New Horizons: Nasa spacecraft speeds past Pluto - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-33524589 <comment><USER3> Quote from a friend of mine on the team:

"After 9.5 years and 6 billion km, we made it to Pluto 72 seconds ahead of schedule."

Amazing!

The views of Pluto and Charon already reveal how incredibly fascinating this system is. The dichotomy of their surface colours will most definitely lead to further insight into formation processes in the Kuiper Belt.

Just such a shame that we can't land this time around. With the volume of discoveries generated by MESSENGER and Cassini, and the wealth of knowledge that New Horizons is going to generate, it's such a shame that my favourite planet, Uranus, is likely not going to be visited in my lifetime. I spent my PhD studying the mysterious outer ring system of Uranus, and I'm 100% positive that a close-up view of the entire system would blow our minds.

Somebody who solves/disrupts science communication deserves a Nobel Prize.

 _EDIT: Fixed typos_

<comment><USER4> Any actual engineer will probably find this comment painfully naive, but here we go:

If it's infeasible to slow down to get into orbit or land on Pluto, what about the feasibility of designing a probe to impact Pluto at XX km/sec and survive well enough to send back data.

Like, fire a (metaphorical) bullet full of scientific instruments directly into the surface of the planet.

Is it simply that we have no way to build something that could both survive such an impact _and_ be complex enough to do anything useful afterwards? Or might it create too much destruction on Pluto's surface? Or some combination of those?

Edit:

I mean, it worked when we went to the Moon: [http://gallerytpw.ca/wp- content/uploads/2011/09/Georges-M%C3...](http://gallerytpw.ca/wp- content/uploads/2011/09/Georges-M%C3%A9li%C3%A8s_Le-voyage-dans-la-Lune.jpg)

Edit 2:

Not literally a bullet. I'm aware of the speed difference between NH and a bullet. ;-)

<comment><USER5> A bullet travels about 1,700 MPH. New Horizons is going about 36,300 MPH.

The probe weighs 480 kilograms, so it's kinetic energy is approximately 63.2 Gigajoules. For reference, this is like 15 tonnes of TNT released on impact. Hard to make something that survives those kind of conditions.

<comment><USER6> Plus, probes that far out have worse-than-dialup transmission rates. It takes 42 minutes to return a single photo from the LORRI camera. Bursting large amounts of data out in a short period of time before impact isn't feasible.

[http://www.planetary.org/blogs/emily- lakdawalla/2015/0130080...](http://www.planetary.org/blogs/emily- lakdawalla/2015/01300800-talking-to-pluto-is-hard.html)

<comment><USER7> You would put something else in orbit and have high bandwidth communication to it and relay from there.

<comment><USER8> Putting something else in orbit is the hard part.

<comment><USER9> The relay doesn't have to be in orbit around Pluto, it could be trailing the impacter and fly by. Deep Impact did something like this with a comet.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> In honor of Clyde William Tombaugh [1], the astronomer who discovered Pluto, a canister [2] containing his ashes is on-board the New Horizons space probe. It reads:

 _" Interned herein are remains of American Clyde W. Tombaugh, discoverer of Pluto and the Solar System's 'Third Zone.' Adelle and Muron's boy, Patricia's husband, Annette and Alden's father, astronomer, teacher, punster, and friend: Clyde W. Tombaugh (1906 - 1997)."_

A fitting tribute.

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

[2] [http://media2.s-nbcnews.com/j/newscms/2015_28/1109391/150706...](http://media2.s-nbcnews.com/j/newscms/2015_28/1109391/150706-ashes_7dd0a2249a8eb96eedd34f0c5687f931.nbcnews- fp-360-360.jpg)

<comment><USER11> It's interesting that by sending his remains on that probe we basically guaranteed that at least some human remains will survive millions of years in interstellar space, unless of course, New Horizons collides with something(which I guess it will, given enough time?).

<comment><USER12> It would be fitting I think if aliens found his ashes considering he's was something of an ET evangelist and eventually claimed some of his mysterious sightings (green fireballs and glowing rectangles moving in unnatural ways) were probably of ET origin and its unscientific to dismiss this out of hand. Wiki:

Although our own solar system is believed to support no other life than on Earth, other stars in the galaxy may have hundreds of thousands of habitable worlds. Races on these worlds may have been able to utilize the tremendous amounts of power required to bridge the space between the stars..." Tombaugh stated that he had observed celestial phenomena which he could not explain, but had seen none personally since 1951 or 1952. "These things, which do appear to be directed, are unlike any other phenomena I ever observed. Their apparent lack of obedience to the ordinary laws of celestial motion gives credence."

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clyde_Tombaugh#Interest_in_UFO...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clyde_Tombaugh#Interest_in_UFOs)

<comment><USER13> if we were to humanize alien that much, I'd see more likely for his ashes to become cosmetics for their gullible upper middle class.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Interesting note, as of today, the US is the first country to have successful spacecraft missions visit all of the classical planets.

There is one big exception, of course: the Soviet Union was the first to have a spacecraft visit Earth, with Spunink.

This category is completely arbitrary, especially given that Pluto is now considered a minor planet. Still, it's an achievement of note.

      Mercury - 1974, Mariner 10

      Venus --- 1962, Mariner 2

      Earth --- 1957, Sputnik 1

      Mars* --- 1965, Mariner 4

      Jupiter - 1973, Pioneer 10

      Saturn -- 1979, Pioneer 11

      Uranus -- 1986, Voyager 2

      Neptune - 1989, Voyager 2

      Pluto --- 2015, New Horizons

* The Soviet Union launched several probes to Mars before the US did, but those probes failed. This may be true of other planets as well.

edit: formatting

<comment><USER15> Not to shoot the messenger, but it annoys me when these things are viewed through the lens of artificial divisions such as nations. I understand that space exploration has been used as a tool to further many political machines, but it seems silly to me, especially when staring at a picture as beautiful as this from a distance that makes Earth seem so small, to think about the people living on this planet as anything other than humans, rather than citizens of different countries. It just feels divisive where it should really feel uniting. (Kumbaya!)

I really hope we someday get to the point where no one really cares what "country" achieved the next space exploration milestone.

edit: To be fair, I am really heartened when I see how international the teams that do work in the space station generally are. We've come a long way.

<comment><USER16> Competition breeds innovation. Yes, we are one planet and one species, but our species is Human and we have an innate nature to compete!

<comment><USER17> Competition _may_ breed innovation, but surely it's not the truism you suggest.

Sears is an example of how the introduction of internal competition does not lead to useful innovation - [http://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2013/07/16/do- inter...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2013/07/16/do-internal- markets-nourish-innovation-the-case-of-sears/)

(It may lead to increased levels of backstabbing, but that's hardly innovative.)

Humans are a social species, so also have an innate nature to cooperate.

Also, the concept of 'country' is a rather recent invention. See [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nation_state#History_and_origi...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nation_state#History_and_origins) for some context. It's certainly possible that kohanz's "hope [that] we someday get to the point where no one really cares what "country" achieved the next space exploration milestone" can be true yet still have competitiveness.

Perhaps space exploration of 100 years from now will be lead by volunteer teams based on, their WoW clan membership. While preposterous, the teams could still be competitive even if they are not organized by nations.

<comment><USER18> That's a very narrow and technical view of what constitutes a state, to the point of excluding ancient empires and nations like Greece, Rome, Egypt, Israel, China and others. They wouldn't meet the standards of modern statehood insofar as they lacked rigidly-defined borders or fully-developed civic institutions, but I think it's a mistake to imagine that they lacked any sense of national identity.

I certainly agree that competition can be wasteful, but proxy conflict can be healthy, eg the space race as proxy competition for the Cold War which almost nobody wanted to see played out as an actual military conflict. Private competition will undoubtedly exist the future (and is already coming into being today) but the capital and infrastructural requirements of space exploration are such that only nation states can command the resources for large-scale projects at present. You might be interested in this comparison of how Apple, the world's most valuabel company, stacks up against actual countries, which suggests it could be considered in the same league as Azerbaijan, Belarus, or perhaps Norway, depending on what metric you use - impressive, but still small potatoes in the overall scheme of things: [http://ftalphaville.ft.com/2015/01/28/2103622/if-apple- were-...](http://ftalphaville.ft.com/2015/01/28/2103622/if-apple-were-a- country/)

<comment><USER17> There was no ancient Greece nation. I suspect you mean it as a placeholder for the Hellenic era, or perhaps the kingdom Macedonia.

But as to the issue, I recently listened to a lecture about the process of deciding what the European nations would be after the First World War. The different nations had wildly different ideas of how to decide what was their national territory and people. The people of Alsace speak German, but the French said (and I paraphrase) "look at their love of wine and joie de vivre - they are French, but were forced to speak German".

Or of a farmer in central Europe, when asked "what are you?" answered "farmer", and then "where are you from?" brought the name of the local town. When asked more insistently, he said "Catholic". The concept of nation made no sense to him.

The concept of nationhood is quite complicated. Is Scotland a nation? India during the British Empire? It's more complicated than I want to get into. But in the context of the tgcordell comment, which tries to connect species imperatives with national competition, I mean to point out that the concept of 'nation' is too new to really have an evolutionary component. (And if it does, it's built on cooperation.)

I don't deny that proxy conflict can be healthy, though proxy conflict in Korea wasn't all that healthy for those involved. Is it possible to determine the healthy conflict beforehand, or is it something that's mostly done after the fact?

<comment><USER18> _placeholder for the Hellenic era_

Yes.

I agree with your general points, but while many people would certainly have been unaware of or indifferent to a national concept I think people in cities on major trade routes or in power centers like Rome would certainly have been aware of other places and would have been broadly aware of their own significance (although this awareness was doubtless concentrated among a social, military and business elite).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> As a child, I loved reading about space and astronomy. I think I pretty much read every book about these topics my local town's library. (It wasn't a large {town, library}) Isaac Asimov's non-fiction books were among my favourites.

I never imagined that now we'd be getting the level of detail seen in these photos of Pluto (level of detail akin to a Moon shot), which until now, only existed in my mind from various artistic impressions. I can only imagine how the folks on the New Horizons team feel after seeing the results of their work after so much time and effort.

<comment><USER20> Amen. I work at NASA and I'm gobsmacked at the beauty of the New Horizons imagery. I can't wait to see the good stuff.

Isaac Asimov's science essay collections had a profound effect on me. I learned physics years ahead of when I would have in school by reading these essays and learning how to do calculations involving kinetic energy, mass, acceleration, etc. Even more important, those essays helped me learn how to think like a scientist. Asimov's secular humanist world view also influenced my own world view greatly. I met him several times at various SF conventions and I miss him.

<comment><USER21> Not just essays; he wrote something like a real physics textbook at high- school level, which I learned from as a teenager. (Not in school, of course. IIRC it was more illuminating than my actual high-school physics text.) [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Understanding_Physics](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Understanding_Physics)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> The images we've been seeing the last few weeks, which grew by a few pixels every day or so, were exciting. I read about how much higher resolution the images would be as the probe reached its closest point in the flyby. But I had no idea how striking the best images would be.

When I opened this article, my jaw dropped. I never in my life expected to see Pluto in this level of detail. I always imagined it would be just a cold ball of rock. This is absolutely amazing.

And there's this still: _Images set to be released on Wednesday will be more than 10 times the resolution of those already published._

</comment><comment><USER23> A larger image was just posted to the New Horizons Twitter account.

Image:

[https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CJ32XAEVAAAp_8T.png:large](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CJ32XAEVAAAp_8T.png:large)

Tweet:

[https://twitter.com/NASANewHorizons/status/62092320062141235...](https://twitter.com/NASANewHorizons/status/620923200621412352)

<comment><USER24> I bet the scientists just hate that this stuff is shared on Twitter. They made a big deal that this was transmitted from New Horizons as a compressed image (to transmit it quickly) and then it gets mauled by Twitter's recompression too.

<comment><USER25> It's not like these copies replace the higher-res ones. Not a project scientist, but I'd rather as many people as possible see some image than only a few see only any at all.

<comment><USER24> The problem is when people zoom in and "see" things in the JPEG compression artifacts.

Also when they release the pic on Twitter in crappy form _before_ they release it in uncompressed form.

<comment><USER26> It says png on the file and headers.

<comment><USER24> Ah, it does! They did the original "sneak peak" on Instagram and this was the file: [https://igcdn-photos-h-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak- xfa1/t51.28...](https://igcdn-photos-h-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak- xfa1/t51.2885-15/11311925_687877714680167_484233801_n.jpg)

I hear so many complaints about Twitter recompressing pics I figured that would happen here.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> What we need now is a real-time play-by-play by Carl Sagan. . e.g. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c8eqYVFgzIU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c8eqYVFgzIU)

Or Larry Soderblom on Triton. Try to dig up the full "Encounter with Neptune". . . classic. . . first ten minutes - [http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x8zzlq_encounter-with- neptu...](http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x8zzlq_encounter-with-neptune-www- document_tech)

</comment><comment><USER28> Apparently it snows on Pluto:

 _Pluto has an atmosphere. It snows on Pluto and the snow sublimates back into the atmosphere._

[https://twitter.com/OSIRISREx/status/620932748824285184](https://twitter.com/OSIRISREx/status/620932748824285184)

<comment><USER29> With a 248-year orbit around the sun those must be some long winters.

<comment><USER30> The long winters aren't so bad, although sometimes it's a bit disconcerting when the commander thinks aloud.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Plutos "demotion" from being a fully-fledged planet makes me wonder if it would have been politically feasible to start the New Horizons project if the redefinition had happened a few years earlier.

Still, I am pleasantly surprised by the excitement this mission is garnering.

<comment><USER32> It is well-known that the New Horizons PI, Alan Stern, had a strong distaste for the "demotion" of Pluto. (An extreme example, this interview: [http://www.space.com/12710-pluto-defender-alan-stern- dwarf-p...](http://www.space.com/12710-pluto-defender-alan-stern-dwarf-planet- interview.html), which is rather ... over the top in terms of its arguments.)

<comment><USER33> I actually think his core argument - that a "planet" should be determined by its physical characteristics rather than where its orbit happens to lie - <USER2> pretty reasoned and grounded in logic. I'm on his side about the whole "clearing the neighborhood" criterion; it's totally arbitrary, and has less to do with the object itself than it does with where that object lives.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is awesome. Congratulations to everyone who pulled this off (and fingers crossed that the data gets back successfully).

Everyone has earned the right to chant the name of whatever country they feel like.

<comment><USER33> Sealand! Sealand! Sealand!

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> This gives me a tremendous amount of Pride in humanity, even though I had nothing to do with it. (Other than perhaps pay a little bit of taxes)

</comment><comment><USER35> It kills me we're not gonna orbit Pluto.

<comment><USER20> In the press conference, the PI was asked about a future mission. He said that he has thought about orbiters and landers and considers the Pluto system to be a valuable science target. But he said that we need to study the New Horizons data for some years, to better design the next mission. At this time, they wouldn't know what the best instruments to send would be. Also, it is far from clear how to send a mission to Pluto that takes a reasonable amount of time to get there (9 years, in the case of New Horizons) but can also stop when it gets there. Cassini took almost seven years to reach Saturn and the orbital insertion burn was something like ninety minutes! I'm not sure how fast it was going at the time, compared to New Horizons at Pluto, but the point is, if you want to get there quickly, you go fast, but then it's hard to stop.

<comment><USER24> > At this time, they wouldn't know what the best instruments to send would be.

There's an interesting BBC documentary series on the planets, called The Planets, that has an episode covering the Voyager probes. They had to do some quick redesigns on them after Pioneer 10 and 11 visited the outer planets and found fun stuff like radiation and unexpected rings. They said that if they hadn't had the earlier probes, Voyager would have been fried when it got to the system.

<comment><USER36> I second that recommendation, and it's currently on Netflix. It's a good documentary series. A little long in the tooth now, but only for the entirely positive reason that we've done a fair bit more planetary science since it was made.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Does anyone know how they colour correct these images?

I'm guessing there isn't a robotic arm holding up a test card in front of the camera :-)

<comment><USER38> I think they usually have a black and white camera with filters of specific wavelengths, some of which roughly correspond to red, green, blue, and they combine them. The color pictures I've seen from Mars and Cassini usually say "approximate true color."

<comment><USER39> They have no green (495-570nm) filter, just panchromatic (400-975nm), blue (400-550nm), red (540-700nm), near-IR (780-975nm) and narrow-band methane (860-910nm).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Today's XKCD: [http://xkcd.com/1551/](http://xkcd.com/1551/)

</comment><comment><USER41> Super achievement.

Imagine writing a piece of code see the test results only 9.5 years after !

<comment><USER42> And I thought testing in CI was slow.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> > Nix is estimated to be about 35km across, and Hydra about 45km in diameter. > Kerberos and Hydra are a lot smaller

Is one of those Hydras supposed to be something else?

<comment><USER44> Probably. Styx is the other one.

<comment><USER45> I'm still disappointed none of them were named "Acheron".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> This is incredible. Note that this is also a true representation of Pluto's colours by merging a high resolution greyscale picture taken by the #1 camera "Lorri" and a second (lower resolution) colour picture from the #2 camera "Ralph".

</comment><comment><USER47> There's a detailed and informative article about the design of the New Horizons probe on the British Interplanetary Society site at [1]. An even more detailed description of the science payload can be found at [2].

[1] [http://www.bis-space.com/2015/07/13/14875/inside-new- horizon...](http://www.bis-space.com/2015/07/13/14875/inside-new-horizons)

[2] [http://www.boulder.swri.edu/pkb/ssr/ssr-payload- overview.pdf](http://www.boulder.swri.edu/pkb/ssr/ssr-payload-overview.pdf)

<comment><USER48> For the Twitter-inclined follow Emily Lakdawalla [1] - she is usually mere seconds behind the actual data, which is pretty amazing.

[1] [https://twitter.com/elakdawalla](https://twitter.com/elakdawalla)

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> It seems Pluto has much less craters than our moon. Is this because our moon is much closer to a heavy body which attracts all kinds of objects?

Anyway: wow! The quality of this preview is already amazing. Waiting for the high res version :)

<comment><USER50> I think the main reason is that Pluto has an active atmosphere; it snows. Plutos icy surface may be somewhat active as well, so craters may disappear over time in a way that the craters on the moon cannot.

However, there may be other factors:

1\. As you note, the mass of the Earth-Moon system is much greater than the mass of the Pluto-Charon system.

2\. In the Earth-Moon system, the moon is the outer protector. In the Pluto system, there are five smaller protectors and Pluto is the protected.

3\. The inner solar system is a small, dense region closer to the gravity of the sun and gas giants. Objects thrown in our direction are likely to stick around. In contrast, the Kuiper Belt isn't very dense and objects thrown in that direction not only have more places to go, but may be on their way out of the solar system or into extended hyperbolic orbits.

3\. KBOs aren't very dense, so even impacts which occur may not create massive craters.

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> So this got me thinking... is there a way to forecast our space-travel capacity into the far future?

Could we conceivably create a formula that takes into account all of humanity's previous milestones of technological breakthrough's and the distances they have achieved for us.. and project where we could be 100, 500, 1000 yrs from now?

Perhaps there is a vague velocity pattern we can derive from a plethora of historic data?

*apologies for not being very articulate today..im still in awe!

<comment><USER52> A formula? No, probably not; the thing with space exploration is that it depends on the one hand on money, i.e. government funding or commercial exploitation, and on the other on physics - getting something into space, let alone propel it far away, is a very costly process when it comes to fuel and whatnot required - which increases exponentially the more you want to achieve out there.

Although companies like Virgin Intergalactic and SpaceX are working hard on making it more affordable, thanks to some advancements. Still though, practically speaking, getting anything into orbit is hard enough.

We'll probably see a manned Mars mission in our lifetime, but for anything beyond that you'll probably have to read science fiction.

<comment><USER53> > Still though, practically speaking, getting anything into orbit is hard > enough.

As the saying goes, "low Earth orbit is halfway to anywhere in the solar system".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> I remember reading about Pluto in dozens of space books when I was a child, all filled with beautiful images sent from Voyager I and II, I'm so excited that we can finally add Pluto to that roster

Also, it's so incredible that the New Horizon's team has managed to get to something so small and far away!

<comment><USER55> That is a moving target no less.

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> Its so amazing to live in a time we found the Higgs boson and flying by Pluto.

</comment><comment><USER57> "Jingoism: the feelings and beliefs of people who think that their country is always right and who are in favor of aggressive acts against other countries." [1]

Can we please stop comparing a success chant with "aggressive acts against other countries"?

Unnecessary nationalism, sure. Jingoism is hyperbole.

1: [http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/jingoism](http://www.merriam- webster.com/dictionary/jingoism)

<comment><USER58> Your comment confused the heck out of me. Can you clarify a little more? Did I miss something in the article?

<comment><USER57> Sorry, this was meant as a reply to a different thread.

Context was:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9884196](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9884196)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9884930](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9884930)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9884324](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9884324)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER59> Is there a mountain hiding on Pluto?

</comment><comment><USER60> I'm more than a little disappointed that we haven't got gleaming alien cities in the viewfinder this time, but I guess there's still a chance that Ceres is going to give humanity the boost it needs.

:)

</comment><comment><USER61> Why didn't it stop to look around? Smell the proverbial roses? Wasn't that its main mission? Or is it now going to check out other Kuiper belt objects?

<comment><USER62> It was going much too fast to stop (given the available propellant). Also, that would have extended the transit time significantly. On the upside, it's sounding like the Kuiper belt is a really interesting place, so we'll get to see much more!

</comment></comment><comment><USER63> Why can't we see any stars or light in the background?

<comment><USER64> The reason that the stars do not show up on the image is that the stars are so dim that the camera cannot gather enough of their light in a short exposure.

<comment><USER65> Since you can see stars near the moon, you should be able to see stars near Pluto, which is less bright. More likely, there are no stars in the (very narrow) angle of the camera.

<comment><USER8> This is exactly the reason. Properly exposed with a camera, you cannot see stars near the moon.

This is exactly the same effect. There are probably not any stars of high enough magnitude to be visible on the same exposure with such a bright object. In fact, there are definitely not: otherwise, we would see them on the image.

For more proof, check out some earlier navigation images taken by New Horizons as it approached pluto, greatly overexposing Pluto and Charon in order to see the stars around them: [https://twitter.com/NewHorizonsBot/status/615264675975065600](https://twitter.com/NewHorizonsBot/status/615264675975065600)

It's difficult to imagine Pluto, being so far out, being "bright," but remember that light intensity falls off at an inverse square rate with distance. New Horizons being so close to pluto, it's actually an extremely bright object relative to the stars behind it.

In fact, NASA did a fun twitter experiment where they gave people the exact time at their location on Earth when it would appear as bright as noon on Pluto. You can see many resulting images here, illustrating how bright the Pluto surface might look were you standing on it: [https://twitter.com/search?q=%23plutotime](https://twitter.com/search?q=%23plutotime)

<comment><USER65> I stand corrected.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER66> Is the clip at the top just audio with a black screen? That seems like the least useful thing; I'd wager that any blind visitors have screen readers.

</comment><comment><USER67> I hope we can reach even faster speeds for the next missions. This one made it relatively quick, the next one can be faster?

</comment><comment><USER68> Does anyone know of a KSP mod or similar that reproduces the current status of interplanetary probes in the solar system?

<comment><USER33> I don't know about reproducing statuses, but between the KASA pack and the Real Solar System mod, I'm sure one could have a blast recreating quite a few real missions (though I think KASA focuses more on manned missions than unmanned).

</comment></comment><comment><USER69> Wikipedia says the data rate from Pluto is effectively about 1 KBit/second. That's why it takes so long to get the photos....

I'd like to find more detailed information about the hardware and software on this thing. It's amazing that it was launched back in 2006. My 2006 Mac Pro is basically useless now....

</comment><comment><USER70> Traveling at 16km/s for 9.5 years would dilate time by almost 300 minutes! Not only is there a 4.5 hr delay because of the speed of light, there's an extra 300 min of relativity correction.

<comment><USER20> Whoa! I hadn't thought about that. The speed of New Horizons hasn't been constant, of course, but the accumulated time difference is probably close to what you calculated. There would also be a correction due to it being farther out of the Sun's gravity well, but that's a much trickery calculation.

<comment><USER71> (Just a note: His math is off.)

You also have to account for the dilation caused by the force of launch itself.

But then you have to subtract the dilation of Earth.

> There would also be a correction due to it being farther out of the Sun's > gravity well

Because it is in free-fall relative to the Sun there is no Solar gravitational dilation.</comment></comment></comment>


360M reasons to destroy all passwords - <AUTHOR> https://medium.freecodecamp.com/360-million-reasons-to-destroy-all-passwords-9a100b2b5001#.755dw5z4d <comment><AUTHOR> In light of all the recent data breaches, and waking days of my life spent reseting passwords, I think there is only one solution to this mess. Let's destroy all passwords. It starts with developers.</comment>


Shorter hairstyles will help stop spread of Covid - <AUTHOR> https://www.walesonline.co.uk/news/uk-news/shorter-hairstyles-blowdry-covid-salons-18418545?l= <comment><USER2> sounds dangerously like a huge conflict of interest though, doesn't it?</comment>


Why choose Node.Js over Go (and vice-versa) for creating Command Line Apps? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> Shipping Go binaries is effortless.</comment>


"The Cambist and Lord Iron: A Fairy Tale of Economics" - <AUTHOR> http://lesswrong.com/lw/3d6/the_cambist_and_lord_iron_a_fairy_tale_of/

<comment><USER2> Why the link to LW rather than the original source?

<comment><AUTHOR> Because I hate direct PDF links, the link includes some explanation (beyond a bare-bones title) of why HN readers might find it interesting, and the discussion on LW clears up some plot points that someone reading the story for the first time might miss or not understand.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Wonderful story. Thanks!</comment>


The Car of the Future Will Sell Your Data - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-02-20/the-car-of-the-future-will-sell-your-data <comment><USER2> The car of the future will sell your data and also be vulnerable to hackers, and extremely difficult or even impossible to repair.

I know a few others in the tech industry who also spend their spare time collecting and restoring _old_ cars, as in made more than 50 years ago. Parts and documentation are surprisingly available, and there's an extensive aftermarket thanks to a general lack of DRM-ish things --- these were made even before microcontrollers, so they're as "unconnected" as possible, and anything that goes wrong tends to be a relatively simple fix. Manufacturers were more concerned with actually making good products than locking out competitors or planning obolescence. The lack of annoyances such as needing to wait for the radio to "boot up"[1] or controls hidden behind layers of menus is also a plus.

They may not be as safe, fuel-efficient, nor environmentally friendly as today's cars, but there's a certain amazingly pleasant and comforting feeling of _freedom_ in driving one. It's hard to describe.

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15934023](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15934023)

<comment><USER3> > The car of the future will sell your data and also be vulnerable to hackers

I see few things happening. There will be a time when modern connected car I own no longer receives software updates while it otherwise would remain a great daily driver. Each passing day it becomes more vulnerable to being hacked to perform variety of things. What is the level of risk that I am willing to accept before having to get rid of the otherwise good car since I no longer feel safe operating it? Eventually there will be an event where this risk gets realized. This will further hasten the move towards policies/legislation where private automotive ownership is no longer allowed and everything moves towards subscription based auto ownership. This will take longer in the US due to cultural reasons, whereas Asia and Europe will hesitate much less to implement this.

At which point I suspect also the data collected by subscribed automotive belongs to the vendor 'renting' it out.

<comment><USER4> I think the trend will go even further where private autos are replaced with a fleet of automated taxis. Especially in dense cities, this would allow for more utilization and require less need for parking.

It really isn't a new thing in countries where (non-automated) taxis are super common and private car ownership is much rarer (e.g. much of Asia and some of Europe).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> At some point I think we'll need strong regulation to stop advertising getting weaseled into every product and service. There doesn't even seem to be much of any exchange here (e.g. free stuff for ads), just a one-sided grab for profits. "Discounts and rewards" are often just advertising by another name.

I'm really glad that I was careful not to buy a "connected car." I was mostly concerned with security (e.g. ransomware), but this is another problem to add to the list. As far as I can tell, the connectivity offers little to no actual benefit to owners.

<comment><USER6> Couldn't you just, you know, not purchase those products or services?

<comment><USER7> Not buying these products is a false affordance. Your friends have them, your spouse carries one every time you go out together, your children clamor for them at Christmas. If I have to keep my lawn well maintained or face a fine, there's no good reason that people should be exempt from laws that regulate behavior that has a greater impact to society than tall weeds.

<comment><USER8> Sounds like your part of HOA that's your first mistake. Although some cities are picky as can be.

Although, I hate ads and, they are just low information propaganda. Honestly, I wish they would go the way of the dodo.

<comment><USER7> Yeah, it's a city ordinance.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> As a computer scientist, and all around maker/hacker, I find shit like this despicable. I'd love to be able to get a Tesla, download the data to my own lap top, and play around with their API's and what not, but it's not an option. Tesla owns all the data, and they can do whatever they want with it. No thanks.

All modern cars are all proprietary, and their hardware/software is mostly garbage that can't be tinkered with, fixed, or modified.

If that's the only option in the future, I'll take my welder, and my old cars and head for the hills to try and finish off the rest of my days in relative peace -- free of intrusive spying and advertising.

<comment><USER10> Tesla has an API that you can use to download quite a bit of data in real- time. You can't get past data with it.

Also, you can write Javascript apps that run in the web browser.

I did a bunch of hackathon projects using that data when the Model S first came out, now there's an ecosystem of apps and stuff available for the cars.

I won't fault your opinion for Tesla having more access to your data than you might like, but your opinion about what you can download seems a little incomplete.

<comment><USER11> Im certain hes implying they have stored history of vehicular data

<comment><USER10> He did, and they do. I don't like that Tesla knows as much about my habits as Apple does. That wasn't my point, however.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> There needs to be regulations in place so that we do not build another free market tech Stasi. Stasi was the secret policy in east germany that spyed on every move of its citizens. In other words that we do not have devices that spy on us all the time and that data is sold for profit.

Examples Geo location based ads where you have been driving. Real estate ads where you have been driving. Increased health insure if you eat junk food. Marketing from online brands when you stop by your local store. Automatic speed tickets if you exceed the speed limit Higher auto insurance if you speed. More expensive car insurance if you drive reckless or honk too often. Gym card ads if you do not exercise or eat a lot of junk food

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

<comment><USER13> I wonder to what extend the typically German forms of tormenting an individual like copyright trolling or _Rundfunkbeitrag_ letters have their inspiration in _Zersetzung_ practices.

<comment><USER14> Probably not at all. It's absolutely easy to not be subject to that: Pay all your dues as required by law and don't distribute copyrighted content you have no license to.

<comment><USER13> or otherwise you wouldn't want your life to become accidentally inconvenient and your opinion dented, would you?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Ads in the car dashboard?! Let the meteor hit the earth already and put an end to our civilization.

<comment><USER15> But what if it's a few thousand $ cheaper? Like the $50 Kindle Fire tablet.

<comment><USER16> What if that kindle was $25, but every time you wanted to use it, you had to watch a 30s ad and then while reading give up 20% of the screen for a banner ad? Still wanna buy/use that kindle?

I think what GP is trying to say, from my perspective, is where does it stop? All this effort just to get the end user to consume more and more. The brainpower that's being wasted on delivering ads! Could that not be used to solve actual -- real -- problems instead? Why is delivering ads such a big problem that we're spending so many resources and so much effort on it?

You pay $50 for that kindle and save some money, but don't fool yourself into thinking it's not costing you -- really use as a civilization -- a lot more.

<comment><USER17> > Why is delivering ads such a big problem that we're spending so many > resources and so much effort on it?

Showing ads isn't really that difficult of a problem, especially on tablets which have built in video players.

> You pay $50 for that kindle and save some money, but don't fool yourself > into thinking it's not costing you -- really use as a civilization -- a lot > more.

Isn't it bit presumptuous/egotistic to assume that you're a more accurate judge when it comes to the value of not seeing ads for a given consumer than them themselves?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I worry that soon many cars will share ads and/or sell your location information with basically no way to opt out. If automakers are determined to make you run their adware, they can just program their cars not to start unless you have the latest software. They even have a couple legitimate excuses to do this: maybe the latest software fixes some remote exploitable security hole that makes the car unsafe to use, or maybe always-on tracking is an anti-theft feature.

If software updates are an all-or-nothing affair, then they can bundle whatever they want and force you to use it if you want a working car. If it's too obnoxious you could sell it, but the resale value might not be very good and we'd end up with a lot of people driving adware-infested automobiles because they can't afford anything better. I hope we have some sensible consumer protection laws to prevent this kind of thing coming to pass.

This issue reminds me of a Vernor Vinge science fiction novel that describes battles between space-faring civilizations. If one side happened to capture a ship that belonged to the other side, they really couldn't do anything with it except melt it down for scrap metal because they couldn't trust all the embedded computers not to do anything nefarious.

</comment><comment><USER19> I'm presently replacing my car (Europe) with a new Opel, I'm somewhat disgusted at how the manufacturer is pushing their OnStar service as a wonderful thing. It's GPS and full-time connected LTE with a suite of sensors in the car, and this is for a commodity €25k vehicle. It's a big-brother network, it defaults to "on" and whilst there is a "disable onstar" software button it cannot be defaulted to "off".

Customer benefits are touted as being "crash assistance if you need it", "easy access to a customer service agent (phone) who knows your position and can program your navigation" and "always-on unlimited LTE hotspot".

My wife is excited about it because always on-lte means wireless entertainment for the kids, a "safety" net incase we have a crash (but we drive nearly exclusively inner city miles, and within that group, nearly exclusively the same 5 mile stretch of main-roads). I'm flabbergasted by people's convenience over security mindset, or maybe it's the pseudo physical security offered by such overwatch programmes vs. the digital privacy security.

</comment><comment><USER20> I am so interested in the modern car for it's sensor suite... but so uninterested for it's cloud features. My hope is, when I next buy a car, that I can still disable the manufacturer's network connection, even if I have to go under the hood or behind the dashboard to do it.

<comment><USER21> >the manufacturer's network connection

is that actually a thing for cars without a subscription? i'd imagine they forgo the monthly cost of a data connection (that they're not getting paid for), and download any data off the car when you take it in for servicing instead.

<comment><USER22> Let's take Tesla as an example. Not representative, but still.

They are constantly connected and log __everything__. They own the data, and they will happily use it against you if it serves them (ie, you die in an "autopilot"-related car crash, they pull your location data and show that you were leaving from a bar at 2:00 AM). Since it's not encrypted to a device key that only you own, like how iOS devices work, Tesla is also forced to hand over your data to federal authorities as soon as they get subpoenaed.

It scares me a lot, frankly. I don't have enough money to buy a Tesla either way, but I don't think I could pull the trigger knowing what their data policy is like.

Of course, with the way automated license plate readers are going, you'll probably be location tracked even with a "dumb" car, but at least the data would be more fragmented.

<comment><USER20> Yeah, paying six figures to buy a car that's been built to rat me out if it serves the corporate interest is not what I'd call a good investment. They've also threatened to sue someone for interfacing with the software of their own car, vindictively banned a journalist from buying their cars due to a negative blog post, and the only place you can even see a Tesla repair manual is in a state that legally requires it... and Tesla charges $30 an hour for the privilege.

They hinge heavily on how evil laws are requiring third party dealerships, while being a case-in-point example of why third party dealerships protect consumers from an overbearing mothership.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Mine won't, I guarantee it. As long as it is just technology it should not be too hard to strike back. It will get more complex when it is both tech and legal, such as 'you shall never touch the radio module of your car for safety reasons' because the data harvester/ad injector uses the same platform as the collision detector and OTA update.

There ought to be a mandatory disclosure of any phone home or online activity engaged in by your car.

</comment><comment><USER24> > "Telenav Inc., a company developing in-car advertising software, is betting > you won't mind much"

That's not a bet I'd put £5 on.

Will they be giving dealers a "magic remote" to make sure no ads pop up during a test drive?

</comment><comment><USER25> My car of the future will have a very complicated hosts file. The manufacturer had better not try to break the self-driving features if I block the ads. If they do I volunteer to be the pedestrian that gets hit by a car with ad-block so I can sue them for the stupid decision.

<comment><USER13> Considering how difficult it is already to use hosts file (e.g. on iPhone) I wouldn't count on this brilliant and lightweight universal blocker to have a use with cars.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Google's Waze does exactly that. Ads at a stoplight.

Get ready to pay the premium for no-ads. However likely very hefty!

<comment><USER27> That is the question people should be asking if you don't like the question "how much extra would you pay not to see ads in you car?" we can do the equivalent "how much of a discount would trade to see ads in your car?"

<comment><USER26> The problem with cars is that you cannot avoid them, like you can avoid browsing ad-infested website or turning off add-annoying TV channel.

Everyone will know that and hence car manufacturers and car dealers seriously subsidied by an ad publishers will charge hefty price tag for anyone trying to escape ad prison system.

<comment><USER28> > The problem with cars is that you cannot avoid them, like you can avoid > browsing ad-infested website or turning off add-annoying TV channel.

The web and TV are open enough that you can work around those negative experiences (with ad-blockers on the web or a DVR to skip the ads on TV).

I don't see car manufacturers that engage with this scheme allowing third- party software or hardware that would block the ads. If anything, you'll only see an extra fee to drop the ad.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> So the banner ad will now follow you from your website and phone onto your car's navigation screen - sigh.

<comment><USER30> I can't wait for the car to drive you to the store posting the ad, whether you want to go or not. Spend a mandatory 60 seconds in the parking lot.

Somehow we have to stop the madness. If only we had the guts.

<comment><USER31> Ah, the future... Where all cars are Indian taxis which take you round the back streets to their brother's carpet shop.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> just a scam to collect data and turn the consumer into a never ending product and revenue source for the manufacturers. What's worse is this will have a higher usage on low to medium earners who will opt in and save some money.

</comment><comment><USER33> It will probably also have planned obsolescence.

<comment><USER34> I highly suspect that the car of the further future won't be owned by individuals and we will start seeing the opposite of planned obsolescence.

<comment><USER35> Unplanned evolution?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> > the car of the future

i'm building my own. i already ride an ebike everywhere and i'm working on some modifications to extend my range to what i used to be able to reach in my ICE vehicle.

i have been ebiking for a while to force myself into a healthier lifestyle. more recently, i was inspired by sun trip[0][1] to explore the concept of a light electric vehicle (lev) powered by a combination of solar and human power. since its diy, you can bet that any "connected" parts of the machine will be running libre software and the most open hardware i can get my hands on.

why depend on car companies when i can bypass them and buy parts wholesale? electric drive trains aren't very complex[2], especially the sort that you would put on an ebike. like, a basic understanding of electronics and the ability to follow some instructions is all you need.

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

[1]: [https://viewer.heropunch.io/%25RE0KrWXuFmUSXFhaHNWfT8HNSBuut...](https://viewer.heropunch.io/%25RE0KrWXuFmUSXFhaHNWfT8HNSBuutvW%2FWdUO7ZzWOII%3D.sha256)

[2]: [https://bafangusadirect.com/products](https://bafangusadirect.com/products)

</comment><comment><USER37> Is this data that valuable? You already have more granular info from everyone's phones.

<comment><USER38> Yes but that data is mostly owned by a few giant tech companies. This gives the automotive manufacturers a chance to get into the personal information brokering business. They have different priorities to Google and may be willing to sell data for uses Google won't.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> It would be interesting if beyond the free access to services we get from companies selling our data, we also actually got payed. Maybe that could act as a bootstrapped first approximation of basic income. Get money by doing nothing, just selling your data and activities to ad machines or as machine learning training data. Just go out and exist in the world, act naturally, and if you're ok with your data being recorded and fed into a model, you'll be able to pay rent this month.

</comment><comment><USER40> For decades, IMO, the companies have tried their best to make it as hard (and expensive) as possible for people who can fix their own. Making this another gambit in the chess game.

</comment><comment><USER41> We are so carpet bombed with ads that in some sense the demand for peace and contemplation is a synthetic need generated by not only the content of ads, but by their very presence. Ad free consumer gadgets provide a new way to price differentiate between the wealthy and the poor. The advertisers, and through them, the owners of corporations and the owners of the society, win no matter how you slice it.

<comment><USER42> I rarely see ads. But then, no TV or smartphone for me.

And I'll be keeping my '92 Civic hatchback.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> Sigh, why can't we have technology to already embed a microchip in the brain that would modulate the electrical impulses in the visual cortex to display ads in your visual system directly.

Oh and you absolutely need to accompany that with a rectum insertable GPS tracker that will become standard goverment issue and mandatory same way was biometric passports.

</comment><comment><USER44> Good we have EU and GDPR, IMO the largest difference between USA and EU when it comes to data protection is that in EU MY data is mine, it don't belong to the company who store and they cannot sell it to any 3rd party without me first accepting it

<comment><USER45> They seem to suck at enforcing that. Does tesla not track EU cars? I bet they do.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> Showing ads, even when you seem to be at a stop, would be far too much of a liability issue. People would get distracted at a stop sign, or when waiting to make a turn. You'd end up paying for half the world's fender benders.

</comment><comment><USER47> Im'a let you finish, but every device and capable to communicating with any other device in the present and the future will sell your data.

</comment><comment><USER48> Yet again, another site with autoplay video.

</comment><comment><USER49> The data orgy is everywhere :(

</comment><comment><USER50> The car of the future won't be your car, so it won't be your data.

</comment><comment><USER51> The <blank> of the Present already sells your data

</comment><comment><USER52> "Officer, I was distracted by a Durex ad."

<comment><USER26> ...or:

"I was in rush to take advantage of a valuable offer I just saw at the last stoplight" ...

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> that's what something like oculus go will be for, your (the) car is doing the driving so just watch a movie.

</comment><comment><USER54> The car of the future will run on steam.

This means it is a hardware and a software-platform where besides basic tasks like driving - everything can be bought by third party vendours, who pay a fee to the supplier of the software-platform.

S/He whoever overcomes his embedded plattform - fire and forget idea of software in this area first, shall inherit it all.

Let the challenge begin.

PS: Seriously- take John Deere- they basically have people begging and hacking, to work for them for free- and decide - no we sell parts and packages.

</comment><comment><USER55> In America sure, lost cause. I expect this wouldn't fly in EU unless you give your consent. And why would you?

<comment><USER45> The 'consent' will be rolled in to the purchase contract. Dont want us to have your data? No car for you.</comment></comment>


Amazon Route 53 - A New DNS Service from AWS - <AUTHOR> http://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2010/12/06/announcing-amazon-route-53-dns-service/ <comment><USER2> Very interesting. We currently use DNS Made Easy but I see two huge advantages to Route 53:

1\. It's API-driven, so we can modify our DNS entries programmatically. You can't do that with DNS Made Easy. (They've been "planning to implement an API in the future" for a long time now.)

2\. At our scale, it's exactly 1/4th the cost of DNS Made Easy. That'll be a nice chunk of change. Plus, like other AWS services, you only pay for the number of queries that you actually use.

<comment><USER3> Yup, same here. DME additional query & overage fees are killing me.

Has anyone tried this out though? My impression is that R53 is _exclusively_ API driven, at least for now. I'd kinda like to have a web interface to fall back on.

<comment><USER4> Based on the web interfaces available for the other AWS services, I'm sure it won't be long before someone cooks up a simple CRUD web front-end.

EDIT: I forgot to ask, what kind of overages are you seeing? With Route 53 you'll be charged $501/month if your zone gets 1B queries.

<comment><USER3> The pricing is a little complicated and I think there are volume discounts, but I believe I'm paying something like $2/million in advance and $6/million if I go over plan.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> As someone who uses Nettica for Dynamaic DNS (which this seems to be targeting) I think it's great that Amazon is creating some competition in this area. Not enough web developers consider Dynamic, programmable DNS and that's a shame because I think it's a must. I monitor every site I have from an external location and if there's ever a host outage I have the DNS re-routed to a backup host within 10 minutes (it doesn't always propagate as quickly as I like but there's little that can be done about that)

I'm happy with Nettica but Amazon's offering will draw attention to this important point. Plus competition leads to more features, better service and so on.

<comment><USER6> What do you set your TTL to? Do caches actually respect it?

(My experience with this is that the downtime that I want to route around usually lasts longer than the TTL. And even if it doesn't, the recursive resolver / OS cache / browser cache ends up persisting the record longer than the TTL advises.)

<comment><USER5> Actually they don't but in the opposite direction. I set it at 7200 initially just to see if it would work and found not only did it work but updates came even quicker in most cases. Google's DNS for example will update after about 10 to 20 minutes regardless of the TTL setting.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Amazon got a lot less interesting in the last couple of weeks, I hear they will take down your site without so much as a warrant.

<comment><USER8> Thank you, Jacques. Nobody else was thinking that. Very insightful. Much better that we talk about Wikileaks... again... than discuss a programmable dynamic DNS service run by one of the largest tech companies on the Internet.

<comment><USER7> I think Amazon trying to sell a mission critical service like DNS right after rolling over at the first prod from some politician (and a pretty lousy one at that) serves as a good reminder that if you want to use services from them you'd better make sure that you are not going to do anything at all that challenges the powers that be or you'll be out faster than a warrant can be served.

Service providers of all sorts should stand by their customers until a court order to the contrary is served, especially when institutions like the EFF are solidly on the side of those customers.

[http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/12/amazon-and-wikileaks- fi...](http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/12/amazon-and-wikileaks-first- amendment-only-strong)

Amazon releasing more critical infrastructure that can be shut-down at someone's whim is bad timing to put it very mildly.

<comment><USER9> _Amazon trying to sell a mission critical service like DNS right after rolling over at the first prod from some politician_

I think it's pretty clear that Amazon didn't roll over because of Lieberman's remarks. Rather, Amazon did what they did because they thought it was the right to do: "it is not credible that the extraordinary volume of 250,000 classified documents that WikiLeaks is publishing could have been carefully redacted in such a way as to ensure that they weren't putting innocent people in jeopardy".

I understand you're passionate about this, but let's not conflate what actually happened.

<comment><USER10> Joe Lieberman called Amazon and said [something] to them.

Late that evening, Wikileaks was cut off.

The next day, Lieberman put out a press release: "This morning Amazon informed my staff that it has ceased to host the Wikileaks website. I wish that Amazon had taken this action earlier based on Wikileaks' previous publication of classified material. The company's decision to cut off Wikileaks now is the right decision and should set the standard for other companies Wikileaks is using to distribute its illegally seized material. I call on any other company or organization that is hosting Wikileaks to immediately terminate its relationship with them."

Lieberman's spokesperson added: "Senator Lieberman hopes that what has transpired with Amazon will send a message to other companies."

The next day, Lieberman introduced a bill in Congress that would make it a Federal crime to do what Amazon was doing, hosting the Wikileaks material.

You could characterize that as "pretty clear that Amazon didn't roll over because of Lieberman", but that characterization would be utterly mendacious.

<comment><USER11> men·da·cious/menˈdāSHəs/ Adjective: Not telling the truth; lying

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Here's hoping that this is the first step towards making ELB actually usable -- i.e. dropping the requirement that you must point a CNAME at the ELB hostname, which prevents you from using a zone's root record (you can balance www.foo.com but not foo.com). To wit:

 _In the future, we plan to add additional integration features such as the ability to automatically tie your Amazon Elastic Load Balancer instances to a DNS name_

As demonstrated by <https://forums.aws.amazon.com/thread.jspa?threadID=32044>, lots of people want this.

</comment><comment><USER13> Routing traffic to wikileaks would have been a perfect demonstration of this new system. Instead they decided to show how much they respect freedom of speech.

And tptacek, yes we should speak about wikileaks when discussing Amazon, from now on. This isn't a fanboy site, this is a place to discuss the real ramifications of a company's actions.

</comment><comment><USER14> Does anybody else think $1/Mo a zone/domain is high? Sure its nice that a million queries is only going to run you $0.50, but I suspect most people have a lot of domains, but little queries. Makes sense if you have a single domain, that gets a boat load of DNS requests, but if you have a lot of domains, with very little requests, its not cost effective.

<comment><USER15> I was thinking the same thing upon first inspection. We have about 200 domains with DNS Made Easy. We don't even get close to the allotted queries for the account. I think we pay about $180 per year for all 200.

I'll need to read up on this a bit more. It does appear to be significantly more economical to stay with DNS/ME.

<comment><USER2> It's a lot more favorable when you have few domains and many queries. We have many tens-of-millions of queries per month, on only two domains. This would cut 75% off our DNS hosting.

<comment><USER16> Same here. This would be a nice little cost saver, except it appears they don't support anycast. As such, it's a nonstarter for us.

<comment><USER17> "The query resolution functionality of Route 53 is based on anycast, which will route the request automatically to the DNS server that is the closest."

[http://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2010/12/dns_amazon_route...](http://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2010/12/dns_amazon_route_53.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> if anyone is wondering about the name, 53 is the port that dns operates over.

<comment><USER19> It's an unfortunate name choice since '53' looks so similar to 'S3'.

<comment><USER20> My first guess was that that was intentional. It seemed clever at first, but now I'm not so sure.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> There's no mention of IPv6 support. Given the situation that IPv4 addresses will be running out shortly, it'd be nice to see some acknowledgment of forward-thinking IPv6 plans.

edit: sorry to be so out of step - I guess I should have tied wikileaks to ipv6 to fit in with the rest of the comments.

<comment><USER22> The FAQ says they support AAAA

<http://aws.amazon.com/route53/faqs/>

<comment><USER21> Great - would have done good to put that somewhere on the main page (imo). Thanks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Say what you want about the whole Wikileaks affair, but regardless of where you stand, Amazon's sense of timing seems really bad. Couldn't they at least have waited a week after they declined to host Wikileaks?

People will undoubtedly tie the two things together, and Wikileaks supporters will make a big effort to point out Amazon's recent misstep.

I would probably have waited just a couple of days or weeks before this recent event was out of most people's minds.

<comment><USER17> No such thing as bad publicity. Seriously, I don't think Amazon will even notice the tiniest drop in sales, that's just not how it works.

<comment><USER24> Not immediately, no. You can't really just stop using AWS and switch overnight. In the long term, this will factor in decisions whether to expand on AWS or for someone starting new, just like other factors like price, benfits, and lock-in.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> If you like AWS or not: It's not a good idea to have everything in one account.

It's a single point of failiure anway and you want to distribute your core infrastructure between different parties. It's cool to run a DNS by AWS but not cool if you don't have mirrors/secondary nameservers, too.

</comment><comment><USER26> I hope they eventually build in the ability to do location based DNS load balancing. For me that would be a killer feature.

</comment><comment><USER27> A big reason this is important is that it's a stepping stone to location based DNS routing. That'd be the very last showstopper for some deployments being exclusively AWS.

<comment><USER3> "In the future, we plan to add additional integration features such as the ability to automatically tie your Amazon Elastic Load Balancer instances to a DNS name, and the ability to route your customers to the closest EC2 region."

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> This combined with the recently rolled out SSL termination in the Elastic Load Balancer product ([http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2010/10/elastic-load-balancer- sup...](http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2010/10/elastic-load-balancer-support-for- ssl-termination.html)) makes supporting custom domains a cinch.

</comment><comment><USER29> "It is designed to give developers and businesses a reliable and cost effective way to route end users to Internet applications by translating human readable names like www.example.com into the numeric IP addresses like 192.0.2.1 that computers use to connect to each other."

Maybe this isn't a big deal, but wouldn't someone who needs a DNS service either already know this or have a developer or IT guy who has explained to them why they need a DNS service?

<comment><USER7> I'd like to see how far you get on the public portion of the internet with a 192.x.x.x anyway.

<comment><USER30> you mean 192.168.X.X?? 192.0.X.X is a public ip address range

<comment><USER31> 192.0.2.0/24 is actually intended for use in examples and documentation, just as it was used in this announcement.

Per RFC5737 - <http://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc5737.txt>:

"The use of designated address ranges for documentation and examples reduces the likelihood of conflicts and confusion arising from the use of addresses assigned for some other purpose."

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Amazon should add a feature for geographic load balancing that could compliment their aws locations

<comment><USER3> I believe that was in the email announced under planned features for the future.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Great, so now they can also switch off your DNS if they don't like what you are hosting.

</comment><comment><USER34>
      DJ Bernstein TinyDNS 1.05

Anycast djbdns, nice :)

<comment><USER4> Did you use fpdns (<http://code.google.com/p/fpdns/>) to finger-print Amazon's service? If so, I've never heard good things about djbdns :( NSD (<http://nlnetlabs.nl/projects/nsd/>) seems to be the new hotness as far as authoritative DNS servers go.

<comment><USER34> No, I've set up Route 53 on my own domain (ramov.com) and queried the results via DNSCog (<http://www.dnscog.com/>).

I've used NSD once, it was good. Other than djb 'non standard' conventions and installation procedures, I see no other issues with his software and am happy Amazon opted for djbdns, especially since I don't have to manage it :)

<comment><USER35> This announcement would have been worth something if they supported DNSSEC automatically for all the domains they host. Using unmaintained broken software prevents them from supporting advanced protocol features.

For another example, the DNS already has a standard update API, but Amazon chose crippled software and reinvented the wheel instead of interoperating with the dynamic update code that is already out there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Can anyone explain what this hosted zone part is, I must be too sleepy or am just missing what it is.

<comment><USER37> I believe a hosted zone simply corresponds to a single domain you want to host the DNS for.

If you've ever ran your own DNS server this would be equivalent to a "zone file": <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zone_file>

<comment><USER38> If I wanted to point

www.domain.com

and

svn.domain.com

to separate IP's, would both of these count as a single domain or would I need to pay for two?

<comment><USER39> Those would be part of one zone, the domain.com namespace.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> I take it Wikileaks won't be using this as their DNS provider.

<comment><USER5> Oh for God's sakes let it be. If you want to boycott Amazon then Fine. Do it. No one's stopping you. But don't spam other threads with your political views.

<comment><USER41> A hidden boycott? Doesn't make a lot of sense.

<comment><USER42> Depends on your aim. If you are voting with your wallet and you want Amazon to know why, then spamming these threads doesn't do a lot of good. If you are boycotting and you want to recruit others to do so, then spamming these treads does do a lot of good (for you, the boycotter), but in the end it _is_ a solicitation.

<comment><USER41> I agree with his "don't spam other threads" (and I think a real spamming would make any boycott less effective); I just don't think the comment amounted to spam (which is subjective of course).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> We're very happy Zerigo DNS customers. Great API, great infrastructure, great support.

<comment><USER44> Us too, Zerigo has been awesome, and is already API driven :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> I'm excited about the API available for AWS 53, but I just love the old crusty looking Zone Edit. <http://legacy.zoneedit.com>

If you're dealing with low volume DNS for a couple domains, Zone Edit is hard to beat.

</comment><comment><USER46> Did anyone else see "Amazon 53" and think "Amazon S3"?

</comment><comment><USER47> It seems to me that GoDaddy does this for free? I've also used Slicehost for free.

Is there a difference between their free DNS offering and Amazon's paid version?

<comment><USER48> TTL minimums.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> I'm currently using Zerigo. They've been awesome so probably wont switch anytime soon. Tough competition going up against AMZN for this though.

</comment><comment><USER50> The pricing is $1/zone and 1 billion (!!) queries per month.

Which seems quite good for a globally hosted DNS service.

Only potential limitations are that its listed as "beta" and that as far as I can tell you have to use the scripts in the Route 53 developer tools (or write your own) to manipulate the zone and do the initial set up.

<comment><USER51> The pricing is $1/month and $0.50 per million queries for the first billion queries.

<comment><USER50> My mistake - you are correct.

Its a shame - it would be nice for them to throw in a the first billion!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> needs more RRSIG - I don't understand why you'd launch a new DNS product at this point without DNSSEC support.

<comment><USER17> because like... the whole world uses DNSSEC right?

<comment> mike-cardwell What is your point?

A significant number of people don't use DNSSEC because they're tied to DNS services which don't support it. And that is an argument for creating more services without support for it?

<comment><USER17> I imagine the argument is that it's harder and they need time and it's not a critical component so it's better to bootstrap their business first. You know, entrepreneurship.

<comment> mike-cardwell I don't buy it. They provide support for the "SPF" record type, but not "RRSIG". They would be equally simple to implement, yet DNSSEC would be hugely more beneficial.

I've never come across anyone using the SPF record type. nearly everyone just uses TXT for that.

I think DNSSEC was just an oversight on Amazons behalf. A mistake that they will hopefully fix in the not too distant future.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> Yeah, as if anyone wants to leave the DNS info in your hands too, Amazon, after pulling Wikileaks at a senator's call.

Amazon should offer domain names next, so it's just one stop for politicians who want to completely eliminate a website from the web when they feel like it.

</comment><comment><USER54> $0.50 per million queries – first 1 Billion queries / month

$0.25 per million queries – over 1 Billion queries / month

bleh.

<comment><USER3> Where are you getting service now? I'm paying something like $2.00 per million at Dns Made Easy.

<comment><USER54> <http://dnspark.net/>

Not sure how many dns lookups get done a day but I see about 6 - 7 million people daily.

20m lookups per month for $14/year, and they don't actually track or bill the excess stuff, I've asked them about it before and it's not implemented with no ETA.

Been with them for a long time and love them although their interface is ugly.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> What's the big deal here? Linode provides me all of the DNS I need.

</comment><comment><USER56> One thing I couldn't find is if it supports wildcard DNS (granted I only did a quick in page search both here and the service description page). Anyone have any insight?

<comment><USER57> From Amazon:

Amazon Route 53 supports wildcard entries for all record types. A wildcard entry is a record in a DNS zone that will match requests for any domain name based on the configuration you set. For example, a wildcard DNS record such as *.example.com will match queries for www.example.com and subdomain.example.com.

</comment></comment><comment><USER58> Is there any performance reason to use this as DNS as opposed to the DNS servers on register.com for just a regular web site?

</comment><comment><USER59> This is awful timing on their part, re: wikileaks, and talks of decentralised DNS safe from politics.

</comment><comment><USER60> Would love to see some reliability and speed metrics in the coming weeks as adoption increases!

</comment><comment><USER61> It would be nice if they added this service to their management console; I'm lazy.

</comment><comment><USER62> It would be nice if they supported vanity nameservers.

</comment><comment><USER63> Finally! I've been wanting this for AGES!</comment>


Why you should do OpenGL and not DirectX - <AUTHOR> http://blog.wolfire.com/2010/01/Why-you-should-use-OpenGL-and-not-DirectX

<comment><USER2> This is sort of a loaded article, since it glances over the benefits of DirectX. (Note: I'm an OpenGL developer, but I worked on implementing D3D10 on top of OpenGL, and I've worked with DX7+ over the years. I'm not a fan, but leaving these things out is misleading.)

First and foremost, it's wrong to compare OpenGL and DirectX, rather than OpenGL and Direct3D. OpenGL directly competes with a small portion of Direct3D, and requires several libraries (I'm a big fan of SDL, OpenAL, etc myself) to begin to touch the breadth of DX.

Second, with OpenGL you have many vendors producing extensions and implementing them at different times. With Direct3D, you have a single set of features you write for which are guaranteed to be there (in a given version). This means that when you write code for OpenGL, you have to special-case paths for many different available extensions and duplicate many pieces of functionality.

If you want to use shaders, you have to either make your own effects system on top of GLSL/ARB shaders or use something like Cg. The Direct3D effects pipeline saves a lot of time, but of course reduces flexibility.

In the end, the call on OGL vs DX really comes down to these things: How much do you care about cross-platform compatibility? How much time do you have to put into your engine? Do you want complete flexibility w.r.t. your rendering pipeline?

If you're an engine-tech-heavy firm, OpenGL will almost always be the right choice. If you're just making a game, DirectX will almost definitely save you time. Again, I'm not a DX fan, but it has its place, and this sort of article is woefully misleading.

<comment> loup-vaillant "If you're just making a game"

…for Microsoft's platforms. This article[1] tend to prove that the extra time you spend with OpenGL can be a worthy investment, even if you are "just making a game". (I know you didn't say otherwise, but you sounded like you _thought_ otherwise.)

[1]: [http://blog.wolfire.com/2008/12/why-you-should-support- mac-o...](http://blog.wolfire.com/2008/12/why-you-should-support-mac-os-x-and- linux/)

<comment><USER2> No, I certainly agree that cross-platform compatibility is important (the D3D10 implementation I mentioned in my post was for WinXP, OS X, and Linux, and spawned from a reimplementation of Win32 on OS X/Linux), but this has to be weighed against the costs.

Going with OpenGL, SDL, OpenAL, etc is certainly not the easy route, even with the huge benefits, and for small dev houses it can easily become overwhelming. If your code needs to be cross platform, then OpenGL (or both, but that again is more expensive) is the only way to go. If cross-platform compatibility would simply be icing on the cake, then you need to weigh the development costs of both approaches.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Don't read.

This article is simply a manifesto calling for developers to use OpenGL. The mindset of the author is firmly locked in the late-1990s, which was the height of the OpenGL vs. DirectX flamewars. I'm amazed that he didn't bring up Fahrenheit. (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fahrenheit_graphics_API>)

The accusations about Direct3D gaining dominance because of FUD or some other nefarious actions are pretty ridiculous. Graphics APIs evolved rapidly during the period between 1998-2005, and there were times when Direct3D had a clear technology lead in certain areas. I've never met a single graphics developer who switched away from OpenGL for any reason other than preferring to work with D3D.

However, the balance has stabilized in recent years, and the author of this article doesn't tell us anything useful about current technology.

<comment><USER4> The rest of the article aside, I think that avoiding MS lock-in is a great reason to use OpenGL over Direct3D.

<comment><USER3> Lock-in is definitely a big concern, but the article vastly overstates the cross-platform benefits of OpenGL. Different platforms have different capabilities and limitations, and most of the work in creating high- performance 3D software involves optimizing for specific hardware.

For example, porting an OpenGL-based game from Windows to the PS3 would not be significantly easier than porting a D3D-based X-Box game.

<comment><USER5> FWIW: SCEA provide an implementation of OpenGL for PS3 so it should be 'easier'. I've heard it's not that fast given the strange nature of the PS3 hardware pipeline but it might be fast enough.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Ignore the article. I'm an OpenGL developer but I would dearly love to use Direct3D instead - Direct3D has a very nice API and is well supported on all graphics cards, while OpenGL is a mess of extensions and only works well on Nvidia GPUs (and maybe ATI). The only reason we use OpenGL is for independence from Windows.

</comment><comment><USER7> I wrote a big comment about OpenGL vs Direct3D with a bit of a historical as well as future looking perspective here: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=593801>

In summary, OpenGL is an abstraction of 3D concepts with many vendor-specific extensions to enable performance. Direct3D is an abstraction of the most common implementation of real world 3D hardware. Game developers did, and continue to, unambiguously ask Microsoft to produce the latter.

I understand the graphics pipeline pretty deeply if anyone needs some clarification.

</comment><comment><USER8> Having used both and worked at companies that make 3d engines as their main product, I've seen that one good way to approach this problem is to simply abstract away the API into a common interface that can be swapped between.

At a high level, the concepts that both APIs provide arent that unsimilar and abstraction is possible even if you are using some of the more esoteric features of each.

</comment><comment><USER9> I was hoping for a good comparison of the two, and instead got a typical fanboy rant. There are a few good points, too bad they are buried.

<comment><USER10> I rather see it as an attempt at a manifesto, a call to action, to point out the risks of blindly following MS too closely.

<comment><USER2> The danger here, though, is in writing a blatantly misleading article clearly targeting those developers that would be better suited by DirectX, generally. Developers doing the sort of complex work that OpenGL is particularly well suited for (tech-heavy engine development, wherein total control is useful) tend to know that they need OpenGL. Developers just looking to write a game would often be better served by using DirectX, and leaving out the (very real) benefits of DirectX/3D is just downright misleading.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Can anyone comment on how Open GL ES plays into this? It seems to be the defacto standard for SmartPhones and that market is going to continue to grow rapidly. Is that going to influence OGL's adoption elsewhere? Or are there other factors that make that irrelevant?

<comment><USER12> I doubt portable games would affect OpenGL's use on the desktop directly. Games on the major consoles are typically not ported to portables and vice versa, so the two markets will remain segregated. And while console games are frequently ported to PC, portable games are not -- although perhaps this will change with the adoption of WebGL mentioned in the article. In any case, portable games will not directly help the performance, stability, or feature- richness of desktop OpenGL drivers in the way that console games help desktop Direct3D drivers.

That said, one way that portable games _could_ contribute to the general advancement of OpenGL is by being the first platform that new programmers learn. A typical console game requires significant coding experience and artistic assets to compete, while the expectations (and costs) for a portable or web game are much lower, making such a game a more appealing target for a beginning programmer. And perhaps those programmers will continue to use OpenGL when they go on to make desktop games.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I was under the impression that DirectX was a more extensive API, and included support for more complex high level operations- is this untrue?

<comment><USER14> "DirectX" is an umbrella term that covers a lot of low level APIs. OpenGL is just a 3D graphics layer (good one) while DirectX does many things including 2D, IO and sound. Now it seems as if the author is only comparing OpenGL to Direct3D, but he doesn't make that clear.

<comment><USER15> Minor correction: OpenGL actually works great for 2D as well. There are versions of all the API functions that accept vertices with 2 dimensions instead of 3. And you can quite easily make vertex buffer objects with only 2 dimensions.

<comment><USER2> You have the ortho modes and all that, but that's not really 2d drawing. Doing things like concave shapes with specific line drawing (especially if you want decent anti-aliasing) is complex and expensive, since OpenGL isn't particularly well suited for it.

Of course, on the DirectX side you have the DirectDraw vs Direct2D mess, not to mention that the APIs are very poorly designed (in my opinion, at least). Doing 2D stuff in OpenGL isn't terrible, but it's certainly not well suited to it. In most cases, something like SDL ends up being easier and rarely too much slower (well, unless you're scaling/rotating...).

<comment><USER15> It's true that OpenGL doesn't have built-in support for things like concave shapes, but you can always do tessellation and feed GL triangles. (Some tessellation options were mentioned in the article.)

I've found that for my particular uses, the hardware acceleration you get with GL makes it worth it for 2D, even if it's perhaps not otherwise as well-suited for that as SDL.

<comment><USER2> You know, this makes me think. Are there any good 2D libraries for OpenGL? I've seen a few, but they all seemed very special-purpose or were either poorly designed or just didn't work. It'd be interesting to have a nice library like SDL, but sitting on top of real hardware acceleration.

<comment><USER16> Just wait for SDL 1.3 to mature. From the wikipedia article: "SDL 1.3 is a major update to the SDL 1.2 codebase. It replaces several parts of the 1.2 API with more general support for multiple input and output options. Some feature additions include multiple window support, multiple input device support (many mice, many keyboards, etc.), hardware-accelerated 2D graphics, and better Unicode support."</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Automated Code Repair - <AUTHOR> https://www.quantifiedcode.com/blog/automated-code-repair <comment><USER2> Wow, that's awesome guys! Do you have more background info on this? Anyway one can get involved?

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey, glad u like it. You can have a look here: [https://www.quantifiedcode.com/how-it- works](https://www.quantifiedcode.com/how-it-works)

We do also have open source projects, such as The Little Book of Python Anti Patterns.</comment></comment>


New eBay strategy angers small sellers - <AUTHOR> http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/06/20/BU9K11C0KS.DTL <comment><USER2> eBay seems to be its own worst enemy at times.

However, their game, their rules.</comment>