Desktop Metal gets $115M in funding to deliver metal 3D printing - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2017/07/18/desktop-metal-gets-115-million-in-funding-to-deliver-metal-3d-printing-for-manufacturing/?ncid=rss&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Techcrunch+%28TechCrunch%29 <comment><USER2> For a nice CGI movie on their high volume model:

[https://www.desktopmetal.com/products/production/](https://www.desktopmetal.com/products/production/)

<comment><USER3> Very impressive video. Questions that page completely doesn't answer, though: How much does the system cost? ($5k to "reserve", but what's the final cost? Their "downloads" page, of all places, has a price sheet for the "studio" system, but not the "production" system.) What does the software workflow involve, from CAD software to printing?

Also disappointing that, despite having an innovative piece of _hardware_ , they still treat the _software_ as heavily proprietary as well.

<comment> Const-me > despite having an innovative piece of hardware, they still treat the > software as heavily proprietary as well.

My client created an innovative piece of hardware without investing in proprietary software. In a couple of months, he found cheaper clones offered on aliexpress and taobao. While the design was good, the product failed commercially. Then the company found me, I've created heavily proprietary software for the next version of their hardware. The product sells OK so far.

In addition, creating software from scratch specifically for the given hardware delivers better overall value for the end users.

<comment><USER4> If I may, what was the product and what is within the proprietary software which differs it from the clones? Because given China manufacturing scale it is given that every other thing will have a clone on aliexpress or taobao.

<comment> Const-me A 3D printer.

On the very high level, I've implemented a small subset of what Autodesk Netfabb premium does, the subset relevant to the hardware my client is offering. That Autodesk software costs $500/year, I guess that's what differs our product from the clones: a clone would cost $500/year extra.

Another thing, 3D printers are too different, they use many different technologies (FDM, SLA, DLP, SLS, etc.), and within each there're different printing materials. These things are very relevant to e.g. slicing and support generation. Compared to the software like Netfabb which has to support all of them, our software only supports a single printer and a carefully selected set of printing materials. That's why, hopefully, we were able to deliver better overall UX.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Jamison Go reported that his beetleweight fighting robot, Silent Spring, used a drum weapon made using a Desktop Metal system. The drum was printed using 4140 steel, then hardened the traditional way.

It apparently yielded very good results, winning the beetleweight category at Bot Blast. You can search YouTube for videos of it in action.

<comment><USER6> Video of Silent Spring [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nRLupZvjcrk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nRLupZvjcrk)

<comment><USER7> The gyroscopic effects of the spinning disc on the black robot are fascinating.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This machine is definitely some extremely exciting stuff! Most companies I work for (I'm in the US) unfortunately does not have much of a machine shop any more. They either got closed down during the recession or the machinist had to leave for health/age reasons and the role never got fulfilled again. No one wants to have to setup a machine shop in their building since it takes a lot of money and logistics. According to management, "It's not worth it".

That being said, I am not sure how competitive the production unit will be. A lot of the commercial industry does not necessary care about weight reduction or aesthetics. I can't foresee that the parts made by these machines will be anymore cheaper than traditional sintering or more accurate than milling.

</comment><comment><USER9> Sounds interesting; any details on how it works, what materials it can be used with, what are the consumables, strength, accuracy/resolution, maximum size, etc..?

<comment><USER10> Looks like fused jet deposited powdered metal printing.

Strong but not nearly as strong as casting (especially without secondary processing), as for materials powdered metal printing is usually either ferrite alloys or nobel metals the former is much more common.

Resolution is in single digit microns or finer.

This is based on similar products not this specific one, it might be faster which is important but there is only that much you can improve on the process.

The speed also to me looks like a result of very limited market in terms of competitiveness. Existing products are few and they rather sell you more machines than drastically improve the printing speed by making it much smaller and focusing on smaller parts.

I don't know if they use induction or optical fusing based on the size I would go for optical so they might have found a good laser or a absorption facilitating epoxy/flux to go with the powder.

Edit: based on a comment here it looks like they don't do fusing as part of the print.

In this case its metal powder with a chemical binder (glue) which usually contains flux and vaporizes at a fairly low temperature.

After the printing the parts go into an oven (usually encased in sand for temperature control)

The oven brings the part to a high enough temperature for the crystal formation but not close to the melting point.

In this process larger crystals can form but not nearly as large as with cast forging.

<comment><USER11> I don't see the advantages to this over lost-PLA casting. Am I missing something?

<comment><USER12> That's what I was wondering. Shapeways makes metal parts by a similar process as a service. See their 2009 video.[1] There's a mini-industry making metal jewelry that way.

I notice that Desktop Metal doesn't show their oven in the video. That's the big, expensive, somewhat hazardous unit. "Easily swappable aluminum gas canisters ... safe to use on the shop floor" says the data sheet.[2]

Wazer, the low-end water jet cutter that's still stuck at "pre-order", has a similar problem. They're trying to make a somewhat messy industrial process less messy. There's some hand-waving involved. You end up with a sludge that's a mixture of water, shattered garnet, and whatever you're cutting. They gloss over what you have to do to dispose of that.

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B9VOwqtOglg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B9VOwqtOglg) [2] [https://desktopmetal.s3.amazonaws.com/Studio- office_friendly...](https://desktopmetal.s3.amazonaws.com/Studio- office_friendly.pdf)

<comment><USER11> I was pricing out metal casting after I watched this video:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a-FHY5FNsWc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a-FHY5FNsWc)

12 minutes uncut. They go from printed model to working cast piece.

All new, Kaya Cast vac chamber they use is $1k, the Paragon kiln is $800, and the Electro-melt furnace is $350. Add in safety gear and incidentals and you are looking at 3-4 thousand dollars to go from a 3d print to a cast metal piece. Heck, depending on the complexity, the vac may be optional.

<comment><USER12> Hot metal casting on a small scale isn't complicated or expensive, just messy. Desktop Metal is trying to do this in an office environment. Because nobody has a shop any more.

(The "maker movement" may have run its course. TechShop seems to be in financial trouble.[1])

[1] [https://www.bogleheads.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=177391](https://www.bogleheads.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=177391)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Maybe im just a debbie downer but I don't see how these could possibly compete with metal sintering and traditional milling and CNC work. An inferior metal alloy with a huge price tag that will require machining anyways.

</comment><comment><USER14> Waiting for the day that printer will be able to print copies of itself.

<comment><USER15> Maybe just a robot that keeps ordering copies of itself from Amazon? That seems more attainable.

<comment><USER16> This is an amazing idea. I want one.

<comment><USER17> "Alexa, Simon Says Alexa, order an echo."

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Anyone know how it works?

</comment><comment><USER19> Anyone know who the primary customers for these will be?

<comment><USER20> Any engineering shop that's prototyping and possible creating production products. I got to see the prints first hand, pretty solid stuff. Sadly they hadn't printed a T-800 terminator yet, but give it time. Skynet is alive!

<comment><USER19> Would their be a market to be a middle man that owns the printer and does the work to coordinate low volume runs from shops that need some prints, but not enough for full volume or enough to own/maintain the printer?

<comment><USER21> That already exists.

[https://www.shapeways.com/materials/steel](https://www.shapeways.com/materials/steel)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> What 3D printer or service -- in any material, metal, wood, plastic, glass, anything -- can print something affordably i.e. $5 for something that's say 1" by 5" by 5" ???

</comment><comment> enahs-sf feature request: T1000.

</comment><comment><USER23> So where are they at right now in terms of progress? R&D? Prototype built?

Why didn't somebody already build something like this?</comment>


The Origins of Malloc - <AUTHOR> https://www.spinellis.gr/blog/20170914/ <comment><USER2> This article was rather brief.

<comment><USER3> Agreed. I do like the trivia of malloc() likely being "map alloc", and free() originally being called mfree().

The article also quotes Lions, which is a fun read. You get the sense that the Unix philosophy of "everything's a file" originally had a sibling: "everything's an int".

<comment><USER4>
      B is typeless, or more precisely has one data type: the
      computer word. Most operators (e.g. +, -, *, /) treated this
      as an integer, but others treated it as a memory address to
      be dereferenced.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B_(programming_language)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B_\(programming_language\))

<comment><USER5> And linear addresses and addressing has tons of advantages. Macroarchitecture obviously deal well with word-sized linear addresses and there's all sorts of neat speed up tricks the microarchitecture can use when the word-size can address as much or more than the memory port interface, address lines, cache address lines, TLBs, etc.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Most independent programming language? - <AUTHOR>

Independent means something like this: http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/independent<p>What would be your recommendation? I want to feel free, or break free as Freddie Mercury says. <comment><USER2> Forth. The only language/OS that you can bootstrap from nothing but thought and frustration to a full system (runtime, editor, compiler, assembler) in under a year (if you cheat by studying the work of others, a lot faster)

</comment><comment><USER3> Not possible - you need to rely on the work of others to get things done.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for your response. I was talking about "the most". And maybe I just want to know the programming language that doesn't rely its existence to a sole entity.</comment></comment>


Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak thinks Edward Snowden is a 'total hero' - <AUTHOR> http://uk.businessinsider.com/apple-co-founder-steve-wozniak-interview-edward-snowden-is-a-total-hero-2015-5

<comment><USER2> Obama needs to issue Snowden a pardon of some sort and allow this whistleblower to come home without fear of retribution for helping to defend our U.S. Constitution.

<comment><USER3> Do you really think he could come back to the US without living in fear? Even if Obama pardons him officially, there may be many unhappy americans with weapons at home, who don't like what Snowden has done.

But an official pardon would allow him to settle everywhere, for example in Europe. That would certainly be helpful.

<comment><USER4> > unhappy americans with weapons at home, who don't like what Snowden has > done.

I really doubt this is a big issue.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I certainly admire Wozniak as an engineer and a person, but there is something obscene about gushing over the cleanliness and opulent veneer of a repressive dictatorship. Americans have been jailed there for taking pictures of public buildings, making comments on Facebook (while in the US), and other normal activity. This oppression makes the news here because it involves westerners; the constraints on the lives of their own citizens must be far worse.</comment>


Notifo (YC W10) Launches New Site and Mac Growl Client - <AUTHOR> http://notifo.com/desktop <comment><USER2> The new site is really great. Notifo was one of those services that launched with such a terrible look and feel, but I still thought the core idea they had was pretty solid. I figured they could always go back later on, clean things up and do quite well. I'm glad to see that they've been able to do just that. Really happy for them.

I'd love to see more and more service adoption now; hopefully the new site + new Mac client will help foster that.

</comment><comment><USER3> Yes!! I've been waiting on this one for a very long time (though had some python hacks aside). But a very timely update indeed thanks!

I do hope there will be a easy_install package for *nix folks.

</comment><comment><USER4> I don't want to pressure anyone and the new site sure looks great but... Android, pretty please?

\--

Sent from my Droid

<comment><USER5> It's currently Priority 0 (meaning, _top_ priority!)

If you'd like to be part of the beta list or know when the app is out, please add your email here: <http://notifo.com/mobile_apps/android>

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Can't wait to see all the web I consume flow thru Notifo! RSS feeds and Atom feeds on way! Also make a Chrome Extension to subscribe to web page whenever I'm on it (extract the feed url from the page's body). So useful for short and long term subscriptions...

</comment><comment><USER7> Chad, new site looks great, is that Paul's handywork?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yup :) if I may say so myself.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> just signed up and am very interested to use to generate alerts from mysql. NB Drew Crawford's new Phone Pipe command line service: <http://github.com/drewcrawford/Phone-Pipe>

</comment><comment><USER9> Hey Notifo,

FYI there is a bad link on <http://notifo.com/user/setup> in this paragraph.

Services and projects are continually being released for Notifo. Some services require you to visit their website and provide your username. Projects send notifications to your account only and require your API Secret found on the settings page.

<http://notifo.com/settings> should point to <http://notifo.com/user/settings>

<comment><USER5> Thanks! fixed and deployed to production.

<comment><USER9> Ha, that was quick, you fixed it before I could enter my notifo user name in my hn profile.

<comment><USER10> that's how jazzy and stammy roll

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> In Google Chrome 5.0.375.125 on OS X, your new website looks like this after a brief flash of working content: <http://imgur.com/kvDye.png>

If I block the TypeKit script, it works just fine. I think it looks better too.

<comment><AUTHOR> I noticed that same thing once or twice during development but couldnt reproduce it regularly. Yeah it's typekit. I sent them a screencast of the issue but haven't heard back (this was about a week ago).

If I closed Chrome or did the icognito mode it worked just fine. Any tips on how to reproduce it would be appreciated.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> fwiw, prowl has done the same thing (forward growl notifications to an iphone) for at least a year:

<http://prowl.weks.net/>

i submitted a patch to the adium guys to be able to generate events (growl notifications, and thus prowl events) only while away:

<http://trac.adium.im/ticket/13278>

this way as soon as i stepped away from or locked my mac, adium would go away and any instant messages received while i was away would get instantly forwarded to my phone.

now that i'm on an android phone and an openbsd laptop, i can't use this setup anymore, but i'm anxiously awaiting notifo's android client so i can write something to do this with pidgin.

<comment><USER5> well, this isn't actually that. it's the other way around. notifications you get through Notifo are displayed through Growl on your mac (not forwarded from growl to notifo).

There are a couple of growl forwarder plugins out there for notifo that have been made by the community.

we're working on the Android client, have no fear :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Every time I try the site on my iPhone, safari crashes immediately. I can share details by email.

<comment><AUTHOR> In short: It's the typekit fonts. I had experimental iPad/iPhone support enabled, which works fine with iOS 4 Mobile Safari but likes crashing previous Mobile Safari versions. I just disabled it.

[http://blog.typekit.com/2010/04/05/experimenting-with-web- fo...](http://blog.typekit.com/2010/04/05/experimenting-with-web-fonts-on-the- ipad/)

Long version: we have a dedicated mobile version of the site but we never got around to updating that before the launch so we disabled it.. had some other issues too and the content was all outdated. So a mobile friendly version of the site will be built soonish. I just wish jQuery Mobile was here already so I could build it with that. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Great work Paul and Chad</comment>


Movement to get rid of Adobe Flash started 3 years ago. Flash is still alive - <AUTHOR> http://occupyflash.org/ <comment><USER2> I never install flash on any computer I own. I don't run any closed source software outside of a VM.

It is very possible to get by without flash. In the rare cases where flash is essential to view a video, for example the SpaceX livestream a short while ago, I stick the url into `youtube-dl` and I have yet to experience a situation where it is not supported. In the case of the livestream, You can do:

        $ youtube-dl -o- $URL | mplayer -

To stream it yourself. This is how I watch iPlayer.

As a side note, I found this humorous:

> It's a fossil, left over from the era of closed standards and unilateral > corporate control of web technology.

Google is your ISP (Fiber), Google makes your hardware (Pixel & Nexus), Google maintains your OS (ChromeOS & Android), Google made your browser (Chrome), Google strong arms web standards (http2), Google Decides what you see (Search), and places ads on it.

To confine `unilateral corporate control of web technology` to the past is laughable.

<comment><USER3> youtube-dl is great. It has a bunch of functionality, like "-x" to extract audio via ffmpeg (very useful for saving space).

I also like the "whitey" CLI interface to youtube, which uses youtube-dl to get the video URL and can either download it, or feed it straight into mplayer.

For iplayer, there's also get-iplayer ( [http://www.infradead.org/get_iplayer/html/get_iplayer.html](http://www.infradead.org/get_iplayer/html/get_iplayer.html) ), which is pretty fantastic; except that sometimes they enable some new feature by default, which breaks the old behaviour (eg. automatically transcoding everything to the same format, which is IMHO a waste of time and quality).

Unfortunately the BBC have recently removed the programme feed that get- iplayer uses, so it's no longer possible to list available programmes as text (useful, eg., for grep). Instead you have to actually visit the iPlayer Web site and navigate around to find each programme, which is a pain.

If the worst comes to the worst, it's usually possible to find the URL of a Flash video using a Web inspector tool like Firebug, and perhaps a bit of URL- unescaping. Protip: lots of Web sites don't care about user agents other than (the most popular) Web browsers, so set the user agent of your download tool (wget, cURL, etc.) to match some version of Firefox, to avoid inconsistent behaviour.

<comment><USER2> Many sites do not have a simple url you can feed into mplayer, iPlayer being a prominet example that uses some proprietary RTMP standard or something.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Of course it is. The thing those 'movements' don't seem to understand is that budgets are limited and that people (and companies) tend to build websites the way they used to make paintings: once. Then maybe, over time they'll update the content but flash is usually not seen as part of that content but as the infrastructure, or 'deliverable' at the time they commissioned the website. So if it worked at delivery time it is presumed to work for eternity.

And so all those flash bits are here to stay, possibly _forever_. That's why there were a lot of people - me included - that were arguing against things like flash, silverlight, binary components and other web-page plug ins because they will sooner or later end up being unsupported. Besides causing gigantic accessibility issues for the handicapped.

So, now we have a mess, and that mess is here to stay. That won't stop large company 'x' from doing this all over again in a few years just because they can but at least there may be a few more voices trying to stop the plug-in madness before it gets out of control.

If it isn't in the html spec: don't use it. Welcome to a web full of non- rendering holes that may or may not be functionality and an archive full of websites that nobody will be able to see without powering up a VM circa 2004.

<comment><USER3> What you say is correct, but a bit over-the-top. Compared to broken hyperlinks, concerns over missing Flash content is pretty small. It's at least conceivable to automatically load some JS-powered Flash implementation, but if a link's target isn't available in an archive, there's no way to get it back.

<comment><USER4> Plenty of sites that were archived have their whole UI in flash, so for those sites the pages are pretty much empty pages without flash.

I'm not aware of any JS-powered flash implementation or how that would solve anything since presumably that would come with all of the drawbacks that the non-JS powered flash implementations of today have (and that we are so keen on getting rid of).

<comment><USER5> Mozilla is working on it: [http://mozilla.github.io/shumway/](http://mozilla.github.io/shumway/)

I think it's for mobile first where Flash is no longer available.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I find it strange Flash is still around, given that iOS and Android don't support Flash anymore and that YouTube has made a lot of video content available as HTML5. I thought that other sites would have followed suit. Is there evidence of a mass exodus from Flash?

<comment><USER7> There is way more to Flash than video. You see a lot of Flash silently running invisible in the background to enable modern web app features that aren't yet possible or easily achieved with standard HTML and JS. For example, Flash was used for web sockets before web sockets was a thing. Flash was also used to facilitate uploads.

<comment><USER3> This is definitely true, given how often I've had my keyboard become unresponsive, only to find out that some little Flash widget had the focus and completely bypassed the browser, requiring me to use the pointer to click on some (hopefully) empty area of the page.

I will say that Flash isn't usually _required_ for most of these uses; just like Javascript it should degrade gracefully to a fallback (eg. a POST form for uploads). Except for web sockets, if they're powering something fundamental (which is the same for JS).

The only time I've added a Flash widget to a page without a fallback has been "copy to clipboard" buttons, which didn't have a decent alternative. In those cases the button just doesn't show at all.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Flash is not going away. There is too much content using it, for example there are tons of flash games. And not just little toys, there are some very good games. Also MMO's use it extensively.

Some games are transitioning to unity player - you can't really call that much better though.

<comment><USER9> Re: unity, maybe a little, since that also implies the game can relatively easily be ported to native platforms (iirc)

<comment><USER8> You are thinking of the unity player rather than the web player which has not been ported to Linux.

However I believe the games themselves are cross platform so there is hope.

There is an easy to install wine based port of the web player for Linux.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The movement to get rid of IE 6 took like, 12 years and it's still around in small numbers.

</comment><comment><USER11> Has there been any serious attempts at creating a flash or a SilverLight killer? Let's face it: flash and SL exist almost exclusively because of video (yes I know there are other uses but most of them like sockets etc can be done in other ways today, I'm talking about why it's still deployed for new sites).

Every other kind of snazzy desktop-like animated experience can be created in js, and if you dread using js you can write them in another language and compile to js. The js runtimes are fast enough these days.

But: video. Especially _live_ broadcast video. What is the best attempt a replacing flash/SL there? The rights for sports events are worth billions, and a single game can sell for $20-50, so an open unencrypted video service just will.not.happen. The rights holders would rather retreat to cable. Whatever the solution is will have to have the same features in terms of DRM and other protection that flash has.

EDIT: just realized the solution is quite simple: just get off the web and let those who want to watch e.g NHL Game Center use a special application, not a web browser.

<comment><USER4> I earned my bread and butter for well over 15 years with just that: plug-in free video. It's always been a hack and audio is harder than video (though you can hack your way around that as well). So yes, those attempts have been made and it was pretty successful. But, ironically, mass adoption of flash killed it and now that flash is being killed there is nothing left to really replace it (except maybe to revive jpeg-push for live streams but that's also not really an option...). This Nov. 2013 post from wowza (one of the better streaming platforms available today) is a good read: [http://www.wowza.com/blog/a-note-on-html5](http://www.wowza.com/blog/a-note- on-html5)

<comment><USER11> DRM extensions for html5-video could help, but at this point I'm actually inclined to say keep html (and the web) clean from that and just use custom applications for DRM video.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The only thing I use Flash for is to allow a user to easily get something to their clipboard. ([http://zeroclipboard.org/](http://zeroclipboard.org/)) - until that is possible, afraid I will still be using it.

</comment><comment> SG- This new MacBook I got last month didn't come with Flash and I decided to not install it. I also decided to switch to Safari from Chrome.

I was surprised how many sites and embedded video now offers HTML5, obviously Youtube and Vimeo have been working for years, but just video on news sites that use their own video solution work.

The biggest surprise was visiting twitch.tv and seeing the live video stream work in HTML5 (only in Safari, not Chrome).

<comment><USER13> Safari can stream live video because it supports HLS (HTTP Live Streaming), which is Apple's own thing.

Sadly, there's still no good way to stream live video across multiple browsers without Flash. Eventually, this will be possible via the Media Source Extensions API, but even then, you'll still probably have the issue of different browsers supporting different containers and codecs - which will lead to people doing crazy things like converting MPEG2-TS to MP4 in JavaScript web workers.

I had to keep a pretty close eye on all of this stuff when I worked at Aereo, and it always bummed me out to think about the fact that it's still not really possible to stream live video in a web browser without plugins.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I generally don't install Flash on my machines but recently I installed it because a major financial site that my employer uses (I know, WTF!?, right?) required it. I set the plugin to ask for permission every time and, holy cow, nearly every site, particularly news sites, requested it. It's a key part of the Web's advertising infrastructure.

</comment><comment><USER15> I have a potential client project coming up where they will need to access a user's webcam and record video and audio from it. They'll want this to work in modern desktop browsers (let's say latest Chrome, Firefox, Safari, IE10+). At this point in time I don't believe it's possible to do this with HTML5 technologies alone.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> The website for Occupy Flash has outbound link to [http://ie6funeral.com/](http://ie6funeral.com/). Apparently, some Japanese funeral company has bought the domain. I find that quite funny.

</comment><comment><USER16> I don't understand the essence of this movement, by all standards it is the mobile lobby who should be to blame.

Killing Flash is like killing the Concorde Airplane, it just means it is too advanced for its time.

Everyone who knows anything about Flash and HTML5 knows that in terms of CPU resources HTML5 is still far far far FAR behind on what the Flash plugin can do... yes, even now.

HTML5: [http://themaninblue.com/experiment/AnimationBenchmark/html/](http://themaninblue.com/experiment/AnimationBenchmark/html/)

Flash: [http://themaninblue.com/experiment/AnimationBenchmark/flash/](http://themaninblue.com/experiment/AnimationBenchmark/flash/)

<comment><USER15> I don't think those benchmark links are really furthering your argument; in both Chrome and Safari on my Mac I get roughly twice the FPS with the HTML5 version...

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> The only thing I regret is not be able to play nitrome games anymore.

</comment><comment><USER18> a while ago, I wanted to create a real-time broadcasting website. I explored all sorts of technologies, like webrtc, mediasource ... none seems to be suitable for what I wanted. then, I asked how twitch does it? it's flash.

what html5 can do is what flash can do long time ago. the motivation for replacing flash must not be technical but perhaps political.

why didn't adobe release flash as opensource to push it as a standard.

</comment><comment><USER19> "Help*less technically-oriented people understand and uninstall Flash Player"

Funny , remove the space and it looks a lot more different !

</comment><comment><USER20> I wish i could, my jobs require's it to VPN

<comment><USER21> WHY! I mean... why?

Why would you need Flash to use a VPN? Is it some weird web-login? How do you write a VPN client in Flash? Who thought that requiring Flash for a VPN would be a good idea?

Your comment raises so many questions.

<comment><USER20> its only used as part of the authentication process. Terrible design I agree

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Yeah, but at least flash is way less alive than it was three years ago. I rarely encounter the need for flash these days.

</comment><comment><USER23> What I find funny is that this website uses flash itself.

<comment><USER24> I don't think it does. It uses swfobject2 [1], a js project, to detect if flash is installed and give you a frowny face if it is.

[1] [https://code.google.com/p/swfobject/](https://code.google.com/p/swfobject/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> My favorite Quicktime of Ill Repute website, despite promising that it serves up naught but ill-reputed Quicktime, now tells me that I don't have Flash installed.

</comment><comment><USER26> Flash AND java (and one can argue javascript too...)

<comment><USER27> You mean Java Applets, don't you?

<comment><USER28> Yes, I'm pretty sure that's what he meant.

Most people who are not in "enterprise" IT (that includes many web developers) only think of applets when they hear Java.

Sad, but true.</comment></comment></comment>


The ANITA Anomalous Events as Signatures of a Beyond Standard Model Particle - <AUTHOR> https://arxiv.org/abs/1809.09615 <comment><USER2> The two most exciting bits are:

> Having excluded SM explanations at >5σ confidence, we have argued that the > SEECR phenomenon, if confirmed, can support a discovery-level claim of > "beyond the Standard Model" (BSM) physics.

> Within these SUSY-motivated scenarios, the SEECR particle's associated > least-mass SUSY particle can provide an attractive candidate for the dark > matter

Seems like I picked the perfect time to become obsessed with particle physics and astrophysics a few weeks ago. Can't wait to see what happens if/when this passes peer review and gets independently confirmed!</comment>


Show HN: Render abstract syntax trees using React - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/codejamninja/react-ast <comment><USER2> Neat project! I wanted to leave some feedback for the author.

If you just want an interface for building up an AST using composition, you can do this without React. You can even continue to use JSX—it's as simple as having a function definition to create AST primitives and have a JSX pragma that calls into it.

What React is excellent at is taking two trees and finding a set of mutations to transform the nodes from the first tree to the second—with utter disregard to how those trees came to be. That's what the renderer provides—the set of operations that can be performed on nodes.

I don't see how the actual React part can be used here. Even the suggested uses are all single-pass operations where this diffing will never come into play.

That said, to me this project (in its current state and with the goals expressed) would be so much simpler and more efficient written as a JSX pragma, without the React part.

Maybe there's more to the React functionality in this project that I'm missing. I don't want to discourage the author from doing something with React for this project—there's many directions you could take this that could make excellent use of React.

<comment><AUTHOR> Great feedback. The points you make are good. Listed below are the reasons I chose to go with react.

1\. I'm getting my feet wet with React rendering (I will be building a full react renderer in the future for another project)

2\. It may be useful in the future for dynamic code editing (not sure but a possible use case)

3\. Though react really shines in the render lifecycle, it does provide a nice pattern for building components. I see this project being used as a way to componentize composable code generators and snippets.

<comment><USER2> > I see this project being used as a way to componentize composable code > generators and snippets.

You can do this without React though, using only JSX. I've implemented this pattern in a library (not open source yet) that builds in a lot of these composition patterns (pass children as child or prop, etc) so that you can use it in familiar ways while still just being JSX.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Can someone explain what's this is about?

> _Please (star) this repo if you found it useful (star) (star) (star)_

Gotta be very important for _something_ , since it's literally the second line in the readme.

<comment> burning-madness Recruiters use GitHub profiles as a proxy for engagement and, I would assume, amount-of-stars-in-pet-project to be used as a KPI in this measurement.

I think that's asinine but I don't make the rules.

That's not how _I_ evaluate people when I'm doing the hire.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Gotta say, this is falling flat for me.

Some pretty big, wordy claims in your intro paragraphs (basically over the top marketing speak). Then the examples seem to completely miss the point for me. The examples include so much implicit knowledge, it's hard to follow.

What would I ever need to use this for? Looks useful if I were building a testing tool or IDE tool, but I can't see much use outside of that.

</comment><comment><USER5> The Code component seems like a catch all. If it were to support actual AST, surely

const a = 3

Would have looked something like:

<Assign> <Lhs constant><Id>a</Id></Lhs> <Rhs><Literal>3</Literal></Rhs> </Assign>

<comment><AUTHOR> The Code component would do a poor job at nesting code in a body. The point of this project is to make it easy to generate code through an AST, hence the  "catch call".

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I admittedly haven't given this much thought, but...why would I want to do this?

<comment><USER7> Probably to learn about how ASTs and React rendering work.

I've had thoughts about writing a WebGL backend so I could describe a scene graph with React; this would probably be a good stepping stone to learn how to do that

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> no demo / screenshot? not buying it

<comment><USER9> There is an example in the Readme. From what I can tell this isnt "rendering" an AST to the DOM, its using JSX to "render" source code.

<comment><AUTHOR> Exactly :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> No demo or screenshots of the product, only a link to the developer's own personal page. Not a great showing to be honest.</comment>


Can we Contain Covid-19 without Locking-down the Economy? (by MobileEye founder) - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/amnon-shashua/can-we-contain-covid-19-without-locking-down-the-economy-2a134a71873f <comment><AUTHOR> A balanced and mathematical model for exiting the lock-down.

By Mobile-eye founder, Amnon Shashua, which was sold to Intel for $10BN.</comment>


Comparing Hacker News & the Slashdot Effect - <AUTHOR> http://cmdrtaco.net/2011/10/then-along-came-hacker-news/

<comment><USER2> Almost 10% of us are mobile. On a small screen with slower bandwidth HN is a lot nicer than /. Almost annoying that even though the site is so efficient already the site icon and the logo aren't the same url or that the arrows are not unicode arrows or just one image rotates or ... :)

<comment><USER3> Agree about "Y", I often tap it and end up at YC when expecting HN.

<comment><USER2> Given that it does go to YC it makes even more sense to have it be the YC site icon so if the YC guys ever change that logo/icon HN would automatically get it. Then again a lot of mobile browser don't fetch the site icon so couldn't it just be a 'Y' in an orange box with no icon fetching at all?

<comment><USER2> Looking at the code one way to speed up the total site load time would be to have the main page be static and completely cachable. onload have it fetch a list of articles and populate the main page. This way it would fetch the articles and images all at the same time v.s generating the main page, and then fetching the resources.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> _In other words, Slashdot sent fewer people, but they stuck around a little longer._

His hunch is that it relates to the story. My hunch is that HN users usually have many links to read through on any particular visit, whereas Slashdot's post level is low enough that you can spend 10 minutes on a single item. They're pretty chalk and cheese as far as experiences go.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's a good point, although the question is on HN and SD, what % of items do users actually click on? While HN has far more single news items, Slashdot has a lot of comments, and the articles themselves are longer. Apples & Oranges to be sure.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm surprised to learn that as many as 2% of Hacker News visitors use IE. Why? Who are you?

<comment><USER6> My employer (a public school system) has blocked everything but IE9 on port 80 to keep students from using proxies/tunneling/[other firewall avoidance method].

<comment><USER7> I'm curious - do they check the user agent? Or something more complex?

<comment><USER8> It could be a Windows domain policy. Active Directory is a really powerful management tool.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Hey Rob!

The person who squatted 'cmdrtaco' on HN claims to be saving it for you, and they put contact details in the profile.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=cmdrtaco>

BTW, you must be new here ;)

</comment><comment><USER10> I just get "Error establishing a database connection" which is some sort of delicious irony...

</comment><comment><USER11> Is there still a CmdrTaco user? <http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=CmdrTaco> says no ...

<comment><USER12> <http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=CmdrTacoMalda>

<comment><USER13> That isn't the question... The question is, is there anyone squatting in the username cmdrtaco? I hope not, because that's just not cool.

<comment><USER14> There was someone squatting the username and they posted in the last Taco HN submission asking Malda to contact them via email (listed in their profile) to claim the account. He may not have seen that or just not mentioned in this write-up.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I wrote a similar post a couple of weeks back from my (shorter) stint on HN: <http://willgrant.org/hn-traffic-stats-summary/>

</comment><comment><USER15> It looks as though the HN effect has brought down the site. At last. Maybe 16 cents didn't quite cut it after all.

</comment><comment><USER16> Um ... I'm guessing what this says is that the HN effect takes down the site?

</comment><comment><USER17> As CmdrTaco says, two things reveals that HN users are a little more 'on the edge': more Chrome users, more mobile users. BTW, HN seems to have also _more_ Safari users, even if he says the opposite.

<comment><USER18> Subjective. I use Firefox because it's a more stable, modern, and featureful browser than Chromium in my opinion. That doesn't make one of us more "on the edge" than the other.

You're basically saying that since one community prefers strawberry ice cream to chocolate, they're more modern somehow.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> worst post ive ever read</comment>


Plastic Logic: Like Kindle, but Thin like iPhone. - <AUTHOR> http://www.plasticlogic.com/

<comment><USER2> Unless this is drastically cheaper than the Kindle, I don't see it doing well. For me, the biggest draw of the Kindle vs. the competition is the anywhere wireless access to a huge library of books. Unless someone else can offer that, I don't see how they'll compete.

<comment><USER3> Apple, with their partnership with AT&T, is in a position to compete. They also like thin & sexy.

<comment><USER2> They have the connectivity, but not the catalog.

<comment><USER4> Indeed. And the catalog, given how backwards the book industry remains, is the key.

My friend recently finalized his book with a major publisher. Despite efforts to edit electronically, he relented to five rounds of fedex'd doorstops. He offered to generate the Kindle edition himself, but this was deemed contractually impossible.

These companies have to be culled to get to our veritable library of ebooks. But in the meantime, I imagine Amazon has been kicking lots of asses to get this far.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Plastic Logic: Like Kindle, but Thin like Kindle 2.

<comment><AUTHOR> <http://twitter.com/stevewoz/status/1940204510>

</comment></comment><comment> patrickg-zill The key is if they can produce something as good as the e-ink display without the need for a glass substrate. The glass is the part that cracks/breaks.

<comment><USER3> Better interactivity would be key as well. Interactivity increases the value of many kinds of information tenfold. E-ink is still too slow.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6>
      "We expect to accelerate the momentum of our sales in 2010."
      "Product pricing will be announced in early 2010."
      "Our full feature set will be announced in early 2010."

Am I the only one who thinks these early introductions are kinda silly? Looks awfully vaporous. Let us know a month or two in advance, not a year or two.

<comment><USER7> Actually, Plastic Logic first started marketing this reader in fall 2008. Makes you wonder.

<http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=29020>

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Is this a competitor in the eReader market or is it an attempt to sell their technology to companies already making eReaders? The two year thing makes it seem like the latter IMO.

Either way I'm very interested. I hope Apple does something like this. </fanboy>

</comment><comment><USER9> If someone makes a waterproof one I would spend $1000.

<comment><USER10> Would you give me $1000 for this zip-lock freezer bag I have here?

(It is waterproof, doesn't block the screen, and lets you operate the buttons through it. Elegant it's not... but it will protect your Kindle from water and sand.)

<comment><USER11> It isn't waterproof so much as splash-resistant.

<comment><USER10> They seem waterproof to me. Immerse them in water, and the contents don't get wet. Just don't open the bag while it's under water, obviously.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Most Danish voters oppose government plans to cut the top rate of income tax - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-09-13/danes-loves-their-high-taxes <comment><USER2> I'm not in Denmark but in a very similar European country. I don't want the high taxes. The current taxes and mandatory payments feel unfair.

The generations before us worked during the greatest economic boom in history, were mostly employed in safe and high paying government jobs (still are), bought houses before their values tripled, and are now receiving monthly pension payments that are almost twice what most young people earn through work. My effective tax rate is more than 50% (including mandatory pension payments that are more than 10% of my pre-tax pay). A good part of that goes to pay the pensions of existing retirees. A third of my remaining pay goes into paying rent for the apartments owned by the older generation. In the end, I get around 1.5k euro out of the 7k I cost my company (employers also have to pay additional social and pension payments).

Looking at the current luxurious lifestyle of the older generations, and the rapidly ageing population, and increasing youth unemployment — I want out.

<comment><USER3> This sounds like Sweden or Norway, and I couldn't agree more.

<comment><USER4> Sweden is #8 in terms of total tax wedge in the OECD. Norway is the 18th highest and just barely above the OECD average, compared to e.g. US at #25, Belgium at #1, Germany #2.

Sweden is high, but still 6-8 percentage points below Germany, Italy, Austria, Hungary, France, and about twice that beow Belgium, which is an extreme outlier.

<comment><USER5> ...but the structure of the tax wedge is quite different. In Denmark, almost all of it comes from income tax while in other countries it's usually 40% paid by the employer...

<comment><USER4> That's a good point. I'm generally opposed to including payroll taxes when talking about tax for that reason, because what people tend to compare when talking about _income_ , tends to be their contracted salary _excluding_ anything paid by employers. If you then include payroll taxes when comparing tax, you should compared it income + payroll taxes as your "actual" gross income.

But when you discuss with people who want to quote high tax rates, they almost always include everything in order to try to get shockingly high numbers, which is why I now tend to use the OECD numbers because they too favour that, and their numbers still tend to come out far below what certain people like to think they pay (I was shocked at first to find out that there is a huge number of people out there that have _no idea_ what their actual tax rates are, but just blindly go by the marginal rates and assume that's what they're paying...)

But of course that comparison also goes the other way if you try to compare against countries where the relative split is wildly different.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> In other countries, taxes are complicated (no citation needed). There's income tax, but there are also social security payments, industry-specific taxes, etc. And you have to pay for your own education and healthcare!

Danish tax is simple and all inclusive. It is around 50%, which is about the same as in US if all hidden obligatory payments are taken into account. But it is all inclusive: all education and healthcare is free in Denmark, and social security grid is immense.

I am a pro-free-market person and Ayn Rand admirer. But even I think that Danish system is not that bad: you just pay 50% of your income to the government immediately, and they do not bother you until the next time. On the other hand, in the US, the IRS will pursuit you relentlessly, there are insane friction multipliers like healthcare insurance rising costs spiral, and everything is so complicated that only lawyers are happy about it.

Free markets only work if the government is separated from the economy. If they are entangled, you are getting the worst of both worlds.

<comment><USER7> Let's be serious here. I'm French, all for high taxes and all but please let's not delude ourselves thinking that American people pay "around 50%" taxes. As soon as you have enough money to afford it, you'll pay a tax lawyer to get that down to about 15% or something, thanks to a bajillion hidden tax system loopholes allowing the rich to get an advantage on the less fortunate.

And even if you take into account the price of college, health care and everything, you'll get to about the same amount but the whole point in the US system is that you do NOT have to pay for other people, cause who needs solidarity in a society.

<comment><USER8> > As soon as you have enough money to afford it, you'll pay a tax lawyer to > get that down to about 15% or something

You need a _lot_ of money before that's an option. By that point, you have enough to be one of those citizen-of-the-world globe-trotting types with vacation homes that double as convenient tax shelters.

That is to say, the American middle class pays quite a bit in taxes. Even the poor working class pay a flat 12.4% in payroll taxes, maybe 7-8% in sales taxes (depending on locality), and varying amounts in service taxes (fees, tolls, etc.). That's assuming they make too little to pay income tax.

<comment><USER9> Working poor also get the earned income tax credit which mostly offsets their payroll taxes.

<comment><USER10> Which is a subsidy for low wage employers

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> More accurately, Danes value their welfare state and high-equality society and are smart enough to accept that it has to be paid for. Therefore any campaign on cutting taxes immediately attracts the suspicion: what services are going to be cut?

<comment><USER12> So are you saying its unreasonable for services to become less costly over time ?

<comment><USER11> No silver bullets + Baumol Cost Disease + greater expectations = very unlikely that services will become cheaper. Someone promising to make public services _much_ cheaper should be treated like someone offering to sell you a $10 Rolex. It's either fraud or theft. God help you if someone tries to sell you a computer system to improve public services, that needs _very careful_ management (18F, GDS, _not_ Capita and friends) if it's not to become a cost writeoff.

I should probably expand on Baumol Cost Disease: many public services inherently involve humans doing touchy-feely automation-resistant things, and as the rest of the economy becomes more automated or imported this gradually becomes _relatively_ more expensive. Things like childcare, where the cost in childminder-hours-per-child is inherently fixed. You can raise the ratio (ie reduce quality), but you can't produce an hour of childminding in 50 minutes.

Besides, when redistribution is a goal in itself, it's a mistake to talk purely about cost and you have to look at outcomes.

<comment><USER12> > Someone promising to make public services much cheaper should be treated > like someone offering to sell you a $10 Rolex.

That's what we do in the private industry the whole time. We try to improve processes, reduce wasteful behaviors, improve our efficiency and ultimately try to offer better services and products, while competing on value vs other competitors.

I don't see any reason why such a way of thinking would not be applicable to the public sector.

My experience of the public sector is rather the exact opposite: they have way too many civil servants for the work they do, and could benefit in simplifying/streamlining their processes to cut down costs significantly and at the same time improve their services.

> Besides, when redistribution is a goal in itself, it's a mistake to talk > purely about cost and you have to look at outcomes.

That's a naive view. There is a lot of waste in the "processing" of redistribution.

<comment><USER13> I agree that a lot of processes could be improved and simplified to augment the productivity.

But we shouldn't expect a huge productivity gain either. Most of public servant are professors, police officers, nurses and doctors a least in France. They won't gain in productivity as the parent said.

I think that the public sector is really bad at marketing itself... When we think about public servant, we think about administrative clerks, whereas in reality they're a small part of the public sector.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This is simply not true. In Denmark we have a welfare and tax scheme that benefits the majority at the expense of the productive few and the poor (Director's law?). I have never met a danish entrepreneur who didn't complain about taxes, never ever... [http://taxfoundation.org/sites/taxfoundation.org/files/docs/...](http://taxfoundation.org/sites/taxfoundation.org/files/docs/Sanders%20Capital%20Gains.png)

<comment><USER15> And I have never met one who _did_ complain about taxes (I haven't asked about it either). The danish successful entrepreneur Morten Strunge recently entered the tax discussion saying that he did not think much about taxes and that current proposed tax reliefs would not make much difference to him.

I see myself as an entrepreneur and I am not complaining about taxes. In fact I have a hard time seeing taxes as something working particularly against entrepreneurs.

1) When you're an entrepreneur you keep your salary low and you re-invest the profit in your company. This will limit the amount of taxes you pay personally and in the company.

2) As an entrepreneur you likely have a dream about huge growth in the company and making a lot of money in the end. Why would you worry about having marginally less "lot of money" in the end?

<comment><USER14> How do you define "marginally less"? Open your eyes and look at the graph I posted.

Let me name the obvious few: Christensen and Fornais (Saxo Bank), Jesper Buch (Just Eat), Mads Peter Veiby (M1), Lars Tvede, Toke Kruse (billys), Martin Thorborg (Jubii/Amino/Dinero/Agera). They are all members of Liberal Alliance and all of them frequently advocate lower taxes. Janus Friis (Skype) fled the country to avoid taxes (nuff said). I have met at least 50 entrepreneurs who openly complained about the current level of taxation.

<comment><USER15> Using the numbers in the graph, if you make 1 billion you would have 580 mio. after taxes in Denmark and 720 mio. in UK. The difference is huge in absolute numbers but relatively it is not. I doubt that entrepreneurs would have any less drive or motivation to succeed because of this difference.

> Christensen and Fornais (Saxo Bank), Jesper Buch (Just Eat), Mads Peter > Veiby (M1), Lars Tvede, Toke Kruse (billys), Martin Thorborg > (Jubii/Amino/Dinero/Agera)

Most of these are liberalists who happens to be entrepreneurs. They also all belong to the commercial/business type of entrepreneurs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Having been to Copenhagen a few times in my life (partner used to live there) I came to realise there might be two extremes in terms of the way you look at tax rates.

Some people might move to Dubai because its income tax is low or even nil - that attracts people who are more interested in their own well being than their communities'.

Now some people - I would include myself here (rightly or wrongly, it doesn't really matter) - look at countries with high taxes and low inequality and enjoy the idea of a country where the well being of the community might came before than yourself getting rich.

It's all a bit utopical (and, knowing Copenhagen, it really feels a bit off reality) but I can't help not thinking about it.

<comment><USER17> All people who are net receivers from the system do so literally for their own well being.

Which is logical. And ok, because obviously there are lots of truly helpless cases in any given country.

But over the decades, it accumulates fraud. Or even worse, a kind of learned helplessness which keeps people in their place. Maybe Denmark is different. But my guess is that many living in Belgium and France will be able to point out multiple cases of fraud or at least debatable cases in their immediate surroundings.

Finally, a lot of the available money never leaves the hands of the vast bureaucratic caste that manages the system.

I guess what I want to say: people will be people, regardless of the system. Social democracy involves a lot of cynicism and greed too. And probably in a less constructive way than systems that don't rely exclusively on "anonymous" Big State-enforced redistribution.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> > Perhaps it's no coincidence then that their word for taxes, skat, also means > "sweetheart".

The word "skat" means _treasure_. That's why we also use it as a word for our sweethearts.

<comment><USER18> Oh cool, we have the same word in Dutch, "schat".

<comment><USER4> You know any two of German + one of the Scandinavian languages + Dutch, you can often read the third pretty well if you apply some imagination - they're all very closely related.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Not mentioned is that Denmark has the OECD's lowest inequality. Having visited a couple of times, it does feel like they're doing something right.

<comment><USER20> That's a metric that evidently appeals to you. So be it. It's a relative measure and my preference, possibly shared by others, is for an absolute one. Human nature and entrepreneurship being what it is, as general wealth increases thus does inequality increase. We have seen this happening on a grand scale across the world during the last 20 years or more.

One other point: what suits the Danes wouldn't necessarily suit the Brits or others. National characteristics are certainly different even we try sometimes to ignore this probably because it's tacitly interpreted as some hint of mild racism.

<comment> V-2 > _One other point: what suits the Danes wouldn 't necessarily suit the Brits > or others. National characteristics are certainly different even we try > sometimes to ignore this probably because it's tacitly interpreted as some > hint of mild racism._

Quite right... see [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_Jante](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_Jante)

<comment><USER21> Or not: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tall_poppy_syndrome](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tall_poppy_syndrome)

<comment> V-2 Just because something is called a syndrome doesn't mean it permeats a culture in which it was identified

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> The fallacy here is to aggregate the people. Democracy has been compared to two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for dinner. Proposals to cut government will fail when more than 50℅ figure they are net beneficiaries. This does not mean the system is just or that the lambs approve of their exploitation.

<comment><USER9> I love how the rich and privileged in this hypothetical are the lambs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> As a dane I can tell you the headline is a lie, almost everyone I know thinks that we pay way too much for the mediocre services we get.

<comment><USER17> (Caution: serious venting ahead ;-)

Same here in Belgium. Both the situation and the propaganda about it.

Total tax pressure is extremely high. Government services in Belgium are mediocre at best.

Imagine every public institute disease possible (rent seeking, no skin in the game, resistance to reform, employees not giving a shit, impossible size, …). Then multiply it by the fragmentation between Belgium's many governments and departments and regions and bureaucracies. Then there's the EU.

But in the end it all depends on whom you ask.

The ever growing group of net receivers of the system are very happy. Multinationals and the very rich don't care.

Even people who are employed in the private sector don't care. They have a significant portion of their taxes paid for by their employer. So for them it remains an abstract thing as long as they don't get fired.

The ones who sweat extremely high taxes the most are self employed people and SMEs. Basically most people who are personally involved with a business and are willing to work very hard to get ahead with something.

But hey, it's social _democracy_ so the majority is what matters! And boy let me tell you, the majority is very happy with socialism. I bet a lot of them would rather get rid of refugees and immigrants than abort socialism.

And since the majority has got it all figured out, I'm looking to emigrate, away from Utopia.

It'll have to be Australia or NZ because Canada and the US have closed down. Anything Western outside the EU that's just slightly behind on the curve is fine.

<comment><USER11> Good luck immigrating to Australia if you think the US has "closed down" \- you might get stuck in a concentration camp on an island.

Belgium is a little special because of the fragile Flemish vs. Walloon "ethnic tension". It seems to be stable so long as both sides are permitted equal subsidy.

<comment><USER17> Yes. Flemish/Walloon stuff is a lot, but it doesn't stop there. France has similar problems with out of control government.

Why not Australia? My occupation is on the list of wanted occupations?

<comment><USER11> Then you'll probably be OK. It's just that immigration is no longer welcome in general. Great place if you avoid the spiders and the bogans, though.

<comment><USER17> Well, we'll see whether they want us. I'll be visiting the country with my wife in a couple of weeks. Then I'll file the paperwork.

Btw I'm not frustrated in daily life ;-)

I've just started to believe that "happiness with high taxes" is a euphemism for an ever growing sense of entitlement that is (barely) being fulfilled. At least in Belgium and France.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I'd be happy to pay more in taxes if I knew the money would be spent wisely.

</comment><comment><USER25> >The government's plan involves cutting the top rate of income tax by 5 percentage points

>The main idea behind the change, which is now being discussed by parliament, is to make salaried work more attractive and woo some 40,000 people off welfare in the process. Not a bad plan for a country that faces labor shortages and growing pressure on its costly social safety net from an aging population.

This is a sales pitch for tax cuts on the rich, not an idea.

Somebody, somewhere made a campaign contribution and this is their reward.

<comment><USER26>
      and raising personal allowances so as to boost the salaries of the lowest earners by an average of 7 percent

So the plan is to cut the taxes of high-earners, as well as improving the tax- free allowance for everyone…

Without increasing other taxes, or reducing spending?

Where's the extra money coming from?

<comment> guard-of-terra From creating jobs, taking people off welfare and making them pair their taxes, albeit reduced.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Their individual ones? Or the ones other citizens are paying?

<comment><USER15> Both.

</comment></comment><comment> guard-of-terra Explanation doesn't seem to make sense:

"Equality is deeply ingrained in a society that resents individuality and success", therefore they would oppose smaller taxes for the poor (same taxes for more affluent).

"Danes treasure their welfare state", therefore they would oppose measures to decrease load on said welfare state while giving unemployed a job.

Somethig is amiss here.

</comment><comment><USER28> Bill Gates, on the other hand, is in favor of switching from income tax to progressive consumption tax.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ar0ri9NLArs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ar0ri9NLArs)

</comment><comment><USER29> Here is a well laid out argument for flat tax

[http://www.hoover.org/research/flat-tax- solution](http://www.hoover.org/research/flat-tax-solution)

</comment><comment><USER30> The sad thing is the US has a focus on taxes not spending. SS, Medicare, State, Local, Federal spending add up to 41% GDP yet taxes are no where near that. But, unlike say Japan at 42% GDP spending we don't get free healthcare etc.

<comment><USER12> Lol healthcare is far from being free in Japan.

<comment><USER30> 100% free sets up perverse incentives. The minimum subsidy is 70% and there are effective price controls. So the actual bill is often higher in the US for those with decent insurance.

<comment><USER31> > 100% free sets up perverse incentives.

How is that? I realize 100% free is pretty rare (I have a usual out-of-pocket cost of around $20 for an ER visit for example) but what are the perverse incentives created by completely free healthcare?

You mean that those who supply the healthcare are incentivized to give more expensive treatments, because the patient doesn't need to keep an eye on the bill?

Shouldn't the buyer (which in case of publicly financed healthcare is the government) be the one who oversees the cost, and not the patient?

<comment><USER12> Buyers are easily corrupted since there are few of them.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Fashion companies with high R&D spending? - <AUTHOR> So, I just realised 99% of brands slap on Chinese bare min. quality items their brand and call it a day. Even luxury ones. But, take Nike. You try their flyknit shoes and you go "wow", because they're SO good. They spent $B in R&D and they x10ed the comfort, speed or whatever. Can you name other fashion/clothing/footwear brands/items that actually keep increasing their quality YoY? <comment><USER2> Maybe not really what you're asking, but [http://streamoid.com/](http://streamoid.com/) is a fashion startup investing a lot in cutting edge computer vision R&D. Seems to be real demand for at least that type of thing from some big brands.</comment>


12 Russian Intelligence Officers Indicted for Hacking the Clinton Campaign - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/13/us/politics/mueller-indictment-russian-intelligence-hacking.html <comment><USER2> Copy of the indictment that details the actions/methods of the hackers: [http://cdn.cnn.com/cnn/2018/images/07/13/gru.indictment.pdf](http://cdn.cnn.com/cnn/2018/images/07/13/gru.indictment.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER3> Why is this flagged? Is talking about hackers on hacker news going too far?

<comment><USER4> Likely because the comments here were pretty low-quality from the get-go, so people are attempting to head off flame wars ahead of time.

<comment><USER5> It's unfortunate that the worst of a community can kill a story just by acting badly. The most easily riled and offended shouldn't be allowed to dictate what's discussed on any site.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Count Eleven in the indictment is the most serious one of the lot. The DOJ alleges there were attempts to hack election machines.

</comment><comment><USER7> Serious question: If this case goes to trial, which is unlikely, will the defendants be allowed to subpoena the DNC server, which to date has not been forensically examined by any government agency?

<comment><USER8> The FBI had images; you don't need a physical server

<comment><USER9> This is the first time I am hearing of this. Could you please cite a source for this information?

<comment><USER10> _In his testimony in January on the cyber attacks, then-director of the FBI James Comey said the agency never got access to the machines themselves, but obtained access to the forensics from a review of the system performed by CrowdStrike, a third-party cybersecurity firm.

"We got the forensics from the pros that they hired which -- again, best practice is always to get access to the machines themselves, but this my folks tell me was an appropriate substitute," Comey said._ [0]

[0] [http://www.politifact.com/truth-o- meter/statements/2017/jul/...](http://www.politifact.com/truth-o- meter/statements/2017/jul/11/donald-trump/did-john-podesta-deny-cia-and-fbi- access-dnc-serve/)

<comment><USER4> I think they got a forensics report from Crowdstrike, not an image, but it's hard to tell for sure because the people making statements aren't fully aware of the distinction most likely.

The fact that I can't find specific reference to an image being provided, just "forensics", would lead me to suspect that an image was _not_ provided, as otherwise later clarification on this point would have been beneficial to some parties involved. Then again, maybe I'm just missing it.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Firefox v25 completely breaks plugins.clickToPlay option - <AUTHOR> https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=880735#1

<comment><USER2> Status: RESOLVED FIXED

but what that means is "allow plugin" is in the top left of the screen and enables that plugin site-wide.

So enable for that one flash video and see ads for ever more.

Seems the bike sheds were looking a bit boring.</comment>


"Blitzableiter" RC is now available to protect you against Flash exploits. - <AUTHOR> http://blitzableiter.recurity.com/news/show/6

<comment><AUTHOR> How it works: [http://blitzableiter.recurity.com/wiki/blitzableiter/Blitzab...](http://blitzableiter.recurity.com/wiki/blitzableiter/BlitzableiterBasics)</comment>


Death to Lorem Ipsum – The story behind our app, Lorem Ipsum Tool - <AUTHOR> http://kureno.com/blog/death-to-lorem-ipsum-the-story-behind-our-app-lorem-ipsum-tool/

<comment><USER2> Argh! Someone really doesn't understand Lorem Ipsum.

 _"When you are designing with Lorem Ipsum, you diminish the importance of the copy by lowering it to the same level as any other visual element. The text simply becomes another supporting role, serving to make other aspects more aesthetic. Instead of your design enhancing the meaning of the content, your content is enhancing your design."_

That's just so wrong. Line heights, line lengths, fonts, font sizes and margins are vitally import visual properties of your website. If you want to make sure that you picked the correct values for those properties and if you don't yet have copy, you should use Lorem Ipsum. Text is certainly not _just_ a visual element but it is _also_ a visual element.

You diminish the importance of copy if you insert some crappy boilerplate stuff which has really nothing to do with your client. Lorem Ipsum is a clear signal that the copy is not yet finished and needs to be finished.

 _"By adding Lorem Ipsum to the design you are essentially dressing your king before you know his size."_

You can decide which colors and fabrics to use before you know the king's size.

There certainly are situations where the copy has to be known before you can start laying out elements (forms are a example), but in those cases you shouldn't use boilerplate, you should use the real copy! You actually need to!

 _"The point I tried to make is that you and your clients need to be thinking, understanding and gathering content before the design. Using Lorem Ipsum is a way to half-heartedly go about the most important part of your site."_

And crappy boilerplate stuff will make that point … how exactly? At worst clients will just take the boilerplate, change a few words and leave it at that. Lorem Ipsum is a powerful reminder that text is important! Clients often don't get that, that's certainly true, but the best remedy for that is _telling them_ – again and again – not changing the filler text.

(And, as was already said here, searching for Lorem Ipsum is hell of a lot easier than searching for crappy boilerplate stuff.)

The biggest problem with Lorem Ipsum is that it's pseudo Latin and as such doesn't have the same word lengths or letter frequencies as English. None of this nonsense, though.

<comment><USER3> I would argue that neither of you truly understand the problem with Lorem Ipsum. Content should drive the design of a website. All too often web designers create a proof while _also_ deciding roughly what content goes where. The creative process should not only begin with fonts, colors, layout, etc but also with content. You should begin your website process with general questions like "What are we trying to say?" instead of "We need a website with a boilerplate feel".

Switching the copy from Lorem to boilderplate makes it even worse.

<comment><USER4> _That's just so wrong. Line heights, line lengths, fonts, font sizes and margins are vitally import visual properties of your website. If you want to make sure that you picked the correct values for those properties and if you don't yet have copy, you should use Lorem Ipsum. Text is certainly not just a visual element but it is also a visual element._

The important point is that lorem ipsum is _not_ content, rather, it is a tool for approximating the aesthetic of content that _might_ be placed there in the future.

Nobody is saying that design begins with fonts/layout/color (although that does happen at times), rather, that when you get to a point where you need to decide how bodies of text will look, you use things like lorem ipsum to approximate how other text will behave within that field.

The other thing about lorem ipsum, which you may be missing and the op certainly misses, is that by not actually being english, you don't get hung up on the meaning of the content, rather, you can pseudo-objectively evaluate the aesthetic choices used to set the text. again, the whole point is to create a template for setting actual text very well.

the largest problem with lorem ipsum is people using it who don't understand _why_ they are using it. I think that using dummy copy that _looks_ like legitimate content is more harmful than using random latin. At least with real latin, you don't delude yourself into thinking that it's anything other than text used to decide formal typographic or layout choices.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Lorem ipsum is valuable precisely because it is meaningless. It is designed to fill space without distracting a pedantic reader who will inevitably find misspellings and glitches in any preliminary body copy.

It is also really easy to find out if you've left lorem ipsum in your production directory -- one line of grep is all it takes. If you use any other form of fake copy, good luck to you making sure it's all gone before your site goes into production.

<comment><USER6> Indeed, in '98 our application was put onto an IBM demo disk of Java applications - we were a VC funded startup and I was the CTO.

After we had sent them the stuff to include on the disk a very worried developer came to me and told me that "some of <deleted>'s test data went to IBM". The test data in question had been sourced from some particularly unpleasant alt. newsgroups.

I had a genuine "my career is over" moment...

Turns out that the only data that got sent out was a reference to the word "sheep" in an search index. That was all.

I've tended to be quite careful about test data since then.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> The article makes the following (rather weak) points against Lorem Ipsum:

1) Nonsensical Handwaving such as "you'll feel more inspired with real content" and "Instead of your design enhancing the meaning of the content, your content is enhancing your design."

2) "it will take 5 minutes to explain to confused team mates and clients".

3) You might forget to replace the Lorem Ipsum dummy text

The tool doesn't seem to fix any of these. Instead it makes them worse, because it makes the dummy content look like real content.

</comment><comment><USER8> I don't think you can do away with five hundred or so years of typographic history that easily. The use of Lorem Ipsum and the first Oration against Catiline came through need, not through a desire to flaunt random Latin texts. There is a definite need for filler text that doesn't distract as one finishes a design. If leaving lipsum text up in a live design is a problem, the solution is to replace it with real content, not replacing it with more dummy content. At least lipsum is recognisable as such. Wouldn't it worse if a user took the content for real?

</comment><comment><USER9> I find that using more realistic content is a great help in web design and development since it's easier to understand and "feel" the final web experience. A site filled with Lorem Ipsum to me is like a portrait of a person where the pupils are missing, it's lifeless.

What I typically do is that when I work on a site about music, I'll just find some similar sites and take images and text from there that is a close match to what will eventually be used in the project. Especially for bigger projects and content-driven sites, where the client will later add the final stuff via their CMS, this works great (especially when you have otherwise only cat pictures and "this is a test" text that some dev added).

Seems like people have different experience, but I find using more realistic content a great help for everybody involved, since it simply makes the site more real and therefore it's easier to make it better.

</comment><comment><USER10> I agree that Lorem ipsum shouldn't be used as a replacement for instructions but it does have its place in prototyping.

Lorem ipsum is tremendously useful as placeholders for content types such of sample blog posts, sample description etc. These content are irrelevant to the web developer.

</comment><comment><USER11> So how is this a tool? It seems to "generate" the same text everytime I press the button. So 5 static HTML-Pages could do the same. Or am I missing something?

</comment><comment><USER12> Lorem Ipsum = fake content. Lorem Ipsum Tool = fake content.

</comment><comment><USER13> Don't tell him that story about the fox and the dog.

</comment><comment><USER14> Long story short: It depends on what you're designing.

There are times when using Lorem Ipsum hurts you. There are many times when it does not.

God save us from designers and developers who suddenly realize that maybe not everything they do is ideal, and then feel the need to crusade to bring the unbearably terrible designers/developers up to nearly-palatable mediocre, instead of focusing on their own work to improve it from pretty good to excellent.

</comment><comment><USER15> Fail.

Ever seen those psychological tests that have word "RED" printed in blue ink, the word "BLUE" in yellow ink, and so forth? The test is to say the _color_ , not the word. Most people find it difficult and irritating, because the verbal parts of their brains hijack the process and insist on reading the words.

The point of using meaningless text is to quiet the verbal parts of your brain, so you can become conscious of the abstract visual and aesthetic elements.

The converse is also true. Design of the verbal elements has to use meaningful text, preferably in a context where the visual and aesthetic design has been toned down to not distract. Hence the popularity of monochrome wire-frame mockups for document design.

Edited.</comment>


Wikipedia Lamest Edit Wars (Infographic) - <AUTHOR> http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/visualizations/wikipedia-lamest-edit-wars/

<comment><USER2> Once again, an "infographic" at InformationIsBeautiful.net contributes very little beyond the underlying prose it's based on (in this case a Google spreadsheet, which is actually _easier_ to read).

<comment><USER3> Unfortunately, InformationIsBeautiful.net basically exists to be an advertisement for the author's book, The Visual Miscellaneum. Which is a very pretty book--I own it--but not really full of informative infographics. There's some original content in the blog, but far too much of it is reposts of graphics from the book.

For a better (or at least more varied) selection of infographics I like:

* Chart Porn (<http://chartporn.org/>)

* Flowing Data (<http://flowingdata.com/>) which also covers datavis software

* Information Aesthetics (<http://infosthetics.com/>)

* We Love DataVis (<http://datavis.tumblr.com/>)

(edit: formatting)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I love how the death star article is on there. Though I don't know that this qualifies as an infographic: the only info on it is title + num_edits. The relative sizes aren't informative, their locations aren't informative (horizontal or vertical, I'm sure the Jesus article is still highly edited).

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Lamest_edit_wars> for the data. Not sure where to get the edit counts, aside from checking the history statistics.

<comment><USER5> And, dammit, it's spelled _Brasil_.

<comment><USER4> IMDB says "no": <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0088846/>

Battle!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> One of these I remember quite well--Angels and Airwaves "is" a band vs. "are" a band. Wikipedia's summary:

 _More than 40 reverts in one hour by two editors. The point of contention? Whether "Angels & Airwaves" is a band or "Angels & Airwaves" are a band. (British English requires "are," as the band comprises multiple people, while American English requires "is", as the band is a singular entity.) ALL-CAPS edit summaries laced with profanity and death threats liberally employed by one side. Stopped only after admin intervention, but resumed again two minutes after the 3RR block expired. Both get blocked for seven days, and one of them gets his block extended to eight days after stating he doesn't care as long as the other side gets a block of same length. The other side keeps his seven-day block._

I was the admin in that case. It was my proudest moment in all of Wikipedia adminship.

<comment><USER7> I think mentioning the British/American disparity does a disservice to demonstrating how truly ridiculous the argument was, because it distracts from what the "are" user was actually arguing, which is that "are" is correct because the subject is is named by a phrase comprising two things join by a conjunction, "and".

Reading the actual "discussion" is both hilarious and depressingly frustrating. The Alex 101 user had to have been trolling, 'cause, I mean, _come on_.

<comment><USER6> "Angels and Airwaves" is a syntactically encapsulated name in American English. Americans still say "Black and Decker is a company" or "Emerson Lake & Palmer is a band"--and those are non-metaphorical uses of "and" to name the members or founders of the group!

<comment><USER7> _"Angels and Airwaves" is a syntactically encapsulated name in American English._

Why are you explaining this to me?

Like I already said, the argument didn't even have anything to do with British versus American conventions. That aspect wasn't even brought up until later by another user.

Suppose the band wasn't called "Angels and Airwaves", but "Airwave Angels", and that it wasn't really a band in the literal/literary sense of the word―suppose it was a one-man production through-and-through. The user who raised the argument would have _still_ argued for the change on the same basis, which was that it should be "are" because "Angels" is plural, regardless of the actual number of members and with no notion of British and American style differences.

Bringing up the differences between British and American English legitimizes the issue slightly, but it was completely unrelated. Suggesting that it somehow has something to do with it detracts from how truly ridiculous the argument actually was.

<comment><USER6> I still don't understand what you're saying, though. It _is_ a matter of British vs. American English, and the major problem to me, at the time, seemed to be that the two sides didn't understand that fact, they just tried to stubbornly apply their own cultural norms against each other. The point you mention is a common British rationalization for the British convention, but that point was probably only argued because that person didn't realize the convention is different from country to country.

By Wikipedia conventions, incidentally, "Angels and Airwaves _is_ a band" is correct because it's an American band and articles on American subjects are written under American conventions, whereas "Emerson Lake & Palmer _are_ a band" is correct because they are a British band. That didn't save that guy from being blocked for a week, though (or maybe 8 days, I can't remember whose block I extended.)

<comment><USER7> _It is a matter of British vs. American English_

It is correct to say that there is a difference between British English and American English with regard to using "is" or "are" with collective nouns. It is also correct to say that those kinds of disputes happen fairly regularly on Wikipedia. It is _incorrect_ to say, however, that this particular argument was an instance of that kind of dispute. I'll quote from the user himself, since my own explanations seem to be inadequate here:

 _The reason why "are" is right is because the word Angels is plural (as in more than one angel) and Airwaves (as in more than one airwave) is plural. Without the "s" it makes it singular (proper noun). Again, leave it like this: "Angels and Airwaves are", not "Angels and Airwaves is"._ \--Alex 101 ([http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk%3AAngels_%26_...](http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk%3AAngels_%26_Airwaves&action=historysubmit&diff=40530211&oldid=40528991))

Here's another example: suppose you have a dog named Airwaves. Alex 101 would argue that since you named your dog Airwaves ("as in more than one airwave"), when you speak about certain characteristics of your dog, you should say "Airwaves _are_ an obedient puppy.", rather than "Airwaves _is_ an obedient puppy.". You can see that this has nothing to do with differences between British English and American English; they're both in agreement here. By all means you should say "Airwaves is an obedient puppy.".

The argument about British versus American English might be petty, but at least there's some kind of substance to it. What Alex 101 was arguing on the other hand, is just crazy.

For sure, later in the discussion there _was_ some mention of regional differences in style, but it was neither the impetus for the argument, nor did it constitute the bulk (or perhaps that should be the loudest?) part of the dispute.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I cracked up when I saw the "war" about the time signature of Pink Floyd's song "Money" - 7/8 or 7/4 or 21/8 :D

</comment><comment><USER9> I'm pretty sure they are still arguing over the Jesus article (I got sucked into it once, not pretty)

</comment><comment><USER10> _Every_ article is a potential unsuspecting victim of an edit war.</comment>


The Biggest Star - <AUTHOR> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Sun_and_VY_Canis_Majoris.svg

<comment><USER2> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VY_Canis_Majoris>

</comment><comment><USER3> Please pass the SPF 14,000 sunblock.

<comment><USER4> Reminds me of the Roz Chast cartoon.

        - SPF 1000 - spend an afternoon in a kiln
        - SPF 43*10^23 - take a walk on the sun</comment></comment>


New in Chrome 80 - <AUTHOR> https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2020/02/nic80 <comment><USER2> I'm very pleased to see optional chaining come with Chrome 80. It's been a language feature I've been wanting for a while and in combination with the nullish coalescing operator, setting defaults for undefined becomes a lot more elegant.

Firefox has the nullish coalescing operator which is great but I'm really hoping that optional chaining is being given some priority.</comment>


Forget Elon's Batteries–Fix the Grid with a Rock-Filled Train on a Hill - <AUTHOR> https://www.wired.com/2016/05/forget-elons-batteries-fix-grid-rock-filled-train-hill/ <comment><USER2> Yeah, let's stick with the batteries, though. It's a very space-efficient and elegant "drop-in" solution that's going to become much cheaper over the next 5-10 years.

</comment><comment><USER3> Recent discussion of the storage system:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11595195](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11595195)</comment>


Big-O and related notation - <AUTHOR> http://www.johndcook.com/asymptotic_notation.html

<comment><USER2> "Introduction to Algorithms" contains a summary on that subject.

This page looks like my notes (cheat) I used in finals. You need to know what you are doing to make that information useful.</comment>


Printing with sound - <AUTHOR> https://www.seas.harvard.edu/news/2018/08/printing-with-sound <comment> gene-h TL;DR they make a droplet on a capillary tip and use the radiation pressure of sound to push it off, enabling printing with liquids with viscosities ranging over four orders of magnitude.

It's cool, but in the current approach they still need to produce a somewhat spherical droplet in order to apply downward radiation pressure from sound. So it would be hard to apply to printing of thermoplastics which might be more prone to forming tubes rather than droplets. The fact that they need a 3d droplet is another thing that will make scaling this approach interesting. Because we need a somewhat complicated 3d structure, which is a capillary tip inside a tube which needs to be longer than the droplet by some factor due to the wavelength of sound, this is going to be challenging to fabricate in bulk at the microscale like we do with today's inkjets. One might even need fairly exotic processes like LIGA to fabricate structures with this aspect ratio.[0]

It may not end up being a mainstream droplet jetting technique, but the fact they can jet liquids over four orders of magnitude is pretty compelling. Especially for research purposes

Also, the materials and methods is somewhat entertaining. It's not often that you see white chocolate, which they used as a substrate to print honey droplets on to, listed as a material used. Tuning the parameters was probably pretty tasty

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

<comment><USER2> You can print droplets of thermoplastics via the Arburg process [0].

[0] [https://www.arburg.com/en/products-and-services/additive- man...](https://www.arburg.com/en/products-and-services/additive- manufacturing/apf-process/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Doesn't this have profound implications for 3D printing?</comment>


Startupping: a moderated startup community - <AUTHOR> http://startupping.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> cool stories, but lots of typos.</comment>


A Chinese ride-hailing company is unhappy with its Tesla fleet - <AUTHOR> https://www.businessinsider.com/tesla-criticized-in-times-square-billboards-by-shenma-zhuanche-2019-4 <comment><USER2> Worth mentioning (more regard the Robotaxis)

"As Horace Dediu often reminds us, every vehicle has a job to do, and Tesla's do the job of providing high-end, high-performance, environmentally-friendly status symbols to tech executives quite well. But that's a very different job with very different needs than the prosaic business of commodity mobility that taxis provide, whether currently in human driven form or in the future as robotaxis. "

from [https://www.thedrive.com/tech/27725/tesla-fleet-company- stru...](https://www.thedrive.com/tech/27725/tesla-fleet-company-struggles- raise-questions-about-robotaxi-plans)

<comment><AUTHOR> That's a good point, although I fail to see how Elon's claim of 1 million robotaxis by the end of 2020 can take shape in the first place.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> The story may be true but why do I feel the Chinese government is quietly supporting any story that shows Telsa in a bad light? The quantity of EVs in China amazing but the quality is extremely bad.</comment>


Advance in high-pressure physics - <AUTHOR> http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2017/01/a-breakthrough-in-high-pressure-physics/ <comment> gene-h It hasn't been confirmed yet[0]. Their evidence so far is that they saw something shiny in the diamond anvil. The shiny thing may not necessarily be metallic hydrogen, and could just be the coating.

There are also questions that they reached as high of a pressure as they said they did.

Metallic hydrogen has been created in the lab before. Of course, in these previous cases the metallic hydrogen didn't last long(neither did the test apparatus) as the necessary pressures were reached using explosions.

The first confirmed production of metallic hydrogen used a giant gun to shoot a large bullet at a small container of liquid hydrogen at ~7 kilometers per second.[1] One unconfirmed attempt even used a specially designed bomb to compress liquid hydrogen[2].

[0][http://www.nature.com/news/physicists-doubt-bold-report- of-m...](http://www.nature.com/news/physicists-doubt-bold-report-of-metallic- hydrogen-1.21379) [1][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metallic_hydrogen#Shock- wave_c...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metallic_hydrogen#Shock- wave_compression.2C_1996) [2][http://web.archive.org/web/20120321111752/http://lateralscie...](http://web.archive.org/web/20120321111752/http://lateralscience.co.uk/Hmetal/index.html)

<comment><USER2> Compressing hydrogen with explosions and bullets is actually very old and well-understood science ... if you have the clearance. Explosively compressing hydrogen is how you trigger hydrogen bombs (also via radiation pressure, which probably doesn't create metallic hydrogen). H-bomb research is all about slamming things into liquid H2. I wouldn't be surprised to hear that metallic hydrogen had been briefly produced somewhere in the desert during a bomb- related test.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> A few questions I didn't see addressed in the article:

Did they confirm metastability? I guess confirmation of that isn't as easy as simply removing the pressure and seeing if it continues to shine and conduct electricity, or they'd have mentioned it.

As rocket fuel, how do you convert it back to molecular hydrogen to release all that energy? As simple as lighting it on fire in the presence of an oxidizer?

Is it liquid or solid? If liquid, how practical is it going to be in their suggested use in long-distance power transmission? You'd need some kind of flexible packaging that doesn't allow for voids to open up (because then you've lost conductivity) that also won't leak.

And if it's easy to light it on fire as rocket fuel, how can we prevent our long-distance electricity lines from turning into fiery conflagrations in hostile conditions? Could lightning strikes detonate them? Maybe that risk could be reduced with high conductivity coatings on their outer wrap, but that doesn't cover every eventuality.

I met a guy once who was in the business of providing valves for liquid hydrogen handling, he said it was very tricky to handle the stuff safely. Stringing it all over the countryside in a form that packs more than a 3x energy punch of its conventional liquid form could be interesting.

<comment><USER4> It's solid, altough soft. For rocket fuel you could spray a disintegration catalyst along with the oxidizer.

<comment><USER5> For rocket fuel, you probably would not want to oxidize it. Low molecular weight in the propellent means higher exhaust velocities. Nuclear rocket engines used H2 propellent.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> There are some skeptics. "Their main concern is that Silvera and Dias really only have one data point: a single measurement of the reflectivity of their sample at high pressure. While that could indicate metallic hydrogen, it could also be something else, like the alumina coating they used on the diamonds to prevent hydrogen from leaking into the crystal and making it brittle." [http://www.forbes.com/sites/samlemonick/2017/01/27/theres- re...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/samlemonick/2017/01/27/theres-reason-to-be- skeptical-about-metallic-hydrogen/#764646e1ae27)

</comment><comment><USER6> This has been the week for high pressure experiments. Scientists were also able to create a stable helium-sodium compound under high pressures.

[http://www.nature.com/nchem/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nchem...](http://www.nature.com/nchem/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nchem.2716.html)

[http://www.sciencealert.com/forget-what-you-learned- scientis...](http://www.sciencealert.com/forget-what-you-learned-scientists- might-have-just-created-a-stable-helium-compound)

</comment><comment><USER7> Quote: "One prediction that's very important is metallic hydrogen is predicted to be meta-stable," Silvera said. "That means if you take the pressure off, it will stay metallic, similar to the way diamonds form from graphite under intense heat and pressure, but remain diamonds when that pressure and heat are removed."

But the article doesn't say whether the observed result persisted after the pressure was removed.

</comment><comment><USER8> Previously:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12875868](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12875868)</comment>