A Ray-Tracing Pioneer Explains How He Stumbled into Global Illumination - <AUTHOR> https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2018/08/01/ray-tracing-global-illumination-turner-whitted <comment><USER2> I used to be active in computer graphics. Great to see an article by Whitted himself. A bit of trivia: I think _the_ pioneer in the field of ray-tracing is Albrecht Dürer [1] who ray traced by hand in the 16th century.

[1]: [https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Man-drawing-a-lute-by- Al...](https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Man-drawing-a-lute-by-Albrecht- Duerer-1525-In-this-drawing-Duerer-illustrates-a_fig16_312605716)

<comment><USER3> That immediately reminded me of "Tim's Vermeer", have you seen it? Software guy Tim hypothesizes that Vermeer was tracing rays using an optical setup without strings, maybe vaguely similar to Dürer's. He sets out to recreate the device and Vermeer's painting's. It's a wonderful project.

<comment><USER2> I haven't seen it, but I just watched the trailer. Looks like an awesome documentary, thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Papers mentioned in the article:

"An Improved Illumination Model for Shaded Display" (1978):

[http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.107...](http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.107.3997&rep=rep1&type=pdf)

"A 3-Dimensional Representation for Fast Rendering of Complex Scenes" (1980):

[http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.133...](http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.133.6937&rep=rep1&type=pdf)

</comment><comment><USER5> It's a good historical anecdote about making progress in computer graphics, but ray tracing is largely an obsolete method, since 'path tracing', the method that stochastically solves the rendering equation by James Kajiya, can do global illumination way more realistically (in principle, it can give true realism). In fact ray tracing cannot do global illuminuation and any ray tracing engine that does that is essentially including a hack on top of its core ray tracer. You can even look at the images shared in the article and see for yourself as to how realistic or unrealistic they look.

Path tracing is not good for 'real-time' computer graphics at the moment, because GPUs need to be still more computationally powerful, though I think 2018 or 2019 is the year we'll have the first computer game based on path tracing. On the other hand, ray tracing is already easily doable in GPUs, since it's computationally less expensive than path tracing, but IMO, no one is interested in it since games either want maximum possible realism, or if they want "cartoonish graphics," they want a certain look, not the look imposed on them by the renderer, and ray tracing cannot give enough control to produce any look the artist has in mind (without massive hacks).

EDIT: I just realized, nVidia is promoting ray-tracing as the future of CG, and everything they're describing are actually qualities/features of path tracing and have nothing to do with ray tracing (except for this historical article). I'm seriously perplexed. Maybe nVidia's marking department thought the word 'ray tracing' is more catchy, and more people know about it, so they should use it everywhere. It's common knowledge in CG research community that ray tracing cannot do global illumination.

EDIT 2: Another possible reason is that if they start mentioning path tracing, people will start asking questions about the difference between ray tracing and path tracing, and sales people don't want to get into that. It's a bit like calling LCD displays thin CRTs out of fear that if they mention LCD, people would start asking about the difference between CRT and LCD.

<comment><USER6> The thing about path tracing that isn't mentioned often is that it can take anywhere from 1/60th of second to 16 hours to render a single frame. The images that people associate with path tracers are usually of the 16 hour variety. Just because a game could technically use a path tracer as it's render engine doesn't mean it will provide any visual benefit over traditional realtime rendering.

<comment><USER5> Two points:

\- What you said is true of any rendering method you use. If you have a complex scene, it'll take more time to render one frame.

\- What I said about 2018 or 2019 is what nVidia's promotion is all about. See the demos linked at the bottom of my comment. They keep calling it 'real-time ray tracing' but it's really 'real-time path tracing'. And it's already happening.

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vdnwrt3Xdak](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vdnwrt3Xdak)

[2] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tjf-1BxpR9c](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tjf-1BxpR9c)

[3] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jkhBlmKtEAk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jkhBlmKtEAk)

<comment><USER7> These samples just don't look that impressive to me. It looks like they are just milking some tweaks in each one.

[1] Looks really good but only one light source and barely even a bounce of light. Nice backlight halo, but that's not ray-tracing.

[2] Obviously a lot going on here and some progress of some sort but if only all the reflections weren't so blurry. What's up with that?

[3] 99% of what makes this scene look good is the PBR texture tuning. This lighting does _not_ look good and nothing is moving. Very few reflections and small but they do look proper.

<comment><USER8> [2] At 3:43 and 5:12 you can see the reflections at different levels of roughness. The rougher the surface, the more diffuse it will appear.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Tracing ray from camera towards light source is called Whitted raytracing - author of the text is J. Turner Whitted.

</comment><comment><USER10> Would absolutely pay up if I could get realtime raytracing for Fusion360 (Industrial/Mechanical Design software). Waiting for renders to bake only to find out that the lighting needs to be adjusted slightly can be frustratingly slow.

<comment> semi-extrinsic Hmm, IIRC Inventor does realtime raytracing, with first image after ~10 seconds and production quality images after a couple of minutes (this was on a XPS 15 laptop with the GTX 960M GPU).

My guess is that it's one of the features Autodesk doesn't want to put in Fusion360 so they retain a market for the more expensive Inventor.

<comment> GuB-42 I don't think we can call it real-time below 6 FPS (0.17s). That's the framerate of cheap anime. And the goal should be at least 30, which is a typical video game framerate.

The only examples I have where real-time raytracing is used are demoscene productions where shapes are defined using simple mathematical primitives. (see the 4k intros "absolute territory" and "zetsubo", both from prismbeings for example).</comment></comment></comment>


Boston Startup Meetup: tomorrow (22 Apr) at 6:30pm - <AUTHOR> http://www.mypunchbowl.com/parties/240386-boston-startup-meetup?

<comment><USER2> The Boston Lisp User group is meeting at 6 p.m. at MIT.</comment>


Ask HN: Solve a Facebook 'suggested friends' riddle - <AUTHOR>

I've just created a Facebook account for work using my real name. I used my personal phone number and work email in order to verify the account. The only other activity I've done is to add my company as my employer. All this activity has occurred exclusively on my work Macbook. That is the absolute limit to my activity so far on facebook.
On the right hand side I now have a list of suggested friends. I know every single one of them either directly or via my wife. There is one person in particular who is a suggested friend who does some consulting work for our company but has absolutely no connection to the company on facebook.
Granted, facebook algorithms are undoubtedly a bit of a mystery but I'm intrigued (and concerned) as to how accurate its friend suggestions are. Can anyone shed some light on this? <comment><USER3> Did the list of suggested friends appear as soon as you first logged in or did it appear a time after you created the account?

I can see how this can happen without parsing addressbooks or whatever:

Someone searches for you the day you create it (perhaps someone you mentioned making a FB account to) and added you. Then you're included in to a circle of people, you get added to the "do you know" and perhaps someone else adds you as a friend, then you get suggested to other people, etc.. Maybe there are dangling tags (unresolved to a FB account) with your name in photos of the person who friended you, cross-match with the other people in the album, suggest most likely company and friendship groups from that, rinse & repeat establishing a probability for a list of people to be friends. This sounds like it would be pretty effective to me.

When you say "personal phone number" presumably you mean mobile phone? Did you install the FB app? It's not a phone number that your wife might list as an alternate is it (eg for recovering access if she loses her phone)?

</comment><comment><USER4> Facebook can read emails and address books of your friends who might have your email address and it goes from there. Same thing happened to me. Most poeple on facebook are fine with sharing all their personal data with facebook - <USER2> that by extension includes you.

Essentially if any of your friends have emailed you or you emailed them, even once and only one of them it's trivial to rope in the rest.

<comment><AUTHOR> Is this common knowledge? Sounds like incredibly poor practice to sniff emails & address books without prior permission or at the very least, transparency.

<comment><USER4> They all ask for permission and most people just tick the box. Linkedin lets you do the same thing. People give them their passwords to their email accounts willingly. Looks to me it's a pretty common practice but I'm no expert on social websites. I wouldn't do it but that doesn't matter, there's always plenty of people who will.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I bet they look at the IP address as a signal - people who sign in with common IP addresses have a higher likelihood of knowing each other.

</comment><comment><USER6> I created two accounts a while ago with completely different personalities and friend circles. They didn't have any friends in common. One day I logged onto both accounts from the same PC, logged into A, logged out, logged into B.

The next day when I logged into A account B appeared as a suggested friend.

This PC wasn't blocking cookies/js or using a vpn.

</comment><comment><USER7> It isn't who you know, but who knows you.

Facebook is reaching a kind of herd level whereby, those people who aren't yet on Facebook, are actually on Facebook, but they just don't know it yet.</comment>


An aggregate 3M support QAnon as followers or members of FB pages and IG accts - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/jun/25/qanon-facebook-conspiracy-theories-algorithm <comment><USER2> Sorry, misread that as having to do with 3M the company.</comment>


Laziness Does Not Exist - <AUTHOR> https://humanparts.medium.com/laziness-does-not-exist-3af27e312d01 <comment><AUTHOR> My favorite quote from this is:

"When a person fails to begin a project that they care about, it's typically due to either a) anxiety about their attempts not being "good enough" or b) confusion about what the first steps of the task are. Not laziness."</comment>


A Man Who Volunteered for Auschwitz (2012) - <AUTHOR> https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/10/the-man-who-volunteered-for-auschwitz/263083/?single_page=true <comment><USER2> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Witold_Pilecki](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Witold_Pilecki)

<comment><USER3> Also a really good song about the guy [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wvDg7UftJw8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wvDg7UftJw8)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Another man with a related story was Jan Karski [0]. Interestingly, Jozef Cyrankiewicz, future communist PM of Poland who testified against Pilecki, smuggled Karski out from the Nazis.

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

<comment><USER5> Excellent book by Jan Karski.

Story of a Secret State: My Report to the World. Reads like fiction. He also entered a concentration camp to report on the activities there.

Interviews with him can be found on youtube.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> It's amazing how quickly our Russian allies turned into our Cold War enemies at the end of WWII. I've heard a lot of blame on both sides, the US stockpiling arms, McCarthyism fanning the flames. But the end of this story drives home just how brutal Russia was. A wwii hero who not only deliberately went to Auschwitz for three years, organized prisoners, compiled intelligence reports, then escaped and fought bravely for the resistance in Warsaw and somehow survives it all ends up getting tortured and killed by Russians a few years after the war.

<comment><USER7> This is a bone of contention and a heavily discussed subject, because the world is not a black-and-white place. The Red Army _was_ indeed a savior. It is thanks to those masses of poor soldiers, of which eight millions died, that the horror of WWII last only five years or so. All Europe and all world indeed should be grateful to them.

On the other hand, there was the Stalinist regime, ruthless rule, killing one's own people and others - for power and control. Whenever someone makes any judgement about Russians, they make a generalizing mistake. On top of that, I'd be very careful when making judgements about people's behaviors in extreme situations, it's quite easy to make that at a distance.

<comment><USER8> > The Red Army was indeed a savior. It is thanks to those masses of poor > soldiers, of which eight millions died, that the horror of WWII last only > five years or so. All Europe and all world indeed should be grateful to > them.

That is under a big assumption that Stalin's USSR was actually better than Hitler's Germany. Since there were lots of people who fled Soviet-occupied parts of Poland into German-occupied ones (hoping that life under Hitler will be less of a horror), this is not really clear whether the cure was not worse than the disease.

<comment><USER9> It would very much depends on who you were. If you had German ancestry you would be better off under the Germans, if you were Jewish you were far worse off. A lot of people in the former USSR occupied areas like the Baltics or Ukraine actually greeted the Germans as liberators, but they quickly changed their mind when they realized the Germans considered Slavs subhumans.

<comment><USER10> Hitler had this list of peoples to exterminate:

      * Jews
      * Romanies ("gypsies")
      * Slavs (Poles, Russians, Ukrainians, Czechs, modern Macedonians, Serbs, Slovaks, Bulgarians, Slovenians...)

Jews took the biggest blow, but Hitler didn't plan to stop there. And not all of it was even ethnic. For example, he hated homosexuals and disabled people. He was going to clean the race. Communists were a target, too.

The reason he didn't exterminate everyone at the same time is that he needed slaves and collaborators in the transitional period. People down the list could be used to exterminate those higher up (indirectly, but sometimes directly).

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

<comment><USER11> As well as almost any Polish professionals: Teachers, professors, lawyers, government officials, religious figures. The goal of the Germans was to dismantle almost all of Polish society and replace it with German society.

<comment><USER12> The Soviets _also_ had the goal of exterminating the Polish professional class, hence their massacres at Katyn & elsewhere of, among others, Polish Boy Scouts.

Few people realise that the Soviet Union took roughly one-third of Poland when it & Germany invaded Poland at the beginning of the Second World War — and it kept that territory _after_ the war. Polish society in those conquered territories was replaced with Russian society.

<comment><USER7> This is the point of view taught in Polish schools, so it's unthinkable for a Pole to think otherwise. However, Lithuanians, Belorussians and Ukrainians would beg to disagree.

For me the most fascinating is the case of Lithuania. Polish children are taught about the Commonwealth, common history, fighting together... So when they hear about anti-Polish sentiment there, it makes no sense to them. People are surprised and can't understand it. That's the fault of presenting a one- sided version of history and completely ignoring the POV of your neighbors.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> While this article in general is fine, some of the details are wrong. Namely - he died on 25th of May, not 22nd as written there, also he was arrested May 8th not 5th. Not sure about the other details, I didn't had time to check it.

</comment><comment><USER14> I finished reading Pilecki's reports (turned into a book) a year after visiting auschwitz. The reports are quite hard to read. I just had to know how somebody could get out of that camp. (Being in the military, he knew many people in the camp that helped him along the way)

This article is a great follow-up story for the book.

</comment><comment><USER15> In my book, Witold Pilecki is in the same folder as Irena Sendlerowa, a Polish nurse who smuggled hundreds of Jewish kids from the ghetto, who was tortured so severely that the Nazis bastinado-fractured her feet - to no avail. Un- fucking-believable bravery that inspires me every day to resist the silly trumps and putins of our time.

<comment><USER16> Putin actually has his opponents murdered. Look up what happened to Boris Nemtsov, he was gunned down right outside the Kremlin. I would take Trump over Putin any day.

<comment><USER17> What's more, Nemtsov isn't the only one who was killed by Putin.

Alexander Litvinenko was poisoned with processed Po-210, which was determined to have come from a facility owned by the Russian state. It was placed in his tea by two Russian agents, and an investigation by the British government concluded that Putin probably personally signed off on the murder.

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

[http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20160613090324/htt...](http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20160613090324/https://www.litvinenkoinquiry.org/report)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Some other good articles on Pilecki: [1] [2]

Of his imprisonment under the Soviets he told his wife:

 _" I cannot live. They killed me. Because compared to them Auschwitz was just a trifle."_

[1] - [http://www.poloniainstitute.net/witold-pilecki-bravery- beyon...](http://www.poloniainstitute.net/witold-pilecki-bravery-beyond- measure/)

[2] - [https://www.warhistoryonline.com/world-war-ii/story-of- the-m...](https://www.warhistoryonline.com/world-war-ii/story-of-the-man-who- volunteered-for-auschwitz.html)

<comment><USER7> Sadly, Pilecki was killed by the fellow Poles, not by Soviet Russians. The article you quoted makes goes even as far as to distort the reality:

> His Soviet prosecutor, Czesław Łapiński, died on the way to the hospital, > before his trial for judicial murder.

This person wasn't Soviet - he was a Pole, born in Silesia, a Polish soldier fighting the Nazi. I know it's more convenient to portray it as "the Russians were guilty of all wrong", but the reality is that during the Stalinist rule many atrocities were committed by Poles on Poles.

This point o view is actually present in the official version of the history as taught in many countries, with a notable exception of Germany: one's own country is always portrayed at its best, and its citizens as good fellows. The idea that one's ancestors might commit many atrocious crimes is terrifying. Yet, it is often the case. In this particular situation, some people were motivated by greed, some by their survival instinct, but some were just firm believers in Communism and were convinced they do the right thing. To them, Pilecki was just a bandit and a traitor. It's important to be aware of that, because this lesson from the past has bearing on present and future, for whoever is able to reason and draw conclusions.

<comment><USER19> Soviet doesn't necessarily equate to Russian, in the same way that you can be a non-German Nazi...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> "Hacker News"

<comment><USER21> [https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)</comment></comment>


Exploring Emacs - <AUTHOR> https://www.hackerschool.com/blog/11-exploring-emacs <comment><USER2> I was a Vim exclusive for several years before shifting cold turkey to emacs on the 01/01/2012 (first new year resolution I keep in my life!). My impression is still the same as day one: I will never reach the same _raw_ speeds in emacs as I used to (and still do) in Vim, but I've never had as much fun exploring the inner workings of any system as I have with emacs.

The functions described in the article are crucial. You should rewire your brain to type them every time you ask yourself a question.

Generally speaking, Unix is very good at self documenting. Whether it's text editors (vim/emacs), shells (bash, zsh, ksh) or just plain man pages (did I mention the _info_ pages for GNU tools?), the systems are great at holding their own full documentations.

I cannot recommend enough adopting the reflex of checking the local documentation before opening your web browser and hitting Google.

<comment><AUTHOR> This is my experience exactly. I was a long-time, very fast Vim user, but I wanted to play around with Proof General, an Emacs mode for using proof assistants like Coq[0]. Emacs slowly cannibalized my Vim usage from there: I started using it for Clojure, and was amazed that M-. would hop me into Clojure source. Then I started using it for Erlang, and then I started taking all my notes in org-mode. It wasn't until I was already pretty comfortable in Emacs that I learned about the C-h commands.

For pure text surgery, I'm still significantly faster in Vim. But the fact that Emacs is so explorable/discoverable is just so fun!

[0] <http://proofgeneral.inf.ed.ac.uk/>

<comment><USER3> > For pure text surgery, I'm still significantly faster in Vim.

Have you tried viper mode or one of the equivalents? I'm curious how it compares to vi. One of the things that I (as a long time Emacs user) have considered is to switch to using viper mode, even though I only know vi enough to edit a config file on a remote machine that lacks emacs. But I'm curious how it compares to the real thing, and if it gets in the way of ancillary emacs stuff (I can't live without stuff like "C-x v =" and "M-/").

<comment><USER4> Skip viper-mode and go straight to evil-mode, which is based on modern Vim rather than classic vi. It even supports a plugin system, so that missing features and popular extensions (like surround.vim) can be reimplemented with ease (<https://github.com/timcharper/evil-surround>).

The difference between Vim and the original vi is pretty huge. Just as an Emacs user might be stymied by the missing Lisp support in uemacs or zile, a habitual Vim user leans on stuff like text objects and visual selections, which were never even a twinkle in Bill Joy's eye.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> This is one of the huge reasons I'm still an emacs user in the face of so many IDEs. Until you've used emacs for a while you don't realize that emacs was built in emacs and has great tools like the ones described in the article to poke around its innards.

Writing emacs lisp in emacs is a joy because it's so easy to drill down when things don't work and figure out exactly what is going on.

</comment><comment><USER5> An extended tutorial using Emacs's self-documentation: <http://david.rothlis.net/emacs/howtolearn.html>

Random testimonial: «The guide has been extremely helpful and without it, I wouldn't be making the switch from vim. I particularly like that you present just enough information about various tools that I can use them productively, while referring to the excellent built-in docs. A lot of the programmer- critical tools have good documentation, but no "here's the bare minimum you need to know not to go back to your more comfortable environment" guides.»

<comment><AUTHOR> Your guide was indeed very helpful when I was getting to know Emacs. Thanks!

<comment><USER5> That's great to hear -- thanks. :-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The features that make Emacs self-documenting are superbly done.

I wish other software systems emulated them.

Another example: if you write "(funcall " (or if the insertion point happens to be an existing call to "funcall") and then hit C-h f, Emacs prompts you with "Describe function (default funcall)". If "funcall" is the function you wanted documentation about, you do not have to write out "funcall" again -- you just hit enter at the prompt.

</comment><comment><USER7> How Emacs changed my life by "matz"

[http://www.slideshare.net/yukihiro_matz/how-emacs-changed- my...](http://www.slideshare.net/yukihiro_matz/how-emacs-changed-my-life)

</comment><comment><USER8> C-h k C-h k gives me: C-h k runs the command describe-key, which is an interactive compiled Lisp function.

It is bound to C-h k, <f1> k, <help> k, <menu-bar> <help-menu> <describe> <describe-key-1>.

I have no link to the source file. I am running version 23.1.1

<comment><USER5> You don't have the elisp sources installed. If you're on a unixy system, use your system's package manager to install the "emacs-el" package.

<comment><USER8> emacs23-el. Thank you very much

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Serious question: If you switched from Vim to Emacs, and are happy with it, how fast/slow are you in Emacs for pure text manipulation (moving lines, changing text within quotes, joining lines, etc)?

<comment><USER10> Frankly, not quite as fast. But much faster in a lot of other interactions such as note taking, organizing stuff, writing structured text, interacting with git, using REPLs, using shells and many more.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Emacs' help system is fantastic and is one of my favorite things about it. But I had no idea you can navigate to the C source code too. That makes me so happy. :D

</comment><comment><USER12> could you guys explain why vim is faster in text editing than emacs?

<comment><USER10> Because you use single keystrokes instead of chords. Most editing actions are single keystrokes im Vim. This is especially true for complex things such as macros or command repetitions. In a way, this lends itself better to muscle memory. At times, you will do terrifically complex things in Vim without even knowing how you did them. This does not happen to me in Emacs as much.

But then again, my Emacs is growing with me and with every tweak I do it is becoming more of an extension of my mind and my particular way of working. This is not something I experienced in Vim.

<comment><USER13> Although I agree with your explanation I always wonder if using something like keychord in emacs could allow me to move as seemlessly around the text in emacs as in vim.

P.D.: Also something the the . command in vim is only posible due to the mode switching being an implicit start macro/end macro.

<comment><USER10> In my experience, fluidity of simple commands is not much of a problem, because muscle memory will take care of that eventually anyway.

However, C-x C-S-8 is certainly a more complex move than qq.

And the one for recording a macro to a register is even more complex. So complex in fact that I don't remember it. Hence I use those commands less often.

But the flip side is that something like occur or REPLs or magit or org-mode offer different benefits that you can not quantify in keystrokes as easily.

I guess there are different kinds of fluidity. To my mind, Vim is unmatched in low-level text manipulation fluidity. Emacs optimizes for a kind of higher level work flow fluidity.

Maybe Evil is the answer. But my brain has seemingly disparate modes for Vim and Emacs that are weirdly incompatible to each other.

Also, it helps to reimplement your favorite commands in Emacs. For example, I have M-s and M-r bound to something like f/F in Vim. Similarly, M-o and C-o act like o/O.

<comment><USER14> You really should put powerful commands like macros on easier keys. I think I used something like this (although not on F1): <http://emacswiki.org/emacs/KeyboardMacros#toc6>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> "In Soviet Russia..."</comment>


Operation Shock and Awe - DDoS operation set up for major bitcoin sites - <AUTHOR> http://pastebin.com/QAPxhEbP <comment><USER3> Hold Up.... Quick question. How is the price of bitcoin suppose to fall to 1BC = $30 when they're going to DDOS all the exchanges except for BitStamp?! People can't sell their bitcoins and cause a devaluation if they aren't able to login. A tiny percentage of bitcoiners actually have auto-bidding set up, and if BitStamp is the only one up, won't it get flooded with traffic and possibly go down too?

Anyway, assuming this is true....

I guess this will finally show how self regulation doesn't work when profit is the motive. Then again, this leaking is proof that at least one individual is attempting to self regulate.

This is the very thing that will scare people further away from Bitcoin. Knowing it's this easily manipulatable. Knowing Reddit I'm pretty sure they'll try to spread the news of this as far as the internet reaches. However most bitcoin owners will never find out.

I guess in 24 hours we'll see if it works or not.

<comment><USER4> <https://www.bitstamp.net/> is down ( just getting a CloudFlare error ), so looks like they can't rely on BitStamp for this operation at list.

<comment><USER5> Bitstamp: "We are under attack. Will be back as soon as possible." 12:25 UTC <https://twitter.com/Bitstamp/status/326295596963090432>

<comment><USER6> It seems someone doesn't want this operation to commence.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Sort of a side note: does anyone have any insight into law enforcement activities related to DDoS / zombie networks? It seems like this problem has been growing out of control and nobody in government cares even the slightest bit about it. Yet if you download academic articles that are already ostensibly in the public domain then you can easily raise the ire of the criminal justice system at the federal level.

<comment><USER8> _It seems like this problem has been growing out of control and nobody in government cares even the slightest bit about it._

What are you basing this on? Take a look at this: [http://www.fbi.gov/news/pressrel/press-releases/fbi- internat...](http://www.fbi.gov/news/pressrel/press-releases/fbi- international-law-enforcement-disrupt-international-organized-cyber-crime- ring-related-to-butterfly-botnet)

I believe that the Microsoft DCU has also worked with the government on a number of botnet investigations and takedowns. Rustock and Bamital come to mind without googling it but I think there are more than several additional ones.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Obvious double(?) bluff: the kind of people who really do this stuff would have access to better ascii art.

<comment><USER10> The art is mangled by pastebin; the raw version looks somewhat more legit: <http://pastebin.com/raw.php?i=QAPxhEbP>

<comment><USER11> Well now I'm scared! :P

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> As seen on Reddit: [http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1cu4ck/ridiculous_d...](http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1cu4ck/ridiculous_ddos_operation_set_up_for_monday/)

</comment><comment><USER5> This reads more like a thought experiment - to demonstrate what could be possible - than a real thing or even a hoax. For example it mentions the potential profit. I'd be more convinced if it were in 1337speak - <USER2> punctuation is far too tidy.

<comment><USER5> Wait, "Distributed F5"??

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> The authors could also be hoping the "leak" itself, without actually executing the plan, causes panic sells by becoming a sort of self fulfilling prophecy.

Also, it seems last night's ddos on mtgox didn't impact the price that much, at least not as much as previous attacks have, so I'm hoping the reduced effectiveness of such actions combined with the market clueing up to the ruse will help stabilise the bitcoin.

</comment><comment><USER13> Saw this posted by Mikko earlier. It's an interesting ploy, and I'm interested to see what comes of it. Specifically, I want to know whether the media, as it were, is going to be willing to propagate this sort of story, even with the plan being relatively well-known at this point.

Of course, this could be a long play. "Leak" this plan, build confidence that the media isn't going to propagate false stories, and then when a similar plan is effected, people are potentially more likely to take this manner of news seriously.

</comment><comment><USER11> Just so people know, there's no correlation between these documents being drafted up and the aforementioned operations actually taking place.

It takes a coordinated effort and a mass of resources in order to successfully pull this off (ignoring the fact that they leaked the document anyway).

It only takes 1 person with a creative mind and a bit of spare time to write the document up and 'spread' it around, which in itself will cause some panic.

</comment><comment><USER14> So is this a North Korean-style of preemptive attack, tell everyone when you're going to attack and what you're going to do?

</comment><comment><USER15> If you had 250,000 BTC to sell, you'd buy some better artwork.

</comment><comment><USER16> Sounds like someone really wants us to all sign up for BitStamp.

Completely unsubstantiated theory: someone figured out how to compromise BitStamp user accounts, but not enough users yet...

<comment><USER11> More like they want you to sell your coins on Bitstamp. (You'll be prepared for quick pickings! :P)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Looks to me like someone is trying to make this look like a legit secret bulletin to a hacker group, when actually it's an attempt to provide proof of the bitcoin flaws.

</comment><comment><USER18> Normally if someone has 250,000 of anything it would not be to their advantage to crash the market before a sell-off. If anything they should prop-up the currency value with fake press releases as they sell in order to cash out high and buy back in as low as possible, then write a story about the sell-off to cause a panic.

That said, I suppose it's also possible that a group would want to destroy the currency in its current form too, for giggles?

<comment><USER19> It's also possible they have such a low cost basis (remember that it wasn't that long ago when BTC was less than 1 USD) that 30 represents s massive profit

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> For the context:

[http://bigstory.ap.org/article/hackers-compromise-ap- twitter...](http://bigstory.ap.org/article/hackers-compromise-ap-twitter- account)

Fake announcement from AP was pulled off only on Twitter (about explosions in White House), short-term drop in stocks.

</comment><comment><USER21> Does this not just play into the conspiracy theories of the (already conspiracy theory and delusions of grandeur prone) bitcoin community?

</comment><comment><USER22> Wishful thinking, there's no way the price goes back to $30 at the moment. Not a chance. Maybe in the future, but not right now.

<comment><USER5> It got down to about $50 last week (16/Apr, MtGox)

<comment><USER22> Yeah, but that seems to be the maximum bottom of the pit at the moment.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> How would they buy on MtGox anonymously?

<comment><USER24> They wouldn't, but that's not a necessary part of the plan.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Seeing as he claims "1,000,000+ compromised machines", my guess is this is just a spoof.

<comment><USER26> I don't actually think that's difficult, there's 'commercial' botnets for hire for an X amount of time for this kind of coordinate attack.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> This could be possible though, no?</comment>


Is the spelling bee necessary? - <AUTHOR> http://krrishd.github.io/blog/post/the-spelling-bee

<comment><USER2> Spelling mistake in the second paragraph.

s/greate/great/

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, I'll fix that :)</comment></comment>


Show HN: HNfavorites – Explore the community's favorite content - <AUTHOR> http://www.hnfavorites.com <comment><USER4> Nice. I suggest dropping the "Ask HN" posts or filtering them onto a second page, since those discussions tend to be a lot different from original story submissions.

We need to do more with the favorites feature! We'll do that eventually (in accordance with our motto, "move slowly and preserve things").

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks dang! I was super excited when you guys first announced favorites - there's so much cool stuff on HN that disappears after a day or two. Filtering the "Ask/Show/Tell HN" posts onto a new page is definitely a next step - <USER2> well as adding a favorite comments page.

Could you guys add favorites to the API? Scraping is pretty rough - <USER3> doesn't seem to like me.

<comment><USER5> For me the Ask HN posts tend to have the most gold in terms of information. I tend to bookmark these the most.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Cool project!

I'd take issue with the claim that "the feature has had a good amount of adoption", though. The top result only has 41 favourites despite ~800 points.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks man! Yeah that's a fair point - favorites still have a lot of room to grow. Hopefully this project can get them the attention they deserve.

I'm happy to report that a pretty large percentage of the daily active users on HN have favorited a few items (and some outlier users have favorited hundreds)!

<comment><USER6> That would be great, although personally speaking I like to keep all my bookmarks in one place, so it wasn't that useful for me. However, I do favourite particularly interesting comments sometimes, and would love to see what other people have saved as very often they're more interesting than the link itself.

<comment><AUTHOR> Cool - I'm actually planning to spin off a version that just shows favorited comments when I have time!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I would find it really funny if this thread becomes a top favourited one since it's directly bringing attention to the feature and is very much worth bookmarking in some way.

+1 favorite :)

</comment><comment><USER8> That would be a fun link along the lines as /new which would help new users get a sense of the place.

</comment><comment><USER9> I like this thing about HN community, making something interesting from raw materials! Good Job.

</comment><comment><USER10> I only noticed the feature a week or two ago, I guess this is one of those things that will slowly gain use...

</comment><comment><USER11> great stuff, a lot of cool posts i wouldn't have known about otherwise.</comment>


Ask HN: Building career on AWS - <AUTHOR> Can a IT grad build his career on cloud by doing AWS certificates? <comment><USER2> A job working with AWS is probably better if it is either/or. To put it another way, certificates are not entirely a substitute for workplace experience.

Good luck.

</comment><comment><USER3> It's a start. Find someone who's doing the kind of job you want, and ask them their advice.

</comment><comment><USER4> It's valid for sure but try to get some real xp with the playform and it will be great.</comment>


MIT Media Lab Changes Software Default to FLOSS - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/mit-media-lab/mit-media-lab-changes-software-default-to-floss-4305e478e40#.fpz223oey <comment><AUTHOR> For a few decades I have had a balanced view of supporting libre, open source, and proprietary software.

Now for political reasons (my anti-globalization and anti-one world government / TPP / TPIP feelings), I am favoring libre software as one more small technique for supporting local business and generally smaller companies and organizations.</comment>


How to grow my hosting company? - <AUTHOR> I wonder which platform/sources I can use to find leads for my software hosting company?
FYI, It's profitable business last 10 years, I usually sold to my friends and their friends etc. I build websites and eCommerce solutions for them. And yes I'm only 24 years old drop out of collage. <comment><USER2> It's a saturated market, and has been for a long time.

On the low-end you've got cpanel resellers, on the middle-ground you have people who buy hardware and stick it in racks in other peoples' data-centers. On the high-end companies build, assemble, and host their own kit.

Really it comes down to identifying your ideal user and marketing, advertising, and cutting costs.

Small hosting companies usually promise "personal support", but of course the reality is that support is timeconsuming if you're doing it alone, and expensive if you have to hire decent sysadmins.

Actual specifics will depend on where/what you're doing. Do you have your own hardware? Your own links? Your own AS, etc? Or are you reselling something from somebody else?

</comment><comment><USER3> Hosting and the tech behind it, networks, etc. Is something I'm interested learning more about. Recommend any resources? Also, do people still care about college? This is a college dropout asking.

</comment><comment><USER4> "drop out of collage"...that line itself could make money.</comment>


Ask HN: Splunk Alternatives? - <AUTHOR> At our company we love Splunk for its amazing query capabilities, dashboards, rich set of APIs, speed etc.
Are there any credible competitors for this tool? We are open to both proprietary or opensource.
Splunk is too expensive and is not cost-effective for our business and we are desperately looking for an alternative. any guidance would help. <comment><USER2> I'll give a non-orthodox suggestion: ClickHouse

You'll need to manage some stuff yourself, and assemble your own dashboards and stuff, so there will be some labor involved. That being said, I doubt it will be more painful than managing an ELK stack: there are just too many ways you can destabilize a cluster with it.

ClickHouse clusters from my experience are ridiculously scalable, fast, and stable. There are several other accounts to back that up, and a good case study is Cloudflare, which uses it to store and query all of their logs and metrics from all data centers (that's quite a few PB of data).

There are some projects on GitHub you can use to get inspired, but what you need is pretty much a ClickHouse cluster, Grafana, and a Log Shipper.

</comment><comment><USER3> Elasticsearch (well, the whole ELK stack)

[https://www.elastic.co/](https://www.elastic.co/)

Depending on your volume and situation, there are hosted options or you can roll your own on-prem.

<comment><USER4> +1 on elastic search. We swapped splunk out for es + some inhouse pipelines and it's been a decent replacement. It's not 100% the same. We can't throw random garbage logs at it and create structure, we pushed structured logging onto service owners, but it's covered a lot of our common use cases e.g. what happened with this request?

We haven't moved off of splunk for all of our logs, but have reduced the volume going there significantly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> At my company, we used to pay 7 figures to splunk, until we realized how much data do we actually need. We cut down a lot of unnecessary logging and sent only the things that were needed.

Most of the data that was needed by business folks was sent to segment in terms of events and for genuine errors were sent to sentry with stack traces and converted most of the logs to metrics.

This helped us cut down a lot of $$ for logging and monitoring. Elastic search is a great alternative, but it takes an entire team to maintain it. I'm not sure, if its worth the time and effort.

</comment><comment><USER6> It'll really depend on your use-case. If you're not doing _too much_ volume (less than 1-2TB) and you're willing to put in the work, ELK stack (as others mentioned) will be more cost-effective from a software cost perspective. You'll end up making up those costs in person-hours though, as you'll lose the benefits of managed/SaaS.

If you'd rather not spend the time managing an ELK stack, there's a lot of logging options (disclaimer: I work at one of them, [https://logdna.com](https://logdna.com)). It'd be helpful to unpack what you mean by "credible" competitors however. Our product, and most others in our space frankly, can't match Splunk in terms of feature-set today, so knowing what is most important to you would be helpful. For example, if you're looking for basic log storage and search, you'll have tons of options. If you need compliance, that would narrow the field a bit.

I'm happy to chat if you're interested in giving us (LogDNA) a shot or if you have other general questions, feel free to shoot me an email, I'm just peter@[ourcompanydomain]. I'm not in sales so I don't really have any incentive to push you towards us unless it makes sense, and a lot of our competitors have great products as well so happy to try and point you in the right direction.

<comment><USER6> Quick follow-up on my last comment, if you're interested in trying us out, a few highlights: \- don't need stress about structuring logs beforehand, we'll parse common log types automatically, parse JSON automatically, and you can create custom parsers after the fact \- it takes two kubectl command to dump all your kubernetes logs onto us, and we'll add metadata after the fact like pod name, container name, namespace, etc (we also have a few dozen other integrations/ingestion options, of varying levels of quality/support) \- we're responsive with customer feedback, and love to talk to customers about how we can make our product better

Hopefully that's helpful information!

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Graylog: [https://www.graylog.org/](https://www.graylog.org/)

It can also integrate in your existing Splunk setup if you want: [https://www.graylog.org/post/graylog-splunk-integration- is-n...](https://www.graylog.org/post/graylog-splunk-integration-is-now-here)

(which allows you to ship data to Graylog and/or Splunk and setup analytics in both as needed)

</comment><comment><USER8> It's important to consider whether your requirements include long-term retention and search of data, or only recent search and dashboards. Many of the open-source solutions such as Graylog-free or ELK don't retain information long-term by default, so if long-term data retention is your goal, you should take that into account (Graylog offers it, but only for $$$).

On the other hand, if your primary use-case is near-term searches and reviews of data (e.g. "we just need to see the last 90 days of information for troubleshooting and stats"), you'll be pleasantly surprised with the capabilities in both Graylog and ELK without the additional overhead of Splunk. I'll say, too, that I found working with Filebeat for ingestion to be a lot easier and automation-friendly than working with Splunk forwarders—so much so that we're basically adopting an "only use Splunk for indexing" approach to ingestion and using everything else to get data into it.

</comment><comment><USER9> I had to go through this last year with my previous company. Splunk's licensing is outrageous. They cap the data transfer on a PAID license arbitrarily. Even getting coordinated with their sales to just pay them was a chore. They do nothing to foster open development on their platform. IMO, the open offerings actually seem designed to make it impossible to improve/contribute/extend in a cost effective way. It is also ill equipped to deal with Kubernetes even though they did release a reasonable if Windows Guy bloated example of a k8s deployment at the beginning of this year. I was completely baffled when I found out it was a Django project. It feels like something from the depths of enterprise Java.

Elasticsearch (or ELK/EFK) is really eating their lunch but if you have any experience managing an Elasticsearch cluster at scale you might have some reservations about it. If you'd like to audit it I might suggest using a Helm chart like this one[0] to deploy a full stack to a Kubernetes cluster. Even if you aren't using k8s for production it's a fast way to get a handle on it. You can deploy a test cluster easy on GKE quick for nearly no money. If that seems too inaccessible, there are a few good docker-compose[1] implementations too that can get you going right away.

I don't think it's quite ready for production, but we were already using Prometheus and Grafana so I was auditing Loki[2] and was pleasantly surprised. Though at the time I determined it would not be a substitute at scale for Splunk or ELK but could be viable for many people and the project is moving fast to do cool stuff.

[0] [https://github.com/helm/charts/tree/master/stable/elastic- st...](https://github.com/helm/charts/tree/master/stable/elastic-stack)

[1] [https://github.com/deviantony/docker- elk](https://github.com/deviantony/docker-elk)

[2] [https://grafana.com/oss/loki](https://grafana.com/oss/loki)

<comment><USER10> In my previous job Splunk payments were ok enough not to warrant change but I spent couple of days trying to figure how to renew the license and pay for it. Their license portal was so horroble and full of funnel loops that it was next to impossible to renew the license.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I work at Google Cloud, and this is a common request. If you're on GCP, you can build your own using logging exports and BigQuery. Otherwise, I typically recommend Elastic.

</comment><comment><USER12> Scalyr is great, but I'm not sure if it's any cheaper. [https://www.scalyr.com/](https://www.scalyr.com/)

</comment><comment><USER13> Depending on what you're looking for, you might not want to spend a lot of time maintaining your own stack for dashboard.

For really good user/account dashboards, which is the most common first tool companies build, you check try windsor.io which does most things out of the box with no setup

If you're looking to build custom dashboard and are okay with spending time actually coding and maintaining it (just code snippets, not a full ELK stack) try retool.com

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks I will checkout windsor and retool

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I work in the past on a big virtual ecommerce company and their solution was to move all their nosql(primary store)/log data to postgresql for reporting and analysis.

I think that is smart.

P.D: Better to not use nosql but well marketing of nosql back in the days...

p.D2: Most logs are pure NOISE. What I wish to have in some ways to reduce them when incoming and the distilled put in a rdbms. I think this is the best for most but not see much info about this.?

</comment><comment><USER15> No one mentioned GrayLog. They're a relatively new player in the game, but they show great promise. I should mention that their dashboards are probably not as mature as Splunk and some of the other platforms, but I've met a few people who use it and they seem happy! [https://www.graylog.org/](https://www.graylog.org/)

<comment><USER16> I was using Graylog but I wasn't happy because it took ~8GB RAM and ~20% CPU (IIRC).

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I work at Datadog and we've been pretty successful at attracting customers over from Splunk depending upon the use case. Others in industry are SumoLogic, ELK etc. You can check us out here if you want [https://www.datadoghq.com/](https://www.datadoghq.com/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks ! Do you guys sell logging separately or should we buy both metrics and logs to use your platform ?

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I work at Coralogix [https://coralogix.com](https://coralogix.com)

We're a relatively new, relatively small player in this space, differentiating by real-time anomaly detection and tooling to help our customers keep costs low (by filtering out logs known to be irrelevant).

</comment><comment><USER19> I work DevOps at a 60 person company. I wanted Splunk very badly, but due to pricing had to compromise.

We got SumoLogic. I'm very happy with it relative to ELK.

It's almost as good and much cheaper. The limitations would be that dashboards aren't as customizable and that some advance searches are harder.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your input!! Is sumo Logic pure Saas or hosted ? How do they scale at load ?

<comment><USER19> They host it for you. My experience has been that they scale fine.

I don't know about your use case specifically, but for our case (~100GB of searchable data at any given moment), searching takes a few seconds for basic queries.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Elastic has been getting a lot of business from priced out Splunk users.

</comment><comment><USER21> AlienVault, or its FOSS version, OSSIM. [1]

[1] [https://www.alienvault.com/products/ossim](https://www.alienvault.com/products/ossim)

<comment><USER22> Alienvault (now AT&T Cybersecurity) is really focused on the SIEM space and is only ok at that. While it has a lot of features, it's not very flexible. For example, neither the vulnerability scanner nor the compliance scanner can send out alerts upon newly found vulnerabilities/compliance issues. My feeling is that if you're used to using most of Splunk's capabilities, Alienvault will be disappointing

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Full disclosure: I work at Humio. Great, cost-efficient monitoring, sub-second ingest latency, on-prem or in the cloud. Feel free to check it out - humio.com

Runs smoother than the ELK stack.

</comment><comment><USER24> I'd have to mention humio.com They're mainly just for logs, but I really love their query style.

<comment><USER25> We recently migrated from splunk to humio at work and not only their query is easier to work with but creating dashboards and reports is simpler and faster. Also, their UI is extremely responsive. Kudos for humio.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Elastic which used to be called Elasticsearch. There is a free community tier of this, though according to recent drama, not sure how much longer it will remain open as such.

<comment><USER26> Wow....generous person. Thanks for the downvote. I have an identical answer to like 1/5 of the people here. I guess even popularity is a great reason to censor!</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Unix system version information - <AUTHOR> I am writing cross-platform shell scripts, and seeking advice on how to print the current unix system version information on BSD, Linux, macOS, etc.
Here's what I have so far: https://github.com/SixArm/unix-system-version-information
Can any HN system administrators suggest improvements or additions? Much appreciated! <comment><USER2> You might like to compare with the detection code in screenFetch: [https://github.com/KittyKatt/screenFetch](https://github.com/KittyKatt/screenFetch)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Useful discussion about this script on Reddit: [https://www.reddit.com/r/unix/comments/515px6/unix_system_ve...](https://www.reddit.com/r/unix/comments/515px6/unix_system_version_information_quick_script_to/)</comment>


Dutch Researcher Created A Super-Flu Virus With The Potential To Kill Millions - <AUTHOR> http://www.doctortipster.com/6952-dutch-researcher-created-a-super-influenza-virus-with-the-potential-to-kill-millions.html

<comment><USER2> Previous HN discussion (lots of comments) on another sensationalized story on this issue (including neglected links to less sensationalized accounts of the facts):

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3279225></comment>


The Headphones Equivalent of Spotify - <AUTHOR> https://gerrardstreet.nl/en/#howdoesitwork <comment><USER2> sort of a nice idea but im always somewhat wary of a headphone company that doesnt seem to talk much about sound quality.

long battery life and modualr design are all well and good but if it sounds like crap then its all for nothing. Dali have just released their wireless headphones which costs a little more than 2 years on this service for the entry level model, not only will they sound excellent they offer upto 60 hours battery

now were this a service where i could pay a fee to choose from a wide selection of high end headphones which you could swap at any time id be sold (something like this kind of exists in japan where you can rent headphones from e-earphone on a weekly basis)</comment>


Astronaut Chris Hadfield retires - <AUTHOR> http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/story/2013/06/10/tech-hadfield-mission-recap.html In the world outside of the NSA news cycle.... <comment><USER2> Commander Hadfield did as much for the space program as anyone in recent memory. Massive kudos to him.

</comment><comment><USER3> Retiring but I hope not disappearing since it would be a shame to lose all that momentum to inspire kids, or anyone.

<comment><USER4> I've got to think this career move makes sense if he intends to continue leveraging his newfound star-power and momentum. He's got a great audience that's gonna keep tabs on him, so perhaps he wants to take on new challenges while the iron is still hot.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Nowhere left to go once you've made the first music video in space...

<comment><AUTHOR> =). I think we both know he will be doing cool things to advance his passions.

Road trip with Neil deGrasse Tyson!

<comment><USER5> Definitely. Good to see someone making science cool.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I guess nothing can compete with being in space. If he could go back, I'm sure he wouldn't retire.

</comment><comment><USER7> Wow! I can't imagine how anyone could ever go to space, come back, and then voluntarily forfeit their ability to visit space again in the future. Chris Hadfield, I'm sad knowing that you won't be back up there any time soon making more youtube videos.

<comment><USER8> The "Riding Rockets" book by shuttle astronaut Mike Mullane goes into this a bit. It's very hard on the families. Rocket launches aren't _that_ safe. And the best time to retire is right after you get back, because that's the furthest time from your next flight. The longer you wait, the more you get caught up in the next one and just want to make it through that one.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> A damn good career. I hope he stays around, he inspires people everywhere.

</comment><comment><USER10> Really a great guy and he did so much for space exploration and science with humor and panache. Thanks so much!

</comment><comment><USER11> I'll miss his G+ pics stream

<comment><USER12> I recall him saying he has thousands of pictures he hasn't put up yet. I suspect we won't see the last of him for quite some time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Hope he joins SpaceX

<comment><USER14> Maybe they'll open an office in Sarnia? /s

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> One of the few who makes me a proud canadian.

<comment><USER16> Yup, him and the Beiber. :)

<comment><USER17> I seriously doubt that...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Commander Hadfield is an authentic space oddity.

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KaOC9danxNo](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KaOC9danxNo)

<comment><USER19> Don't forget the songs on his soundcloud:

[https://soundcloud.com/colchrishadfield/jewel-in-the- night](https://soundcloud.com/colchrishadfield/jewel-in-the-night)

[https://soundcloud.com/colchrishadfield/danny- boy](https://soundcloud.com/colchrishadfield/danny-boy)

[https://soundcloud.com/colchrishadfield/eleanors- song](https://soundcloud.com/colchrishadfield/eleanors-song)

[https://soundcloud.com/colchrishadfield/big- smoke](https://soundcloud.com/colchrishadfield/big-smoke)

and of course this one:

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AvAnfi8WpVE](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AvAnfi8WpVE)

(He wrote or helped write all of the above except for Danny Boy obviously.)</comment></comment>


No, a mentally ill developer is not good for your team - <AUTHOR> http://www.donburks.com/the-mind-of-a-developer/

<comment><USER2> I find this post completely ignorant. For starters, mental illness is a holistic issue as much as it is a chemical/medical issue. Anyone with a mental illness who has taken ownership of its symptoms through all the channels available to them to circumvent any detriment it has on their life; including family, social, and career; can be a good developer, father, friend, mentor to other developers, team lead, CTO, etc... if that is their chosen path. You obviously have only experienced people with mental illness who are not being treated or treating themselves properly. I bet you have also had great experiences with developers with mental illness because you had no fucking clue they were suffering from it, because they were using the tools available too them to have a great quality of life and enjoy their careers as aspiring, hungry, productive and bleeding edge coders.

<comment><USER2> and I think the title of your post should be, "I am not fit to be on a team with mentally ill developers!"

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Dyslexia is not a mental illness asshole.</comment>


Google Street View to blur Canadians - <AUTHOR> http://valleywag.com/tech/your-privacy-is-an-illusion/google-street-view-to-blur-canadians-303754.php <comment><USER2> They should just replace their heads with the heads used in the South Park movie.</comment>


The Gun Industry's Lucrative Relationship with Hollywood - <AUTHOR> http://features.hollywoodreporter.com/the-gun-industrys-lucrative-relationship-with-hollywood/ <comment><USER2> I'm pretty sure guns have featured large in movie posters long before 9/11 ... and I don't recall there being a big change in that ratio, at least for USA- originating films, around that time. (I'm in AU - but much of our pop-culture comes out of the US.)

I recall on a recent visit to India that movie posters there now seem to include shots of people looking stern and holding a gun -- previous visits (only a few years ago) tended to just have the stern looks, no gun. Presumably trying to compete for an audience that now likes a bit o' shooting.

Back in 2011-ish I saw a poster for an animated sci-fi movie, I think aimed at kids, but sadly can't remember the name of it. A picture of a vaguely humanoid-looking alien, over-sized head, holding a stylised laser blaster, with the tag line 'This is the smartest creature in the universe'. Obviously the film, and the poster, were not made by the smartest creatures in the universe, but the poverty of expectations inherent in the juxtaposition of the words and image were depressing. An Excession quotes is relevant:

"It could see that - by some criteria - a warship, just by the perfectly articulated purity of its purpose, was the most beautiful single artifact the Culture was capable of producing, and at the same time understand the paucity of moral vision such a judgement implied. To fully appreciate the beauty of a weapon was to admit to a kind of shortsightedness close to blindness, to confess to a sort of stupidity. The weapon was not itself; nothing was solely itself. The weapon, like anything else, could only finally be judged by the effect it had on others, by the consequences it produced in some outside context, by its place in the rest of the universe. By this measure the love, or just the appreciation of weapons was a kind of tragedy."

\- Excession, by Iain M Banks

<comment><USER3> > Back in 2011-ish I saw a poster for an animated sci-fi movie, I think aimed > at kids, but sadly can't remember the name of it. A picture of a vaguely > humanoid-looking alien, over-sized head, holding a stylised laser blaster, > with the tag line 'This is the smartest creature in the universe'.

Megamind, perhaps? That was an animated comedy/superhero movie featuring a super-intelligent alien super villain, and is from the right timeframe (released late 2010).

Megamind is an excellent movie, but was overshadowed by Despicable Me, which came out a few months earlier, because they both had as their major theme the villain turning into the good guy.

> Obviously the film, and the poster, were not made by the smartest creatures > in the universe, but the poverty of expectations inherent in the > juxtaposition of the words and image were depressing.

If it was indeed Megamind, of course he has a blaster: he's a stereotypical alien super villain. The movie is a spoof/twist on the superhero/villain relationship, so starting with a stereotypical villain is quite reasonable.

<comment><USER2> Possibly. I did try to hunt down the name a couple of years later for a ranty blogpost about the prevalence guns in movie posters (as it happens). I looked at the posters for Megamind, but none matched well with my memory of the image or the tagline.

Understood, and agreed, on plot of Megamind and requirement for stereotypical bad-guy-with-gun origin story, but I think my underlying point survives. Even if this was the movie / poster -- smartest entity in the universe shouldn't require a gun (or at least would be ashamed enough to not be waving it about).

The idea that powerful / influential (regardless of good/bad alignment) people as portrayed in our pop-culture need to be seen to be holding a gun is regrettable. If you haven't already, start taking a note of movie posters and the ratio of guns:no-guns -- obviously ignore the romcoms etc genres.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> If you've never seen this:

[http://www.imfdb.org/wiki/Main_Page](http://www.imfdb.org/wiki/Main_Page)

It's every gun in every film ever.

Whether or not it's useful to know every film that ever used your favourite gun is up to you.

</comment><comment><USER5> The article doesn't really support its thesis - that there's a symbiotic relationship between the gun industry and Hollywood. Clearly gun manufacturers benefit from product placement, but it's not at all clear Hollywood benefits from the gun _industry_ except as a place to buy props.

<comment><USER6> I like your point, but Hollywood would be making a lot less money if it took out guns and stuck to people punching each other.

<comment><USER7> Never mind as the viewing generation moves further and further from the old west era, the effects of being shot becomes more and more outlandish.

Check the early westerns and such and the guy will seize up and tip over, and that's it. These days they will take flight, either over a bar, table or out a window, from a standstill.

Never mind that they love going over the top with sound effects.

A gun shot is not that much different from a firecracker, and a punch is near silent...

<comment><USER8> Foley artists have been exaggerating sounds since the '20s (soon I'll have to qualify that with 1920s...). Guns are not the sole source of exaggeration in Hollywood.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foley_(filmmaking)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foley_\(filmmaking\))

<comment><USER7> I agree, but it is quite often the most outrageous. And they get away with it because so few of the current viewers have had to fire a gun, let along at another human being.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Makes no sense to me. Vast numbers of Hollywood stars who build their careers as violent people on screen (Jason Bourne e.g.) are anti-gun people in real life. I don't think Gun companies are putting any pennies into movies.

People in general including myself love violence on television and love guns in real life. I think Hollywood is merely appealing to people's taste to make profits for themselves.

</comment><comment><USER10> Why would gun industry ask film industry to do product placement for M134 Miniguns, M240 machine guns, or Thompson submachine guns when they can't sell full auto guns to civilians since 1986?

<comment><USER11> I asked my dad a similar question, growing up in the 1970s-1980s era. "Why is IBM running TV commercials for mainframe computers on _The Dukes of Hazzard_? Don't those cost millions of dollars? Do they think we're going to buy one?" He muttered something about how the commercials might encourage people to buy IBM stock.

Later, I realized that the reason for those commercials was to make IBM more or less synonymous with "computers" in my adolescent mind. They were playing a very long game... too long, as it turned out, but still not an altogether bad strategy. Maybe that's why the arms manufacturers do similar things.

If he were alive today, I'd ask him some other hard-to-answer questions, such as "Why are the Democrats still obsessing over gun control, when all it does is cost them one election after another?" I guess it's just another misguided long game.

<comment><USER10> Quick, which company makes M134, M240, or Thompson SMG?

I had to look up two of the three, even though I think I'm reasonably well- versed in guns. So if it is a long game, it's a really long one.

<comment><USER11> I guess a cynical view (and probably that espoused by the article, which I haven't yet read) is that they're trying to normalize the presence of weaponry in popular fiction as well as in everyday social discourse. If you're in the gun business, you don't want the only people talking about guns to be your critics.

The military also has a stake in glamorizing weaponry and warfighting, and they definitely have a symbiotic relationship with Hollywood in that respect.

<comment><USER12> That'd be like trying to "normalize" the presence of shirts, or automobiles. Guns have been ubiquitous in popular fiction of all kinds for decades, if not centuries, since they're such a useful device for drama or just entertaining fights. Don't forget how Dr. Watson always had his trusty pistol at hand whenever Holmes needed him.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This article presents one of those ironies about human society: how as much as we promote working things out without violence, we have that inner craving to just see the good guys to blow the baddies away. It's almost like fast food, in fact.

And it's not just movies. You see it in many major video games too. Take Mass Effect for example; You could play as the most loving, all-tolerating paragon character in that game but in the end there are baddies that you have to shoot, not love/tolerate.

<comment><USER10> I would say that video games affect people's choices more than TV or movies.

For example, gun ranges usually have Desert Eagle for rent, but not S&W M&P. In real life Desert Eagle is pretty rare because it is completely impractical, while S&W M&P is popular with civilians, police, and competition shooters. But in video games the situation is reversed - gamers know Desert Eagle and ask for it when they come to the range.

<comment><USER14> There are many, many films and TV shows starring the Desert Eagle, though: [http://www.imfdb.org/wiki/Desert_Eagle](http://www.imfdb.org/wiki/Desert_Eagle)

Besides, there's a third possibility: that the Desert Eagle is simply a "cooler" weapon than the M&P, and hence chosen by gun ranges users and by film and video game producers for the same reason.

<comment><USER10> That's partly because M&P hasn't been around that long. Among recent movies (released after 2005 when M&P was created), imfdb lists 10 with DE and 16 with M&P.

TV is 11 DE vs. 23 M&P, and video games 9 DE to 1 M&P.

So if you think that movies and TV shape demand, you would expect to see more demand for M&P at the ranges.

In reality the distribution of guns people ask for at the ranges is a lot closer to what's in video games than in movies/TV.

There are many "cool" guns, but if they're not in video games, nobody cares.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I don't see how someone would be able to benifit from getting firearms into movies since I'd say more then 90% of the people consuming this medium can barely tell a P226 from a Makarov or even tell the difference from a SIG MPX from an AR15. Don't you need the Brand-Recognition for this sort of advertising? Is this not how this form of normalization works?

</comment><comment><USER16> Didn't work very well for the bren 10 did it - sonny's side arm in Miami Vice</comment>


Ask HN: Is the CV still relevant?  - <AUTHOR>

How much impact does an accolade like a college degree have in the tech industry? Do employers weigh a portfolio over educational background? <comment><USER2> You need a degree + X years of experience to get in the door unless you can corrupt somebody in management. I'm sure a portfolio is valuable as well. What you have created is an important part of your background, just as where you went to school and where you have worked in the past is an important part of your background. A portfolio is likely to be given more weight by technical reviewers who can judge it properly, while HR is likely to care more about work background and education.

In short: A good CV gets you through HR so the engineers have a chance to look at your portfolio.</comment>


What Queries Does Microsoft's Telemetry Service Run on Your Sql Server? - <AUTHOR> https://www.brentozar.com/archive/2019/02/what-queries-does-microsofts-telemetry-service-run-on-your-sql-server/ <comment><USER2> Dupe: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19110202](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19110202)</comment>


Are start-up employee's usually consultants/contracted? - <AUTHOR>

Is it typical when being hired at a Start-up to not be a full-time employee but a monthly contracted worker? <comment><USER2> It depends quite a bit on what the terms are. I spent a few years doing consulting/contracting for early to mid-stage startups, and every one of them had slightly different terms.

Most startups in my experience, however, prefer to have full-time employees. The opportunity cost of having an employee leave the project in the early phases is often times devastating, and contractors/consultants are more likely to jump ship if something more lucrative comes along. The same can be said of "real" employees, but you're often in a better position to make a more compelling offer (i.e. stock, options, benefits, etc.) to the latter rather than the former.

<comment><AUTHOR> in this case everyone is hired as a consultant/contract worker.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Most of the startups I've seen try to hire core full-time employees that get lower salaries + options.

I have seen a few rare instances where a consultant is hired but usually startups can't afford the consultant rates hence the options</comment>


Show HN: Apper - Node.js framework for restful, real-time single page apps - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/asyncanup/apper/

<comment><AUTHOR> Because Express isn't enough. It lacks structure and conventions.

Apper provides:

\- Much needed structure to server-side code with strong conventions

\- Reliable directory hierarchy for code based on REST end-points

\- Design for real-time right off the bat

\- Transparent minification & bundling for single page apps

Apper lets you create bigger apps by using smaller independent chunks as subapps. Simply place individual subapps anywhere in the directory hierarchy, and they get exposed under a relative base URL.

Nested subapps are totally cool and highly encouraged. In fact, simply by moving a subapp directory to another directory updates the exposed relative URL of that subapp. No frills.

PS: Posting to Hacker News for the first time, always been an anonymous reader. Would love some constructive comments about where to take this framework thing forward :)</comment>