How a Low-Level Apple Employee Leaked Some of the iPhone's Most Sensitive Code - <AUTHOR> https://motherboard.vice.com/amp/en_us/article/xw5yd7/how-iphone-iboot-source-code-leaked-on-github <comment><USER2> When I worked at Apple, the culture of secrecy was enforced primarily by fear of MarCom (Marketing and Communications) and Legal. It might sound ominous, but I always felt it was quite the opposite.

Instead of being treated like children, with hands tied and every interesting piece of technology locked behind layer upon layer of approval and access restrictions, probably 80% of all of Apple's source was available to anyone within the company. This promoted a sense of ownership, a feeling that no matter what your "product" was, we all worked on the entire OS, together. It also allowed for the free exchange of ideas and enabled engineers to be self motivated when faced with a challenge. More than once, when I was stuck, I would dive into the code archives and look to find some bit of code that someone else wrote that might do what I needed, and then I'd call them up and see if we couldn't work on a common solution.

All of this was possible because Apple made it very clear on day 1 that we were being entrusted with the secrecy that is such a core facet of who Apple is, and that if we violated that trust, there _would_ be consequences.

I feel sorry for this "Low-Level" employee, because I suspect they are soon going to find out just how much of a price tag Apple puts on their trust and valued secrecy. On the bright side, they're probably too young to have any real estate holdings Apple could go after, and Chapter 7 gets wiped out after, what? 10 years?

<comment><USER3> >On the bright side, they're probably too young to have any real estate holdings Apple could go after, and Chapter 7 gets wiped out after, what? 10 years?

It is hard to imagine one could get penalty of bankruptcy instead of going into Jail for this.

I actually value this working model a lot. The comment below suggest this is culture of fear, instead I call this a culture of utmost trust. ( Well he did say he hate Apple, haters are going to hate whether it is rational or not )

<comment><USER2> > It is hard to imagine one could get penalty of bankruptcy instead of going > into Jail for this.

IANAL, but I believe for a charge of grand larceny you'd have to show intent to steal, and the "Low-Level" employee seems to have a pretty legitimate case that this was negligence, not theft. On the other hand, I think it's a pretty straight-line open-n-shut case for Apple to sue for damages, and I'm not sure that ruining a young software engineer's financial life for a decade is less of a deterrent than jail.

<comment><USER4> The negligence was only in losing control of the code. I guess successfully maintaining tight control of the code would be a mitigating factor (or, more likely, lead to not getting caught), but taking the code from Apple for the purpose of sharing it with these researchers in the first place is clearly premeditated (so, showing intent) theft.

<comment><USER5> Yes, it's stealing afterall. Taking screenshots using one's phone is still possible to steal the code, although the effort would be tedious for a large codebase. But for an active adversary, if that's the only method, he/she would do it. I fear there is no way around that, even with logging enabled (there will be thousands of accessing the codebase per day). If the proposal is to lock down the repository and requires approval, that will make the development very slow. Not even in the banking would a manager want to ask "why" all the time...

<comment><USER4> I have no idea what they might do, but it's not a law of nature that they have to crack down on access. They have tens of thousands of employees, a single breach isn't evidence that a trusting, open environment doesn't work.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Maybe this will sound silly and ridiculous, but I'm going to ask regardless.

Why doesn't Apple just opensource iBoot? It could be under a very restrictive license; one that doesn't allow the code to be redistributed or used by anyone in any project. The assets and tradmarks would also be protected. However, it would let people study the code — yes, some people will use that knowledge to make jailbreaks, but you know some will tell Apple.

Apple has opened projects like ResearchKit before.

I guess my hope is the iOS community would be able to take a more direct approach to contributing to platform security that we depend on. How much code has been smuggled out? Probably way more than this if it's so easy.

<comment><USER7> > It could be under a very restrictive license; one that doesn't allow the > code to be redistributed or used by anyone in any project.

Open source means allowing the usage of code. Putting code under a license that does not allow any kind of usage is definitely not open source. And then why should Apple allow people to view their proprietary code when it has no intention to allow 3rd party usage? Chinese firms are already aping Apple's design. Everyone knows what they will do if they can see all the code.

<comment><USER6> You're confusing open source with free software. You definitely can have open source code that you can't use (legally). Taking the code off GitHub and using it without Apple's permission would be theft.

Open Source only means the code is available to be seen by the general public. Free Software means you have specific rights, like the right to view, modify, and distribute the code.

A possible license could be APSL: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Public_Source_License](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Public_Source_License)

<comment><USER8> Code that can be viewed but not used would not be in compliance of an OSI- approved license. I suppose you can call anything open source but OSI is the arbiter in the minds of most.

<comment><USER9> Sure. If you use an OSI license maybe. But I seriously doubt they can stop me from using the phrase open source if my code's source is open.

<comment><USER10> Obviously thay cannot stop you from misusing a term. I used to believe like you that the definition was more broad like you indicated. But the people who coined it had a narrower free software defintion in mind.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open- source_software](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-source_software)

<comment><USER11> The fight over the meaning of "Open source" was lost by OSI almost two decades ago.

Here's a 2002 version of their website essentially admitting as much: [https://web.archive.org/web/20021001164015/http://www.openso...](https://web.archive.org/web/20021001164015/http://www.opensource.org/docs/history.php)

>The OSI Certified mark is OSI's way of certifying that the license under which the software is distributed conforms to the OSD; _the generic term "Open Source" cannot provide that assurance_, but we still encourage use of the term "Open Source" to mean conformance to the OSD.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The companies I have experience with had huge monorepo. It's not unimaginable that everyone inside the company has access to some important code, what usually they don't have access to is customers' data which has few more checkpoints. They mostly considered the code commodity, you could take it and still couldn't compete with them. In fact, this is one of the core reasons, some companies are hesitant in going all remote. No one wants their questionable code to be leaked.

<comment><USER13> What difference does being remote make?

<comment><USER14> Jurisdiction. It's tough to prosecute some developer in India or Ukraine from the US.

<comment><USER13> Ah, okay, good point. You have the option of not employing foreigners though.

<comment><USER15> And I would assume that as in the UK collective punishment Is legal in the states.

Refusing to sponsor any h1'bs from that country would be one penalty.

<comment><USER16> Too harsh a penalty I'd say.

<comment><USER15> Well if you harbour cyber criminals and refuse to extradite they made their bed they have to lay on it

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I found a pony in Apple's iBoot source code.

[https://medium.com/aishik/i-found-a-pony-in-apples-iboot- sou...](https://medium.com/aishik/i-found-a-pony-in-apples-iboot-source-code- def8cef10b24)

<comment><USER17> One "playful" way to tell if source have been copied, or recreated via a clean room means.

<comment><USER18> Pony is bracketed by #ifdef DEBUG. I think the dev just liked ponies.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> No amount of investment in security software protects companies from social engineering. Eventually, someone needs to have access to core IP and that someone needs to be trusted to do the right thing.

If a lowly engineer can leak this to the public, an intelligence agency hell bent on obtaining source code can certainly have full access to it. I suspect the top dogs (NSA,CIA, Mossad, FSB, China) have full access to source code they deem necessary, with or without the company's consent

</comment><comment><USER20> This article doesn't explain why a "low-level" employee would have access to this code to begin with. Apple certainly doesn't give everyone access to everything. What role were they actually in?

<comment><USER21> From what I heard, this employee was an intern working on the team that owned this code.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Allowing people to send code to friends within jailbreak community and expecting no leak? Did I read that correctly?

</comment><comment><USER23> Spy agencies in Russia, China, and the US will have a copy of most of Apple's source code anyway. It's trivial to get a number of employees working for any of these companies. They must all be fully infiltrated, probably at high levels too, which is pretty neat.

<comment><USER24> Sophisticated spy agencies don't need the source code. They can disassemble it.

<comment><USER13> That won't get you all the FIXME and TODO comments.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> And kids, this is why security by obscurity is such an awful, awful idea.

If it's true their products' security "doesn't depend on the secrecy of our source code" then there shouldn't be any issues in open-sourcing it already. Open source, not making it free software, which I suspect they'd never do anyway. Even having some form of assurance they're not doing anything nefarious behind the scenes and a proper bug bounty program would be plenty.

<comment><USER26> > And kids, this is why security by obscurity is such an awful, awful idea.

This is probably the most misunderstood security concept on the net. What it is supposed to mean is that security should not _depend_ on obscurity. For some reason people seem to take at as meaning obscurity should not be part of your defense at all.

In real life, obscurity is useful in many cases because it slows down attackers. For example, lets say you want to get to my credit card database. What you need to do is:

1\. Break into one of my public facing servers.

2\. From that server, find a way through the firewall that separates the network the credit card handling system is on from the rest of my company's networks.

3\. One through the firewall, find an exploitable flaw in the design or implementation of the credit card storage system.

If you can get a copy of the source code and configuration of everything except for passwords (i.e., there is no obscurity in my system), then you can set up a clone of my system in your lab and work on finding all the holes you need at your leisure and without drawing my attention.

Once you've got exploits for a public facing server, the firewall, and the credit card storage system, you might be able to do a quick attack and get in and get the credit cards before I can do anything.

If I've included obscurity it is much less likely that you can do a quick raid like that. You'll have to plod through the layers of my system step by step, working ON my systems, giving me a much better chance of noticing your attack and stopping it before you get to and find a hole in the final layer where the credit cards are stored.</comment></comment>


Space mining is going to seriously disrupt Earth's economy - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.co.uk/article/international-laws-are-not-ready-for-space-mining <comment><USER2> Pretty much the whole of human activity is spent on managing scarce resources in one way or another. Most things that have reduced this "burden" have been to the betterment of society (on the whole, of course there have been local winners and losers) so there is no reason to believe that some new form of scarcity reductions will not also follow this trend.

I think the major flaw most people make in this area is assuming that the current situation is the optimal and any disruption is inherently bad -- e.g. gold has always been scarce so it must always be scarce. Bastiat talks about this phenomenon with his "that which is seen and that which is unseen" theory one could argue.

\--edit-- Bastiat link -- [http://www.econlib.org/library/Bastiat/basEss1.html](http://www.econlib.org/library/Bastiat/basEss1.html)

<comment><USER3> Totally true, but it's really, _really_ important to stay alert and watch disruptive economic shifts like a hawk.

The first thing keep in mind when radical improvements arrive is that spectacular new things have been dropped at our feet before, and killed a massive shitload of people. Not everybody wins when things get generally better. Some people lose, and when the individual tales of losers are closely examined, sometimes they have lost through incredibly bitter narratives no less.

Some cavemen were probably left crippled only to die a miserable caveman death by trying to mount horses, some people were gored by non-collapsible steering columns in early car accidents, some people were smeared across mountain tops by early planes without hazard avoidance instrumentation.

Things get better, but indivuals still pay for it.

<comment><USER4> Next you'll be saying that computer viruses could exist, or that bitcoin's blockchain could suck up way too much energy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Study: The politics of space mining – An account of a simulation game

Citation: Paikowsky, Deganit. Tzezana, Roey. Acta Astronautica Volume 142, January 2018, 10-17.

Link: [https://doi.org/10.1016/j.actaastro.2017.10.016](https://doi.org/10.1016/j.actaastro.2017.10.016)

DOI: 10.1016/j.actaastro.2017.10.016

Abstract: Celestial bodies like the Moon and asteroids contain materials and precious metals, which are valuable for human activity on Earth and beyond. Space mining has been mainly relegated to the realm of science fiction, and was not treated seriously by the international community. The private industry is starting to assemble towards space mining, and success on this front would have major impact on all nations. We present in this paper a review of current space mining ventures, and the international legislation, which could stand in their way - or aid them in their mission. Following that, we present the results of a role-playing simulation in which the role of several important nations was played by students of international relations. The results of the simulation are used as a basis for forecasting the potential initial responses of the nations of the world to a successful space mining operation in the future.

Highlights:

• The realization of space exploitation will disrupt world politics.

• The simulation highlighted the political tensions and different interests.

• Inclusive international process is needed to reach fast adaptation.

• Creative mechanisms are needed to allow sharing of new global wealth.

<comment><USER6> Isn't it way too expensive, just like recovering tons of gold from the bottom of the sea from sunken ships?

<comment><USER7> Yes. What these predictions assume is that there will be a massive orders-of- magnitude reduction in the cost of space transportation. The moon rocks brought back from Apollo missions are estimated to have cost NASA over $50K per gram (see [https://www.space.com/11804-nasa-moon-rock-sting- apollo17.ht...](https://www.space.com/11804-nasa-moon-rock-sting- apollo17.html)). Gold is only $40/gram currently.

<comment><USER8> I'm not sure Apollo is the best benchmark. The primary goal was to send the astronauts there and bring them back. Just changing the primary goal should result in a huge reduction in the cost per gram. You'd just send a tiny excavation rover and have it fill bins for the return trip. Followup trips might even skip the rover and just use the one already there. There is a huge amount of room for efficiency and cost savings especially if you leave the humans home.

Though, Moon rocks are a bit of an outlier. They don't have much value outside of science and as a curiosity. You might want to focus on something with more predictable demand. In which case, it may get more complicated than "shovel stuff into a bin".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Hmm..natural resources are a tiny part of total world GDP, so apart from the practicalities (actually mining the stuff, getting it here), I don't see how the world economy could be "disrupted" by changes here.

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

[https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.TOTL.RT.ZS](https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.TOTL.RT.ZS)

<comment><USER10> Mostly by massively reducing the market price of minerals that are relatively easily obtained through space mining.

Like, the total worldwide value of gold is $7.5 trillion (at about 187,000 tonnes). If mining thousands of tons of gold becomes super cheap, the price of gold would crash even without actually doing the space mining, as people try to exit their gold positions in advance of space miners flooding the market.

<comment><USER9> > worldwide value of gold is $7.5 trillion

And what's the total value of worldwide assets? If I look at [1], I see that Blackrock by itself has $4.7 trillion under management, and the total "under management" is $139 trillion. Estimates from [2] give guesses of at least $1-2 quadrillion.

So even if you manage to find so much gold that the existing value goes to zero, the impact seems limited to me. And I severely doubt you'd easily get that to zero.

> (at about 187,000 tonnes)

That's a lot of weight to (a) mine and (b) get to earth, and gold is certainly among the highest value-density you're going to get. Just theoretical availability does very little to prices, see _Gold in Seawater_ [3]: "Ocean waters do hold gold – nearly 20 million tons of it."

Currently, returning things to earth is sufficiently expensive that it is uneconomical to return satellites (costing on the order of $300m[4]) to earth, for example for repair.

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

[2] [https://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20071029233836A...](https://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20071029233836AAnbTnr#)

[3] [https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/gold.html](https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/gold.html)

[4] [https://science.howstuffworks.com/satellite10.htm](https://science.howstuffworks.com/satellite10.htm)

<comment><USER11> Minerals, however, do not decompose. A 100 block of gold you could just throw at a specific location and then re-"mine" after the somewhat violent landing, nothing will be wrong with it, aside from significant melting at the edges.

(and in the "nothing wrong with it" assessment, the same cannot be said of the landing site, but there are plenty of places where that wouldn't be a great issue, e.g. one of the huge deserts like the Sahara, Inner Russia/China or Australia). Note that to an extent you can control the blast. So a 100 ton "mining ball" would not nearly have the same impact energy as a 100 ton asteroid, and even compared to the average meteorite it would be on the extreme slow end. There's a "minimum" blast that's essentially unavoidable, but it's not that huge, only a few square kilometers, and slowing things down to that speed is not hard if you take your time. Only if you want to return things intact do you need to go through the expensive process. Obviously doing the above method with an astronaut would be frowned upon.

It's also been studied what happens if you want to go further. If you're willing to wait ~10 years, returning near-earth things to earth by crashing into it is incredibly cheap. If you're willing to wait ~100 years, from almost any point in the inner solar system.

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

In the longer term I would argue that the economy will move to space. For most production processes weightlessness, and vacuum environment (not to mention infinite expansion space and infinite energy) would help a lot.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Mining/refining is a significant source of pollution on earth. It's interesting that in talking about economic impacts, we don't talk about the reduction in "expense" to our environment and health.

If the current mining industries could be replaced with those that do not pollute our living space, there are significant gains to be head in the form of more usable land and better ecological environments.

Additionally, a number of much cleaner technologies are currently very expensive because of the scarcity of resources and pollution involving mining. Lithium for batteries is one example. Disposition of used batteries would remain a problem, but perhaps similar off-world approach could be used there.

<comment><USER13> The counter argument is that increasing heavy metal load on the Earth's surface from space Mining could be very bad.

<comment><USER4> Not impossible, but most of the heavy metals that end up in the environment get spewed out during the mining and refining processes that would no longer take place on the earth.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I'd argue space-based energy collection and redistribution to Earth would be equally disruptive. China and the US are still heavily dependent on coal for energy as a single example. Nuclear's dream of "too cheap to meter" never came to pass and I'm sure that would be true of extra-planetary power as well but it would still put huge pressure on fossil fuels and if cheap enough could help further drive the switch to electric vehicles. It also has the added benefit of not requiring trips to the Kuiper belt like in system mining could.

<comment><USER15> Orbital power is either beamed to Earth, or connected to a supercomducting space elevator. Beamed power is problematic, because it's either as diffuse as sunlight, or concentrated enough to be a weapon in its own right. And if you can make a space elevator length of superconductor economically, it's easier to make a ring of PV and superconductors passing through the world's deserts (and connecting them to each other and to all the cities) — it's always daylight somewhere in the world.

<comment><USER14> Absolutely dude, I wasn't trying to hand wave and claim these are solved problems! I was just saying if we're having a thought exercise about potentially disruptive space-based technology that energy would be another interesting one to discuss.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> _It's 2035 and Earth's population has grown dramatically. People are desperate to find alternatives to the dwindling natural resources needed to keep the global economy functioning. We have bled the Earth dry._

...

 _In January 2035, a US company becomes the first to successfully mine minerals from space and transport the cargo back to Earth. The haul contains huge quantities of gold and platinum, although it is only a fraction of the resources from the asteroid. The price of gold falls by 50 per cent._

That's anticlimactic. If you were to make a list of "dwindling natural resources needed to keep the global economy functioning" I don't believe that gold would make the top 20. Neither doubling its supply nor halving it would have much impact on the aggregate provision of goods and services within the terrestrial economy.

Platinum group metals are more interesting from an industrial standpoint. Though automobile exhaust system catalysts currently account for the lion's share of industrial palladium demand, and I expect that demand driver to already be past its peak by 2035. There are no doubt other things we could and would use PGMs for if they were significantly less expensive and more abundant. Fuel cells, though they will always have certain disadvantages compared to batteries, would probably be significantly more widespread by now if the cost of platinum were comparable to e.g. silver.

</comment><comment><USER17> The sorts of disruptions we should worry about are ones that disemploy a lot of people who need a job. Certainly self-driving cars will do that. But how many people work in the production of precious metals?

Once upon a time, asteroid mining would have been highly disruptive to monetary policy, but today currency values are not tied to metals.

</comment><comment><USER18> How do they want to bring their stuff back to earth? Is there any technology on the horizon that allows us to bring heavy masses to Earth in an affordable way?

<comment><USER19> Gravity

<comment><USER20> > How do they want to bring their stuff back to earth?

> Gravity

Quite. I not an expert at all, but the question "how do we bring it down" is better put "how do we bring it down _safely_ and so that we can easily recover the material".

Throwing rocks down the gravity well is easy, keeping the velocity low at bottom end, or low enough plus aiming accurately at an empty spot, is hard.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Everyone is aware that the Crypto bubble is headed for a big crash, we have a derivatives bubble looming that dwarfs all others, the Dow is climbing to ludicrous heights at a rate of 1,000 points a week (which is definitely not ominous at all), society has grown hopelessly dependent on information systems that never cease to amaze with their fragility, and international politics has once again devolved into a game of Nuclear Chicken (only with more players this time). So yeah, let's worry about the economic dangers of space mining.

<comment><USER22> Way to be pessimistic. Let us focus on the awesome things of our time, like complete eradication of some illnesses through vaccination, information systems connecting us with latencies and speeds never seen before, the availability of knowledge was never better, child mortality down and life expectancy up to levels never seen before. C'mon. I wanna see some enthusiasm for our time and human achievements!

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OSIRIS- REx](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OSIRIS-REx)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucy_(spacecraft)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucy_\(spacecraft\))

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/16_Psyche](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/16_Psyche)

</comment><comment><USER24> Energy is our most obvious problem. Mining in space requires much more energy then mining our sublunary world, just at a time when energy is about to become scarce. This simply doesn't add up.

<comment><USER16> Solar power in the inner Solar System is abundant and always on.

<comment><USER24> Yes, but strangely enough, we didn't tapped into it. There may be some difficulties, not even mentioning EROEI.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> What about the other kind of mining? The cost of running a mining rig is electricity and cooling. Solar panels for one and the vacuum of space for the other. Looks like the cost to launch a small satellite starts at $10,000 (or 1 bitcoin). The cost of the electricity required to mine 1 coin in the US is as low as $3224 (as of Dec. 2017). What would be the hash rate and lifetime to make a microsatellite a cheaper mining platform than terrestrially?

<comment> ben-schaaf Cooling in a vacuum is a lot more difficult than with an almost endless supply of cooler gas to run over your hardware. The ISS runs liquid ammonia cooling to large sets of radiators in order to keep the station and solar panels cool. I'd imagine you'd need a similar setup if you're putting your cubesats far enough out that they won't need active propulsion to stay in orbit, and if you're using similar consumer hardware.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> This assumes the mined resources would be brought back to Earth. Why would we bring resources back down the gravity well? The real value is mining and manufacturing in situ. The real race is to become the first person to build a manufacturing facility in orbit.

</comment><comment><USER27> Imagine sending a Caterpillar 797 dump truck into space? 13 semi trailers worth of truck that needs boosted into space, landed on another planet, and then re-assembled.

</comment><comment><USER28> because all asteroids are simply clumps of gold and platinum. -eye-roll-

<comment><USER29> You're rolling your eyes, but you're not that far from wrong. Earth's geological processes have buried most of the heavier elements in the core, where it's beyond reach. The concentration of platinum-group metals is far, far higher in metallic asteroids than it is in the Earth's crust.

<comment><USER30> For ruthenium, rhodium and palladium we are probably better off reprocessing nuclear waste. Especially rhodium is rare on Earth btu formed in fairly high yield during nuclear fission.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Would something like this work to prevent mass shootings? - <AUTHOR>
 I've had an idea for awhile that I think would help prevent some of these mass episodes of violence we've been seeing lately. I personally don't have the resources to implement anything like this but I know there are many engineers out there who do and I just want to put my idea out there to get everyone's thoughts and maybe help improve on the idea. So essentially my concept is that people be equipped with a PPD (Personal Protection Device). You would be required to take a short training class before having one and be licensed and registered. It would use some combination of non-lethal weaponry (stun dart, gas round) and use a smart targeting system where it basically works like a camera and it's point and fire. The target would be "painted" and the the device would figure out the best trajectory to the target. So in the heat of the moment a non-combat trained person would have an easier time using it. After the round is fired and the target is unconscious, the police would be notified and a picture of the target sent to them as well as the GPS coordinates of the device. I imagine if something like this was even integrated into cellphones or something it could become extremely widespread and everyone would have a method to protect themselves that didn't rely on guns alone. I think if adoption rate was high enough then these shootings would become less frequent.<p>I just wanted to share this idea. I know the technology is out there to put something like this together but like I said I don't have the time or the resources to do it myself. I might have overlooked something as well. What are your thoughts? <comment><USER2> 1\. This will not "prevent" mass shootings

2\. This will be misused.

3\. You think arming everyone is a better option than just decent gun control?

4\. From what I can tell, this can be easily be defeated by a bulletproof vest and a gas mask.

</comment><comment><USER3> It is hard to make a non-lethal weapon which is effective.

When the taser was first commercialized there was an article about it in the newspaper of my town. Some cops tried zapping each other with it. One was knocked on his ass, but the police chief had a high BMI and could barely feel it.

The old tasers were safe but not very effective. After years of experience they increased the energy and they got to be more effective but occasionally deadly, certainly more painful.

With chemicals it is the same. You can knock people out with opioids or benzodiazepines or both but you have some chance they stop breathing or they are already addicted and have a tolerance and there is no effect. An oral surgeon can sedate you without much risk in an outpatient setting, but he gives you pure oxygen to breathe and has a pulse ox on your finger.

Tear gas can go all the way from "they laugh at you" to "permanent lung damage", etc.

Beanbags, "rubber bullets" and such all occasionally kill and aren't always effective.

Unfortunately there is no "phaser set to stun".

</comment><comment><USER4> It sounds like you are suggesting creating a weapon that is both autonomous and handheld, is that right? What is the point of combining those two things? Who will pay for the development of this device? Who will pay for the production? Do you imagine giving one to every citizen of the US?

What prevents anyone from abusing this device?</comment>


A Brief Review of Scoping and Hoisting in JavaScript - <AUTHOR> https://medium.freecodecamp.org/a-brief-review-of-scoping-and-hoisting-in-javascript-e74c38283b65 <comment><AUTHOR> Learn how Scoping and Hoisting effect the way code we write will deal with our declarations (such as var, let, const and function) with a few examples.</comment>


Check out this BuzzFeed article on Ares Drones and its Kickstarter - <AUTHOR> http://www.buzzfeed.com/rhymeswithdonna/ares-drone-is-doodlers-dream-1f2x3

<comment><USER2> People seem to generate more interest/upvotes on HN when they keep things personal. You're promoting your company with other people's articles as though you're not part of the company. Your headline should be something more like, "Check out this BuzzFeed article on my drone-flying software". If you're self- promoting, be upfront and honest about it. Maybe even tell us something extra about the product that we can't find on your Kickstarter page.</comment>


Ask HN: Anyone hosting their site on servers in their garage? - <AUTHOR> Why more startups aren't doing this?
I'm all done with slow disk on cloud hosts.  I have no budget to pay for a colo or a dedicated host.  I'm planning on building a server with commodity components and an Intel SSD.  I figure I can build a server with a quad core AMD chip, an Intel SSD and extra memory and Disks I have lying around for about $500.
A Comcast Business Broadband package gets me 22 Mbps/5 Mbps for $100 a month. Double that for 50Mbps/10Mbps.
I don't need 5 nines of reliability.  I'm willing to deal with a couple of hours of down time in an emergency while we're getting off the ground.
Why aren't more startups doing this?  I understand that you might want to buy decent "enterprise" hardware at some point if your site takes off.  But, hardware is dirt cheap compared to the crap offerings you get on cloud hosts.  Am I missing something? <comment><USER2> Over an year this costs you about $1200 for bandwidth + $500 for hardware + electricity/service. Let's say an even $1600 or ~ $135 / month.

$135 / month buys you two 1.5GB Linode instances or one 2GB Slicehost instance (I use Slicehost but they seem to be much more expensive compared to Linode).

The reason I see renting VPSs, especially at the beginning, as a smart thing is that you are postponing the actual hardware costs towards a later time, when you are (presumably) profitable. And if you decide to cancel the whole thing, it's just a matter of shutting down the instances and that's it. It just seems much more convenient.

Now, if you already have the hardware and you trust the electricity/bandwidth provider you could self-host. But investing time and money in hardware and self-hosting might just be the one thing that stops you from doing the right job software-wise. (Of course, unless your service depends precisely on the fine-tuned hardware that you might manage yourself, but I don't think you are in this situation -- it's just a cost discussion).

<comment><USER3> Plus your time to spec and build the boxes and to maintain them. If your time is worth $100 an hour that is going to be a _lot_ more per month than $135.

<comment><USER4> When you're bootstrapping a startup, you're more likely to have time than the money that your time is worth.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It's fine until your garage burns down / floods, or someone digs through your street's connection.

Those things are unlikely, but even with a backup you're going to have pretty horrendous amounts of downtime. You could lessen the impact by having some off-site secondary system ready to go at any moment, but then at that point you might as well be renting a server.

<comment><USER6> More than calamities, I'd worry about simply going away for a week or two and having something happen. With Linode/whoever, even if I'm somewhere remote, I suppose I can at least call or write email and get some help. If everything's at my house, what would I do? Leave the keys to a friend? "Can you feed the cats and take care of the servers in case they have a problem at 3AM?"

<comment><USER7> > "Can you feed the cats and take care of the servers in case they have a > problem at 3AM?"

LOL now this would be a _friend_.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Probably the startups that do something like this, don't really talk about it.

The negative replies here are one reason. Competitive advantage may be another.

Personal example: I had a dedicated rackspace server for about $650/month. I was doing basic web hosting, but also streaming video via Flash Media Server.

Now the video server and web server need not be on the same physical hardware. No more than 50 users simultaneously stream video. However, bandwidth overages pushed that monthly fee to over $1600 several months ago (and that was only two weeks into the month).

So, I switched from rackspace to some commodity php/mysql all-you-can eat webhost. I then set up additional video servers on Verizon Fios Business package, with a 35/35Mbps connection.

Now the video is not crucial to the success of the website, more like icing on the cake, so some downtime is acceptable in my case.

However, I do have a UPS that can run the server for approx. 14 minutes underload, which is enough time for me to manually switch to a backup generator.

Of course, I had all these things already (UPS,generator).

For me, it was a no-brainer. $150/month with 5 fixed IPs and I provide my own physical hardware PLUS unlimited bandwidth, versus $650/month.

The momey saved can be spent on hardware or software. As traffic increases beyond the capabilities of the Fios connection, I may consider rackspace again.

OTOH, I have several buddies that would be willing to colocate additional hardware at their FIOS enabled locations.

It simply depends on your needs.

Be careful with Comcast business, though. I believe they have some pricey install fees for business accounts, unless you sign a 3-year contract.

BTW, it is not in the garage, it is in a sideroom w/ it's own unit AC.

<comment><USER9> Right on - it is a good way to test a concept for some time, without suffering from high costs.

If/when it catches up, it will be time to externalize. I did something similar (~ same costs) for a project that was a huge gamble - risky, but with excellent returns if it succeeded. Turns out it didn't work, which was the most predictable outcome, but I lost much less with home hosting that with dedicated hosting.

Some people will say that's not trusting one's project. I disagree - like you allot time, you should allot a budget to any given project.

It should succeed or fail within the given budget (which can always be adjusted depending on the situation) unless you want to go bankrupt for a bet that failed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> $100/mo? That's $40/mo. more than I charge for 1U of real datacenter space with a 5Mbps (shared) connection. Plus, if you actually start generating a lot of traffic I'm not going to randomly cut you off or throttle your connection like Comcast might.

<comment><USER11> you know what bothers me? when people quote co-lo price in rackspace without power. If you are willing to go with 1/40th of a 15a circuit, 33.7 watts usable, I could sell you 1u for $20/month and I'd be doubling my costs. Of course, running almost anything in that power envelope would be nigh impossible. that's barely enough power to run three 3.5" disks and nothing else. the OP is talking about a quad-core CPU, so we're probably talking at least 120 watts. If you are selling 120 watts and a reasonable amount of bandwidth for $60/month, you are significantly below market (and I'd like more information)

but yeah, you do have a point, if he's willing to spend that kinda scratch on connectivity he can get a box co-located. From what Ive seen of the market around here, he's going to be a bit over $100/month, (but, if you are way cheaper than that... seriously, lemme know. I get people pestering me all the time about co-lo and I usually send them away.)

<comment><USER10> I include 1 UPS'd outlet. I don't get overly concerned about power draw, it averages out. There is only so much power you can draw in 1U. People coming in with a beefy-ass server are going to tend to want dedicated bandwidth and a small subnet of their own (if not immediately, then when their operation grows), which moves them out of the $60/mo package and in to something more custom.

But yes, power IS one of the more costly bits of running a datacenter and I could see where some sites would expect you to run no more than a nite-lite on the power that is included.

<comment><USER11> >There is only so much power you can draw in 1U

that sounds like a challenge to me, and is the opposite of my experience.

I used to run a bunch of these:

[http://www.supermicro.com/Aplus/system/1U/1021/AS-1021TM- T_....](http://www.supermicro.com/Aplus/system/1U/1021/AS-1021TM-T_.cfm)

with high power CPUs, the goddamn thing would draw four amps. with the advent of socket g34, quad-cpu systems now cost no more than 2x dual-cpu systems, even without the 'two in 1u' bit:

[http://www.supermicro.com/Aplus/system/1U/1042/AS-1042G-TF.c...](http://www.supermicro.com/Aplus/system/1U/1042/AS-1042G-TF.cfm)

where are you located? I'm in the bay area, (where power is super expensive) and my experience has been that power doesn't average out. people keep wanting to bring in ancient dual netburst Xeon space heaters, "It's only 1u!" even though the goddamn thing eats two and a half amps.

this, you see, is why I don't do co-lo anymore.

Now, it's possible that power is just so much cheaper for you than it is for me that it doesn't matter... either way, I want more details. seriously, right now I'm recommending other co-lo places on my co-lo order page... <http://prgmr.com/san-jose-co-location.html> I know the guy running rippleweb is in sacramento, and is paying around 1/3rd of what I do for power.

<comment><USER10> _where are you located_

Massachusetts.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> It's been a few years, but I used to do some webhosting from my house on "business class" cable. It wasn't that much of a sysadmin task once I had things set up. But what killed us was our connection's downtime. I think over a year we were disconnected at least 5 times that we noticed, from a couple hours to a 2 day stretch over one weekend.

One tip: if you're not a cable TV customer (just data), when they connect you, see if you can get the tech to physically label your connection in the junction box out at the street with something like "Business Broadband Customer". We were disconnected at least twice by random Larry the cable guys working on neighbors' stuff. He'd see us connected, but we wouldn't show up as a cable TV subscriber so he'd disconnect us. After the second time, I got our guy (same company, but different division) to label our connection and it stayed connected. That solved our longer outages, but we still had shorter ones.

<comment><USER9> I did the same a while back in early 2007, when FiOS was introduced in my city in France by Orange.

I needed a good server for a custom made webapp (8G RAM minimum, 500 MB with a spare, quad core 64 bit - that was a little expansive in 2007). The cost analysis revealed a low end Dell with a decent CPU, loaded with RAM + dedicated "home" hosting was the most reasonable option, compared to VPS or rewriting the app.

I paid 80 Eur/month for 100 Mbps symmetrical - add that power and lost rent costs (it was in a dedicated room of my appartment) for like ~ 150 Eur/month total.

The big advantage was a full control - I could do what the hell I needed with my hardware. It doesn't take too much time to do administration as you reported.

The only drawback was the Orange Livebox - a brain dead box sold to home users (100 Mbs/20 Mbs for 50 Eur/month) that had far too munch problems for any real use.

Seeing the downtime in the first couple of months was approaching 10 minutes a day, I did hook the optic fiber adapter RJ45 directly to the server. With some reverse engineering, running ppoe on a specific VLAN worked like a charm until this june, when I decided to pull the plug.

The project didn't catch up, it was very innovative in 2006, it is only moderately innovative now - time to kill it (parts of it will be used for a non profit help for Haiti)

Current hardware costs make it more logical to rent instead of build/host/maintain at home.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Way back in 2007 I launched my first successful Facebook app on a shared server from asmallorange.com that cost me $3 a month. Said Facebook app was making $50 a day when it outgrew that "server". I upgraded to a dedicated server with Softlayer that cost $400 a month. Said app was generating $3k a day in ad rev when it outgrew that server. Also I'm not some rockstar coder. Back in those days I didn't even know to index the join columns in MySQL. Had I done that I could have squeezed more traffic through one box. After this experience Ive decided that the majority of web apps can be launched for free.

</comment><comment><USER14> Because you are in the software business, not the hosting business.

Over the long run, a hosting company should be able to keep your website up and running "in less time", "higher quality", and "cheaper" than you can.

If your business can host websites more efficiently and effectively than a hosting firm, maybe you are in the wrong business and should become a hosting company for other firms?

<comment><USER15> Well, holy cow. If he can cook a frozen pizza cheaper than ordering from dominoes maybe he should be in the restaurant business instead of the software business.

<comment><USER16> Not exactly, what is being proposed is more along the lines of making your own dough, sauce and then a pizza versus ordering a pizza or cooking a frozen one. Your home made pizza might taste a bit better, but why are you spending your time making pizza's when all you want to do is eat them?

<comment><USER8> Because they taste better.

<comment><USER16> Which brings us back to the very first point made by kitcar. If you can make pizzas that taste better than Dominos and have a comparable price, then why aren't you a pizza company?

<comment><USER8> Now I understand. Anyone who is a good cook, should quit whatever job they have, unless they work in a restaurant as a cook, and start a restaurant.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I'm always baffled by this question. What on earth gives anyone the perception that data services are only about a connection and a server? How many concurrent TCP/IP sessions do you think that "free" Comcast cable router will support? I can guarantee you that you can overrun it's capabilities with even a single dedicated server. You might have a few spare UPSs lying around, but what about HVAC? What are you going to do when a squirrel blows the only circuit servicing your home? Sure, your servers and connection might stay up, but how long can you run without overheating? When you enumerate the things that data centers have, and your garage does not, I can't see how it makes any sense.

* Redundant electricity/generators * Real HVAC systems (also on generators) * Fire suppression systems * Redundant connectivity * Connections that can handle high levels of concurrency * Secure facility

Never underestimate the impact of downtime to your business' viability. At any given moment, your service will be "critical" to someone. Often times, the loss of confidence can't be regained, and to be brutally honest, that loss of confidence would be justified given that you think it's ok to run your hosting out of a garage.

Given how small the cost delta is between hosting infrastructure at your home versus paying for something like a VPS, you're assigning a very small value to your customer's importance. As a customer, how am I supposed to feel about that? That is probably the single greatest reason more startups aren't doing this. You have to fight and claw for every customer you get. I'm not willing to have them walk out the door because I decided I could save $70/month on hosting by doing it from my garage. If you can't sustain the hosting costs required to run your business today, you won't be able to do it six months from now. Time to reassess your model.

</comment><comment><USER18> I did it for my company. Except replace garage with basement. I have a business ISP account with a dedicated staff rep. and 24/7 on-site repair. It costs just at $77 a month for 10/5 with 5 static IPs.

I purchased an older HP Proliant server off eBay with 12 drives for just under $600 shipped for everything. I installed VMWare ESXi on the machine and then created 5 virtual machines. One machine for an email server, one for database server, one for web, and two staging machines for database/web server. Total cost for those machines was zero, and thanks to virtual appliances I can expand.

At that point I have redundant power supplies, raid hard drives, and plenty of backup swaps. I also can configure the server whenever to allocate resources as needed to the machines running. I can quickly copy and create a new server whenever I need one, which is really nifty.

In the end the only down-time I have is when my power is totally out. If I host I usually have about a 97% up-time excluding regular maintenance. The machine running constantly makes less impact than my Dell XPS 720.

<comment><AUTHOR> Brilliant. I've been looking at VMWare ESXi as well as Microsoft's Virtualization. Microsoft's offerings aren't nearly as nice, but I'm a BizSpark member, so the licenses are free for me right now. And, you're able to migrate live servers from one box to the other, which is a huge plus.

Thanks for the comment.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> What users notice most is latency, not bandwidth.

For example, if every page asset has an extra 1 second latency, then you are adding several seconds to your base page load time as all those 1 second delays stack up. First the main frame has to load, then if you have a subframe, the subframe has to load, then finally the content in it. Nest frames or other content, and suddenly your site seems sluggish for a single user and you're nowhere near your bandwidth limit.

I've had Fios and Comcast and on both latency wasn't great. Latency on their networks varies widely by location and is harder to keep consistent and build a good marketing message around, so they don't sell on latency.

<comment><USER11> the latency difference between fios and co-lo is going to be tiny. 10ms vs 50ms at most. (yeah, 5x difference, but it's still fifty friggen milliseconds)

<comment><USER20> Same for cable.. on TWC I can ping 1,500 miles away in ~60ms.

L3 latency is usually a small fraction of the initial website load time. Inline the js + css, strip whitespace, enable gzip, use memcached, get a server that can fit the whole DB in RAM, etc.

Preventing packet loss is very important, though (a TCP retrans adds 2-3 seconds). I do think datacenters have a real edge there.

<comment><USER11> packet loss is pretty huge, and data centers, generally speaking, really are better in that regard.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> there is no sense to plan for scaling when you are small.

you are wasting valuable resources for things that might not happen. Just spend $10/mo on a shared host and you'll be good to go.

if your product is in such a high demand, that it crashes from the traffic...then you can quickly spend a few bucks on a dedicated server. Until then preparing for millions of users is just stupid, since chances are, you'll only get a few hundred users that first week/month

<comment><USER22> "there is no sense to plan for scaling when you are small."

Agreed. And what's the marketing strategy? If there isn't one, then the business will stay small.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I've done this before when testing out micro business ideas, and if they take off then I get a more professional hosting setup.

Like you I build a fast box myself from parts and made sure I had a good broadband provider with consistent upstream speeds.

If you're idea's successful, you'll soon know about it.

</comment><comment><USER24> While hosting anything that's too serious in your garage probably isn't a great idea- I've hosted stuff at non-traditional places before and been just fine. Nothing of ours is mission critical that I'm doing this with.

We've got a rack at a local university that's in a large (8x10) closet with its own power, HVAC and fire suppression. The facility is fairly secure and you'd have to know two layers of door codes to get in there.

Yet we've got 6 servers in a rack. The servers in total cost us around $3000 (could have done it for less, but one of them we bought new and went overkill on), and we pay nothing for monthly hosting.

If you sniff around local universities, you can likely find someone that is cool with you throwing something in their rack for free or cheap. I know many of the dorms at MIT have several 42U racks on each floor and people throw stuff in those all the time. I know of others that have cheap hosting for affiliated members.

Time to call your alma mater?

</comment><comment><USER25> Fire and thieves do happen (seen a couple of times at customers who were hosting their servers themselves, unfortunately).

It's an option though if in your context, you could tolerate a week (not a couple of days) of downtime, and buy everything again!

Oh - and energy/piece of mind is I believe the scarcest resource for an entrepreneur, too :)

</comment><comment><USER26> I host my sites on a server in my living room.

I use my HTPC at home as a server for my SVN and sites which haven't started making money for me yet. What I like about this setup is that I can deploy large amounts of data in an instant. I have a mostly static site with a few million pages I plan to update daily.

More importantly, now I can justify paying for the fast internet connection and keeping the PC running 24hrs.

The problem area is keeping backups. My server is a retired P4 I got from ebay for $50, which is not really reliable. I had to go through the pain of setting up all my backup scripts, which I guess I would have to do any way.

The P4 has enough processing power to handle all my sites' traffic while I'm watching youtube on it.

I also use the server to download anything and everything I need. It also serves as a file server and hosts some of my personal ssh tunnels and proxies.

Having said that, I would recommend using a home server unless you really don't want to spend money on hosting or if you are worried about bandwidth caps. Start ups can benefit from a home server, but plan to movie it to a real server once you start growing. Don't invest on home server hardware or try to upgrade. What you already have is probably good enough.

</comment><comment><USER27> Yes, but I have an audience of at most twelve.

However, while I use extremely cheap hardware (i build a server for about $300 retail quantity one), the power supplies will fail. The time that they choose to fail will not be in alignment with your choice of time to fail. If you live in an area subject to power failures, you are down if it lasts longer than say 30 minutes. If someone in your neighborhood sucks too much bandwidth, it is likely to pull from your allotment. If your lawnmower or the neighbor's lawnmower cuts the cable, who knows how long it will take to fix.

I have several UPS units essentially for transient protection, and two or three internet providers (cable plus dsl) and a verizon cellular internet access.

If I were looking for users in the hundreds or thousands or more, I would certainly go for a low-cost provider with a good stack. These are not that expensive and I hear that many do an excellent job.

</comment><comment><USER28> You could also just rent the smallest server at hetzner.de for 59 EUR/mo and have them add a 128G SSD for 44 EUR/mo.

That way you pay 103 EUR/mo (about 134 USD) and skip a lot of headache.

<comment><USER2> This is the 2nd day in a row I've heard of hetzner.de. If they remove their one-time setup fee of 149 eur I might give them a try.

<comment><USER29> One-time setup fees seem like one of the dumbest things a hosting company can do. I can think of few more effective ways to keep me from trying a service.

<comment><USER30> Yeah, it is annoying; they do sometimes have specials where the setup fees are waived or reduced. I have to say their service has been excellent for me though (I've used them for years).

Note that you might want to check if hosting in Germany has any legal implications for you - German data protection laws are _vastly_ more strict than the US, say.

<comment><USER2> It's not just annoying it's counterproductive. In my head setup fees trigger warning bells on two areas:

1\. The company is so un-automated that it actually needs considerable human intervention to prepare a server and doesn't actually bother to include this basic operation into their total cost (they sell servers after all).

2\. It's a trick to squeeze at least the 150 euro from you. Because if I find out in the first months that their service is sub-par I can just cancel my subscription but I'm not getting my 150 euro back.

<comment><USER28> As lsc explained the setup fee is not normally for human labor but part of the hosts cost calculation.

Serious hosts will give you free trials ( _before_ you pay the setup fee) any time, unless you ask for special hardware that they themselves have to buy first.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> The reason is because it doesn't scale, and you will end up spending most of your time managing the server stack rather than deploying and selling the product.

</comment><comment><USER32> We have a couple of servers at the office handling various duties like file serving, staging environment, backup email and support website in case our data center goes down. We used to run a few sites on them before we migrated to fully dedicated hosting.

It's not necessarily a bad idea, but I'd probably not do it again now that cheap VPSes are a commodity. Outsourcing the physical management allows me to not worry about assembling hardware, backups, power outages, network outages, burglary, fire and flooding. Neither will the server leave users hanging every time someone on the network downloads alot of data.

Unless you're doing some serious processing, a cheap Linode VPS should hold you over until you're profitable enough to upgrade to some real hosting.

</comment><comment><USER33> I'm done with slow disk on cloud hosts. But actually the one with slow disk was Slicehost, and I AM fed up to hell with that. They caused me no end of problems until I figured out they were the problem. It's a bit deceptive, really, since you're promised your fair share of resources - then it turns out you're disk i/o is as low as 3/mb a sec. W T F.

Instead of going nuts and hosting in my garage, though... I just changed hosts. A rack on a colo would make more sense than the garage route, too.

<comment><USER11> 3MB/sec isn't a fair share of a disk? I think it is.

to start, your cheap sata disk is going to max out a 100Mb/sec for /sequential/ transfers. Now, cut that in quarters, because two different guests streaming data to the disk make sequential random. so you have 25MB/s. double it, as they are probably raid-10ing the disk (at least, that's what I do) so we have a best case 50MB/s to share.

Now, they are probably in a box with 32GiB ram. say they give a gig to the dom0, and you are on a 512MiB guest. that means you are sharing with 62 total guests. So your fair share is less than 1MB/sec of hard drive transfer.

Of course, best case, nobody else is using the drive and you get all 200MB/s, but with 60 guests, that won't happen often.

Hard drives suck. Sharing hard drives makes them suck a lot more.

Note, I know almost nothing about the actual slicehost setup; what I'm describing here is guesses about their setup based on what I know about xen and what I know of my own set up.

My understanding is that Linode is perceived by light users to have better I/O throughput, but this is because they monitor and take action against heavy I/O users. (I think this is a good idea, and may implement it myself)

<comment><USER33> Your calculations assume I am talking about bog $20/mo VPS. Nope, I'm talking about a $160 a month system with 2GB ram, 72 MB HD space, etc. As far as I know 4-8 of those fit on one of their systems. If I had a 256/384 slice, yeah, I doubt if the rest of the system could handle enough traffic that the I/O would matter.

My 2 year old, nothing special home desktop gives me 72 mb/s. I expect that a pricey VPS will perform at least as well. If not, I could get a dedicated server for $40 more.

Running hdparm, slicehost gave me 3-48 mb/s. When it was down under 20, my server was choking doing the simplest tasks - like say, logging into ssh while actually serving HTTP requests. Performance was sucking. Customers complained. I tried tuning my DB. Nope, it wasn't my fault. System load ranged from 3-50 for no apparent reason.

The same test on Linode yields 98-165 mb/s. I moved the server to Linode (saving $80 a month!!), have added new features and increased usage, and performance remains excellent. No mysterious slowdowns, no high system load. Everything hums along without a hitch, proving to me it is Slicehost's problem, not mine. Thank god it is theirs to deal with now. This caused me a lot of stress and I'm so glad to be on a host that is giving me what I am paying for.

I'm sure you know more about this from that side, but this is my experience as user.

3mb/sec is unusable for a moderately busy server. The fact that other hosts give better performance says all I need to know.

If they gave a steady 30-40 mb/s, from your calculations, that's what I'm paying for and yeah, that's probably all I need. The unsteadiness, though, and the dips to near nothing - that is unacceptable. I'm not a hobbyist. This is a business, other businesses depend on us.

<comment><USER11> Yeah, like I said, I from what I hear, linode is managing disk I/O well.

Have you ever gotten a warning about using too much IO from linode?

ok, so let's go back and see the math again... so there were 14 systems or so on that 32GiB system, so if everyone was going at the disk, you'd get what, 3.5MB/sec- about what you were seeing.

I'm just pointing out, when you 'virtualize' a hard drive, you are sharing a resource that really doesn't share very well. you were getting your 'fair share' of the server at slicehost; it sounds like linode just does a much better job of keeping everyone from trying to use all available disk at all times.

<comment><USER33> Our i/o isn't really very high. It is under 1 mb/s on average, actually! So I have no idea what the issue is. You're right, 3 MB/S SHOULD be enough because according to our Linode graph, the i/o hasn't been over 2 mb/s in the past week. I can only imagine that certain times at Slicehost must have been providing less than at the times I tested it.

That's what is frustrating for me. We don't have a demanding application. It's well written and tuned, but I was having these problems, and as far as I knew I was paying enough to not have such problems. Maybe we're on a spacious server at Linode or were graced with idle neighbors... all I know is, the system load on Linode is muuuch more stable, (and low!) even though our system is doing twice as much. And, it costs half as much.

<comment><USER11> I didn't say 3MB/sec was enough... just that it was fair. there's a difference, you know.

I suspect the differences you saw after moving had to do with how active the other users of the disk were. this may have been chance, or it may have been Linode's policy of pro actively doing things about heavy disk users.

<comment><USER33> Thanks for your insights on this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Downtime doesn't sound so bad when your site is relatively unknown... What happens when your fortunate enough to get your first piece of good press that directs a flood of traffic to your site? Seems to me that's when downtime is most likely to happen, and when you'd have preferred to pay professionals to prepare you for it.

</comment><comment><USER35> Im confused. I figured the new best way, with the insanely cheap prices was the cloud. It saves you redeploying in the cloud later. Need more CPU, RAM, etc, click a button, clone a server.

Looking into Amazon even, their prices are fractions of a penny on bandwidth. And I see reddit dump all their servers, drop employee load, and it seems the home garage is rad for testing, but maybe not that great, as one day, if it all works out, you have to retool for the cloud anyway.

P.S. I am doing hosting of non critical stuff myself on a Comcast 50/10 line which is really 60/15, on a few mac mini's, which use near no power, and seem to stay up pretty well. I am just toting around with my personally ideas mostly. I like the fast local lan access, and I jump to a VPN so I can feel it like the rest of the world would. But it is only temp, until the idea proves viable, and then off to the cloud I go.

<comment><AUTHOR> Because disk IO on cloud hosting solutions generally suck. What I'm doing requires a lot of disk IO.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> I have an unused dell pentium 4 box running my website at my parents house :D

It just hosts an info site and blog for my android app on a pretty basic wordpress site that I have backed up. It's also a nice dev/filehost server. I figure I'll deal with scaling if I ever get to it.

The most visitors I've ever had is maybe 50 a day and who knows how many of those are robots. I wouldn't want to run any extensive server side code or an actual web app on it though.

</comment><comment><USER37> Gcan get a root server for €50 upwards (eg. at <http://hetzner.de>). They have great hardware, a 100MBps connection and a couple of TB data transfer included.

See also <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1564897>

</comment><comment><USER38> why oh why people does not look around for dedicated host price before going into that much trouble ?

see this for example <http://www.kimsufi.co.uk/ks/> (note: I don't work for OVH)

that's about 25$/month, look at the specs for yourself.

the pros: * if the hardware go down in flame they replace it. period. * a nice choice of distrib (Linux / BSD / Solaris / Windows) * the f _cking bandwidth (agreed it would be mainly fast for europe)

the cons: _ you will have to do the admin yourself (for the lower prices), and that can take time depending on what you need/do. * after using this you will find any broadband offer awfully slow * you will not be able to live without a dedicated server ;)

I'm not trying to be negative here, but this kind of hosting is much cheaper than hosting the hardware yourself.

<comment><USER11> That box has only one disk, which is inappropriate for most uses. Sure, they'll put up another server for you, but that's not the hard part; the hard part is restoring your backup. Until you are large enough to have redundant everything, mirrored disk, I think, is a must.

<comment><USER38> so ?

there is a 100MB extern drive accessible via FTP, and rsync is your friend

at the very worst, when your server is on a 100MBps link then it's dirt cheap (in time and money) to do the backup on the cloud

<comment><USER11> if you do that, and you test your backup, and you are okay getting paged, waking up, following the procedure, then dealing with the half day of downtime, sure, that's fine.

but a mirror is still a whole lot easier. it just keeps chugging through the drive failure.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> i would argue that if you are only spending $500 on hardware (I'm assuming 8GiB ram there?) you are right on the borderline of co-lo vs vps.

you can get reasonable co-lo for a hundred bucks a month, and ridiculous amounts of bandwidth for two hundred bucks.

also, total up your power costs for the server. the thing is California charges you more the more you use; your top marginal KwH can be pretty expensive, especially if you live with other people.

</comment><comment><USER39> Do you have a UPS in your garage?

</comment><comment><USER40> Hosting is a commodity now. Stop wasting your time and focus on your code.

</comment><comment><USER41> Its too early for you to need to scale, but it seems to me that a service like App Engine eliminates:

1- The cost. Right off the bat you're spending $1,700 that would probably cost you nothing if you hosted it with google.

2- The administration time - why spend any time configuring or administering servers? It doesn't benefit the product when you get this essentially for free.

3- The concerns about security, reliability, single point of failure issues, etc. These may not be critical now, but eventually they will be important and that means you'll have to move. Why not start on App Engine where this is taken care of?

4- Scalability. Again, not something you need now, but rather than re- architect your site and move it later, why not use App Engine from the beginning?

From my perspective, App Engine is such a compelling value proposition that there's no reason not to build your site there. If google somehow becomes untenable, you can host app engine sites on unix using open source software.... and the appengine SDK is open sourced itself. So you're not locked in, other than the "lockin" of providing free service until you get big and a great platform.

</comment><comment><USER42> <http://www.thrustvps.com/vps/advancedvps/></comment>


Mysterious billion-dollar car company is taking on Tesla - <AUTHOR> http://nypost.com/2015/11/06/mysterious-billion-dollar-car-company-is-taking-on-tesla/ <comment><USER2> Hi, Here's my two cents.

TL;DR: I don't feel this is Apple. Though, it might be wrong speculation.

I decided to subscribe to their mailing list, and this was the footer in their confirmation email:

For questions about this list, please contact: firstname.lastname@example.com

Now, I decided to go ahead and hit them a mail, I was hoping it'd expose some detail of the company. But here's what I got instead:

Delivery has failed to these recipients or groups:

firstname.lastname@example.com The email address you entered couldn't be found. Please check the recipient's email address and try to resend the message. If the problem continues, please contact your henpdesk.

Now, this is understandable, but if it's being run by Apple, I'll be damned if they make such major mistakes, seeing their own line of work. But okay, that isn't concrete evidence of that.

Here's the more interesting part of the email:

Original message headers:

Received: from FF-MAIL1.faradayfuture.com (10.0.0.6) by FF- MAIL1.faradayfuture.com (10.0.0.6) with Microsoft SMTP Server (TLS) id 15.0.847.32; Sat, 7 Nov 2015 08:11:00 -0800

Received: from mail-ob0-f178.google.com (188.8.131.52) by FF- MAIL1.faradayfuture.com (10.0.0.6) with Microsoft SMTP Server id 15.0.847.32 via Frontend Transport; Sat, 7 Nov 2015 08:11:00 -0800

[1]

Did you see it yourself? Well, the company is running on Microsoft SMTP Servers. I mean, Apple seriously would not be doing that. Using Microsoft servers themselves would be too much. It's still possible, they're taking too many measures to hide the fact that it's Apple, and a this a part of those.

Another thing, very startup-sy about the company, is that they have liked something on their Facebook page[2], posted by some fanboy, which is not really possible if unless they have the whole Apple PR department at their back, or they made it themselves and monitor it personally. I mean, it's tough for Apple to monitor it themselves. One more thing I saw their Facebook page is Verified. Many other Facebook pages, with far more likes, and possibly, equally big teams/impact[3], don't have their pages Verified. Might be Apple, this shows.

[1]=[https://imgur.com/kam9Yf8](https://imgur.com/kam9Yf8)

[2]=[https://www.facebook.com/faradayfuture/](https://www.facebook.com/faradayfuture/)

[3]=[https://www.facebook.com/LitMotors/](https://www.facebook.com/LitMotors/)</comment>


MySpace To Join OpenID, Bringing Total Enabled Accounts to Over A Half Billion - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/07/21/myspace-to-join-openid-bringing-total-enabled-accounts-to-over-a-half-billion/

<comment><USER2> "MySpace to exploit OpenID" would be a better headline. SSO won't be achieved if everyone wants to own your identity.

</comment><comment><USER3> Patronize sites that accept OpenID: [http://blog.clickpass.com/2008/05/04/clickpass-in-more- place...](http://blog.clickpass.com/2008/05/04/clickpass-in-more-places/)

</comment><comment><USER4> What's the number of accounts that accept OpenID? Or the number of accounts that use OpenID? My company serves a pretty tech-oriented crowd and we get 5% usage of OpenID.</comment>


That New "Lost iPhone" Story Was A Bunch Of BS, Say San Francisco Police - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/that-new-lost-iphone-story-was-a-bunch-of-bs-say-san-francisco-police-2011-9

<comment><USER2> I was amazed by the comments here and on reddit about the initial story, with discussions on everything from how easy is it to lose something, to 'it's a marketing conspiracy by Apple' with no one questioning the veracity of the story.</comment>


Mac Internet share almost 9%; Windows drops below 90%; iPhone Fourth - <AUTHOR> http://apple20.blogs.fortune.cnn.com/2008/12/01/mac-internet-share-hits-record-882-windows-drops-below-90/

<comment><USER2> "(Linux grew even faster, up nearly 16.9% for the month, following a 22% drop the month before.)"

This casts serious doubt on the accuracy of this survey. The article is scant on details about methodology, but the anomaly is probably indicative of an unreasonably small sample size.</comment>


Current State of Home Automation:  Non-Cloud Options? - <AUTHOR> What options are there these days for progammable home automation solutions that are:<p>- compatible with at least some closed products like Cree bulbs, Ecobee, or equivalent
 - Totally not cloud dependent!  Screw the cloud and all the telemetry.  I'd rather set up my own infrastructure if I must access things remotely.
 - Open source, but I don't care if it's not.
 - Nice API.<p>Or is the 'open' nature of what I'm asking not baked yet? <comment><USER2> I use Home Assistant ([https://home-assistant.io/](https://home- assistant.io/)). They have a "Cloud" option, however, you're definitely able to use it entirely locally depending on what kind of hardware and functionality you want to utilize.

Using Z-Wave hardware for your locks, lights, plugs, etc eliminate the need for internet / cloud based connectivity. I have some Z-Wave sensors and such, however, all my lights for the most part are LIFX which use Wifi and synchronize via the LIFX cloud.

If you're interested in checking out Home Assistant here's my public portion of my configuration files and such [https://github.com/brianjking/homeassistant- config](https://github.com/brianjking/homeassistant-config)

Thanks and good luck!</comment>


Shutdown in Minnesota: A sign of things to come? - <AUTHOR> http://www.economist.com/node/18928883

<comment><USER2> What a horribly biased article. I think this could be the poster child for how to right an article that, while not coming out and saying that it favors one side, engineers its presentation such that it's clear that one side is wrong.</comment>


Head of German Conversative Party CDU Asks to "Regulate" Influencers - <AUTHOR> https://www.faz.net/aktuell/politik/inland/reaktion-auf-rezo-akk-will-im-wahlkampf-regeln-fuer-influencer-16209710.html <comment><AUTHOR> Some context for this: The German YouTuber "Rezo", normally known for rather "intellectual low-level" videos published a video last week titled "The destruction of the CDU" [1] where he analyzed the politics of the largest German Conservative Party, the CDU and outlined how they are actively endangering our future with their style of politics.

While one might argue that he made some minor mistakes while choosing sources or interpreting the numbers he found, all in all it's a solid 55 minute video which is quite on point and has all the sources linked for everyone to look at.

In only a few days this video hit the 5 million views mark and was discussed all around German news.

Instead of arguing contentwise with or against the video, the CDU and its members took action like some headless chickens, defamed the YouTuber and so on. They even published an 11 page long PDF which was mostly emotional and pointing out that the video was unfair. To most people this was only proof that Rezo had a valid point and the CDU had nothing to counter.

Another video followed where Rezo and around 70 famous German YouTubers collectively asked to NOT vote for CDU, CSU, SPD (and right-wing AfD) in the upcoming EU election as the former three were in charge for the last decades and were giving a shit about climate change and so on.

As we see on the German results from the EU election this might have worked/helped. CDU and SPD lost dramatically, the Green party is around the same level as CDU now. One might argue whether the video really had an impact or people were just frustrated with the CDU/SPD anyway, but at least it looked like the video had an impact.

This led to the point that Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer ("AKK"), as head of CDU and therefore one of the two ruling parties, asked to regulate influencers during election periods. Obviously this is a huge thing now, as freedom is speech is ensured by constitutional law in Germany and this suggestion is highly unconstitutional and an unheard border crossing.

Note beside: Influencers are totally fine for the CDU when they are talking in favor of the CDU. In 2017 for the federal election campaign they worked together with some influencers and they really liked it.

AKK was only elected in December 2018 (as the least worse option out of three!) as head of CDU and was planned as the successor of Angela Merkel. Seems like those hopes might now be crushed, Bloomberg is speculating if AKK is being put down from the job after all. [2]

Thought you people might find interesting what's going on in Germany, especially with a spin on influencers as a job/profession/hobby around the whole world.

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Y1lZQsyuSQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Y1lZQsyuSQ)

[2] [https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-05-28/merkel- se...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-05-28/merkel-sees- succession-plan-unraveling-because-akk-not-up-to-job)</comment>


Techniques for Duck Typing Ruby's Core Objects - <AUTHOR> http://blog.rubybestpractices.com/posts/gregory/007-rubyish-code.html

<comment><USER2> Title is misleading. What I see presented in the article is a single technique, "implement the same interface." What I expected instead was to see methods for getting ruby core objects to present themselves as more complex objects or so on. In that case, I'd expect to see references to SimpleDelegate, Forwardable, duping the metaclass, extending the singleton class of the instantiated objects and so forth.

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't know how to edit titles on HN, otherwise I'd change it to "A Technique For ..."

As for the rest of the ideas here, they're all good, and if you want to write up a post about them, I'd be happy to run it on RBP Blog. We'll be opening up third party contributions soon anyway. Or if you post somewhere else, I can link this post back to it.

While delegation is interesting on its own, it isn't _too_ interesting when it comes to duck typing in the abstract sense because it by definition chains you to implementation details. Of course, it is nice to make an array-like thing act like an array by just delegating the relevant calls, or something similar.

Of course, things _do_ get more exciting when you do something like this:

      a = [1,2,3]
      a.extend(ActLikeAFoo)
      expect_a_foo(a)

So thanks for pointing this out. It's a great technique for certain needs and hopefully it'll get coverage soon on the blog.

<comment><USER2> I'd be happy to help, please drop a line to firstname.lastname@example.com so I can follow up with you.

<comment><AUTHOR> email sent, thanks.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Low-powered Bluetooth mesh with beacons - <AUTHOR> http://blog.estimote.com/post/153812538740/introducing-the-worlds-first-ble-mesh-networking <comment><AUTHOR> Hi HN, this is Jakub, founder of Estimote, Inc. (YC S13).

We just released a new firmware to support mesh networking with bluetooth beacons - you can read more on our blog: [http://blog.estimote.com/post/153812538740/introducing- the-w...](http://blog.estimote.com/post/153812538740/introducing-the-worlds- first-ble-mesh-networking)

Happy to answer any questions here! : )

<comment><USER2> I have had 5 different ideas for projects just looking at your site. I currently work in an education company with little one's and there are a few ideas that would be awesome in a 3-5 year old age group. It would also be great as a research tool to figure out where children are spending their time in the classrooms during the day.

This is really looks like an exciting technology.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! Please see this list of use-cases - there is an entire section for education: [https://community.estimote.com/hc/en- us/articles/207295257-A...](https://community.estimote.com/hc/en- us/articles/207295257-Apps-and-projects-with-Estimote)

<comment><USER3> I didn't see anything with mass transit there. We're piloting beacons at bus stops and in the busses.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> So... is this broadcast/observe and trickle, or true connections? From the tree demo, it looks like trickle with a limited observe window to limit the power consumption. If it were connection I would expect the tree to light up a little less randomly.

<comment><AUTHOR> Of course, beacons do not keep the persistent connection since that would drain too much battery. But they are not synchronized, so you can pass data to one edge of the mesh and it will be passed with some latency to another edge - like on the tree video. If you watch carefully the tree video it's like a chain reaction since more nodes are influencing other nodes in the range.

<comment><USER4> So yeah. Sounds like nothing new, and there is definitely severe limitations in latency and power consumption in using these methods to do anything except change some settings or toggle GPIOs. Not revolutionary, but definitely cool that you were able to reduce power consumption to run on batteries unlike other implementations that leave the receive on 100% of the time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Any one aware of the technical details of how this was accomplished?

Is listening for other BLE transmissions low power enough that it can be done while keeping the claimed "several years" battery life, or is there something extra going on to limit the power cost of listening?

Is the protocol between the beacons themselves actually BLE in the mesh case? Or do they just expose that to phones?

Are the beacons establishing BLE connections for the mesh, or are they just taking advantage of announcements (which would likely allow avoiding some power consumption as long as the message is small)? A mix?

<comment><AUTHOR> Beacons use only BLE to talk to each other; there no Zigbee or other connectivity technology. That way both phones or other beacons/BLE devices can inject data to mesh.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Would be cool to wire these up to those nuclear batteries:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13060159](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13060159)

<comment><AUTHOR> Wow, this is great - nuclear-energy powered beacons would be a hit. Hope they will commercialize it soon : )

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> What specifically is a "world's first" here? Just curious because I know a hardware designer who designed battery-powered Bluetooth (not necessarily BLE) mesh networks for factory-scale alarm systems two years ago. Not sure if they ever made it to production, but I wouldn't be surprised. That system only required servicing once a year.

<comment><AUTHOR> BLE (Bluetooth Low Energy) is supported these days by all modern phones and we haven't seen mesh implementations on top of BLE that would be low-power. There are other non-low-power BLE implementations for example for lightbulbs, but it's not useful for beacons since they need to be wireless due to operational costs of deployments at scale.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Hasn't the CSR BLE mesh been around for far longer?

<comment><USER9> The thing about CSR BLE mesh is, they differentiate between "active" and "passive" members, and the "active" members use a lot of energy. Mesh in Estimote Beacons is the first that's truly sustainable on battery power alone.

 _Disclaimer, I 'm from Estimote (:_</comment></comment>


Rapidly cooling trauma victims to buy more time for surgery - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/science/2019/nov/20/humans-put-into-suspended-animation-for-first-time <comment><USER2> "He said at least one patient had had the procedure but did not elaborate on whether that patient or any others had survived." I think this is a pretty important detail to leave out.

<comment><USER3> According to an interview, they're trying to get the survival rate of this level of trauma up from 5-10% to maybe 20%. [https://www.popsci.com/reanimators/](https://www.popsci.com/reanimators/) So there's not much to tell from one person surviving or not.

<comment><USER4> There is something to tell from just one person surviving. That would be a world first, and implies this 'could' actually work.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> My wife is an RN in the ICU, and she has had patients on an Arctic Sun. That also cools the body to prevent brain damage, but it only brings the temperature down by a few degrees (around 91.4 F, or 33 C).

Patients on an Arctic Sun usually don't survive, but that's generally due to the condition that put them there to begin with. (For instance, one patient had a blood sugar of 1600; a normal blood sugar is around 100.) She did have one patient who made it off the Arctic Sun with no deficit; without it, he may very well be brain-dead.

<comment><USER6> "The Arctic Sun Temperature Management System is a non-invasive targeted temperature management system, a medical device used to modulate patient temperature with precision by circulating chilled water in pads directly adhered to the patient's skin. Using varying water temperatures and a sophisticated computer algorithm, a patient's body temperature can be controlled to the nearest 0.2 °C. It is produced by Medivance, Inc. of Louisville, Colorado." [1]

For those who don't know what Arctic Sun is, like me.

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

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I thought this sounded familiar. They tried to run this trial in Pittsburgh back in 2014 but didn't get a statistically useful number of patients. [https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/11/28/can- hypothermi...](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/11/28/can-hypothermia- save-gunshot-victims) The new trial was started in Baltimore in 2016.

</comment><comment><USER7> The last paragraph seems to suggest that this isn't actually the first time that people have been put into "suspended animation" via extreme cold, rather it is the first time it was done in an emergency setting.

<comment><USER8> I'm guessing its a bit marketing and a bit semantics.

I am not a doctor and I'm relating this incident third hand, but as explained to me it went like this: A person at our church had a heart attack and essentially died, they were then put into a deep chill / ice bath, then transported to the hospital. At the hospital they received a multiple bypass operation and then were brought up to temperature and out of their induced coma. They recovered and have suffered no ill effects (other than they would because their arteries were clogged). I got the impression that this chilling/induced coma kind of thing was 'new' but no longer experimental.

<comment><USER9> We had a very similar situation with my father-in-law earlier this year, unfortunately though, he never did wake up from the induced coma. He died.

The biggest takeaway for me was to learn CPR and PRACTICE it every year (through re-certification). My father-in-law went without CPR for ~9 minutes- basically pegging his chance at survival to 0. Who knows what the outcome would've been if someone who knew CPR was present to start immediately.

Seriously, get certified and practice CPR techniques. It could save a life one day.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> As a companion to this I highly recommend this article on what happens to the brain during death:

[https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/ana.25147](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/ana.25147)

This is what they are trying to prevent.

<comment><USER11> Also : "Nobody is dead until warm and dead" [https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030095721...](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0300957214005243)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> It'd be interesting if they could use a solution which had a very high content of usable oxygen (fake blood replacement?) instead of water.

Maybe they are, and it's just not mentioned?

<comment><USER13> There have been years of attempts at creating an artificial blood O2 and CO2 carrier but so far nothing really viable has seemed to come out. In the mean time they're just slowing down the chemical processes that cause so much damage to the brain in the absence of oxygen.

<comment><USER14> Seems like a combination approach might help. Even if a carrier isn't good enough at body temperature, it might extend viability when chilled, compared to just using saline.

<comment><USER12> Wonder how feasible it'd be to er... super saturate "stock" blood (eg from blood packs) with extra oxygen carrying red blood cells? Preferably oxygenated just prior to being used for this.

<comment><USER13> Doesn't really help if the path to the brain is leaking like a sieve. Also one of the goals with blood substitutes was to make them physically smaller than red blood cells to get past the second issue which is swelling that can restrict blood supplies. The idea was a smaller O2 carrying molecule could squeeze through where a red blood cell couldn't.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Reminds me of the House episode

<comment><USER16> or Idiocracy</comment></comment>


Is writing mobile apps a bad idea? - <AUTHOR> Most mobile apps I have used could have been done just as well with a website and there are an increasing number of ways to turn a website into an app. Not only that but websites are getting nearly as much access to the device as native apps.<p>So why would it make sense to learn two different programming languages, or Xamarin, when you could just make a web page? <comment><USER2> It's easier to reach most of the time to have an app, preferences can be made easier by the developer as you're not dependent on a browser's implementation and configurations. Performance is usually better too.

<comment><USER2> Also browsers tend to break features often and some browsers follow certain standards, while others don't.

In a lot of cases when developing web-apps you end up special-casing browsers

That's something you won't end up doing in mobile-apps. It's rare you special case OS for those, especially if you're using Xamarin.</comment></comment>