U.S. military is expanding special forces operations in Africa - <AUTHOR> https://news.vice.com/story/the-u-s-is-waging-a-massive-shadow-war-in-africa-exclusive-documents-reveal <comment><USER2> My information from buddies who were there is at least six years old so do with it what you will.

Organizations such as AQM have so much support and capability that local governments are often afraid to oppose them directly for fear that things will escalate and they'll lose the entire country. This often presents logistical challenges for US forces.

American forces are working on multiple levels and approaches not just "direct action".

It's not just about Somalia. Somalia is the poster child and gets the most press but really a drop in the bucket. Africa is a big continent with systemic challenges and those challenges are the perfect power vacuum for these groups.

We've been there since before 9/11\. It's an ooooold fight.

<comment><USER3> The article doesn't say activities in Africa are new, but that they are significantly expanded. From the article:

> In 2006, just 1 percent of all U.S. commandos deployed overseas were in > Africa. In 2010, it was 3 percent. By 2016, that number had jumped to more > than 17 percent. In fact, according to data supplied by U.S. Special > Operations Command, there are now more special operations personnel devoted > to Africa than anywhere except the Middle East — 1,700 people spread out > across 20 countries

<comment><USER4> What are the raw numbers? How do we know the percentage increase isn't mostly due to other commandos coming back home?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The U.S. has lost any strategic thinking.

The U.S. is now fighting a active war against "loosely connected groups from north West Africa to Central Asia" most are Sunni Extremists. This is already a insane thing to do, war on loosely connected groups that reach over 10000km even when the waste majority of these groups have never actually attacked the US or have any plans to. There is also almost no evidence that one can actually win such a war in a military sense. The guy who lead ISIS was turned into a terrorist not in the 1980s when the US was supporting Afgans against the Soviets but rather in 2004 during the Battle of Fallujah. Fighting and bombing people everywhere will create more Anti-American opinions then it destroys. Ironically the only place people actually like the US is in Iran where the US have not been able to bomb anybody for 40 years or so.

Outside of that they are also actively working against and sometimes fighting with the Iranian block (Iran, Syria, Hezbollah and maybe even the Houthis plus a few other groups) who are often equally opposed to the before mentioned "loosely connected groups from north West Africa to Central Asia". This means the US is at a total strategic impact where there are people already fighting but the US wants to get in there and crush both groups but also make sure the destruction of one does not empower the other.

The allies of the US, Israel, Saudis and Pakistan are all highly problematic and in many ways strategically counterproductive. Israel because support for Israel makes everybody else, especially among the population of the region angry prevent the government from embracing any alliance with the US. The Saudis and the Pakistanis are largely responsible for the creation of many of the before mentioned "loosely connected groups" and continue to support them all over the world.

The US supports Sunni governments against Shia governments but is fighting a war against both Shia and Sunni non-government actors. At the same time non of the governments they support actually give flying fuck about the US except for the support they can get from the US.

Why all of this? The US was only involved in the region because of oil. The US does not actually need the oil anymore, even if they did the resources spent are probably higher then just paying the higher price for oil. Not to mention that even without the US everybody who has oil has a huge intensive to sell it.

If you look objectively at any of this you can only shake your head. The danger of all of these groups is minimal. Yet the US spends the same amount of money they did when they were opposing another world supper power.

Sadly in Washington there is a foreign policy consensus and a echo chamber and there is almost nobody who moves very far from the 'party line' on foreign policy. Not to mention the massive vested interest that it supports when the Saudis buy 10 Billions in US weapons.

<comment><USER6> >Why all of this?

It's about strategic positioning to control resource routes in anticipation of the coming resource wars that everyone pretends isn't going to happen. This while the Leo Strauss-ians like Kissinger and Brzezinski work hard to initiate cold-war 2.0 because the Middle East destablization program was simply a precursor to bigger more nasty conflicts, (which start economically) and most of this is arising due to the fact that technology has advanced so fast it altered the nation-states threat model and they don't know how to handle a kind of world where any lone-wolf actor could do devestating things. Hence a surveillance state of totalitarian dystopia is the only response they know that might be able to handle it except they don't really care about national security that much or they wouldn't be wasting taxpayer dollars on kickbacks to relatives around the beltway instead of fixing problems.

Africa is a war ground for precious minerals and metals (and some oil) and because the Chinese have been making big plays there the Americans want to balance out the power so they have a foothold when the minerals that go in that phone in your pocket become more scarce because China suddenly halted exports of theirs or something similar.

I spent some time in the Horn of Africa, and I can tell you I'd rather be in Iraq... at least Iraqi's pickup their dead bodies, and I never saw a 12 year old patrolling with an AK in Iraq either.

The point is that while you are right that we need to rethink how far we overextend our forces into foreign entanglements, there are other things at play here of which terrorism is only a part of and is often a _byproduct_ of. We also need to consider how often such moves have resulted in blowback worse than the initial problem. I look all over the world and see problems that are blowback from our meddling in the first place. (Iran is a prime example of this. The Mullahs would have never come to power if we hadn't overthrown their gov for oil in the first place.)

<comment><USER5> Well, what your are arguing is essentially a conspiracy theory. That does not mean its wrong, but it does mean that there is a waste upper class that have a secrete agenda for the world. I don't think that explanation makes any sense.

> It's about strategic positioning to control resource routes in anticipation > of the coming resource wars that everyone pretends isn't going to happen.

I don't know why that should happen. Even if it did, why would you care about the Middle East? Oil will no longer be a important resource and as long as it is the US has its own supply. A middle east that is unable to export Oil would mean LESS resources for china who I assume would be the enemy in that massive war you are predicting.

> because the Middle East destablization program

If they only want to destabilize the region there would be more effective ways to do it. It also assumes that all the people involved in for example the Iraq invasion were all lairs and all of them seem to be able to keep this secret even once they are retired. It also does not explain why the US send 100'000 people into Iraq to stop the civil war, it would have been far cheaper just to keep out and let things happen.

I see no evidence for this theory.

> they don't know how to handle a kind of world where any lone-wolf actor > could do devestating things

Bomb building has not changed that much, Anarchist have killed far more people in the US then Muslim Terrorists. A small group of students started WW1.

> Africa is a war ground for precious minerals and metals (and some oil) and > because the Chinese have been making big plays there the Americans want to > balance out the power so they have a foothold when the minerals that go in > that phone in your pocket become more scarce because China suddenly halted > exports of theirs or something similar.

The US position on Africa has been extremely light touch. They operate with special forces for the most part. They don't attempted massive economic inroads or outright conquests that would be required if resource security was the main goal.

I agree about blowback.

The main difference between us is that I believe that it is stupidity and internal political intensives. Not some long running prepare for some future war. I don't think any such war will happen, politically, economically and there is the problem of nukes.

<comment><USER6> > upper class that have a secrete agenda for the world. I don't think that > explanation makes any sense.

I don't think people will be able to ever understand whats really going on in the world until they understand it's true, and makes lots of sense. (not sure what you mean by "waste" though.) I have spent the vast majority of my time since I got out of the military tracing the big picture for myself based on the evidence, wanting to find the truth regardless of where it took me. Those who invoke variations of hanlons razor (it's all incompetence) or just say it's perverse results of bad incentives organically corrupting the system, simply haven't carefully examined the evidence. That being said, I do acknowledge two things that hamper my claims somewhat. First, when dealing with such issues I am often restricted to inductive logic due to a lack of hard evidence. Deductive logic is always preferable. Two, I know it's hard for claims such as mine to be taken at face value without better citations, but I do have many contextual citations that I simply haven't made public _yet_. I also understand such a vast scope means I still have a shitton of things to learn, and don't know everything.

> why would you care about the Middle East? Oil will no longer be a important > resource

This is a line I have heard from the intelligencia that hasn't stood up to actual real-world tests. Like I said most of the oil issue was never about us actually having the oil, it was about us _controlling_ who did get the oil. Likewise, I find it humourous that people have already bought the line about no needing oil hook line and sinker. It's simply not realistic to pretend a lack of potential depedence on oil in 2030-50 is going to cause us to suddenly give up our imperial ambitions. Oil is but a part of a much bigger game.

> If they only want to destabilize the region there would be more effective > ways to do it.

What other than war, and especially civil and secretarian war comes even close to the same amount of destablization?

> It also assumes that all the people involved in for example the Iraq > invasion were all lairs and all of them seem to be able to keep this secret > even once they are retired.

First of all, yes, most of them were/are pathological liars. Second, the nature of compartmentalization creates a breeding ground for such abuses to be top down while middle-men ground-pounders (in this case military generals) have no clue about what's really going on. This is a variation of the fallacy I hear too often about "if X conspiracy theory is true, it would take Y number of people to be silent which is impossible/improbable and therefor conspiracy theory is false." Really, all you needed was a core group running the show, the rest tend to just do as told. (Bremer/Wolfowitz/Cheney/Rumsfeld part of core group)

> I see no evidence for this theory.

Then I don't think you have examined very much material relating to it.

> Bomb building has not changed that much. Anarchist have killed far more > people in the US then Muslim Terrorists.

Modern threats are cyber, genetic, etc. That's the threat model shift many in the natsec industry are at least pretending to try to shift to, and even the most academic of the natsec group admits technology has rapidly shifted the equation faster than nation-states of been able to adapt. Ignoring this with such a flippant dismissal isn't a serious attempt at conversation on the topic.

> A small group of students started WW1.

History as written by the instigators. King Edward the 7th was the single man most responsible for WW1. I don't have time to get into this one though.

> The US position on Africa has been extremely light touch.

It has been, but it's not going to be for much longer.

> They don't attempted massive economic inroads or outright conquests

The American's haven't, but the history and modern history of Africa and it's current state is inextricably tied to the European colonialism and exploitation of Africa through "economic inroads" and "outright conquests". Rhodesia, Congo, Suez, Morocco, are all examples of this. Not to mention IMF/World bank explotation that creates the corruption and inculcates the extremism being fought. Hell, South Africa apartheid barely ended in 1991!

So your comment about the US is mostly true, but I'm also talking about the supranational oligarchy of the west as a whole, not just the US.

> The main difference between us is that I believe that it is stupidity and > internal political intensives.

I dismiss Hanlons razor as an inherent logical fallacy, and the organic incentives angle simply doesn't match the evidence or fill the gaps needed to understand the global geo-economic/political games being played here.

Don't get me wrong. I see this response from intelligent people quite often, and I understand it because it's the safe academic viewpoint especially without all the contextual knowledge/evidence required to say otherwise, but I'm telling you now it's not the truth of the matter at all.

The pages of history are littered with conspiracy, and until people can stop trying so hard to dismiss it because of the negative modern connotations they won't be able to approach the evidence and follow it to the truth regardless of where it leads.

See part 4C. [http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-02-23/1967-he-cia- created...](http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-02-23/1967-he-cia-created- phrase-conspiracy-theorists-and-ways-attack-anyone-who-challenge)

<comment><USER5> I'm sorry but I'm not seeing your logic at all.

> King Edward the 7th was the single man most responsible for WW1.

I would actually be interested in that one.

I have only heard one person ever to blame Britain for WW1. That person was conspiracy theorist who believed in Anglo-Saxon elite that has a secret plan for world domination and they had it since 1066.

I myself have read quite a lot about WW1 and making Edward the 7th responsible is simply wrong.

<comment><USER7> I mean the conflict only went global when UK decided to enforce Belgian neutrality with a military response. Otherwise, it would have just been a regional war between France, Germany and Russia. The war would have been shorter and UK would have kept its empire for longer.

Not like UK intervening in WWI ensured peace or anything

<comment><USER5> When France, Germany, Russia, Austria and maybe possible the Ottoman empire fight a war its defiantly not in any way 'local'.

I really don't understand how people can blame Britain for join a war to enforce a treaty that Germany had was a signatory to, and had broken.

That seem like evaluation the two power with different moral standards. Britain tried everything in their power to bring people to peace talks, these peace talks were blocked by Germany and Austria. Then Germany is the first to violate borders and Britain eventually joins the war because they had a treaty and because the Germans behaved like animals in Belgium.

How can anybody make the argument Britain is at fault here?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> According to a former South African coworker - the number 1 problem in Africa is corruption. Terrorism is a byproduct of that.

<comment><USER9> Sadly it's quickly becoming the #1 problem in the US as well.

<comment><USER10> Corruption in the USA and corruption in the developing world are two completely different beasts, similar in name only. Corruption in the developing world is from the bottom up, it's the way that the common person does business. Corruption in the developed world is from the top down.

Try bribing a cop in a developed country and you'll find yourself in an even bigger hole. But in the developing world, it's the normal way of doing business. You bribe a cop to get out of a ticket, you bribe an official to get your paperwork done faster.

<comment><USER11> It's beyond even that. Corruption is the lubricant of bureaucracy. These countries are messed up. One way to "fight" corruption is to create lots of paperwork: after all, if everything's documented, then you can't get away with anything, right? Ignore the fact that most official papers end up rotting in a box in a warehouse.

Faced with these stupid requirements and tons of needed stamps and seals and signoffs, if you wanna get stuff done, you pay Vs letting the ineffective system slowly get to it. In one case, the customs officer worked overtime: after 5, he'd continue to process paperwork, correctly, legally, but extra money decided which pieces he'd work on. After anti corruption systems went into place, he can't do this anymore and just goes home at 5. No one wins.

<comment><USER12> > In one case, the customs officer worked overtime: after 5, he'd continue to > process paperwork, correctly, legally, but extra money decided which pieces > he'd work on. After anti corruption systems went into place, he can't do > this anymore and just goes home at 5. No one wins.

Isn't that analogue to net neutrality though? Old situation: those who pay enter the bureaucracy fast lane, screw the rest. New situation: everyone gets processed at the same speed, regardless of monetary power.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Clickbait title could be fixed..

Edit: You fixed it, hurrah!

<comment><AUTHOR> I should have titled it "The U.S. is waging a massive shadow war in Africa", which is actually not clickbait IMO. I think the current title is misleading, given that the article is more about the already sizable scale of US military operations in Africa.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Oh, United States military operations in Africa? I've heard of that one. Interesting article though.

What bothers me is that there is a ,largely, simple solution here: stop global warming and build educational, medical, and governmental structures to support the people in Africa. We need to bring them along with us in our prosperity, and, find a way for them to enjoy stable government. I know that part of the stable government solution involves taking down dictators and other military action, but this has to also include education, food, medicine, and teaching people how to build things.

<comment><USER15> Much of Africa's poverty comes from the oppression imposed by white people in the past and present. Yes, they [edit: Africans] came with their own problems, but white invaders really fucked things up.

<comment><USER5> What is your evidence for that? Countries with the least colonial involvement are not richer then those with colonial involvement. You can simply not explain wealth in Africa based on history of colonialism. The data just does not check out.

<comment><USER16> Can you provide some data?

It seems that pretty much all of Africa was affected by colonialism; even "litte" colonial involvment would have dramatic effects. Just upsetting an established government can lead to extreme instability down the road, and redrawing country borders can pit cultures into unresolvable conflicts forever.

A country not affected by colonialism would be Japan which did quite well throughout the years.

<comment><USER5> It has been a long time since I went really deep into this topic, so I can not remember where exactly what paper or book had the numbers.

Almost all of Africa was in some way effected, but that leaves you with the same problem. Why is Botswana doing fantastically well when Zimbabwe is going down the drain. Why is Tunis doing better then Libya?

We also have to account for the fact that all of these countries were pretty poor before the Europeans arrived as well. So you can really only blame Europeans for them to continue to not do very well.

Colonization is still a very important topic, but more in the context of how it shaped the institutions in those countries. The question we are trying to explain is why are all these countries unable to make sustainable institutional changes NOW.

> A country not affected by colonialism would be Japan which did quite well > throughout the years.

Well, first I would argue that Japan culture has been far more effected by the West then the culture of Nigeria or Botswana. Why the Japan is a pretty special and unique case is a separate debate.

The same pattern does not hold for south east Asia for example. The countries not colonized are not doing better then those who have.

<comment><USER16> In 1990 people thought the German unification would be a piece of cake. We're rich and we're sprinkle some market economy on the formerly communist part.

Turns out that even under perfect conditions developing a country that was held back just 40 years in its development is extremely difficult.

Africa was held back 1000x more, and in crucial moments in history (industrialization) at that. The situation of Japan is highly relevant as an example what can happen when you have continuity and a stable environment.

<comment><USER5> I agree with everything you say. It just to narrow. Japan would not have not developed if not pushed. Botswana would not as rich if the Brits had never come.

It just not as simple, its not linear and then colonialism comes along and is holding you back. The reality is that the institutions need to develop are complex, culture, foreign involvement, geography all play a role.

Africa is poor because colonialism story just does not hold up. Its a part of the story, but by itself it explains little.

Japan is not successful because they were not a colony. The are successful because they had a centralized state for a long time, that state was was able adopt new institutions. Even had the been a colony, once the imperialist leave Japan would probably have better growth is the avg. growth in Africa.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


List of open problems in computer science - <AUTHOR> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_open_problems_in_computer_science <comment><USER2> This is cool.</comment>


Ask HN: Is there a German version of Hacker News? - <AUTHOR> I'm learning German and would like to interact with a German community akin to the one here on HN. <comment><USER2> No problem / Kein Problem

Wir hacken schon mal deinen Sprachschatz!!

"I am learning German and would like to interact with a German community like the one here on HN."

So wärs nett.</comment>


Folding Paper with a Hydraulic Press - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@yonatanzunger/folding-paper-with-a-hydraulic-press-c858f3d12a58#.avsqgrswc <comment><USER4> > Paper is made by bleaching wood pulp to remove everything but the cellulose, > then pressing and drying it into sheets.

Nitpicking: my book on paper-making talks about fiber, "filler" and "glue" as the main components in any paper or cardboard sheet.

The type of fiber results in different qualities based on source material (types of wood, cotton, etc) and fibre _length_ \- every time paper is recycled the fibers get shorter, and less "fluffy". This is why toilet paper from recycled paper is coarser; it's also why toilet paper inherently wastes good fibers: the good stuff is made from fresh fibers. On the other end we have stuff like the paper used in newspapers. Eventually, the fibers get so short they can only be used for the type of brittle cardboard pulp you see in egg carton.

Combined with fiber length, filler materials determine characteristics like how porous paper is, or how stiff. Glue.. well, should be obvious what that does, and how different types and quantities affect paper.

None of this matters for Gallivan's Theorem, other than perhaps the variation in compressibility that different paper types have. It might have an influence on the whole fusing-into-a-slab thing though.

<comment><USER5> This seems like an excellent context to provide a link to that book.

<comment><USER4> _The Complete Book of Papermaking_ by Josep Asuncion[0]. It lives up to its name, and includes many of the paper/cardboard types it discusses.

[0] [http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2665596-the-complete- book...](http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2665596-the-complete-book-of- papermaking)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Same "explosion" happens when he crushes a book with the press. Wrecks a camera. "Mayhem" as he says: [https://youtu.be/PmvKlnhMjUw?t=1m55s](https://youtu.be/PmvKlnhMjUw?t=1m55s)

<comment><USER7> I'm not convinced that the same thing is happening here. If you look at the aftermath, it seems that the press has curved a hole through the book. The "explosion" seems to be the aftershock of the press hitting the table with force after forcing itself through the book.

<comment><USER6> You see a lot of paper debris in the air that looks similar to the striated but crumbly paper in the OP video.

You make a good point and I think it's both things, actually. 1) The bonds in the paper fracture 2) The elastic energy in the press causes the cylinder to drive downward, splattering the malformed paper in all directions 3) Which makes room for the cylinder to make it most of the way through the book.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Video has an interesting ending [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KuG_CeEZV6w](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KuG_CeEZV6w)

That whole channel is full of interesting things being flattened.

<comment><USER9> The guy has pretty awesome sense of humor!

<comment><USER10> The clay animal crushings are especially hilarious, the million-subscribers video is 14 minutes of clay animals getting crushed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> These youtube canals (also Cody's Lab, Red Hot Nickel Ball, Thunderfoot's science stuff, etc) are how I think education and science could work in the future. People are willing to pay and watch ads to support such content, it's much more interactive than TV shows thanks to comments, and there's very small barrier to entry. It's exciting to see how these channels will develop.

There were even already real discoveries made thanks to youtube and patreon (for example [http://www.nature.com/news/sodium-s-explosive-secrets- reveal...](http://www.nature.com/news/sodium-s-explosive-secrets- revealed-1.16771) ).

<comment><USER12> Just looked up the channels you mentioned as well as the hydraulic press one from the article and they don't look like viable sources of education to me. The Hydraulic Press and Red Hot Nickel Ball channels are purely entertainment along the same lines of "Will It Blend?" The other two are more in depth, but are still low (Thunderfoot seems to be a feminism/politics/atheism channel?) in educational value. They might serve to get people interested in science, but they're unsuitable for learning.

Is this the same as video games getting children interested in programming? Is that how it works, or do kids turn to programming because they want to make video games? If the latter then there's not much value at all in these channels. No one learns computer science from watching Call of Duty videos.

<comment><USER11> I meant the science stuff, not the feminism/atheism/mythbusting rants.

Thunderfoot made some videos on youtube sponsored by patreon. He was experimenting with alkalic metals, and discovered that the reaction can't be driven by the hydrogen reacting as it was usually explained. He went on to work on that in lab with coleagues, wrote a paper and got published in Nature. It seems like science to me, and it was crowdfunded, that's what got me excited, because it could be used to fund research that's hard to get funded by traditional means ("is cool" is a different motivation than "is useful", so there may be many low hanging fruits). The more angles the better.

As for education - it won't replace theorethical lessons, but I think it's useful to see real experiments to develop intuition about how the theories play out in real life, how the quantities look like, what's realistic and what's not. Even with the RHNB which I agree is mostly entertainment - <USER2> physic lessons often don't allow me to predict the result of a given video. Yes it's most probably useless for my life, but so are most of the lessons I had in school. I like having the intuition about how everyday stuff behaves in extreme conditions. It's the difference between knowing that water can freeze, and seeing winter for yourself.

It's that part that was the most jarring hole in physic and chemistry lessons I had (we almost never got our hands dirty, and even if we did - it was done so fast that usually nobody got the experiments right, and there was no time to work out why for everybody, so teachers just moved on). And the stuff used in school experiments were "magical" ingredients that you wouldn't know where to get, and how to handle.

I envy the kids today that they can just look up "how to make sugar+saltpeter rocket". When I was a kid I tried it many times and it never flied (no textbook mentioned you have to have fresh dry saltpeter, or that you can dry old saltpeter in electric owen - it was just a formula and warning that could as well mean "burning 1 gram will destroy your home" or "burning 1 kg will be slightly inconvenient").

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> It's interesting when he try's this with aluminum foil:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2SY6PlbJz0Q](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2SY6PlbJz0Q)

My guess, he's not so much folding it as reshaping and mixing the metal under intense pressure in much the same way you might work dough ... (yeah, bad analogy... )

<comment><USER14> > much the same way you might work dough

No its a good one. Reminds me of how they made "Damascus" Steele by pounding different layers together.

<comment><USER15> Funny. He actually calls it Damascus Foil in the video.

<comment><USER14> I missed that! Maybe it was subconscious.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> > What happened here? To be certain, I would need to repeat the experiment > myself with a few more tools, like a thermocouple and an electron > microscope. But I have a guess.

Someone please give this guy access to a hydraulic press, a thermocouple and an electron microscope. I want to see the evidence!

</comment><comment><USER17> Interesting. I didn't know that the energy we can create with such a simple tool was enough to tear apart chemical bonds. In my head these bonds are somehow a few magnitudes stronger.

<comment><USER18> When you cut something with a knife or rip it apart with your hands you're also breaking chemical bonds. Some chemical bonds are weak enough that just normal light can break them apart. Stuff like Nitrogen triiodide decomposes whenever it feels like.

<comment><USER19> Stuff that has "nitrogen" in its name usually decomposes whenever it feels like, and humans generally don't like the results of that process - <USER3> if they're standing nearby.

<comment><USER20> Fertilizer contains a considerable amount of it and can be handled fairly safely... Unless you get careless: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oppau_explosion](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oppau_explosion)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Jake Gyllenhaal is in the Source Code - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bz0xGnFKMvE Rather unfortunate title don't you think? <comment><AUTHOR> I'm don't think they really thought the title of this movie through. Might get programmers a few strange looks if they tell someone they work with source code after watching this.

<comment><USER2> I dont think they thought the plot through... this looks awful.</comment></comment>


Newly unemployed New Yorkers are being frustrated by 1970s-era technology - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/04/nyregion/coronavirus-ny-unemployment-benefits.html <comment><USER2> Maybe the only example I've seen of technology failing to keep up with proposed changes to the law/policy, usually it's the other way around:

> New York, she added, also had a distinctly punitive approach when > calculating benefits for part-time workers that withholds 25 percent of what > they receive in a week for each day they work, no matter how many hours they > put in. That means that if an unemployed actress spent just an hour or two a > day three days a week delivering groceries for a service like Instacart, she > would forfeit 75 percent of her weekly check.

> Legislation to change the rule appeared to have the support of Mr. Cuomo and > legislative leaders last year, she said, but no bill was ever signed into > law. Mr. Blum said he was told why: The Labor Department's primitive > computers could not be reprogrammed quickly enough to make the adjustment.

So they failed to modernize the technology and then used the outdated system as an excuse not to modernize the law.

<comment><USER3> > So they failed to modernize the technology and then used the outdated system > as an excuse not to modernize the law.

Surely no-one really believes that political will was thwarted here by failed technology? It seems far more likely that someone was looking for an excuse and found one. (At the very least, the fact that the Labor Department still _has_ this primitive technology speaks to the general motivation not to invest money here, if not to any specific sneakiness around this case.)

<comment><USER4> I think people are overestimating the competence of government IT programs.

It's possible to quickly make the technical changes, but when politicians asked the small group of people with direct knowledge of the issue, this is the answer they got.

The small group of people are not plugged into SV mentality quick iterative work. They include (for example) a Perl programmer who has had the same job for 25 years and isn't interested in learning new skills.

<comment><USER5> This is not a very charitable view.

Keep in mind that at least in the Anglosphere, a point often raised about the government is that they are incompetent, that they need to be starved out, so usually

\- they don't have the resources or backing to hire people who are up to date at competitive compensation levels

\- the people left are those who have been able to survive such onslaught from their bosses, so they are presumably very jaded, cynical, and careful about new proposals

Our politicians do not empower the bureaucracy to be nimble, there is no reward for doing so. So I wouldn't expect it to be.

The incentives for government consultants are also generally not aligned to deliver quickly or competently.

<comment><USER6> There seems no way to win with government, unfortunately. If you de-fund it, you get cost cutting, reduced workforce, reduced capability, corruption, and disfunction. If you fully fund it, you get inflated costs, a bloated workforce, inefficiency, waste, grift, and more disfunction. No matter how you fund it, you get disfunction at the end of the day.

<comment><USER7> You classify it as strategic readiness and have something like a Core of Engineers do the work.

Really the US military forces need an additional branch, the Civilian Core of Engineers. They would be held to high ethical standards (on the job), and all work they do for the government would become public domain. I imagine this could be combined with a New New Deal where public-works projects are generally funded, as well as a job guarantee / internship place to build a resume and gain social connections through.

<comment> crooked-v As a minor nitpick, the word is "Corps".

<comment><USER7> I actually did mean Core as inspired by the Corps*. The distinction being that this group of individuals would be more like a not-for-profit company than the military, and thus, they aren't a Corps.

"In many armies, a corps is a battlefield formation composed of two or more divisions, and typically commanded by a lieutenant general." [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corps](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corps)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The issue is not "why don't they upgrade the system" but the issue is "does it do what is required of it by those who sign the cheques"?

Sadly, being a "hostile environment" for claiming benefit is _exactly_ what large numbers of welfare systems the world over are designed to do.

It has taken a decade for America's Underclass to claw its way back to parity - given how many more people are affected this time round, I doubt any country, even US can afford to stall so many of its citizens for so long again.

We can mail everyone a cheque. That might be the simplest solution all round.

<comment><USER9> Mailing everyone a check at the scale of the US population is also a technology problem. I don't expect it to go very well -- it will happen slowly, a lot of people entitled to checks won't get them, checks will be sent to the wrong places, etc.

<comment><USER10> Deposit $1000 into every account electronically

<comment><USER9> I have 3 bank accounts. Do I get $3000? What if one of them is a joint account with another person?

It's not that simple.

<comment><USER11> This part I actually don't think is that complicated. Only one of those bank accounts paid a tax liability or received a tax refund last year. The same one will receive this direct deposit.

<comment><USER12> Isn't this exactly how they're doing it? They're only mailing out checks to people who didn't use direct deposit for their taxes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> You can take a picture, convert it to PDF, and fax it... all on your phone. Some apps offer this for $$$, but it's possible to get it all done for free using websites (take pic -> convert to pdf online -> fax with faxzero.com). Some paid apps even mimic a scanned copy by having you take multiple shots and reconstructing what the paper looks like into PDF automatically.

The government will always be slower to respond to change, so it's sad to hear a story like this. However the author had an excellent opportunity to educate its readers, but instead focused on the fear factor (" _...he had to go to a Staples store in the middle of a pandemic..._ ") - no, he didn't have to do that. Pretending the only way to send a fax involves finding a fax machine is disingenuous.

<comment><USER14> To be fair, the majority of people can barely resize an image, let alone take a good quality clear photo, convert it to pdf, and then have the knowledge of online fax being possible.

<comment><USER15> With respect to all the elders for whom all of this computer technology stuff came up pretty late in their lifetime - when and where do we draw the line about basic computer competency?

<comment><USER16> maybe someone will come along and explain why this is insensitive, but I think if a person has access to a computer (which is not a given) and a naive search query returns (relatively short/simple) step-by-step instructions on the first page of results, it's not unreasonable to expect the person to be able to do that thing.

<comment><USER17> Have you seen people doing basic internet searches? Open "the internet" by clicking the 'e' button, search Bing for Google, go to Google, type in the web address of an email someone sent you that you printed out ... I'm not even kidding.

But yes, most people can send an image on Facebook (with some coaching), so they can learn to send an image to a fax service.

What often confused these things is that people will type "send a fax" on Google, and then install the first thing recommended - those recommendations are based on 'making most profit for $company & Google' and so are often not the best system and often charge a lot c for basic services (with all the usual dark patterns).

<comment><USER16> yes, I often have to watch my father do these things. sometimes I can't handle the frustration and give step-by-step instructions, but I try to act like a TA and have him come up with the next step. usually he can figure it out himself if given enough time, he just doesn't really believe he can.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Same thing happened to a relative on mine two weeks ago when she tried to apply for unemployment.

The state web site wanted additional documentation, and because the walk-in offices are closed, the only allowed method of delivering the documents was by fax.

I signed up for an e-fax service and sent the paperwork for her. She also mailed a copy just in case, though that wasn't listed as an approved method of sending in paperwork.

While I think the state should be able to accept paperwork uploaded to its web site, I understand them not wanting to do that. With the way we've seen unemployment insurance web sites overloaded to the point of crashing across the country, uploading is no longer as reliable as fax. Some would say it never was.

E-mail is a worse solution, IMO. I say this based on the number of misdirected e-mails I receive in my commercial mailboxes from people who mistake one of the web sites I run for all kind of businesses from Boeing to hospitals. Millions of people think nothing of putting all of their personal, exploitable information in an e-mail to a stranger.

I work in the healthcare space, and the social media guy says that people are forever sending him very personal health information through Facebook, Twitter, and other insecure methods. Or worse — when he posts something about a particular condition, hundreds of people will post photos of themselves asking if he thinks they have it, too.

Fax isn't perfect. But it is far better than what Silicon Valley has given us to date.

<comment><USER19> Good point. The failure is that there is no open, interoperable way to transfer files.

<comment><USER20> Http POST isn't interoperable and open?

<comment><USER21> Try sending an HTTP POST to someone's phone.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Posted this on twitter, and will re-offer here. At my company , we have had to build an e-fax platform due to faxing still being used heavily in the medical space. If anyone needs to fax documents for unemployment, DM me on twitter or email me (email in HN profile) and I'll set you up so that you can fax for free.

<comment><USER23> I'm curious about what your e-fax platform is. I've integrated our platform with 2 e-fax providers and I'm not happy with either of them.

<comment><USER22> Hi,

We're nor particularly happy with our API partner either, so would be happy to share experiences. Can you email me at cavan at gethealthie dot com ?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> This is an example of administrative burden. In this case, it's due to bureaucratic incompetence, but it is often an intentional policy lever to limit access to benefits:

[https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/01/28/upshot/admini...](https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/01/28/upshot/administrative- burden-quiz.html)

[https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/18/upshot/medicaid- enrollmen...](https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/18/upshot/medicaid-enrollment- obstacles-kentucky-work-requirement.html)

<comment><USER25> And just as often, I'd add that it's more about systemic factors. Let me quickly tell the story of GetCalFresh: [https://www.getcalfresh.org/](https://www.getcalfresh.org/)

This was built by some friends of mine, my former colleagues at Code for America. Their basic notion was that applying for CalFresh (our version of food stamps) was too hard. So they applied classic Lean Startup techniques to solve the problem. They ran Google ads and directed assistance seekers to a simple Typeform that had barely enough information for the best case, and figured out how to get people benefits Then they iterated rapidly. You can read more of their story in this two-part article: [https://leanstartup.co/part-1-from-root-hypothesis-to- functi...](https://leanstartup.co/part-1-from-root-hypothesis-to-functional- software-with-code-for-america/) [https://leanstartup.co/part-2-from- prototype-to-real-transac...](https://leanstartup.co/part-2-from-prototype-to- real-transactions-testing-with-code-for-america/)

From the stories I've heard from them over the years, the real problem was neither incompetence nor malice. It's that doing anything involving a lot of different people is really hard. The counties actually had online application for years. But those systems were built by large government contractors, and they focused on satisfying the law and the rules. They focused on completeness, on perfection, on conformance to spec. Like so much enterprise software, user experience just ended up being a low priority. There are lots of _causes_ for that, but it's not like any single person is _to blame_. Everybody's just responding to their local incentives, trying to get by.

Happily, a lot of the people in government I've met truly believe in public service. For me the moral of GetCalFresh is that almost everybody involved _wanted_ things to be better. The trick is showing them how to make that happen in the context of the system they're in.

<comment><USER26> > they focused on satisfying the law and the rules. They focused on > completeness, on perfection, on conformance to spec

Did the gov contractors do things like ensure the site was accessible? Because those laws exist for a reason, and the official government website SHOULD be held to comply with them. Sometimes this is detrimental to how slick a site looks.

While your friends site has much less of an obligation to comply with this kind of requirement, a quick check shows that something as simple as contrast is not good enough for vision impaired users [https://wave.webaim.org/report#/https://www.getcalfresh.org](https://wave.webaim.org/report#/https://www.getcalfresh.org)

This ideas that > user experience just ended up being a low priority may be better stated as > user experience for people like me just ended up being a low priority

<comment><USER27> Perhaps the needs of the many should outweigh the needs of the few?

<comment><USER25> No. One, the needs often aren't in conflict. Building an accessible website doesn't hurt people who don't need it. Two, government is there to serve everybody, and in practice a lot of the people it serves directly are the ones already neglected by commerce, so it needs to be especially good at not just ignoring "the few".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I have a digital signature for all my online interactions with the government. In Sweden, for example, there is a system named BankID that is used to access your bank account or pay your taxes.

The last time I used a fax was one connected to a Windows 2000 server in a small company. So, I will use a scanner and use the shares fax printer. Thanks is almost 20 years ago.

I am surprised how low tech the USA is. I would have expected something like that in a small countryside town, but never in a major city.

What's the reason for such a sad state of technology? I do not find it reasonable nor cost effective.

<comment><USER29> Fax is often used in healthcare. As bad as it is, it has the advantage of being universal - there is no vendor lock in. When the alternative is lots of separate systems with their own incompatible file formats and terrible user experience, faxing a document (which produces a paper copy on the other side) might be the easiest way.

<comment><USER30> Email is also universal. The difference is that fax has a legal exception carved out for it that permits HIPAA-compliant systems to consider fax as secure while email is considered insecure and thus non-compliant.

Of course fax is horrendously insecure. But the legal exception stands, and when your security posture is dictated by regulatory compliance and not by results, then it's the best solution.

<comment><USER31> I think this is true. The only time I fax, is annually, to renew my insurance. The 'binding letter' requires a physical signature, and they reject a 'digital signature'. Yet, a fax is digitial. All righty then.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> "Ms. Steffens said that Connecticut has had to resort to recruiting retirees who knew how to program in COBOL, a nearly extinct computer language."

I work at fortune 25. We are training college grad COBOL. It may be endangered but it won't be extinct for decades.

<comment><USER33> Do you find it hard to attract college grads to do that?

<comment><USER34> We have a college grad who volunteered for one of our COBOL/assembler teams. The kind of alpha nerd who runs his own reverse engineered WoW server, that kind of thing. So it might seem surprising that he's want to be buried in COBOL-land, but his rationale was pretty simple: he wanted to come to work, build things, and go home without being on a treadmill of learning new crap all the time.

That was a decade ago. He comes to work, he churns out business functions, he goes home and fiddles with whatever amuses him. Meanwhile the grads in the same era who came into .NET or Java teams have gone through how many patterns and frameworks? .NET to .NET Core + .NET to all .NET Core, WPF, UWP, whatever the new hotness is? J2EE, SpringBoot, microservices, JSF, React, React Native, etc.

I find it hard to think he did the wrong thing, really.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> I'm idly wondering how today's "modern" Java* micro-service buzzword driven setups will look to someone who has to maintain it 40+ years later.

Maybe COBOL and mainframe wasn't that bad after all.

<comment><USER36> At the very least they won't require the physical presence of a mainframe and that's something.

<comment><USER37> They will require different cloud providers to still provide the same interfaces. Good luck with that. You also need different package repositories to still work. I think a mainframe is a safer bet.

<comment><USER34> The upside is that having to tweak things every 5 years (say) will probably make it less likely that things will just work for decades, until they collapse in a screaming heap.

<comment><USER38> It feels to me that a system that doesn't tolerate massive technical debt is a better system.

I think the same phenomena exists with Linux and dynamic linking. Linux is incredibly less crufty than Windows because userspace compatibility isn't so long-lasting, APIs can be deprecated, garbage removed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Can we get a fax.gov?

It's great that there are so many websites that can fax a PDF for you, but theres good cause to not trust them with your private information. Especially given the sort of information a Government service needs to process a claim.

Until the Government can figure out how to make usable websites, fax.gov would be a safer fallback.

It can charge a small fee for service, and maybe whitelist known Government fax numbers (to prevent scammers from convincing people to send data to a scam number).

<comment><USER40> USEMS (United States Electronic Mail Service) as a branch of USPS is urgently needed. However, it should not be operated in a for-profit manner.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> Is anyone working on scaling up approaches like the US Digital Service? It is clear that government is often shafted by contractors that spend very little of the project budget on programmers, and it's starting to hurt people (rather than just being a tax on progress).

<comment><USER39> Unfortunately the problem is more complex than just contractors. The Government could easily push contractors to hire a larger percentage of programmers, and reject contracts with low programmer head count by claiming that such setups do not appear likely to succeed.

What's the US Digital Service approach?

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> I've applied for jobless and other benefits on new York and never used a fax machine. I'd complain that the job listings are choked with spam (e.g. A job listed in Ithaca is really in Syracuse, nope, really in Atlanta) but other than that their systems work OK.

The leader of my friend's coven wrote new printer drivers for 390 mainframes because IBM couldn't be bothered to support enough printer ports that NY needs to support the mandate of turning around paperwork in 2 days.

NY really does it: I get my tax returns freaky fast compared to the federal gov. Drivers license and car permit renewals are fast, permits to stock tripod grass carp, whatever.

</comment><comment><USER43> He's still trying to figure out how to get the required intact wax seal to come thru the fax.

<comment><USER44> In an alternate timeline, people complain about how much it costs to refill the proprietary wax cartridges for their fax machine.

<comment><USER45> In an alternate, alternate timeline, carrier pigeons never went extinct and stayed as the height of asynchronous communication... pgsql (now termed PigeonSQL) is built on top of an elaborate system of carrier pigeons holding and moving small scraps of paper around a large warehouse... pigeons carry messages along extraordinarily complex plexiglass tubing so that today's kids can play their latest video games... and the fax machine is nothing but carbon paper, a press, and a paper affixer with a well trained carrier pigeon standing by, the worst part of the upkeep is all the damned bird seed.

Pigeonpunk (patent pending)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> Yeah, we get that a lot. Its amazing how many faxes we send for students. In a bigger city the library or a UPS store (or equivalent) can be used, but here we do it for them.

Its the same for things that won't ship to a PO box, as we get some student shipments for students who haven't figured out how to write a BS address the UPS guy would figure out. Expecting people to have actual addresses that result in home delivery is just not something that you can depend on in the US.

</comment><comment><USER47> Wow. This problem exists in my country's gov entities too. Only as a result of public pressure they finally enacted the "faxes law" demanding public entities to allow digital means of contact. Now they struggle to enforce the law and faxes are still bottle-necking administrative processes.

</comment><comment><USER48> I used to use online fax services but I never quite felt comfortable with them having my data. So last time I had to, I looked into it a bit and it turns out Twillio has a programmatic fax option, so I signed up for a fax-enabled number and put it in a lambda [1]. Upload the fax somewhere accessible (e.g. dropbox/s3) and sent the url to the handler.

It ended up being really cheap/easy so I keep paying for the fax number now just in case I ever need to do it again.

[1] - [https://github.com/J-Swift/lamda- starters/blob/master/exampl...](https://github.com/J-Swift/lamda- starters/blob/master/examples/node_twilio_faxer.js)

</comment><comment><USER49> I'm certainly not justifying the state of affairs, but there are a lot of private institutions that still operate with faxes as well. They'll accept an original document either snail-mailed or faxed. The easier and quicker option is obviously fax.

Of course the fax encoding and their document management system will likely muddy the details up. So the actual person processing the document will call to confirm the details, and half the time you end up emailing them a crystal clear image file anyway.

I think it's more a legal technology and workflow problem than a computing technology problem. When fax machines were new technology, the legal work was done to bless accepting facsimiles of raised seal documents. Now "modern" B2B faxing works good enough, so this work hasn't been done for emailed images. (And ironically with a good scan you can actually see the physical relief of a raised seal)

FWIW another thing I've found is that even when you can upload image files directly to a document management system, you likely want those to be black and white ( _not_ greyscale!), otherwise they will be turned to black and white with an unpredictable threshold, also destroying details.

<comment><USER50> The problem is it's legal to create totally unreasonable processes and expect people to just sort of deal with them.

<comment><USER49> Back when the fax process was first being implemented, it would have been a convenient advancement. So while your point does have general merit, it's not particularly applicable here.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> Related: "Federal Agencies Need to Address Aging Legacy Systems (2016) [pdf]"; [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22783355](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22783355) ; [https://www.gao.gov/assets/680/677454.pdf](https://www.gao.gov/assets/680/677454.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER52> "Jot down your specific request and any relevant particulars. Enclose your card. Have your man bring it around and I'll ascertain it makes its way into the right hands. Expect to be notified by post on any conclusions, settlements or further necessary queries. Yours, <comment><comment>~"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> I just checked... there are still online fax services.

</comment><comment><USER54> Serious question: Should I learn COBOL in 2020-0?

<comment><USER55> Have you ever said to yourself "self, I really want to work on large, badly maintained accounting and finance systems that should have been retired years ago?"

<comment><USER56> It is _fun_ , for a little while at least.

<comment><USER55> No, it's not. Although I guess maybe it's good for society that _somebody_ finds it so.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> You can blame the government for that one (not specifically BECAUSE it is the government). They made rules about privacy during an era when tech was still growing. With banking, education, and healthcare, this is a norm. You have to fax because somehow computers are "scary and hard to understand!" so we just still use fax machines.

This is also what happens when you have a government that doesn't act proactively to hire people who are competent and gets people as the lowest bidder or a stable wage that never.changes...

</comment><comment><USER58> Heh, maybe we will finally get an honest "follow the money" moment in NY and we'll get to see exactly why they are still on fax.

</comment><comment><USER59> Why rewrite a system that's working? This is why. You can't just coast on the amazing system someone built in the 1970s. Because in a crisis, no one is left who knows how to scale it up. Most of the devs from the 1970s have retired. Make jokes about NodeJS or Rails if you want, but right now NJ and NY could find a ton of Node devs.

<comment><USER60> I'm sure they'd be happy to authorize a rewrite - as long as you can do it in two weeks, breaking every task down to a four-point "story" before you've even looked at the scope.

</comment></comment><comment><USER61> Politicians are elected based not skill but marketing. The hardest job for them is to win elections and then they use connections to make money. At least in eastern eu. If politicians would need to be tested and can be easily fired maybe they can do smth. But in todays system it's nearly impossible.

</comment><comment><USER62> Question: Sure, we can send you anything you need, you just need to fax us your ID. Answer: I can not do sofrom where I am now. Question: Why so? Were are you located? Answer: 21st century

</comment><comment><USER63> I get that these are hardware/software issues, but this is the same deferred maintenance gotcha that's plagued public infrastructure generally.

</comment><comment><USER34> Years of voting for leopards to eat welfare recipients' faces turns out to bite people in the face when they become the welfare recipients.

</comment><comment><USER64> Wow, awarded contract to TCS. That's going to go well.

<comment><USER65> That was my take away. Imagine awarding these government contracts to foreign body shops

<comment><USER66> New York could hire their unemployed software engineers to replace the backend for their unemployment system. It would make something positive from the situation.

<comment><USER65> It seems the contract was granted some time ago (2017?) so it's unlikely this is a choice. But yes, I think municipal/local government contracts should look to source these things locally

<comment><USER67> From the article..

 _Last year, it awarded a $56 million, five-year contract for that solution to Tata Consultancy Services_

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER68> Surprisingly the film industry still uses fax machines. And some use FileMaker Pro believe it or not.

</comment><comment><USER69> all the fax and COBOL talk today, this throwback comic has come up a few times:

In the 24th century... [https://abstrusegoose.com/323](https://abstrusegoose.com/323)

</comment><comment><USER7> Paywall so... archive.org

[https://web.archive.org/web/20200405204230/https://www.nytim...](https://web.archive.org/web/20200405204230/https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/04/nyregion/coronavirus- ny-unemployment-benefits.html)

</comment><comment><USER70> There is no app for that?</comment>


Ask HN: How to present new code-styleguide to colleagues? - <AUTHOR>

Frontend department at our company is growing fast, people are working in small teams, but our CSS/HTML is still a mess. I decided to organize a small workshop and present some basic rules: html5 elements, no greedy selectors, no ids, extensibility, flexibility and so on.<p>The question is how to enforce those rules without getting rejection and hate from other developers? <comment><USER2> Instead of enforcing them and making it a top-down decision, make it a discussion where everyone has input. If the CSS/HTML is really a mess, then everyone probably knows it and has to work with it every day.

See if you can come up with an estimate for how much of a time suck the bad practices actually create, and how much extra time it would take for people to actually do it correctly the first time. If you put it to them as "You can spend 10 minutes now, or an hour later when you come back later and have no idea what's going on", they'll probably be a bit more receptive.

Come in with a set of standards - then ask for objections / suggestions and make it a collaborative effort. Be prepared to defend your choices, and allow others to defend theirs as well.

Is there anything like checkstyle for HTML? (I work in Java, and our team uses it to enforce style guidelines) The easier it is for people to follow the rules, the more likely they are to actually do so.</comment>


"This is why Tesla is so insistent on selling direct to customers" - <AUTHOR> http://www.autoblog.com/2016/01/21/this-is-why-tesla-is-so-insistent-on-selling-direct-to-customers/ <comment><AUTHOR> @Mods that is the actual title, not an editorialization :)</comment>


Research shows how much value consumers assign to various apps - <AUTHOR> https://www.mcguffincg.com/what-consumers-would-pay-for-popular-free-apps/ <comment><USER2> 4,20$/month for YouTube.

> Doesn't seem like much, right?

McGuffin just multiplies that number by the amount of current users to project possible revenue increases by over 10x.

I think this might be flawed in 2 ways:

\- I know I would personally pay much more and would expect most people to "low-ball", not really knowing what it's like to live without it

\- Having to pay something is a huge block to people, especially those in developing regions or who are underage. I would expect at most 50% of users to be convertable into paying customers.</comment>


Ask HN: Making Wireless Work With Linux Mint/Ubuntu? - <AUTHOR>

A few weeks ago, I asked the community which operating system I should install on an old Thinkpad T40 (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=655621). I decided to try Linux Mint and am loving it thus far. One catch: I can't get wireless to work with IBM's internal wireless card - Intel PRO/Wireless 2100.
I've dug around on the Ubuntu help forums and didn't really find an answer I could implement. Funny enough, fellow hackers and founders at our meetup here in NYC wished me good luck - as this tends to be a common problem with Linux. Ethernet isn't working as well.
So, HN, I turn to you. Can you help me make wireless work on my laptop? <comment><USER2> I'm assuming you tried this: <http://ipw2100.sourceforge.net/>

The other thought I had is to save yourself some pain and find a usb wireless adapter that linux supports since, I believe, the T40 doesn't have a pcmcia slot.

<comment><USER2> [http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16833124...](http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16833124183&Tpk=WUSBF54G)

Plug and play on Ubuntu. Has a built-in wireless finder. $75 bucks. At minimum wage, you've probably burnt enough hours on this to pay for it. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Get NDISwrapper: <http://sourceforge.net/projects/ndiswrapper/>

It will allows you to use the Windows driver for that wireless card.

</comment><comment><USER4> I'm sorry, I don't play pokemon.</comment>


Breaking max efficiency of solar cells by activating 2 electrons with 1 photon - <AUTHOR> http://news.mit.edu/2019/increase-solar-cell-output-photon-2-electron-0703 <comment><USER2> This is incredible. I mean it's a long way to seeing this in affordable silicon solar cells, but still amazing to me that the materials engineering can accomplish things like this.

It leads to roughly a twenty percent boost in theoretical max efficiency. If that can be translated to a twenty percent actual improvement, that's huge.

<comment><USER3> We're already below 2 cents/kwh utility scale cost for solar and utility scale battery storage [1]. We're rapidly approaching the point where the solar is "almost free" and you're just going to pay for the battery storage (until that cost is rapidly driven down as well).

[1] [https://www.utilitydive.com/news/los-angeles-solicits- record...](https://www.utilitydive.com/news/los-angeles-solicits-record-solar- storage-deal-at-199713-cents-kwh/558018/) (Los Angeles solicits record solar + storage deal at 1.997/1.3-cents kWh)

<comment><USER4> There's nothing wrong with solar per-se, but it's just not sufficiently power dense if you're talking national scale power usage. [https://www.finder.com/uk/solar-power- potential](https://www.finder.com/uk/solar-power-potential) seems to think that countries like the UK would need more than 10% of their area covering with solar panels to cover their energy needs. I think you'd need to be talking about an order of magnitude improvement in efficiency to really start making it look really feasible as a significant way to change our fossil fuel usage, no?

<comment><USER5> Methodology is flawed. If you switch from burning oil in ice engines to electric you use at least 50% total energy less.

So they overestimate area needed.

<comment><USER6> What's that due to? Less energy lost to dissipation?

<comment><USER7> For the same kind of reason solar panels only access about 15-20% of the energy that hits them.

<comment><USER7> I was serious. Solar cells are like solid state heat engines in that they're fundamentally limited by Carnot Efficiency (which is theoretically high for solar cells as the effective temperature of sunlight is high). If we're going to use "primary energy" and not useful electrical or mechanical energy, then we'd need to include the energy of sunlight falling on the solar panels, which is about 5 times the useful electrical energy produced.

And just like actual heat engines, solar cells are improving. The best cells have achieved 47% efficiency in the lab, comparable to a high performance combined cycle natural gas plant (note that thermal power plants often cheat a bit by listing the efficiency in terms of the low heating value of a fuel, ie the heat produced not counting condensing the water vapor out).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> "2 electrons with 1 photon" \--- that is how photosynthesis works in nature. Great thinking!

<comment><USER9> Photosynthesis is less efficient than solar panels. According to the Wikipedia page on photosynthetic efficiency, typical plants have a radiant energy to chemical energy conversion efficiency between 0.1% and 2%.

<comment><USER8> It's true but photosynthesis has two stages. The light reaction stage is quite efficient. Chlorophyll a is slightly more efficient than commercial solar panels. The dark reaction stage, which assimilates CO2 to produce carbohydrates, is the limiting step that drives the efficiency down.

<comment><USER10> Non-light sensitive parts of photosynthesis has to be inefficient because otherwise aerobic respiration would be inefficient.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Interesting how "through a process called singlet exciton fission" and other article "General Formula for Bi-Aspheric Singlet Lens Design Free of Spherical Aberration" [1] both deal with Singlets. Odd coincidence of the day.

[1] [https://www.osapublishing.org/ao/abstract.cfm?uri=ao-57-31-9...](https://www.osapublishing.org/ao/abstract.cfm?uri=ao-57-31-9341)

<comment><USER12> FYI they are totally different "singlets", a singlet exciton refers to the spin state of the particle (as opposed to a triplet exciton, which has a different total spin). A singlet lens is just a lens with a single simple component.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> This is great - but isn't hafnium pretty rare?

<comment><USER14> Kind of, but not enough to matter for this application anytime in the next several years. The USGS report at [https://www.usgs.gov/centers/nmic/zirconium-and-hafnium- stat...](https://www.usgs.gov/centers/nmic/zirconium-and-hafnium-statistics- and-information) says the US imported 36 tonnes of hafnium last year. If a three-atom-thick layer of hafnium is 0.6 nanometers and weighs 13.3 g/cc, those 36 tonnes would cover 4500 km², enough to produce about 700 GWp of solar energy. The US installed 10.6 GWp of photovoltaic generation capacity last year, which would amount to one seventieth of its hafnium imports. (China installed 45 GWp.)

It _is_ relevant once photovoltaic energy becomes the main power source for the humans, because the materials used in current photovoltaic cells are dramatically more abundant than hafnium.

<comment><USER13> Thanks for putting it into context!

Generally I wonder about sustainability of rare earths (and other elements with limited supply like helium). We build a lot of products that don't last very long - some of it gets recycled, a lot of it doesn't. Wonder what humans 200 or 2000 years later will think of our consumption

<comment><USER14> Helium is a special case: when it leaks into the atmosphere, it eventually escapes into space. So the humans really do _consume_ helium, just as the humans consume fossil fuels. By contrast, all the lithium, phosphorus, carbon, aluminum, iron, hafnium, zirconium, and erbium ever mined on Earth is still on Earth, except for the extremely small amounts sent to Venus, Mars, the Moon, and interstellar space on spacecraft, or transmuted to other elements in nuclear reactors. It is not consumed, just moved around a bit. _Where is it_?

Well, it varies by element.

While some of the phosphorus makes up human bones, most of it is dissolved in the ocean as phosphate, enormously less concentrated than the original deposits of apatite and other minerals it was mined from. At some point the humans might run out of easily accessible apatite deposits, since phosphorus only makes up 0.1% of the Earth's crust. If we consider only the top 2 km of the continental crust (29% of the surface) to be "easily accessible", that's only 3.0 × 10⁸ km³ of rock, or about 7.1 × 10¹⁷ tonnes, of which about 7.1 × 10¹⁴ is phosphorus. Since phosphorus is currently being mined at 153 million tonnes per year, the humans are currently on track to deplete most of it in only 4.6 billion years, considerably earlier than the Earth is on track to be destroyed by the sun.

As for the carbon, it's mined for its chemical potential energy, which is lost when it is burned; but the carbon remains on Earth. 870 billion tonnes of it is in the atmosphere, of which about a third is due to the humans setting rocks on fire; a comparable amount has been added to terrestrial biomass and carbon in the oceans. The part in the atmosphere is relatively easy to recover; existing processes have comparable cost to the cost of digging up rocks. This is not being done at scale because it is "unprofitable".

More than half of the aluminum that has been mined on Earth is still in use. The other half is mostly in landfills, where it is less concentrated than the bauxite ores that are commercially mined, but less oxidized.

Most of the iron that has been mined is in landfills, but not only ores but also slag heaps near foundries are a more concentrated form of iron.

Rarer metals like gold, hafnium, zirconium, and erbium are mostly in landfills. They mostly do not readily form soluble ions to leach into the ocean or groundwater, and they mostly only find their way into the air when incinerated. Their concentrations in landfills are dramatically higher than the concentrations in the ores they are mined from, and this is becoming a "profitable" way for the humans to spend their lives before being killed by the hazards of the landfills. Presumably automation will speed up this process.

<comment><USER13> This is really insightful. A lot of human "progress" and activity includes us exporting growing amounts of high entropy waste, for a mostly unaccounted for, deferred cost.

In most natural systems there is no waste - everything gets recycled. We create a mess digging for elements around the planet, consuming the "value" of the things we make from those elements (and large amounts of energy) in a way which lasts a very short time, and disposing of the waste which then mostly get spread around the planet in even greater mess. I find it difficult to see how automation will easily solve our waste problem - it seems many orders of magnitude easier to try to solve it _before_ human waste gets to a giant garbled heap or gets spread around the atmosphere/oceans/groundwater/(soon low earth orbit) where it's difficult to retrieve, and seems to cause huge problems to the natural world (and ultimately is) by being in places it shouldn't be.

Why are humans so good/bad at creating a mess? Are we equipped with skills/incentives to solve this conundrum, or will we continue to drown in our mess?

<comment><USER14> The Earth doesn't recycle solar energy; it wastes ≈100% of it by radiating it away into space. Over 99% of it never even gets photosynthesized, just being absorbed as heat and then reradiated as infrared. Far less than 1% was ever accumulated in fossil fuels, and of course accumulating it as heat at the surface would be fatal. Nor does it recycle, for example, crustal iron; once the iron finds its way into a subduction zone and melts into the mantle, it gradually finds its way to the core, never to return. Even the fast CO₂ cycle is noticeably leaky, as a substantial amount of CO₂ is taken up by marine organisms that sink to the bottom and stay there, eventually being compacted into limestone and remaining limestone for hundreds of millions of years (the slow CO₂ cycle), until probably being liberated again by volcanism. So, I think that for most definitions of "waste", it is false that in most natural systems there is no waste.

It's true that recovering materials from the atmosphere and oceans is more difficult than mining them. But most of the materials we're discussing don't end up in the atmosphere and oceans; they end up in landfills. And recovering them from landfills is, generally, much easier than mining them from natural deposits.

Landfills are much more concentrated and heterogeneous deposits of "valuable" elements than the ores from which they are mined; for example, a single accidentally discarded catalytic converter may contain 5 grams of platinum- group metals, which are reduced and relatively easy to recover; commonly mined _natural_ ores of platinum-group metals (the Merensky, chromitite, and contact types of deposits) typically contain 5 grams _per tonne of ore_ , mostly oxidized and thus requiring not only froth flotation but also smelting. And catalytic converter platinum-group elements are far from the only "valuable" elements in landfills.

The trouble is that when the humans go digging around in landfills with their bare hands, it reduces their life expectancy a lot, because of poisons, injuries, and poor safety practices around refining. This is not a new problem for mining — the Spanish silver mines were a death sentence for the enslaved indigenous Americans sentenced to work in them — but the particular measures needed to solve the problem are different for landfills than for other mining. Automation will largely solve them. I suspect that the same ritual-pollution taboos that cause the humans to deprecate garbage collectors, cannibals, and undertakers are a major factor in the slow development of landfill mining.

A Kessler syndrome in LEO will be only a short-term problem, as the lifetime of objects there is limited to decades, not even a single million years!, by atmospheric drag, and the quantity of mass there is limited by launch "costs". MEO Kessler syndrome would be a more serious problem.

Doing things creates messes. Lowering entropy locally — one definition of life — raises entropy globally. Doing more things will create more messes. Doing things intelligently can create safely contained messes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> So is two the most possible? Is it possible to activate three electrons with a single photon?

<comment><USER16> Yeah but you'd have to start with very energetic photons. The article says that you mint get two elections when a green or blue photon hits, so to get three even theoretically you'd need to use ultraviolet optics photons. And there just aren't enough of those in sunlight you make a noticeable difference in efficiency.

<comment><USER17> Let me try to do the math here, please correct me if I'm wrong.

The band gap of Si in solar cells is about 1.1 ev. To excite three electrons, a photon thus needs 3.3ev, or about 370nm.

The visible spectrum starts around 380nm or 390nm, depending on which source you believe. So the triple photon frequency would be _very_ near UV.

According to this spectrum [0], there's a sharp drop in solar power around the 370nm.

It seems that with the 1.1ev band gap, exciting three electrons doesn't seem to be worth it. But, if you could reduce it just a bit (by doping, most likely), it might be worth considering.

Of course, reducing the band gap would likely lead to much worse performance overall, so one would need a multi layer approach, which sounds pretty complicated.

And then you need to pray that your glass cover doesn't absorb the UV light, which seems to be a pretty close call[1].

[0]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunlight#/media/File:Solar_spe...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunlight#/media/File:Solar_spectrum_en.svg)

[1]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soda%E2%80%93lime_glass#/media...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soda%E2%80%93lime_glass#/media/File:Soda- lime_glass,_typical_transmission_spectrum_\(2_mm_thickness\).svg)

<comment><USER18> All that said, in space based operations your UV isnt going to be filtered and may allow you to generate more power.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Pardon my ignorance but don't avalanche photodiodes, scintillators, phosphors, etc. excite many electrons per 1 photon? Why is 2 electrons for 1 photon noteworthy?

<comment><USER20> I assume those are powered.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> [https://cen.acs.org/energy/solar-power/Supercharging- silicon...](https://cen.acs.org/energy/solar-power/Supercharging-silicon- solar-cell/97/web/2019/07) has some good takes from people in the field

</comment><comment><USER21> I'm glad to see Baldo has moved on from useless experiments on hexacene. Sincere congratulations to him and his group.

</comment><comment><USER22> I mean it all means bunk till a mass produced product is on the shelves. A lot of these "breakthrus" fail to note edge cases like scalability, durability

<comment><USER23> While true, it's worth noting that it's happened. It's rather like when there's a theoretical breakthrough that might help to cure a type of cancer. Will it result in an actual medical breakthrough that helps people? Usually not. But, occasionally yes, and that's huge, so it's still worth noting. If you don't get enough shots on goal, you never score.</comment></comment>


Show HN: ThingStore, input arbitrary key-values and calculate with them using jq - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/fiatjaf/thing-store <comment><AUTHOR> Demo: [https://abstracted-flavor.surge.sh/](https://abstracted- flavor.surge.sh/)

This is unfinished, but the idea is that you can input arbitrary data organized in records, create "kinds" that come with default keys and optionally default values (can be useful if every record of some kind needs the same formulas, for example) and then do calculations inside or between records using the powerful jq language.

Please see the README for some animated gifs and more explanation.</comment>


Show HN: I built a place to judge the internet - <AUTHOR> https://knowed.com <comment><AUTHOR> The site that I built lets you save links to articles, videos, and stuff like that.. and you give other posts a Thumbs-up or Thumbs-down.

You build reputation "points" over time... BUT those points are specific to individual topics.

So... votes have a bigger impact on the topics members are trusted with (by the community). Kind of like a "peer-review" system.

There's other stuff.. you can build libraries, organize bookmarks, etc. But the real purpose of this is to let a community decide what passes as "GOOD" on the internet... I think we need that.

Enjoy, and please let me know what you guys think. This is my first project, ever, so I could really use some feedback.. Thank you!</comment>


A Month Without Adobe Flash Player - <AUTHOR> http://krebsonsecurity.com/2015/06/a-month-without-adobe-flash-player/

<comment><USER2> I have set Flash to click-to-play for at least a year now, maybe more.

I'm using the "HTML5 Video Everywhere" extension [0], which covers some websites. Many other websites have a link to the mp4 video or an RTMP stream in the flashvars. It takes at most a minute to find it.

Whenever I come across a website that requires Flash, I usually decide to not watch it and eventually complain about them via twitter or something.

There's also youtube-dl [1] which has the -g option to print a direct link to the video. The name is a bit misleading, it actually supports over 500 websites.

And there is livestreamer [2] which gives you links for live streams with over 60 different services.

BTW, an issue with click-to-play is that websites can detect it. For example, SoundCloud asks you to enable it when click-to-play is active, but often works fine when it's completely disabled. I asked their support 2 times about this, but I didn't really get anywhere. However, there are extensions that add a button to enable/disable Flash completely.

0: [https://github.com/lejenome/html5-video- everywhere](https://github.com/lejenome/html5-video-everywhere)

1: [https://github.com/rg3/youtube-dl](https://github.com/rg3/youtube-dl)

2: [https://github.com/chrippa/livestreamer](https://github.com/chrippa/livestreamer)

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm without the Flash player for about half a year. The only thing that really doesn't work is Facebook's native video ("YouTube in a Facebook post" works fine). Modern internet has a surprisingly small dependency on Flash.

<comment><USER4> > Modern internet has a surprisingly small dependency on Flash.

It depends what you do. I've not used Flash for about 10 years, and never really missed it. The most common use of Flash these days is for video players, which is the easiest use-case to work around since it doesn't actually require any Flash-specific capabilities; wget and VLC are a fine replacement, and the URLs can be extracted using Firefox addons, greasemonkey scripts, commandline tools, digging around in Firebug, or just Googling around to find an alternative source. I don't know about videos on facebook.com, since I've never had reason to visit that site.

"Real" uses of Flash (like newgrounds.com which I used to visit obsessively) are basically impossible to work around. None of the FOSS reimplementations (LightSpark, Gnash, swfdec, etc.) is any good, although swfdec seemed the least-bad in my experience. On the other hand, such usage is rarely critical. There are very few "giant Flash file" sites around these days, and most of those that used to exist could be either safely ignored (eg. games) or worked around (eg. emailing the owner to obtain whatever info you need).</comment></comment>


Forget Apple vs. FBI: WhatsApp Just Switched on Encryption for a Billion People - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/2016/04/forget-apple-vs-fbi-whatsapp-just-switched-encryption-billion-people/?mbid=social_fb <comment><AUTHOR> this is huge. I hope they'll be able to keep it turned on.</comment>