A Vaping Illness That's 'Becoming an Epidemic' - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/31/health/vaping-marijuana-ecigarettes-sickness.html <comment><USER2> As someone who has experience in this industry I can point to the cause.

Biomass ("trim") was very easy to source leading up to CA recreational legalization in 2018. For those of you who don't know the majority of cannabis nationally comes from CA and OR. Legalization brought with it enforcement against unlicensed NorCal farms that drastically reduced supply. This was amplified by the massive overproduction of the 2017 market that had many farmers leave the market due to extremely low prices. This is evidenced by the shutdown of soil/grow supply warehouses throughout NorCal.

By February 2019 the last of the October 2018 harvest had been processed to distillate. Many operators started reprocessing waste material. At the same time, distillate started to make it's way over from Mexico. There is a drought of product in the black market but wholesale buyers were reluctant to pay higher prices after becoming accustomed to the low prices of 2018. In the beginning unscrupulous sellers started diluting their product by 60%. Buyers eventually caught on to the charade and started paying attention to the reduced viscosity of the oil as an indicator of cutting agents. Sellers countered this by adding thickening agents.

Now you have an illicit market with high demand, not enough supply, and customers that represent established black markets across the country that don't want to pay a risk premium for oil.

The cutting agents themselves are expensive so people have started making their own. Now people are getting sick from the cutting agents.

<comment><USER3> Do you think that pesticide use could be a contributing factor as well?

I ask because my hemp mentor will never touch concentrates. He argues that even the tiniest bit of pesticides or inorganic fertilizers will also be more concentrated and he's not willing to gamble on it. There's just too many unknowns when it comes to that.

<comment><USER4> If they are extracting from trim and other low-value parts of the plant, yeah that is a possibility. Myclobutanil has a boiling point around 200 C, THC around 155 C. They have similar hydrophobic nature. So any extraction process favoring THC will also likely partition myclo. If you are making concentrate from buds, this isn't an issue, as your ratio of active components to pesticide is going to be similar. However if you are extracting low-density plant matter, your ratio of myclo to actives will be higher.

However, the highest number I've seen reported was just shy of 1 ppm myclobutanil. Not great, but that's still pretty low.

[https://www.thestranger.com/slog/2018/12/20/37272899/no- one-...](https://www.thestranger.com/slog/2018/12/20/37272899/no-one-will- take-responsibility-for-this-pesticide-ridden-vape-cartridge)

<comment><USER2> I've seen 700ppm total pesticides and typically between 50-300ppm in the CA medical market of 2015-2017. Myclo up to 150ppm was pretty common in the crude I was testing. I tested at SClabs, Anresco, Steep Hill, CW Analytical, etc. depending on client preferences.

<comment><USER5> Is this specific to vaping supplies, or would it also impact CBD oil tinctures?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is a casualty of state governments dragging their feet when it comes to legalization.

You can get very "legit looking" THC cartridges very easily where I live (New York). They're Chinese-made copies of legit dispensary brands which are then filled with whatever junk. It doesn't surprise me at all that some of them are tainted.

<comment><USER7> I find it interesting that the article is targeting vaping in general rather than buying tainted products.

(My money is on THC extraction using Butane that is meant for fuel (that's heavily contaminated) rather than lab-grade/ pure.)

<comment><USER8> Surprised terpenes aren't mentioned in article -- when heated too hot they can degrade into benzene. Seems like they are targeted for something to extract not remove (although I know nothing about cannabis - only industrial contaminants).

Not sure how hot the heating elements are supposed to get but if they get too hot you're inhaling stuff that basically creates pneumonia symptoms.

<comment><USER3> The mighty vape is pretty well respected and ranges from 180C to 200C. Would that be hot enough to convert some into Benzene?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I believe these vaping cases are from using elicit, underground THC vaping products and not the usual e-cigarette / nicotine vaping we usually associate with the word "vaping."

There's some details over on Reddit:

[https://www.reddit.com/r/electronic_cigarette/comments/cxov1...](https://www.reddit.com/r/electronic_cigarette/comments/cxov1b/no_one_needs_to_read_this_but_i_need_a_place_to/)

<comment><USER10> That thread seems like speculation without much to back it up. Not everyone showing symptoms smoked THC cartridges and the article makes it clear that experts have not yet identified a specific cause

<comment><USER11> >Not everyone showing symptoms smoked THC cartridges

Are we sure about that? The article doesn't seem to say that to me. It also says that patients sometimes lie about what they vape.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I remain cautiously pessimistic because there are two main possibilities: (1) there is one product (or a series of products manufactured/purified in the same way) that causes respiratory failure in many or all users, (2) all vaping products have a low level risk of causing respiratory failure. I don't think there is enough data to make a conclusion yet, but I am worried this will end up being a low-level persistent problem with vaping products—bootleg or not—for the rest of our lives.

Maybe the culprit truly is dirty oil based extraction of THC... but if so, that will remains a problem for as long as there is no regulation of the official market as well as an operating black market.

OTOH we may end up with a situation like we have in the world of muscle builder / hormone supplements where most people are fine but some users get really sick (e.g. deer hormones sold at regular stores causing severe kidney injury), but not enough of them get sick to get the CDC/FDA involved. I've seen those cases in the hospital and the patients are always confused as to how this could happen because they got the supplement from a vitamin store.

With respect to some of the European posters below who have been using vape products for years: I would not be surprised if there were health consequences to those devices that had not been identified in Europe. The US has one of the best disease identifying-apparatuses in the world (the Centers for Disease Control) and a tradition of surveillance and reporting that is unparalleled. If a substance is harmful to health, it's got a better chance of being found here than anywhere else.

</comment><comment><USER13> Only tangentially relevant, but does anyone have any insight on how applicable this broader topic might (or not) be to the "essential oil" industry?

Specifically talking about the business of "essential oil diffusers" and the sales of essential oils. From my understanding, the diffusers are largely akin to ultrasonic humidifiers containing oil instead of water (though several forms of diffuser exist including ultrasonic, evaporative, heat, etc) -- which I would imagine is basically just putting oil into the air for later inhalation...

The article mentions several times, and somewhat unsurprisingly, that the inhalation of oil is not good for you or for the health of human lungs. Is this the case with all types & classes of oils (ie "essential oils"), or are oils used for vaping specifically bad/worse, or is there just not much data on the broader topic of inhalation of atomized oils yet?

I've read the relevant Wikipedia articles and read through the studies/sources that are freely available, but if anyone has any further insight or knowledge I'd really love to better understand it.

FWIW, my personal _guess_ would be that the inhalation of most any non-gaseous matter is probably bad for you -- but if there's any science/data out there on it I'd love to hear about it.

<comment><USER14> I think concentration and magnitude is key. Frying definitely vaporises oils into the air but it doesn't seem to be causing lung issues.

<comment><USER15> Breathing the smoke and grease from frying is definitely not _good_ for you. That's one reason kitchens tend to have serious ventilation.

But people accept a certain amount of risk, since everyone needs to eat and cooking is a career for many people. Cooking is nowhere near as dangerous as smoking cigarettes.

<comment><USER16> Most cooks I know do both unfortunately

<comment><USER17> Do we have reliable data about the incidence of smoking among cooks and food preparation workers? How does it compare to the general population? Smoking is supposed to affect negatively your ability to recognise taste and smell, which are very important if you work in a kitchen but, at the same time, I too know several people who are in that line of business and are smokers.

<comment><USER18> You know why? Because all the chefs I know say the same thing - smoking is the only way to get any sort of break while in the kitchen, going outside and standing still doing nothing for 5 minutes is not acceptable, but somehow going out and smoking for 5 minutes is absolutely ok in most kitchens. I know some people who picked up smoking _only_ to have an extra break at work.

On the plus side, I also know someone who bought himself an e-cig and somehow buys "blank"(saline/water filled) cartridges for it, just so he can have a short break but without any side effects of actually smoking.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Vaping has much more history in Asia and Europe and seems to be without cases like this. The products from the cigarette industry aren't very prevalent in those contintents and also not vaping of THC and other such fluids. That plus the limited geography and timeframe seems to point only to contaimated juice.

<comment><USER20> Yes, a good investigation would be to analyse what all of these people vaped, and if they all came from a common source.

<comment><USER21> I'm 90% sure they just gave right up when they figured they'd vaped.

what else do they have in common, that's what I'd like to know, maybe they'd eaten that day, or consumed water.

<comment><USER22> I don't think that is how the CDC works...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I'm in the military. Some cadets visited our unit recently and I dropped in to say hi. One of them, a 13yo, asked about using a Juul while on duty. Our tour guide didn't know what a Juul was. Then a dozen kids showed him. Maybe 1/4 of the cadet group were carrying the devices.

<comment><USER24> This has a HUGE sampling bias of only 13-year-olds that end up in a military recruitment program while still being the age of a child.

<comment><USER23> Cadets /= "a military recruitment program". Cadets are more like the boy scouts, at least what scouts were a few generations ago. It is more like a summer camp where, if you are the best camper, you get to go on a helicopter ride on the last day of camp.

<comment><USER25> Does cadets = JROTC?

<comment><USER23> Maybe in the US. There are other countries on this planet.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> The actual number of cases isn't given, only a minimum:

> Dr. Pirzada is one of the many physicians across the country treating > patients — now totaling more than 215 — with mysterious and life-threatening > vaping-related illnesses this summer.

215 is a much smaller number than I would have guessed based on that headline, and it's also an oddly-specific number to just say, "More than" with. This stinks of sensationalism. Shame on you, New York Times, you're better than this.

Why does it matter? Vaping only has to be a tiny bit healthier than smoking and prevent a small percentage of people from smoking, to save "more than 215" lives. The research into the effects of vaping doesn't seem to be conclusive, so I don't know yet whether vaping is safer, or by how much. But when research does come to some concusions, I want public policy with regard to vaping to be written based on facts viewed in context, not sensationalized fearmongering.

<comment><USER27> Don't think it's a weird number. i would certainly hope they know _exactly_ how many cases have actually presented - plus there will always be some more that never see a doctor's office.

<comment><USER26> If they know _exactly_ how many cases have presented, then they could have said _exactly_ how many cases have presented, instead of saying "more than 215".

And this is the number of cases, it's the number of _patients_. You're not a patient until you see a doctor, so that doesn't include people who don't see a doctor.

There are a lot of numbers that are more than 215, but with such a specific number, it makes me think that the number is something like 217, and they just said "more than 215" to sensationalize it.

And to be clear, 215 cases in a nation the size of the US is _not_ "becoming an epidemic".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I'd like to remind everyone of the trial of Tim Heidecker, which was a case similar to this

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WWotb3gci0A](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WWotb3gci0A)

<comment><USER29> He was fully exonerated though!

<comment><USER30> common don't spoil the ending like this

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I don't know how founders and investors of vaping startup sleep with blood in their hands. Outside this epidemic, there is real epidemic among school students making an entire future generation of adults addicted to nicotine.

<comment><USER32> 1) Vaping is far safer than smoking, and I applaud any efforts, profit-seeking or otherwise, that induce smokers to switch to vaping _now_. And though some claim that e-cigarettes didn't hasten the decline of cigarette smoking, and are possibly slowing it, if you look at the data you can't make that inference. In fact, if you look at the data it's just as possible that vaping was hastening the long-term decline. The problem is that of those who claim to both vape and smoke cigarettes, nobody is reporting the ratios--are they vaping in addition to smoking the same number of cigarettes, mostly vaping but smoking a few cigarettes each week, etc?

2) The source for the epidemic of vaping comes from the yearly youth drug survey. And if you look at the survey results, youths are experimenting with vaping in the same numbers as marijuana. And just like with marijuana, the activity is mostly only once or twice a week, not daily smokers. Where's the concern about the "epidemic" of pot smoking among youth? There's ample evidence that smoking pot is much more harmful for youth, both for their mental and physical development.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Maybe I'm showing my age but it brings back memories of Legionnaires Disease.

</comment><comment><USER34> > But vaping has its own problems: To become inhalable, nicotine or THC, the > high-inducing chemical in marijuana, must be mixed with solvents that > dissolve and deliver the drugs.

This is not strictly true; there are vaporizers that take regular dried cannabis buds and deliver THC. No chemicals are involved.

</comment><comment><USER35> Mass hysteria / moral panic perhaps? Isn't the greater, real threats are people are inhaling massive quantities of nicotine and propylene glycol, and not sufficiently cleaning their atomizers?

</comment><comment><USER36> This is all weed pens and concentrates right?

<comment><USER37> Local news said "89% report using products which contained THC" I've not seen it stated online

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> I vape dry herb, should i be worried?

</comment><comment><USER39> We already know exactly what's causing this, and it has nothing to do with THC or vape juice (vegetable glycerin).

These people are vaping grey market THC carts. Grey market being the operative word, because the process used to make wax relies on using butane and other heavy solvents to dissolve the plant while keeping the THC intact. These small, backyard producers are dumb as shit and don't know how to properly remove the solvents.</comment>


Problems with Paywalls - <AUTHOR> https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/06/04/problems-with-paywalls/ <comment><USER2> This is a classic market failure / coordination problem. Most of us understand the articles don't write themselves (AI summaries and fake news bots notwithstanding), first party research and fact-checking is time-consuming and expensive, and newspapers are merely responding to cutthroat market pressures. There's zero Slack [0] in the online news business.

I think it's more a problem of convenience than refusal to pay. I continue to find it surprising that browsers haven't made a more aggressive push into business models for micro-payments, or Netflix-style clustered content subscriptions, where each article incurs zero marginal cost, and some fixed recurring stream is divvied up based on what is read. I get why Google doesn't do this, so as to not cannibalize the bread and butter of their ad revenue, but it seems to align with Mozilla's and Apple's interests, and a differentiator against the current market leader. Brave [1] is at least a good start.

If we _really_ wanted to disincentivize clickbait fluff (not to mention abysmal reading experiences), maybe even give sites/articles a little extra share in response to browser-integrated micro-surveys. Readers usually know when they're being bullshitted, and when they've consumed something of substance, and I suspect would be eager to reward/punish accordingly.

[0] [https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/05/12/studies-on- slack/](https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/05/12/studies-on-slack/)

[1] [https://brave.com/](https://brave.com/)

</comment><comment><USER3> I have a simple solution to paywalls.

I block those websites permanently.

So yes, I _".. refuse their deal – and so be left no worse off than if they didn't exist"_ as the author puts it.

<comment><USER4> Sadly you can't block them in google search results.</comment></comment>


Engineering, path-breaking, and (not) being okay with ignorance - <AUTHOR> https://subwayprophet.github.io/posts/pseudo_engineering_gaps_dogmatism.html <comment><USER2> Maybe partly depends on whether you are the kind of engineer that designs/makes tangible things that can kill people, or the kind of engineer that "moves fast and breaks things"</comment>


Machine Learning for Human Memorization - <AUTHOR> http://blog.smellthedata.com/2010/12/machine-learning-for-human-memorization.html

<comment><USER2> I gave only a quick read, and I'm completely unfamiliar with Scrabble... but: why not use a Markov chain? I would start looking at the two step case, using only the most probable letter. In this case you have to remember a 26x26 matrix, if this doesn't work you can extend it to the top-n letters.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Another question: are there other scenarios outside of playing Scrabble where something like this would be useful?

<comment><USER3> In the abstract? Probably. But in human domains I suspect you're unlikely to find something very amenable to this sort of approach without a lot of looking. I actually think he's better off just memorizing because the words are human words from human minds and just trusting to your own human mind is going to work better than a simple math approach.

The one thing I'd consider adding is memorizing the tuple (word, origin), because English's problem is that my first paragraph is simplified for English; we actually use many different distinct human patterns, and helping the brain partition the problem might be helpful.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> hah, this is cool.</comment>


Stephen Hawking's New Black-Hole Paper, Translated: An Interview - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/dark-star-diaries/stephen-hawking-s-new-black-hole-paper-translated-an-interview-with-co-author-andrew-strominger/ <comment><USER2> This paragraph really nailed it for me:

 _" We show that when a charged particle goes in, it adds a soft photon to the black hole. So it adds hair to the black hole. And more generally if any particle goes in—because all particles carry mass and are coupled to gravity—they always add a soft graviton. So there's a kind of recording device. These soft photons and gravitons record information about what went into the black hole—infinitely more information than we previously believed is recorded by this mechanism. Now whether all information is recorded by this mechanism… I'm pretty sure the answer to that is no, but there are generalizations of this mechanism and then it's a lot more confusing."_

They're showing in this model that perhaps, the event horizon of a black hold acts like this kind of abacus, pushing the photons suspended at the edge of the horizon a little bit in, a little bit out, recording what has fallen over that horizon during the life of the black hole.

That's really, really cool.

</comment><comment><USER3> Maybe a Black Hole destroys information, or perhaps it changes information to a form that we can't (yet) recognize. Presently, both of those states would look the same to us.

<comment><USER4> Did you have something specific in mind? Otherwise as I read your comment I should mention the 'recognizability' of the information is irrelevant to the paper. The paradox is about the differing predictions from general relativity and quantum mechanics, one of which implies that the information is lost and the other of which implies that the information is not (the form it takes is not important).

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> My first question is, how much of this is provable, and how much is conjecture?

<comment><USER6> You can simulate the equations [1] and debate if it matches observed objects.

[http://arxiv.org/pdf/1601.00921v1.pdf](http://arxiv.org/pdf/1601.00921v1.pdf)

<comment><USER7> That would be tough since we've never actually observed an event horizon. We don't know if they even exist.

The only observations we have are of supermassive objects. Do they have event horizons? We assume so, but no one really knows.

<comment><USER8> We may get an answer to that in the future via the Event Horizon Telescope [1] which plans to "directly observe the immediate environment of a black hole with angular resolution comparable to the event horizon."

[1] [http://eventhorizontelescope.org/index.html](http://eventhorizontelescope.org/index.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I find articles like this both incredibly interesting but perhaps even more confusing.

It must be because the complex math underlying these findings can not accurately be expressed in human language.

<comment><USER2> The further down the theoretical rabbit hole you go, the more so even high- level discussions probably need a general comfort with the field.

Discussion about these soft particles, zero-energy photons and gravitons, being added to a vacuum changing its state out to infinity is pretty fascinating. I would have liked him to explain a little more in-depth how one of these particles could have no energy but still have a spin, though I imagine that's left to the reader to go find the papers that define it.</comment></comment>


Getting codes in different languages to interact - <AUTHOR> http://philbull.wordpress.com/2012/08/05/getting-codes-in-different-languages-to-interact/ <comment><USER2> SWIG seems like a glaring omission. It's not great, but it's a lot more fun than using the python C API directly.</comment>


Follow-up to "Quiet Ladies. Wadhwa is speaking now." - <AUTHOR> http://blog.ameliagreenhall.com/post/i-wrote-about-wadhwa-and-youll-never-guess-what-happened-next

<comment><USER2> My thoughts on the original article:

I'm sure Wadhwa does a lot of things that are counterproductive to his stated goals and obstructive to the women trying to have their voices heard. I'm sure he is oblivious to the fact that he ends up stealing some attention from the cause for himself, and to many other things.

However I'm also pretty sure that he is earnest in his intensions and his desire to help women in tech. He is well respected in Silicon Valley by many influential people and has the pulpit to attract the attention to the difficulties women in tech face and the great things they have to offer. His language may be off and he is a bit tone deaf, but consider that he was (probably) raised in a fairly patriarchical, misogynist culture that he has come to actively reject and campaign against. I also take offense at the libelous implication that Amelia (author) makes of the sexual nature of Wadhwa's offer to talk to people who disagree with him at his private office at Stanford.

I am not a woman, a member of an lgbt or any other visible minority group, but I strongly support acceptance and acknowledgement of the shared humanity that we all share, equal opportunities and everybody's fundamental right to human dignity and making choices in their private lives that make them happy. I will take help and support for these causes anywhere they come from, especially if it is coming from a person that is in the position to influence a group that is otherwise unlikely to listen to these messages. I also support open civilized discussion and believe that well intentioned and compassionate people will make changes in their behavior if someone takes the time to explain to them in a non-hostile manner how particular things they are doing harm the people they want to help.

<comment><USER3> > I also take offense at the libelous implication that Amelia (author) makes > of the sexual nature of Wadhwa's offer to talk to people who disagree with > him at his private office at Stanford.

I don't really think it's like that. It's more the latently threatening implications of requesting that someone come see you, one-on-one, behind closed doors on your own turf.

Think of it like the iconic scene in the film _Network_ (as referenced earlier this week in the _Better Call Saul_ premiere) where Ned Beatty's seemingly- harmless Arthur Jensen invites Peter Finch's anxious and ambitious Howard Beale to talk in his corporate conference room. Once the doors close and Beale is without recourse or defense, Jensen blows up into an apocalyptic rage, contextualized by his tone and environment to inescapably inculcate his forced parishioner that he is no less than, as Beale meakly whimpers at the end of the tirade, "the face of God".

Clip for those who haven't seen it: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yuBe93FMiJc#t=20s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yuBe93FMiJc#t=20s)

</comment></comment><comment><USER2> Supreme Court holds that a proper remedy to hate speech is not censorship, but more free speech. Publishing slanderous accusations ("Wadhwa invites women to his office _hint hint wink wink_ ") only serves to discredit the cause.

</comment><comment><USER4> Yeah, self-appointed spokespeople are a weird group anyway. It's good to see one taken down a peg.</comment>


SQL for Data Science - <AUTHOR> https://dzone.com/articles/sql-for-data-science <comment><USER2> I often suggest to people wanting to get started working in programming to learn SQL.

1\. It's easy to pick up but harder to master. 2\. It's been around forever, it doesn't change much. 3\. It's invaluable for reporting and analysis. 4\. You can get a job with just that skill.</comment>


Intel's Ivy Bridge reviewed - <AUTHOR> http://www.extremetech.com/computing/126879-intel-core-i7-3770k-review-ivy-bridge-lower-power-better-performance

<comment><USER2> A very interesting feature of the Ivy Bridge architecture is a new digital random number generator code-named Bull Mountain, which uses teetering as an integral part of its workings. [1]

While consumer-oriented reviews rightfully ignore such things, I reckon that the HN crowd would be pleased to know more about such a nifty hardware solution.

[1] [http://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/hardware/behind-intels- ne...](http://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/hardware/behind-intels-new- randomnumber-generator/0)

<comment><USER3> Teetering must be the marketing term they chose... the phenomenon in play has been known as metastability for as long as I've been a digital designer.

And generally speaking, it's something you want to avoid in your designs, not only because of the unpredictability of the final output (whether it resolves to a 1 or 0), but also because of the uncertainty in how _long_ it will take to resolve.

But it seems perfect for generating randomness. Neat idea. The real trick here is that it's only theoretically unpredictable. In real life, due to "imperfections" in fabrication, the inverters will be biased to resolve one way more frequently. So you might end up with a 60/40 split, for example.

I see they do address this in the article, and have added some "conditioning" to eliminate the bias... I bet it's described in a patent somewhere.

<comment><USER4> Also, there is a bit set after executing RDRAND that tells you if you got a 'good' random number.

<comment><USER5> Does anyone else feel like that's the sort of thing that will become part of a vulnerability someday?

<comment><USER6> No. It's used as a measure to NOT become part of a vulnerability someday, i.e so the system recheck and ask for another random number.

<comment><USER5> If it's just a flag you can ignore, I think that someone will.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I guess I don't really understand why this is impressive - the GPU is still not good enough to handle modern gaming and apparently has some issues with media encoding as well (although I will admit that that section confused me somewhat), and it sounds like the CPU is just a modest upgrade in efficiency.

I'm not saying it's bad, it looks like solid progress form Intel as we all continue to expect, but I don't get why this is considered 'tick+' when it seems less exciting to me than Nehalem.

<comment><USER6> > _I guess I don't really understand why this is impressive - the GPU is still > not good enough to handle modern gaming_

Because the huge of majority of the population does not care about "modern gaming", but they do care about less costs and improved batter life with an integrated GPU and would like to see it offer better performance for apps where it's needed?

<comment><USER8> Your right that the majority of the population doesn't care about playing battlefield 3, as an example. But, a very large precentage of the populous is insanely interested in casual gaming, see farmville.

The value that gets skipped by mainstream "tech sites" is that, yea its kinda crap at playing battlefield 3, but what it does do is create a baseline of capabilities that you can expect out of an average device. In other words, it opens the doors for mainstream adoption of technologies that weren't there before, ultimately leading to a new baseline performance for those putting out casual games.

I guess what I'm saying is that the next farmville could now have decent 3D graphics where as that was out of the question prior to the mainstreaming of decent GPUs. Intel plays a key role in that process.

<comment><USER6> > _I guess what I'm saying is that the next farmville could now have decent 3D > graphics where as that was out of the question prior to the mainstreaming of > decent GPUs. Intel plays a key role in that process._

Well, you have some point, but I think that Intel's GPU capabilities are far better than the needs of a casual 3D game. I would expect to first see some casual 3D games that utilizes at least that power, before I would think that more power is needed.

Also, a biggest problem is that MS doesn't support WebGL in IE, so no 3D casual games, except if you model them with a 3D engine build on Canvas (which would mean it would use only the 2D acceleration features of the GPU that the canvas uses).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Was anyone else looking at those die photos and thinking that it'd be better to put 4 more cores in that space occupied by the GPU?

<comment><USER10> Not really, allow me to explain.

One of the challenges of GPU performance is getting the connection between the CPU and Memory correct. That is why for years and years you've had the 'special' video card slot which was optimized for that, and then the general purpose slots that didn't have the kinds of demands that video offered. So if I get back space for a 'regular' slot and can put the GPU inside, that is a win for me, even though I predominantly use them in servers which brings me to ...

CUDA, or more accurately, running general purpose compute tasks on shader engines. Having the GPU there, even if I am not using it as a GPU, can provide some impressive benefits if I can program it to operate on in memory data in a fast parallel way. So in this regard it stops being a GPU and starts being a kind of funky but powerful co-processor.

And of course the third thing is that keeping the power draw sane is important. Its a small chip and pulling a lot of heat out of it is very difficult. Additional cores, additional heat, higher operating temps (or more exotic cooling systems).

One of the things that would be interesting (but won't happen on an Intel part any time soon) is if there were a bridge port so you could run dual-CPU and the GPUs could run in a crossfire/SLI mode where they each rendered every other line or something along those lines. Since I use dual cpu motherboards that would give me additional compute options that I don't have at the moment, but it won't happen at Intel because it would disrupt the market positioning of Ivy Bridge.

<comment><USER11> Ouch, please don't do this. You're mixing stuff up badly. The "special" video card slot throughout history has simply been a higher bandwidth interconnect relative to whatever else was there (well, in the AGP days it also had a primitive IOMMU for doing DMA into userspace). The integrated graphics on Intel parts, obviously, have the important distinction of sharing the memory controllers (and, I believe, the L3 cache?) with CPU work. That does hurt things under some loads, though many games are actually quite CPU-light these days.

"CUDA" is an NVIDIA trademark for their compute platform, it's not a special kind of technology. In fact Intel's i915 derived GPU works very similarly. In fact, Intel's AVX instructions also work along basically identical lines. They're all wide SIMD implementations of a bunch of parallel tasks(/threads/lanes/warps, the Industry terminology is a mess).

Honestly, I think rwmj is right: for a consumer gaming rig, it _would_ be preferable to have an 8 core part without integrated graphics. The reasons that isn't going to happen aren't technical though: first, Intel needs to ship different binnings of these same parts into segments (Ultrabooks, tablets) where the graphics are required and where price is more constrained -- basically, they have to make these in large quantities anyway. Second (and relatedly) they already do make "lots of cores w/o graphics" variants, but they sell them into the low volume _server_ market where margins are much higher. Selling an 8 core consumer chip would canibalize Xeon sales.

<comment><USER10> Just to clarify:

You: "The "special" video card slot throughout history has simply been a higher bandwidth interconnect relative to whatever else was there..."

Me: "One of the challenges of GPU performance is getting the connection between the CPU and Memory correct. "

Yes, its the GPU <-> (CPU/Memory) interconnect. It has, since the introduction of PCI, been a 'different' slot than other peripherals. So I don't see how we're confused.

You: ""CUDA" is an NVIDIA trademark for their compute platform, it's not a special kind of technology. ... the Industry terminology is a mess)."

Me: "CUDA, or more accurately, running general purpose compute tasks on shader engines."

The industry terminology is a mess, however most readers recognize the name 'CUDA', nVidia's implementation of a shader language, as that technology. Further it was the introduction of using shaders as vector units which lead to folks implementing things like the 'PS2 supercomputers'. (and to be precise, no you cannot use nVidia's tools on PS2s)

You: "Honestly, I think rwmj is right: for a consumer gaming rig, it would be preferable to have an 8 core part without integrated graphics."

Which is great, what I would love to see then is how you reason to that opinion. What is it about the 4 additional cores that would improve the 'consumer gaming rig'. How are you measuring 'good' vs 'not as good'? Cost? Triangles per second per dollar? Developer support?

"Second (and relatedly) they already do make "lots of cores w/o graphics" variants, but they sell them into the low volume server market where margins are much higher. Selling an 8 core consumer chip would canibalize Xeon sales."

I don't think anyone has argued that Intel couldn't make an 8 core processor out of this technology, heck the feature size is small enough they could probably to 12 or 16 cores and still get decent yield, but there are other system issues associated with that, most notably cache behavior and size.

But the specific question on the table was that Intel has made a part which they expect people to put into laptop machines and maybe even tablets. They chose to make it a four core machine with an integrated GPU, are you arguing that the consumer experience on those laptops would be improved if Intel required an external GPU? If so I'd be interested on your take on that as well. First, the way you evaluate value, and then the case for an external GPU that maximizes that value.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Agreed this report comes across a bit underwhelming, but the integrated GPU boost is really what I've been waiting for. And it's more power efficient to boot.

I don't play games, but I do have a crazy-big monitor and want a bit more oomph drive the display before I get a notebook without a dedicated graphics card. Still waiting on the dual core ...

</comment><comment><USER13> for my usage pattern, still no reason for me to move from the core 2 quad.

<comment><USER14> care to elaborate? i have a core 2 quad, which i find more that enough even for some of my "serious" programming work.

<comment><USER13> At work I'm on I5 and I7 stuff and never use all that (I'm one of the few here on HN that isn't a programmer). At home, I was going to put in a 2600K at the last build but there was that whole chipset recall problem and I needed something in quick so I went back a generation and got the core2quad - 8 gig of ram. usage pattern is really office applications and a few specialized plot applications (Igor). after I added the SSD, and a newish video card the CPU is just not the problem. frankly.. there is no problem. so no incentive to upgrade.

When I started using computers heavily in the 90's you were lucky to get a year out of a machine before it was just too slow to do the tasks you needed. For me, those days died when the P4 came out. Unless your super CPU bound like compiling - you just don't need it for basic office stuff.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This is the first time I've heard of Quick Sync. Sounds useful.

It's only supported on Windows, with a proprietary SDK. No documentation. Yay...

<comment><USER11> "Quick Sync" is a marketing term for the hardware video codec on the die, and a software suite built around it. The Intel software is windows-only, but I'm pretty sure the codec is documented. At least it has a section in the big SNB graphics docs dump they did a while back. But AFAIK there are no free drivers written to it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16>
      implements support for DirectX 11, OpenCL 1.1, and OpenGL 3.1.

This should be a boon for game developers.

<comment><USER17> Erm, is this real support, or just more cribbing from Mesa?</comment></comment>


Source code from the book "HTML5 Game Engines" - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/dannagle/HTML5GameEngines

<comment><USER2> The demos from the book are incredibly lame -- hardly more than "hello world".

I checked out the linked game engines, and of them the only compelling option seems to be ImpactJS (Turbulenz is hard to tell since the website linked is user-targeted). That said, ImpactJS seems to be non-free ($99). (Not complaining, $99 is a small price to pay for a good library with documentation.)

</comment><comment><USER3> The examples are pretty bad.

I think a game developer should learn generalized game development rather than focusing on a specific engine, and apply those skills towards the platform of their choice.

I find most of these "game engine" books almost like "learn x in y hours".

</comment><comment><USER4> Is it common to include Javascript as a part of HTML - in the sense that they describe some of the demos as "pure HTML5?"

To me that feels ... wrong. Obviously Javascript is a core ancillary feature for browsers, but it's not part of the markup specification itself.

<comment><USER5> "Pure HTML5" is intended to convey the maturity of "The Web" as an application platform, much like J2EE, J2ME, .Net before it. It no longer means a purely markup solution, but is also restricted to a "plug-in free" user experience for compatible web browsers. This evident when you see the W3C's HTML5 Badge Builder [1] and note all the APIs it allows you to specify.

[1] [http://www.w3.org/html/logo/#badge- builder](http://www.w3.org/html/logo/#badge-builder)

<comment><USER6> So the idea is to use a big monolithic multi-API thing as opposed to modular plug-in based system?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Most infuriating game of pong i've ever played.

<comment><USER8> I agree. It would be much better if the keydown vars were set to false on an actual keyup event rather than setting it to false after the paddle is moved.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: any good resources on space Harvest,Build,Research,Explore game theory? - <AUTHOR>

i'm looking for resources on game theory for [space based] Harvest, Build, Research, Explore games, know any? <comment><USER2> The core of _game theory_ is just the min-max result from von Neumann and Morgenstern. Actually, just as mathematics, linear programming is a slightly stronger subject, and the min-max theorem is a simple consequence of standard results in linear programming.

This von Neumann - Morgenstern result is for, say, the game of Paper, Scissors and Rock. Closely related is the J. Nash result on _bi-matrix_ games where, basically, the difference is two _payoff_ matrices instead of just one.

Beyond those cases there is the case of games such as chess and checkers. Here it is easy to prove that if players play as best as possible, then the outcome is determined just by who moves first. So, the player who moves first may get always a win, a tie, or a loss, depending on the game. To determine what a player should do, the calculation is a simple tree traversal; the practical problem for games as complicated as chess is that the tree is too big for current computers. As some games illustrate, there can be fast, simple algorithms to determine the moves with no tree traversal at all, but so far apparently no one knows such a simple algorithm for a game such as chess.

What else in _game theory_ did you have in mind?

<comment><AUTHOR> i'm dumping on a google doc all my thoughts about a mobile client, massive multiplayer space based game, similar to Eve Online, and like you said best, i'm searching for information on technical and mathematical theory, particularly at the moment, on possible approaches to consistently implement the players resource "ticks"

<comment><USER3> If it's massively multiplayer then I think you're better off exploring economics than game theory. Try these: [http://smartech.gatech.edu/bitstream/handle/1853/31657/bilir...](http://smartech.gatech.edu/bitstream/handle/1853/31657/bilir_tanla_e_200912_mast.pdf?sequence=1) <http://www.gamestudies.org/0302/castronova/>

<comment><AUTHOR> yes, thanks (i'm missing some words on my vocabulary)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


TensorFlow Code for Google Research's BERT: Pre-Training Method for NLP Tasks - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/google-research/bert <comment><USER2> Nice, I was just starting to contemplate about how much work it would be to train a bert model from scratch.

Context to understand the importance of this release: [http://ruder.io/nlp- imagenet/](http://ruder.io/nlp-imagenet/) Though not named in the post, BERT is part of the same family of models as these.

</comment><comment><USER3> Let's say I wanted to classify email subject lines as "likely spam" vs "likely legitimate". As input, I have billions of examples of each.

Would BERT help me by first enabling me to transform the input subject lines into vectors in a high dimensional vector space which could then be the inputs into a relatively shallow network that does the classification?

<comment> jean- Absolutely. If your only input is the subject line, then you're dealing with a single-sentence classification task. You'd need to take the "class label" vector from the top layer of BERT (labelled "C" in Fig 2b of the paper) and then feed that to your own classifier.

For the experiments in paper they actually fine-tuned BERT on the downstream task, but I reckon you'd get acceptable performance by just keeping it fixed and using its outputs as features for a shallow classifier.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Fully replicable code, yay! I really hope this becomes the norm. In fact, I hope this approach becomes so expected that researchers outright ignore papers reporting experimental results without fully replicable code and instructions released with it.

</comment><comment><USER5> The paper is at [https://arxiv.org/abs/1810.04805](https://arxiv.org/abs/1810.04805) however the PDF link gives error: [https://arxiv.org/pdf/1810.04805](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1810.04805)

<comment><USER5> [https://arxiv.org/pdf/1810.04805](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1810.04805) works now

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Can I get JUST the embeddings out of the model for lets say:"My cat dance in the rain" and compare that with the embeddings from "my dog runs in the rain" to compare math-wise(vector-diff) how close they are ?

<comment><USER3> Pretty sure you can tap the model at any layer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> TIL LSTMs are out, Transformers are in.

<comment><USER3> LSTMs were "too good to be true".

<comment><USER8> why?

<comment><USER3> So simple yet so effective - to a point.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Road to Robotic Parking Is Littered with Faulty Projects - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/28/us/road-to-robotic-parking-islittered-with-faulty-projects.html <comment><USER2> There are many good robotic parking systems, but the US-developed ones tend to be one-offs, and are not engineered well enough.

The design problems are mostly basic mechanical design problems. Some systems park a car on a flat pallet, then move the pallet. This has the risk of the car rolling if the brakes don't hold. The more robust systems have a curb on both sides of the pallet and depressions for the wheels, or curbs that rise at each end. (This should be mandatory in earthquake zones.) This also gives the driver more guidance on getting the car positioned properly. The modern systems all check with light beams for proper positioning, but it's better if there are also physical obstacles.

There are palletless systems, where rows of rails rise up under the wheels and lift the car for transport, but those seem to be less popular.

The better designs have more than one retrieval mechanism that can access each slot, so if one fails, the system can still operate, but more slowly.

The lifts have to have the usual safety devices of a freight elevator. There is no excuse for an elevator falling, which has happened.

The usual problems of exposed machinery apply. Everything has to be built for a wet, hostile environment. Optical sensors must survive dirt. Limit switches must survive being banged on. Motors must be weatherproof. Some of these parking systems are repurposed automated warehouse designs, and that's a marginal approach. You want someone on the design team who's designed for a harsh environment, like railroading. "Move fast and break things" will not work.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is a solved problem in Japan and its actually annoying seeing space being wasted in Tokyo by traditional ground level only parking lots, since they could have built a much taller structure to serve more cars.

</comment><comment><USER4> A huge complex and probably expensive system is made so that people can wait while their car is brought to them instead of driving it out themselves. This idea will never make it.

<comment><USER5> Except in places where land is very expensive, for example, Tokyo or NYC.

In addition these systems can be used to good effect in auto manufacturing. BMW has one for finished vehicles; the GM plant I worked at in Arlington TX has one for painted bodies.

Throughput is definitely an issue; in the manufacturing system I worked with, a vehicle could be stored or retrieved in about 1 minute; but these are uniform size and shape, and are not finished products. 6 minutes seems like a very long time, unless you have an app to pre-retrieve your vehicle.

Also I wouldn't care to design one for all of the various types and sized of vehicles.

<comment><USER6> Similarly this is very common in small boat/dinghy storage where land values near water is very high (albeit with a lot less automation). Raised racks store boats long term and an operator has to retrieve it on request.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> "...like a high-tech vending machine." Well there's your problem

</comment><comment><USER8> philadelphia has had one for years - works great. [http://liftparking.com/](http://liftparking.com/)</comment>


Andrew Reisse — In Memoriam - <AUTHOR> http://www.oculusvr.com/blog/andrew-reisse-in-memoriam/ <comment><USER2> What a nice writeup. Sounds like this guy was well liked by his colleagues. I never met the guy, but this has me kind of down, perhaps because I'm a fan of what oculus is doing, or perhaps because I live in the area. My condolences to his loved ones and colleagues.

</comment><comment><USER3> Andrew's photography work is beautiful: <http://www.reisse.net/>

</comment><comment><USER4> What a great loss. Mr. Reisse sounds like not just an immensely talented hacker, but someone with the selfless attitude that our world needs more of.</comment>


Russia deploys Avangard hypersonic missile system - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-50927648 <comment><USER3> I was under the impression that "shoot the missile down with another missile" style ICBM defence doesnt work, and that everyone already knows this. Or rather, it has a ~50% success rate, which is essentially the same thing if your adversary can launch multiple rockets or if any of them have MIRV capabilities.

Does this hypersonic maneuverability thing actually change anything or is it just sabre rattling?

<comment> Tuna-Fish The actual reason why Russia (and others) are going for maneuverable hypersonic missiles is that everyone believes that Brilliant Pebbles would work, if it was ever deployed.

And the reason why Brilliant Pebbles suddenly became more relevant was that the reason it was considered unworkable in the 80's was high launch costs. SpaceX has already seriously cut those, and they openly talk about future plans that cut them by an order of magnitude or more. Starship will probably take a lot longer to bring to service than SpaceX says it will, but if it ever reaches the kind of capability Musk talks about, it will be possible for a person to go to sleep in a world where ICBMs work and wake up in a world where one power has a five-nines capable shield against them.

<comment><USER4> > it will be possible for a person to go to sleep in a world where ICBMs work > and wake up in a world where one power has a five-nines capable shield > against them.

The only rational thing to do if you have a 99.999% capable ABM shield is to perform a decapitation strike, since you know this advantage cannot be permanent. And therefore a rational opponent will perceive such a shield as a mortal danger, and will need to perform a pre-emptive strike before the shield is in place. From their point of view, once the shield is up, they'll be hit anyway, better strike first.

SpaceX does not enter this picture, as they use liquid fuel rockets, not solid fuel. But from Russia's point of view, it's hard to truly believe the US is not secretly seeking such a shield, no matter what assurances they receive that the US missile defense is only limited in scope. The ABM defense is a matter of capability first, and quantity after. Once the capability is properly tuned up (and the US appears to be close to that point), the quantity could be built in a sprint of 12 months. This is not a likely scenario, but it's a plausible one, and Russia needs to plan for it.

<comment> Tuna-Fish > SpaceX does not enter this picture, as they use liquid fuel rockets, not > solid fuel.

The point of Brilliant Pebbles is to put several thousand ABM satellites into permanent orbit. This can, and should, be done with liquid fuel rockets.

> The only rational thing to do if you have a 99.999% capable ABM shield is to > perform a decapitation strike, since you know this advantage cannot be > permanent. And therefore a rational opponent will perceive such a shield as > a mortal danger, and will need to perform a pre-emptive strike before the > shield is in place. From their point of view, once the shield is up, they'll > be hit anyway, better strike first.

The saner alternative is to seek second-strike capability that cannot be intercepted by that shield. Such as hypersonic glide strike vehicles.

And the reason Starship is such a threat is that once there exists a proof-of- concept ABM satellite, a launch vehicle that can take up 150 tons per vehicle, several times a day, times multiple vehicles working at multiple launch sites, can deploy Brilliant Pebbles in a few hours.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Perhaps a stupid question, but during the re-entry glide I'd expect the glider to be shrouded by plasma. Doesn't it stop radio signals? How does the glider get information on the route?

<comment><USER6> I don't know how this system works but US hypersonic missile designs suggest how it could work without requiring radio signals. Inertial guidance gets you into the general area of the target, at which point you switch to active terminal guidance i.e. the missile can identify and maneuver toward the selected target.

This is _much_ more difficult than it sounds. At hypersonic velocities, your entire terminal guidance system is being actively destroyed by atmospheric ablation. Decades of research went into how to make a terminal guidance system that survived _just_ long enough while retaining sufficient precision of control to hit the target. It is an exotic materials science problem.

<comment><USER7> Does a piece of cork amount to "exotic material science."

Disposable heatshields are certainly used on all of them.

<comment><USER8> And i always thought the whole point of a missile would be its one time use..

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Yay. We've found another way to wipe out populations with no benefit to other populations. Is there any scenario where weapons of mass destruction deescalate?

</comment><comment><USER10> Russia has a history of announcing weapon systems for propaganda purposes, and then it turns out they're mostly on paper, half done or of low quality. That doesn't mean this is the case here, but they do have a history of over promising and under delivering. The reality is that Russia's conventional or "normal" ICBM weapons are far more of a threat to the US than any hypersonic platforms.

The Chinese are the ones to watch. They have been much more thoughtful about their hypersonic weapons development and are trying to develop tactical hypersonic weapons in addition to strategic assets.

</comment><comment><USER11> Any peace dividend for the research?

Are we a step closer to hypersonic commercial flight?

<comment><USER12> Or rather, back to it.[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concorde](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concorde)

<comment><USER13> At Mach 2, Concorde was supersonic, not hypersonic

<comment><USER14> Yes, but we're worst from that now, for commercial flights.

From supersonic back to subsonic...

<comment><USER15> It's worse than that. In order to conserve fuel, most commercial jets fly slower than they used to.

<comment><USER8> I hear that often, but it seems this doesn't apply to the flights between Asia and France which go over my town.

I know this because when i'm awake in the night i can hear them trough double paned glass in closed windows and then click on flightradar24.com to see who it is.

And then see them between 10.5km to 11.5km up, with speeds between 950 and 1050 kph above ground. Airbus 380 or Boeing 777-ER usually.

This goes both ways between Paris/CDG and many large locations in Asia, easily a dozen per night and direction.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> This appears to be a destabilizing first strike weapon.

<comment><USER3> I fail to see how this is any better than existing first strike weapons.

Anti-anti-ballistic-missile technology doesn't mean much when anti-ballistic missiles barely work, and all your adversaries have lots of rockets each with lots of reentry vehicles.

<comment><USER17> Maybe destabilizing means we, the US now have less time to make a decision on a first strike by Russia and the potential for an incorrect analysis leads to a retaliatory strike before we lose the ability to do so.

<comment><USER18> That sounds like it would be a net negative for Russia

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> > They have a "glide system" that affords great maneuverability and could make > them impossible to defend against

Determine range of maneuverability and make appropriate size explosion in it's path.

<comment><USER20> So shoot it down with a nuke? This has its own problems, EMP being notable.

<comment><USER21> There is a long history of using nukes to intercept missiles.

Here's one of the USA's (ancient) efforts:[1] _Both missiles [long range and short range] used nuclear warheads, and they relied on destroying or damaging the incoming warhead with radiation rather than heat or blast._

The technology was quite impressive for its time. A Youtube video is titled "SPRINT ABM - Zero to Mach 10 in 5 Seconds", with a caption in the video pointing out "white hot skin". [2]

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safeguard_Program#Operation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safeguard_Program#Operation)

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

<comment><USER8> Yes, that was very impressive. But you forgot to mention the operational range of the used missile system.

[3] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sprint_(missile)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sprint_\(missile\)) says 25miles/40km

Think about how many you'd need to reliably protect your denser populated metropolitan areas? And the accompanying radars?

When i first saw this 'Temple of Doom' [4] [https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/1f/SR...](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/1f/SRMSC_MSR_HAER_ND-9-B.jpg/1280px- SRMSC_MSR_HAER_ND-9-B.jpg)

i immediately had to think of the Planet of the Apes movies.

OTOH they'd make really good anchor points in the seawalls we need to build because of rising oceans!1!!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> >Such "boost-glide" systems, as they are known (Avangard appears to be one of these), are launched like a traditional ballistic missile, but instead of following an arc high above the atmosphere, the re-entry vehicle is put on a trajectory that allows it to enter Earth's atmosphere quite quickly, before gliding, un-powered, for hundreds or thousands of kilometres. [ ... ] Indeed the glide vehicle's trajectory, "surfing along the edge of the atmosphere" as one expert put it to me recently ...

Almost a century later we're still implementing weapons program as conceived by Nazis. In case of Avangard even the gliding phase speed of 20 Mach is the same as in the Nazi design :

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

"The design was a significant one, as it incorporated new rocket technology and the principle of the lifting body, foreshadowing future development of winged spacecraft such as the X-20 Dyna-Soar of the 1960s and the Space Shuttle of the 1970s. In the end, it was considered too complex and expensive to produce. The design never went beyond mock-up test.

The Silbervogel was intended to fly long distances in a series of short hops. The aircraft was to have begun its mission propelled along a 3 km (2 mi) long rail track by a large rocket-powered sled to about 1,930 km/h (1,200 mph). Once airborne, it was to fire its own rocket engine and continue to climb to an altitude of 145 km (90 mi), at which point it would be travelling at about 21,800 km/h (13,500 mph). It would then gradually descend into the stratosphere, where the increasing air density would generate lift against the flat underside of the aircraft, eventually causing it to "bounce" and gain altitude again, where this pattern would be repeated. Because of aerodynamic drag, each bounce would be shallower than the preceding one, but it was still calculated that the Silbervogel would be able to cross the Atlantic, deliver a 4,000 kg (8,800 lb) bomb to the continental United States"

<comment><USER8> This lacks a _' now playing:'_

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EJC- _j3SnXk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EJC-_j3SnXk) (O Fortuna - <USER2> Burana - Carl Orff, 3m28s)

<comment><USER22> Strong move! I'll raise you the "Götterdämmerung will fly" scene - [https://youtu.be/gwsPLciYPyU?t=32](https://youtu.be/gwsPLciYPyU?t=32) \- in particular and the whole movie in general :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I tend to think the likely explanation of Russian hypersonic weapons is akin to commercial sector marketing of AI, all too often hype over substance.

Russia is simply unable to conventionally compete economically and militarily with the US.

So in order to buttress domestic and international support for Russia's Putin regime, the result is hypersonic information operations.

Unlike conventional precision guided weapons for tactical use, hypersonic missiles are strategic and nuclear in focus.

So not as likely to be exposed as vapourware in operational use.

So a likely area for empty chest puffing and peacocking.

Empty theatrics is a real possibility.

Russia is not likely to share hypersonic missile telemetry.

Nor is the US DOD and industry, as keeping quiet allows for opportunity to seek addition funding to counter hollow capability.

</comment><comment><USER24> I wouldn't believe it's anything close to operational and reliable. The only weapon Russia is capable of deploying today is cheap propaganda (which turns out to be quite efficient nowadays, thanks to how much stupid people it can reach via the Internet).

<comment><USER25> Historically, USSR then Russia never boasted about non existing weapons, on the contrary, they tend to deny their existence until they deem it useful.

<comment><USER26> Historically. But these are different times and we've been in a propaganda war for a while now.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> yeah more propaganda they can't even feed their people.

<comment><USER28> _Agriculture exports, at $20.7 billion in 2017, have overtaken the arms industry as Russia 's No. 2 earner. Wheat makes up about a quarter of the total. Russia harvested an area of wheat almost twice as large as the U.S. in the year ended in June, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture_

[https://www.wsj.com/articles/grain-is-our-oil-russia-is- best...](https://www.wsj.com/articles/grain-is-our-oil-russia-is-besting-the- u-s-as-a-wheat-powerhouse-1537719747)

Russia was the world's largest exporter of wheat in 2017-18:

[https://www.export.gov/article?id=Russia-Agricultural- Equipm...](https://www.export.gov/article?id=Russia-Agricultural-Equipment)

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> The USA has had Mach 23 ICBMs [1] and Mach 10 anti-ICBMs [2][2.2] since the 60s and 70s respectively. The Sprint rocket actually glows white hot because of its high speed.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGM-30_Minuteman](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGM-30_Minuteman) [2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sprint_(missile)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sprint_\(missile\)) [2.2] [https://youtu.be/msXtgTVMcuA?t=20](https://youtu.be/msXtgTVMcuA?t=20)

<comment><USER13> All ICBM reach near-orbital velocities (~7.8 km/s, ~17,000 mph, ~Mach 23), including the Russian R-7 (the world's first ICBM in 1957) and the modern ICBMs on which Russia's Avangard hypersonic glide vehicle will ride. This is only possible while outside the atmosphere.

The difference is that the traditional re-entry vehicles quickly slow down to mere supersonic speeds (Mach 1-5) when they re-enter the atmosphere, making them somewhat more vulnerable on final approach. Hypersonic glide vehicles, in contrast, maintain hypersonic speeds (Mach 5-10) until very late.</comment></comment>


Raising Money From Top Tier VC Firms Means Less Than You Think - <AUTHOR> http://alexstechthoughts.com/post/55694706169/raising-money-from-top-tier-vc-firms-means-less-than

<comment><USER2> I would suggest if you're simply looking at VC firms as a means to get financial capital you're ignoring a large amount of what they can do for you.

<comment><USER3> The post is more about the obsession with getting top tier VC names in your round rather than finding a specific investor from a less popular VC or investing fund that gets your biz better. Investors can be great and helpful- but in the end of the day don't obsess with getting a specific name on your cap table- obsess with building a great company.

<comment><USER2> Sorry... part of what I was implying is that the top tier VC firms often have a lot more to offer in what would help to build a great company (better talent networks, better advising, better ins with potential customers, etc).

That isn't to say you should obsess with them; however, if the chances are higher that they'll help you build a better business than you probably should pursue them.

<comment><USER3> true. at dwolla we've taken from USV, AH and other great VC's. They have helped tremendously. It's just not the end all and be all. Product is above all and VC's can help shape it but just a PSA that people shouldn't obsess.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Tell pg: URL Dedupe Bug / Make No Little Plans – Defining the Scalable Startup - <AUTHOR> http://steveblank.com/2010/01/04/make-no-little-plans-%E2%80%93-defining-the-scalable-startup/

<comment><USER2> Dup: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1030348>

The other submission already has comments.

I think this is yet another case that my suggested duplication detector would have found automatically:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1012215>

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Sure enough. This is a weird one because the URLs are identical. I'm going to leave this active for now as an example of a possible bug.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's the middle hyphen in plans---defining. In the original it's an unencoded character, in mine it's a urlencoded UTF-8 hyphen.</comment></comment>


Egypt'S 1.8 Gigawatt Benban Solar Park Nears Completion - <AUTHOR> https://spectrum.ieee.org/energywise/energy/renewables/egypts-massive-18gw-benban-solar-park-nears-completion <comment><USER2> I wonder if having areas of the desert under permanent shade will influence the local ecology in some way. I suspect insects and such will start to gather there to get out of the sun to begin with at least.

If there are any changes they are probably for the better though.

<comment><USER3> There is some recent research that shows you can do some nice companion farming with solar, in very arid places. The plants get enough light, but also get shade and have reduced irrigation requirements.

[https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-019-0364-5](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-019-0364-5)

<comment><USER4> The logistics of planting and harvesting plants under solar panels sounds tricky though.

If the panels are high enough up to be able to fit a tractor/harvester under them, the cost of foundations and pillars is going to get high, plus the extra complexity of 'working at height' to install and maintain them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> That place is absolutely massive! For a simple comparison, add about 6,500 more solar parks of that size, and we would generate enough electricity* for the entire planet. That would cover an area of 242,000 square km (which granted, is about the size of the UK, or a bit smaller than Texas). 2,500 solar parks of that size would replace all coal plants globally. 1,500 would replace all natural gas plants. So that is 4,000 of those to replace all fossil fuel plants that now exist.

Of course things like base load generation and you know...night time need to be taken into consideration, but I think it really puts it all into perspective. A few more years at their current growth, and renewables will be generating more electricity than coal globally. Coal is also decreasing which helps.

I used some data from here to make rough estimates:

[https://www.iea.org/statistics/electricity/](https://www.iea.org/statistics/electricity/)

I did this to make myself a little less depressed about global warming. Fight for renewables in your towns!

edit: oh yah, that would cost $26 Trillion...but that's for ONLY solar panels which isn't practical.

<comment><USER6> global energy use is unfortunately growing quickly so the most likely outcome is that we continue the trend where new power sources don't replace dirty older sources, they live on beside them.

<comment><USER7> Renewable and natural gas generation is approaching or undercutting the marginal cost of operating coal plants in many areas. This isn't accounting for amortized costs of coal plant construction, simply the fuel and operations cost. So coal is well on it's way out. China and India have all but stopped planning new plants.

Natural gas is some ways away from being overtaken by renewables, but trends need only hold for a fairly short period for that crossover to occur.

The future isn't all rainbows yet, but things do seem to be headed in the right direction. Economics strongly disfavor the carbon economy going forward.

<comment><USER8> Fossil fuels in general are on their way out. If someone doesn't believe it, they should do a google search on stranded assets.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I wonder if we'll see a shift in energy politics as equatorial countries become sites for significant energy generation.

The cynic in me says no, we'll just see existing players exploit those countries, but the optimist in me says there's a chance that many communities could see an economic boost or even transformation if they can get sufficient energy exports set up.

<comment><USER10> The middle east has done pretty well for themselves fiscally speaking, it is still not very politically stable, but they have a lot of money now from significant energy generation.

If we could place a huge solar farm in the Sahara and find a way to transport this energy worldwide, I think it would be great for them. They wouldn't have to transport directly, they could create some sort of fuel that could easily be transported all over the world.

There are hundreds of ways forward to a sustainable future and the technology already exists, and the political landscape is getting better every day. People aren't just going to give up, they are going to keep complaining until something is done. The majority of the world seems to know what is going on and they are upset about it. They aren't going to calm done until we are on the right path.

<comment><USER4> Aluminium is nicknamed "Solid Electricity" because from a cost point of view, it is almost entirely electricity, and is very transportable.

If carbon prices became very high, Iron/Steel would be the same (although with high carbon prices, aluminium would replace many uses of steel).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Not awarding the project as a whole to a single contractor seems like a good way to derisk it. There might be problems with one or the other contractor but a complete failure seems more unlikely because of that. Is my intuition correct here?

<comment><USER12> It also reduces the capital requirements for any single contractor.

<comment><USER13> As yet another bonus, it seems like a good way to head off corruption (assuming they had a maximum number of plots per contractor): you can only bribe your way up to a ceiling number of plots.

<comment><USER4> Set up new company, receive new allowance of plots...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Electricity is power, and Sisi knows this. His predecessor lost support during a few hot summer months of rolling power-cuts. It was rumored that those power cuts were the product of sabotage by electricity ministry managers. But since Sisi came to power he payed Siemens a small fortune to import power stations and stabilize electricity production.

<comment><USER15> Regarding the energy situation, I've also heard that Egypt is also rushing to get their new gas field in the Eastern Mediterranean sea up and running as fast as possible.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Almost as much peak capacity as the aswan dam, pretty amazing!

<comment><USER17> This seems to be at about 20 km from the dam, to use the same grid infrastructure probably.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> so they are not storing the energy produced there.. That is a huge fluctuating energy source in their grid huh?

<comment><USER19> Its the Egyption Desert, i assumed the sunlight would create quite a consistent curve throughout the day almost every day?

<comment><USER20> And at night?

<comment><USER21> > And at night?

It gets dark.

Source: I used to live in a middle eastern country.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> What does visible from space mean?

<comment><USER17> Google map link :

[https://www.google.com/maps/place/%D9%85%D8%AD%D8%B7%D8%A9+%...](https://email@example.com,32.7157651,7769m/data=!3m1!1e3!4m5!3m4!1s0x14363fd9d7a4b311:0xfd82d50b893da021!8m2!3d24.449192!4d32.7170983)

Actually if you zoom out enough, it disappears...

<comment><USER23> This is actually a somewhat normal occurrence and you encounter it frequently enough. Different zoom levels sometimes correspond to different sources of imagery, sometimes months or years apart.

My home still disappears at certain zoom levels, and I see the construction site instead - it was built in 2016.

<comment><USER24> I understand new high resolution data not being available for all areas. But generally I would have expected them to default to either the newer or a downscaled higher resolution source.

The zoomed-out levels also have a ©2019 and not showing any signs of solar, while first modules went online spring 2018 [0]. Probably no big deal for google maps, but there might not have gone everything as intended, either.

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

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Would have been nice if it was exactly 1.21 Gigawatt!

<comment><USER26> What the hell is a gigawatt?

<comment><USER27> A watt is a measure of power. It measures the power at that instant of time.

A watt-hour is a measure of energy. It measures the power used over time.

Giga is an SI prefix. 1 gigawatt is 1*10^9 watts.

It's normal to measure the output of power plants in megawatts or gigawatts.

<comment><USER28> Great Scott, it's a Back to the Future reference, not a serious question.

<comment><USER29> Jokes are generally frowned upon here, and are often asked to be kept on Twitter or Reddit. This keeps the comment quality high here.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Sigh. The recent drone attacks on infrastructure in Saudi Arabia have dramatically changed things. A single drone dispensing small cluster sub- munitions could destroy a large swath of solar panels.

I fear that large-scale asymmetric warfare will become more common, especially in the volatile Middle East.

<comment><USER31> Maybe... But a single drone could much more easily put a coal, oil, or natural gas power plant out of commission. How is this relevant?

<comment><USER32> I mean, seriously, it sounds like the opposite. The events in Saudi Arabia have shown how much _more_ vulnerable oil is, with the production pipeline going through much smaller (in terms of m^2) bottlenecks.

You could wipe out millions of gallons/day of production with a well-placed strike, affecting the entire global market, while solar farms are much bigger (a hit will wipe out a smaller percentage) and the effects are more localized.

<comment><USER33> It would be too easy for electro-terrorists to stop production at the solar park: four drones (one on each corner) could simply airlift a rectangular 3x4 mile opaque tarp from Sudan or outer space and drop it over the panels. Probably only take 15 minutes. Drones and tarps are available for a low price on Amazon. This is a scary possibility. Egypt must fund anti-drone defenses today!

<comment><USER34> At the risk of spoiling the joke, just curious about how powerful the drones will have to be...

[https://www.tarpsplus.com/blue-poly-tarp-sold- individually.h...](https://www.tarpsplus.com/blue-poly-tarp-sold- individually.html)

"3.5 oz. Per Square Yrd."

      You have: 3 mi 4 mi 3.5 oz/yd^2
      You want: kg
       * 3688250.3

So each drone should be able to lift about a gigagram.

(Also, this plastic doesn't have enough tensile strength to support its own weight when lifted from the corners.)

<comment><USER33> Good point! The plan needs refinement.

I guess they could break the job down: use one team of 4 drones to lift multiple 1 square yard tarps.

Let's see, 12 square miles is roughly 37 million square yards. Multiplying by four they would only need about 150 million drones. Quite affordable for today's well-funded terrorist with an Amazon Prime account (as long as they choose 3-5 business day shipping instead of overnight).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Apparently there's talks about covering the pyramids with solar panels too, since tourism has been declining in the last few years. Now with this new Solar Park, I doubt it will be necessary anymore.

<comment><USER36> There is also speculation a single face of the pyramids would remain revealed, so that it would be possible to create an artifical snow-slope during the cold desert nights, increasing demand for Egypts famous ski-mittens.

<comment><USER37> You just need a lot of borax for summer skiing.

(Source: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joppenbergh_Mountain](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joppenbergh_Mountain))</comment></comment></comment>


Quitting your day job - <AUTHOR> http://spin.atomicobject.com/2010/09/24/quitting-your-day-job

<comment><USER2> Quitting your day job is one of the best things ever!</comment>


DuckDuckGo just launched a DDG branded XMPP service - mike-cardwell https://duck.co/#Topic/28469000000637077

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm sorry but I don't really understand the utility of that service ? Is there any link to other protocols ? What are the benefits of using this server instead of something like gtalk or some other widespread service ? Why should I jump to this service and make my friend so the switch as well ?

Thanks :)

edit: I know perfectly what is DDG and I really love this search engine, but still.. don't get me wrong, I'm just asking for answers there, not being rude

<comment><USER2> You dont need to convince them to switch! You can still talk to your gtalk friends, its all XMPP/Jabber! This is not a service just for inside duckduckgo. Inform yourself a bit more about XMPPP/Jabber :-).

<comment><USER3> >Inform yourself a bit more about XMPPP/Jabber :-).

I think that perhaps, like me, they were hoping that you would be interested in sharing a couple of use cases for XMPP with us ...?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> For those that haven't tried before, running your own XMPP server is incredibly easy on even a small VPS. I'd recommend ejabberd, its pretty solid, light weight and fast.

<comment><USER2> I always suggest prosody :-) And we use this as our XMPP server cause its the modern way to use XMPP :)

<comment><USER5> I second the Prosody recommendation. I'm in the process of migrating my Jabber server to it, and it's quite slick.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm most interested this oblique reference: "...add our DuckDuckGo Jabber Conference, it will soon be linked to the IRC channel #duckduckgo on freenode".

Where's the technology for linking an XMPP conference to an IRC channel? I lurk in some IRC channels that would love to migrate to a more modern protocol, and that seems a good way to bridge the gap.

<comment><USER2> We use a Perl Bot for this. It will uses POE-Components to connect to the IRC and to the XMPP and then dispatches the messages to one from the other.

If you are interested, just join us on IRC and we talk about it :)

<comment><USER7> A friend did this: <https://gitorious.org/irctk> ("irctk is a general-purpose IRC wrapper written in C with libircclient"). I think it could be pretty straightforward to do the job using it.

<comment><USER2> We prefer Perl, cause we got one solution for everything and can easily combine the thousands components offered. Just cause a lib does IRC doesnt help us much :-) It must be easy! :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> There are many secure ways to use XMPP. What is so great about ddg doing it?

<comment> mike-cardwell I can't answer that question. However, I did leave the following comment on their announcement page:

Will you be following the same principals in regard to privacy as the DDG search engine follows? Personally, I would love to see the following:

1.) No connection logging. Ie, don't log when people log in and from which IPs

2.) No chat logs

3.) High profile information and instructions on how people can use OTR (Off the Record) for end to end chat encryption

4.) A Tor hidden service gateway to the XMPP server

Regarding 1 and 2, the least that is required IMO is a privacy policy detailing which information is stored and for how long.

<comment><USER9> I think, general (tech-savvy) audience would more enjoy encrypted logging (message archiving), using some variant of XEP-0136, but storing messages encrypted to user's public PGP/GPG key.

So the messages are kept (in case you want to refresh your memory, but don't have locally-stored history), but are unaccessible by third parties.

<comment> mike-cardwell I'm not sure about that. People who want chat logs can simply generate them on the client side. That way, even if they're using OTR they still get the chat logs.

<comment><USER9> Yes, but how they're going to access logs when connecting to XMPP service from multiple machines?

<comment> mike-cardwell By checking the logs on the machine the logs are on.

Besides, anyone who is tech savvy enough to mess with public key encryption is going to be using OTR anyway, making server side logs useless.

<comment><USER9> I'm using OTR, but only for conversations that are worth protecting. IMHO securing typical chat with friends (mostly consisting of funny/interesting link exchanges) is almost pointless.

But having the history is still useful ("remember that article I've sent you yesterday").

<comment> mike-cardwell Not as pointless as most people intuitively think. What if the chat server you're using is compromised by a hacker trying to make a name for themselves and they publish all of the chat logs on bittorrent?

Some examples of comments in a private chat that might at first appear like they don't need encrypting, but might come back and bite you in the arse if they ever get published:

"God work is boring today. Need to update my CV/Resume"

"Bob was a bit of an idiot last night wasn't he"

"Thinking of skiving off work tomorrow."

"The wife has been nagging at me all afternoon. Fancy a pint later?"

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> apparently Google pointed duck.com at the Google search main page after Duck Duck Go inquired about it. I guess this is why its duck.co

EDIT

See this post by yegg, the duck duck go founder

[http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/epd59/google_poi...](http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/epd59/google_points_duckcom_at_google_search_after_duck/c19v4cz)

</comment><comment><USER11> The URL make me cry:(

<comment><USER2> Why?! :-)

<comment><USER11> <https://duck.co/#Topic/28469000000637077>

Note the #. Now, remove it and everything after it and reload the page.

Why am I being downvoted? Didn't we all just throw shit at gawker for doing the same thing?

EDIT: This fundamentally breaks the web. The # and everything after it are _not_ sent to the server. It relies on javascript and extra-protocol information to get the document, which breaks the idea of a resource having its own name. The # was suppose to denote a section of a resource, not a resource in-and-of itself. I'm sure everyone here knows this, but I had to get it off my chest.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Very cool, although it could probable use a name. Maybe "DuckDuckChat"? "DuckDuckGo XMPP Service" is not going to be used by all but the most technical of users I think...

Even "DuckDuckGo Jabber Service" is better, XMPP just sounds so unfriendly.

<comment><USER13> Quack?</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How to sell my side project to my current company? - d--b

Hi HN,
I have been working on a side project for a while, and now I think I have a prototype that is not quite ready for beta, but almost. At the same time, a partner at my current job told me that they have a project they want to do, and they don't really know how to make it happen. What they don't know is that the side project I have been developing would be perfect for the task.
So I really want to take advantage of the situation by approaching the partner and telling him that I have been working on a tool on my own, and that it would make sense for them to use it for their project.
What I would like to do is:
1. Create a company (not yet created because I work in finance, and if I create a company I have to tell my boss for legal reasons...) 2. Make sure the company owns the IP of the tool I developed 3. Still work at my current job, part-time if possible, to keep the money coming and to integrate my tool into their infrastructure, and to have some time to work on the company (raising money, communicate, finding other clients) 4. In 6 months or so, leave my current job, and work full time on the company.
So, I am asking myself the following questions:
a. Is that a sound plan? b. How do I present my plan to them? c. This must happen all the time, are there any kind of templatized legal agreements for my point 2 and 3 above? d. Are there any pitfalls? What are the ways I can get screwed?
Any help, past experiences to share, or good advice would be much appreciated! It is a rather exciting / stressful time! <comment><AUTHOR> _Are there any pitfalls?_

The biggest one would be the fact that (depending on the exact wording of your employment contract) your employer may own the IP of any work you do relating to the industry you work in - _including what you do at home_. By bringing this project to your employers attention you might just end up handing it over to them.

Also, if they're sensible, your employer's due diligence would include asking you for proof that you didn't do any work on this project during your contracted working hours, and that you didn't use any of your employer's IP in it. That will be expensive for you to produce. If you can't proove you didn't work on it during work hours then technically that's fraud, but in reality it'd just mean you'll be handing the project over.

Consult a good lawyer before bringing it to your employer's attention.

</comment><comment><USER2> 1-6 above is not a sound plan. If your idea is "big", leave your current job and start a company now. If the idea is smaller and more targeted AND you think this will bring real value to your current company, forget "your" intellectual property. Sell the idea internally. Create a buzz about your contribution. This serves to make you a more valuable employee, for which, no doubt, you will receive both tangible and intangible benefits. If you can't sell it inside, then at least you can learn about how to sell.</comment>


Show HN: Open-Source Disposable Email (Served by Serverless Kittens) - <AUTHOR> https://inboxkitten.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> Creator here.

The idea behind InboxKitten is to provide an open-source serverless disposable email service, that you can launch for free on top of mailgun free tier API. And possibly rebuild it from scratch in a 24 hour hackaton.

All you need to do is send an email to `email@example.com`, go over to inboxkitten.com, and search it up. And Nyow, your email will be there. No signup nor passwords needed. You can use this for either email testing, or to access website content that insist of collecting your email.

Unfortunately, when our actual testing email services went down, it went from fun idea, to a real project. And the Prototype was done in 14 hours, with several more hours put into refining to what it looks like today.

Finally if you need your own private secure (not @inboxkitten.com) domain, and inbox. You can fork and deploy adopt your own inboxkitten, by deploying it for free on using your firebase, and mailgun api keys.

More details can be found on either our github, or our site

[https://github.com/uilicious/inboxkitten](https://github.com/uilicious/inboxkitten) [https://inboxkitten.com/](https://inboxkitten.com/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Also feel free to ask / clarify anything here =)</comment></comment>


Learning to program, again - <AUTHOR> http://www.nobugs.org/blog/archives/2009/08/23/learning-to-program-again/

<comment><USER2> _I'm frustrated that, in industry, "unit tests" are about the state of the art as far as widely adopted practises go. But I don't want to just check one or two cases for my functions – I want to check them all!_

This is my frustration with TDD when touted as a guarantor of code quality. I think there's a lot of hype because in dynamic languages like Ruby a good test suite combines most of the benefits of compilation error reports in a language like Java with some reasonable validations of code correctness.

However the claims start to get sort of outrageous, like writing tests first makes you design better architectures, which I think is at best incidentally true--making code testable is a valuable property, but there are dozens of abstract properties that make code "good".

The more production code I write, the greater my fascination with functional programming and mathematical proofs because it seems to me that pure functional code is the most powerful single tool in the quest to write flawless software.

<comment><USER3> I think that declarative style is actually above functional style in terms of getting flawless results; declarative is the "ultimate abstraction" everyone seeks, since it lets you jump from problem definition to problem solution immediately. But it is found within language features as varied as named variables, type systems, classes, constraint primitives, functional algorithms, macro systems, and domain-specific languages. You can't actually be "declarative" from just one of those things; it's using them in combination, in incremental layers, that gets you to a truly beautiful result.

I also think that the majority of programmer zealotry originates from programmers who stumble upon a paradigm that allows them to be more declarative than before; being so stricken by this new power, they become blinded to the limitations.

<comment><USER2> I'm not talking about functional _style_ , I'm talking about pure functions. Declarative style is an orthogonal concept.

I can buy the argument that a declarative style makes _intent_ clearer, but it's not the "ultimate abstraction" because _all_ abstractions are leaky and also even if one happens not to be, it's still open to misinterpretation due to human assumptions (ie. the whole reason laymen programming tools have never worked out).

Clarity and intent are beside the point though. I'm not talking about making life easier for the programmer. I'm talking about getting guaranteed correct results. I'm talking about bugs, and bugs live deep inside code. The easy bugs are ones where there has been a wrong declaration in the DSL-veneer. The only way to guarantee there is no deep bug is through a mathematical proof, and you can't prove anything without enforced purity. I don't particularly enjoy math, but it delivers by _far_ the strongest guarantees you can get in software.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: I finally relased my first product - <AUTHOR>

So, after many years of kicking about little apps and not putting the full effort in, I decided to bite the bullet and get on with it.
Very much inspired by patio11 and Bingo Card Creator, I present Griddol (http://www.griddol.com) a tool to create and play word searches. Intended mainly for teachers, but encouraging those who like a word search too.
This been churning around in my head for over a year in various forms, and I used the concept to help learn CoffeeScript, CouchDB and node.js, so even if the product itself is a failure, the learning process has been valuable.
I'll be the first to admit that it's somewhat(!) unpolished and needs a lot of work and content, but it's out there now.
I appreciate any comments you might have. <comment><USER2> Congratulations. I strongly suggest a design which visually suggests what to click on. At the moment everything looks buttonesque and virtually nothing leads to you being happy if I click it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Noted. At the moment I am just happy if anyone even visits the page though. But I realise that there is no clear direction to the new visitor. Another thing to add to the never-ending list.

<comment><USER3> You need to prioritize that never-ending list. Visitors having a bad experience should be somewhere at the top of things to fix. Adding feature X and Y should probably be somewhere at the bottom.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> It's cool, but needs a lot of design, it's very raw yet.

One other thing, the program should not allow me to click anywhere, like, if I start to make a word in horizontal and them click 4 columns on the vertical he shoul not compute that, or something like this... (I don't know if you can understand this without some screenshot)

polish, polish and polish more. :D

<comment><AUTHOR> I think I know exactly what you mean - restrict the highlighted letters to be in a single direction.

Something I was considering was changing the selection mechanics so that you click at the first letter and then drag to the final letter before releasing. I think that would be more intuitive.

Yes, I agree it's raw, almost embarrassingly so. Still, release early and iterate!

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Great job getting on with it. I look forward to seeing if/how you modify your design and implementation.

As I was browsing through your JS code to figure out how you end up positioning the words (vertical, horizontal or diagonal), I found the "naughtyWords" list to be hilarious. It was immediately clear to me that the developer inhabits the UK.

Congratulations on your success!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the encouragement!

That actually reminds me - that stuff shouldn't even be in the client-code. And even if it should be there, methinks it ought to be scrambled somehow :)

Your deductions are indeed correct - I am in the UK - Cambridge in fact.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> First of all congratulations ! Some feedback : on IE9 at the registration page the textboxes appear emtry (no username,password,confirm passwork text) , a visitor would probably hit the back button !

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for pointing that out - my IE testing has been sporadic at best! I'll definitely take a look at that.

<comment><USER6> Also , as patio11 mentioned a better visual design would be helpful for your site. You may find great templates for a low price at <http://themeforest.net/>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> clickable: <http://www.griddol.com></comment>


The Nostalgia Machine - <AUTHOR> http://thenostalgiamachine.com/

<comment><AUTHOR> I've never written any javascript before this, if you have the time please check it out on github and tell me what I'm doing wrong. [https://github.com/EliotSlevin/NostalgiaMachine](https://github.com/EliotSlevin/NostalgiaMachine)

</comment><comment><USER2> This is great. Deserves an upvote.

<comment><AUTHOR> <3</comment></comment>