.

The result? In the two large scale programs that have evaluations, the results were that 85% of efforts undertaken under the Clean Development Mechanism were likely ineffective, and 75% of those under Joint Implementation likewise were.

And yet, despite documentation of how ineffective those programs are, do you hear a lot of public scandals about ineffective carbon offsets?

Between perverse incentives and the history of failure, I do not expect future programs to do better. Nor do I expect to hear much about the failures that I think are going on.

amscanne3• 6 years ago

You missed the obvious larger problem with offsets: green washing. By giving people the ability to absolve themselves of guilt, they may change their behavior in response. Taking that extra flight, buying that new vehicle, owning the larger house. If (a) is true, then the existence of the offset is actually harmful.

contravariant2• 6 years ago

Well you can't really expect those kind of solutions to scale. Burning a few bits of paper is small enough that you don't really need to worry all that much though.

tsjq• 6 years ago

I agree. Also, isn't the Kyoto protocol / carbon credits thing a very similar concept? Cmiw

psim1• 6 years ago

Way to go, Dumpster Fire Operator Guy. Nothing gives me more anxiety than waiting for an inevitable printer jam or mechanical failure to occur.

thatdetroitandy42• 6 years ago

i got u fam

ccccccccccccccc• 6 years ago

Anyone remember the Microsoft manual burning ceremony at CCC ?

bdamm• 6 years ago

Just saw a pic of Lindsey Graham go by! Perfect!

thatdetroitandy42• 6 years ago

I chuckled when I saw it in the queue

cyrialize2• 6 years ago

Man, a lot of emails are queued up. I haven't seen mine yet, but I appreciate that they'll send you a clip of it burning.

For reference, here's what I sent: ╰། ◉ ◯ ◉ །╯ "help they trapped my soul in this piece of paper!"

thatdetroitandy42• 6 years ago

that's an A+ submission. we have about 12k in queue right now

jlv2• 6 years ago

Oh! You should display the size of the queue.

cyrialize2• 6 years ago

Y'all had an A+ execution: https://hey.science/dumpster-fire/clip/?id=128758875.

actuator• 6 years ago

It would have been nice if you got a queue number back after sending over an email with the video displaying the current message number being processed.

thatdetroitandy42• 6 years ago

we had that in our original build but removed it because it's hard to estimate when a job will run

carterparks• 6 years ago

52k views, 268 emails torched.... ruby doesn't scale :)

mr_ndrsn7• 6 years ago

Hah! More like physical constraints on physical objects doesn't scale!

The decision was made to not horizontally scale out the dumpster operations to match expected queue uptake. ;)

walrus01• 6 years ago

time to attach a twelve year old HP laserjet with ethernet interface, those things can churn out thousands of pages in a day in a law office environment.

nitwit005• 6 years ago

I was thinking that a paper jam would result in the whole machine burning down, and I just noticed someone wander on to intervene when a print out got stuck at the end.

thatdetroitandy42• 6 years ago

hotfix tongs

grumio• 6 years ago

This is great. This is the new Yuletide log channel.

danans3• 6 years ago

I love the old school pixelated desktop GUI - especially with an HD video stream embedded in it. It's like a classic car with the engine swapped out for an electric drivetrain.

It would have been awesome if windows were movable, too.

thatdetroitandy42• 6 years ago

that's all Adam Stoddard

vandahm• 6 years ago

What's the best way to incinerate a `pom.xml` file?

ohazi• 6 years ago

I love how it has one of those big honking emergency stop buttons.

Like, 2020 may indeed be a dumpster fire, but at least we can be confident that this particular installation is going to be a relatively safe, controlled dumpster fire.

thatdetroitandy42• 6 years ago

it has 3 e-stops

priyadarshy• 6 years ago

I'd been wondering if Hey.com was taking off after so much fanfare and drama when they released. The fact that they're doing this for an inherently viral product which had a massive launch probably means interest has now subsided?

orliesaurus• 6 years ago

the autofocus is killing me

totaldude872• 6 years ago

nice automation, just got one paper stuck though!

totaldude872• 6 years ago

and a dude walked right in and put that in! NICE!

thatdetroitandy42• 6 years ago

service with a smile

ralfd• 6 years ago

The paper just jammed! To bad there is no chat.

thatdetroitandy42• 6 years ago

on duty

dom96• 6 years ago

I always admire these kinds of things, it's a genius marketing strategy and reminds me a lot of the sort of things that the people behind Cards Against Humanity have done. Anyone aware of others doing similar things?

citruscomputing• 6 years ago

https://mschf.xyz/ does similar things

Paul-ish2• 6 years ago

Is there any way I can get a recording of my document getting burned?

bschne• 6 years ago

When you send in an email, the confirmation you get back says you‘ll get a clip once it‘s been burnt

chucky• 6 years ago

Whoever is running marketing at hey.com seems to be very inspired by the marketing that Cards Against Humanity has been doing.

tewt23542• 6 years ago

SheinhardtWigCo• 6 years ago

Basecamp sure knows their funnel. First the App Store drama, now this - hats off to whoever is marketing this thing.

tpmx2• 6 years ago

Now.. this is the kind of performance art/marketing scheme I can get behind.

thatdetroitandy42• 6 years ago

glad you enjoy it. what should we build next?

tpmx2• 6 years ago

that's a fucked up kind of question. you be you?

musingsole• 6 years ago

This looks like a laser printer, right? Could that be what's sometimes causing it to stick to the metal chute (i.e. leftover charge from the toner transfer process)? Or maybe an inkjet would just have different issues from slight dampness.

Spare_account• 6 years ago

It looks like the rain is getting onto the conveyor and the chute, they just tried to dry it off

something2• 6 years ago

My thought was that the metal part of the chute is now holding on to more heat. So when the paper touches the metal is kinda burn-attaches itself to the chute. But your idea sounds more plausible!

Edit: I do appreciate the dude's commitment to burning our messages though!

thatdetroitandy42• 6 years ago

nah, not the toner. it's because the ramp gets wet.

and when it's not wet it oxidizes from the heat. we're trying a few different coatings.

codeulike• 6 years ago

Didnt really get the scale of what I was looking at until the guy ran over with a stick to move a stuck piece of paper

thatdetroitandy42• 6 years ago

it's a 20ft shipping container high cube, which is 11ft tall

mulmen2• 6 years ago

The ramp got wet and now everything gets stuck, that almost makes it better.

Kinda fun to watch them try and figure it out. I wonder if machine revisions/hacks will happen live on stream as well.

thatdetroitandy42• 6 years ago

You got it. Definitely sticky.

I preferred to have this project be a little crappy on purpose. Most marketing projects are so shiny and perfect. This one is literally a dumpster outside. Warts and all.

I made the ramp steeper this morning and it seems to help.

thatdetroitandy42• 6 years ago

I made a license plate hat for it and now it seems happier.

valzam• 6 years ago

Am I the only one who initially thought the whole set up was very small? I.e. it prints A6 pages and the dumpster is a box. But then a guy ran into the frame because the paper got stuck and I realised it's actually a full sized dumpster...

thatdetroitandy42• 6 years ago

It's a 20ft shipping container. High cube so it's 11ft tall.

throwaway888abc2• 6 years ago

Save the trees! Version without printing please. Cool idea

sethammons2• 6 years ago

Like an animated fire that eats the digital email for all to see? Meh. I love that this is real world. Trees are farmed for paper. At full speed, this is likely to burn less trees than I do heating my house every day.

throwaway888abc2• 6 years ago

Ups, my word back! Just quickly skimmed.

dboreham• 6 years ago

Assumed this was about how spammers have made the whole concept of e-mail into a dumpster fire.

treve• 6 years ago

I sent an email and was waiting for something to happen, was just staring at a blank screen... Once I disabled privacy protection my mind was blown. Super funny.

But it does make me wonder if people test their stuff with firefox and privacy protections ON. I think(?) it's the default now.

Either way, funny as hell. Well done!

Also funny that for every piece of paper someone has to walk up and help them get into the dumpster.

mr_ndrsn7• 6 years ago

I use FF as my daily driver, and yes, it's tested fine with "Standard" Enhanced Privacy Protections. I did see the issue you were talking about, but I had to modify the permissions to "Custom".

jasoneckert• 6 years ago

This is possibly the first example of Dumpster Fire as a Service (DFaaS)

thatdetroitandy42• 6 years ago

dumpster macroservice

siltpotato• 6 years ago

Why not support the printer so that it has more elevation than the fire?

thatdetroitandy42• 6 years ago

this is more fun

slowwriter2• 6 years ago

I can’t believe they actually use IBM Video for this thing. I use this terrible, terrible platform every day at work at the moment.

thatdetroitandy42• 6 years ago

it's the best service we found to have control over the feed

slowwriter2• 6 years ago

Don’t get me wrong, there are reasons we use it. It’s just so outdated I never expected a company like yours to even get near it

tdeck• 6 years ago

They really should attach a vibrating motor to the chute part to prevent papers from getting stuck.

pugworthy• 6 years ago

Reminds me of the Burned Your Tweet setup at https://twitter.com/burnedyourtweet?lang=en - except only one person gets to send it messages.

bballer• 6 years ago

Nice honeypot to collect hacker news readers emails :D

xdrosenheim• 6 years ago

Burne mai-- I mean, dumbster mail

thatdetroitandy42• 6 years ago

we don't keep addresses

jordan314• 6 years ago

I appreciated whomever burned a dependabot alert.

jmull3n• 6 years ago

Can I make this my out of office reply?

ranger207• 6 years ago

I have this on on a second monitor, and it really reminds me of New Year's: the colors, the random movement caused by the flames, the multiple views, and the lack of plotline all make it seem like a stream of Times Square on December 31. Y'all should bring this back then to give 2020 a proper sendoff.

thatdetroitandy42• 6 years ago

we'll run it as long as it's fun!

ilaksh• 6 years ago

It would be nice if they showed the queue length somewhere.

liminalsunset• 6 years ago

Seems like it's not running right now as it's after hours, but here's a YouTube video I found of it running:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=il7MffVEIC0

technick• 6 years ago

I think the dumpster fire is broken, sent an email and waited a few minutes. This is 2020, we don't have time nor the attention span to wait for a dumpster fire to start. Come back when its automated...

IceWreck• 6 years ago

While its clear its an advertisement for hey.com, this is still so cool

thatdetroitandy42• 6 years ago

wait, how did you figure it out?

timdaub2• 6 years ago

I don't understand what this website is doing (maybe it's not working on my phone).

I just know that everyone that creates another email client without addressing the elefant in the room, that is privacy, just adds oil to the dumpster fire.

enditruu• 6 years ago

I personally had the video feed (hosted on video.ibm.com) get blocked by Microsoft Edge's tracking prevention, so if you have that feature on, or an adblocker with that feature on in your browser of choice, that could be the issue. The video feed isn't running right now anyway.

timdaub2• 6 years ago

Ah ok, I'm now realizing that the video feed only runs between certain times.

yitchelle• 6 years ago

We had a "previous model cleansing" ceremony once.

When we were about to launch a new version of our product (this is a physical piece of equipment), we took one of each model to an open car park lot, gave each of us a hammer. Each of us took our turn to smash it the bits with our hammer.

Had a quiet drink afterwards with the team.

thatdetroitandy42• 6 years ago

I think those moments are way more important than they seem.

ignisrising• 6 years ago

is there even a reason for this? Don't get me wrong, I love it, but why?

thatdetroitandy42• 6 years ago

why not

Tokkemon• 6 years ago

Because 2020.

dusted• 6 years ago

That's a really neat way to harvest valid email addresses.

thatdetroitandy42• 6 years ago

we don't keep the addresses

pbronez• 6 years ago

My favorite part of this is that they proactively offset the carbon emissions from their electricity usage via https://www.cooleffect.org/

Is there an easy way to calculate the climate impact of a software project? I’d love to do this for my next project.

thatdetroitandy42• 6 years ago

Hey all. I'm the creator behind this project and currently running the queue. Happy to answer any questions you have.

frakkingcylons• 6 years ago

This reminds me of the Holiday Hole event by Cards against Humanity back in 2016. Were you inspired by that? Also how long is this going to run?

thatdetroitandy42• 6 years ago

just generally inspired by CAH projects. they're rare and special. problems aside.

we'll run it as long as it's fun

SamBorick• 6 years ago

were you inspired by The Internet Comment Shredder [1]? Your setup is very similar! Very fun.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SpNlp6AtTOE

thatdetroitandy42• 6 years ago

nope, never saw it

papanoah• 6 years ago

Hey, I have sent an E-Mail yesterday evening. Do you have a rough number, how long it takes on average before the mail gets burned?

thatdetroitandy42• 6 years ago

we are about 13k behind right now

contravariant2• 6 years ago

The image of a dumpster showing a BSOD while burning is very 2020.

thatdetroitandy42• 6 years ago

thought that would be fun. was actually chromecasting youtube's 10 hours of BSOD

Email a Dumpster Fire

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