The Rhine waterway risks becoming impassable because of climate change - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-01-18/europe-s-most-important-river-is-running-dry <comment><USER2> Last week, or maybe the week before it, I read an article called "the death of snow" in a Danish newspaper called weekendavisen. It bluntly stated that we might need to get used to the idea of being the only Scandinavian country without snow, and how it would change our national identity.

This got me thinking about a story from my childhood. My grandparents told me that my great grandfather used to work as a sleigh driver during winters at the end of the nineteenth century. I hadn't believed them of course, I mean, how could one occupy such a job, where you would only be needed a couple of times each year. I had forgotten the story until I read the article about our dying snow. Now that I was reminded, however, I decided to find out if it was true. It was, it turns out that we used to get so much snow each winter that sleigh driver was a legitimate job title. At least until some time during the past hundred years.

I'm sure we would have replaced sleigh drivers with modern snow machines by now. Only the truth is that there has only been one or two winters in my life, where we've even had enough snow for a sleigh ride to be possible.

I'm afraid the death of Danish snow, and, the drying out Europe's most important river, is only the beginning of our trouble.

<comment><USER3> We were also in an ice age back then.

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

<comment><USER4> According to that article, the last little ice age dates to 1850, so that's a bit too far back, no?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm originally from Basel, where the Rhine river is flowing true and very central to the city's history and appearance. We usually go swimming (it's more letting yourself float) in the Rhine in summer by starting at one part of the city and then getting out at the other.

This year it was quite unusual as the current was extremely slow, the water was very warm and you could see that there is significantly less water flowing through. We always talk about climate change but feeling it in ways like these makes it very relatable and real.

<comment><USER6> > This year it was quite unusual as the current was extremely slow, the water > was very warm and you could see that there is significantly less water > flowing through. We always talk about climate change but feeling it in ways > like these makes it very relatable and real.

One data point (i.e. a year) should not be taken as a sign of climate change. There are always outliers from time to time. When drawing such observations it is more relevant to track exactly the state of the river over extended periods of time (20, 30 years at least) so that you have a real sense of what is happening.

<comment><USER7> C'mon guy, I'm sure parent poster is aware of how statistics work and the difference between weather and climate. As the weirdening of environment continues, everyone will have a personal story where the consequences of climate change hit home. This is theirs.

<comment><USER6> > I'm sure parent poster is aware of how statistics work

I can't talk about whom I replied to, but you would be surprised how few people actually get statistics and probabilities right.

<comment><USER8> If we knew how probabilities worked, we wouldn't be surprised.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The article starts out in the present tense, which might give a false impression that this is happening right now. In Cologne, where I live, the Rhine river actually just recovered from a minor flood as you can see on this chart:

[https://www.elwis.de/DE/dynamisch/gewaesserkunde/wasserstaen...](https://www.elwis.de/DE/dynamisch/gewaesserkunde/wasserstaende/wasserstaendeUebersichtGrafik.html.php?pegelId=a6ee8177-107b-47dd- bcfd-30960ccc6e9c)

(Everything above 4.5m is considered a flood)

One side effect of the low water that isn't mentioned in the article is that it exposed multiple bombs and grenades from the second world war.

</comment><comment><USER10> I'm originally from the Rhine river area and I still spend time there. It's certainly true that the water level was low this summer, but it was an exceptionally long and hot summer. I found interesting that my grandma labeled the it "a summer like the summers we were used to long time ago".

There's even a famous german song "Wann wird's mal wieder richtig Sommer?" (When will we have a real summer again?).

Btw since it was basically constantly raining from Oct-Dec, the river replenished really quickly.

<comment><USER11> > I found interesting that my grandma labeled the it "a summer like the > summers we were used to long time ago".

Old people often make fact-free claims about how things used to be.

We don't need to rely on faulty human memories. There are actual records of water levels, rainfall, and temperature for all of the 20th century.

It is simply not true that the past summer was something that occurred frequently in the past.

<comment><USER12> > Old people often make fact-free claims about how things used to be.

It's fun, because if there is something that is really a cliché is people complaining that the weather is not what it used to be. This has been going on for far longer than there has been any talk of climate change. So every time I hear someone saying that you can see climate change is happening because the weather is not what it used to be, I take it with a double pinch of salt.

Alternatively, the existence of the cliche might suggest that (some) climate change is always happening, just on a timescale that makes old people complain, and everybody else just be incredulous.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I'm not sure if "ironic" is the right word here, but that as a direct effect of climate change, coal power plants had to shut down and cars couldn't be manufactured is certainly an interesting twist.

<comment><USER14> Yes, feedback.

But also, shipping by barge uses lots less energy than shipping by rail, and far less than shipping by truck. So overall, it's probably positive feedback.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I grew up in the town below the mentioned Lorelei Rock, St. Goarshausen.

When I was born in 1988 it was the year of was the biggest flood in multiple decades. When I went to elementary school I remembered having to leave our house on planks a few years because of the flooding. It happened just once again in middle school. We moved to Frankfurt in 2003, since then my friends that kept living in the area report that the floods left with me moving away and are sometimes joking if we'd left some faucet running back then.

I guess it's just an example of climate change that I could find in my picture albums without realizing. I wonder what else is lurking in those pictures.

<comment><USER16> As far as I know, Germany did the same as the Netherlands after the 1993/5 flooding. They increased the leeway the water can have and increased emergency pumps. That might be a better explanation than climate change. But they do not rule each other out.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> "Critical to moving coal"? Perhaps moving less coal would be a good thing.

<comment><USER18> With the shutdown of nuclear reactors, Germany is starting to rely more and more on coal plants to provide a stable source of power that isn't dependent on weather patterns (sun for solar panels, rainfall for hydro electric).

<comment><USER19> In Germany, someone invited me to lunch in a place that, upon walking in, had one of those stickers "close $some_reactor" with a nuclear danger logo on it. I almost told them I didn't want to eat there.

I'm not sure what to do about it. Should I summarize the reasons they are stupid and put those flyers in their mailboxes, or would that only get their backs up? Of course I'd not call it stupid in such a flyer but more in the style of Without Hot Air: 'our energy demands are X because this and that; solar is Y Watts per m² so we need Y/X/$size of them, which would be equivalent to $some_state; of wind turbines we would need ... etc. Meanwhile, $this is what is happening to our climate, which by $year will be $that. With nuclear, we could reduce our output to $amount CO2 while producing X amount of nuclear waste. The waste can be stored $there and this buys us a few hundred years to figure things out for the long term. We _need_ nuclear as a stop-gap. Don't support short-term popular voices that will kill us in the long term."

Does anyone have experience reasoning with anti-nuclears?

<comment><USER20> There are just way more economic solutions than new nuclear power stations (and the old ones really start to have a lot of issues and have a lot of downtime). Look at Wylfa Newydd, Hinkley Point C, Flamanville 3, Olkiluoto 3 and then you will see that without even starting to include the massive costs of decomissioning and storage there are just way more economic solutions to reduce co2 emissions. When it comes to demolition take a look at Greifswald Nuclear Power Plant [0], which was decommissioned in 1990 and they are not even close to being finished with demolition - after 30 Years, and apparently there are 1000 Workers employed on or at the site.

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

<comment><USER19> Is there a study or some other resource of someone who looked at all these cases and calculated a cost, then compared them to these "other, more economical solutions to reduce CO2"? And are those "show hn" style prototypes, or is there anything that actually makes a difference that shows up on national statistics (of a country of your choice)? You make it sound as if there is no reason to go for nuclear at all, while that's not what I hear from others.

Edit: by the way, I did not downvote you (one cannot downvote direct replies) and don't know why you are. Maybe it's because you never mentioned what those economical options are, so your post does not really add much to the subthread without further information?

<comment><USER20> it's not the newest one (but prices for renewables have improved since and Hinkley Point C got more expensive) but here is one study which partially looks at it:

[https://web.archive.org/web/20160602073630/https://www.agora...](https://web.archive.org/web/20160602073630/https://www.agora- energiewende.de/fileadmin/Projekte/2014/low-carbon- technologies/Agora_Analysis_Decarbonisationtechnologies_web_final.pdf)

I'm from germany so most studies I know are in german so sorry for being a bit sparse on english sources and I guess german is of no use to you, If I find the time I'll try to find some more.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> If more ice melts in the Alps, how does that lead to lower water levels in the Rhine? One would expect the reverse effect.

<comment><USER22> The ice doesnt replenish in the colder periods. Side streams go dry, transporting less water to the main stream.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> It's interesting how dissent in these climate change threads is downvoted to death. I wonder what sort of effect this has on the undecided?

<comment><USER24> Let me rephrase your question, which should make the answer clear:

> It's interesting how dissent in these round earth threads is downvoted to > death. I wonder what sort of effect this has on the undecided?

<comment><USER25> Reasoning about the role of downvote, I would expect that it reduces the impact of this view on un-decided readers.

<comment><USER24> My point is being "undecided" on climate change is no more reasonable than being undecided on a round earth or a heliocentric solar system.

<comment><USER25> Agree.. I actually meant to reply to parent!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> So there's been no diversion or modification of water upstream during the last century?

A search for say, "Rhine river water diverted" returns interesting stuff to read...

<comment><USER25> Actually no, didn't return much interesting stuff at all. The bottom of the first page had a britannica article from the 1980s mentioning a long standing canal diversion France did in the 20th century, which I sense had low to no impact on the long-term climate sustained decline in water levels in the river.

The top hit on "Rhine river water diverted" is a story about the impact of decline being so strong, traffic is being diverted to road and rail.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Anytime an article about "climate change" use words like "could" "might" "potentially" and this one "risks" we are in speculation, not demonstration land.

If the science was demonstrated there would be no need to use these qualifiers. As always read these things with a grain of salt.

Yes, there will be consequences from climate change but it's not something we can't deal with and some of them are at least partially good such as added vegetation.

<comment><USER28> > Anytime an article about "climate change" uses words like "could" "might" > "potentially" and this one "risks" we are in speculation, not demonstration > land.

Do you not read a lot of scientific journals? Also, the article uses none of the qualifier words you listed except "risk" in an appropriate manner, in the subtitle. The title is "Europe's Most Important River Is Running Dry." Is that _demonstrative_ enough for you?

<comment><USER27> The header is not important as that's used to draw you in and will be the most sensationalist.

What you want to look for is in the actual article and there "risks" is used which is the only important word you need to look for.</comment></comment></comment>


Reasons not to become a consultant - <AUTHOR> http://blog.pluralsight.com/2013/09/26/5-reasons-not-to-become-a-consultant/ <comment><USER2> On the working for yourself, I get what you're/the author is saying, but since going off on my own, I do feel freer to use my time as I see fit. Of course I'm available during business hours but there's a sense of autonomy that, if I need to do something, I'll go do it and catch up later in the day or at night because everyone's aware that if I'm not working, I'm not getting paid.

Whereas, when I was a salaried employee, I always felt pressure to be in my seat and certain times, regardless of function or usefulness. It may be that my positions are a bit different now but I feel a majority of it is how salaried employees view contractors.

A point I didn't see on there and no one let me know prior to consulting was this:

No one wants to lend you money. Really. Nope, not even with that bill rate.

I'm being a bit dramatic but I've been shocked at the difficulty of acquiring financing as a consultant, it's eaten into money I spend on high rents (a note would be ~70% of my rent for a much nicer place) and on several moves. It's annoying and a very real life drain that I didn't anticipate (after some in- depth researching).

</comment><comment><USER3> Two notes:

Re: the non-tangibles - As a consultant, you get to make your own intangibles. If you can't extract some sort of benefit - extra time to work on your own side project, more flexible hours than a regular employee, etc. - that can compete with an office pizza party and free t-shirts, then you should probably look into becoming an employee again. Freedom and self-direction are the biggest intangible out there.

Re: working more hours and getting paid less of them - this is true, but it's also an excellent argument for freeing yourself from the notion of hourly billing. Bill on a daily, weekly or per-project basis if you want to avoid this pitfall.

Other than that your points were pretty spot-on. Consulting ain't easy, and filling a pipeline full of consulting clients is _hard_ (though I still think it's worth it.)

</comment><comment><USER4> "Before cell phones, I knew where every pay phone in Epcot was located, because I rarely got very far from one during the week I spent there with my family."

I found this interesting given that I started in business well before cell phones "back in the day" so to speak.

The fact that that the OP knew the pay phones seems to indicate to me that he carried around a beeper. One wonders though if what he was doing was consulting or rather something that required him to be in constant contact for another reason. And to be able to return calls almost immediately.

</comment><comment><USER5> The article is confusing 'independent contractor' with 'consultant'. All the points are true for 'independent contractor'. For a 'consultant' they're not even in the same universe.

<comment><USER6> How so? Not that I doubt you, or don't have some idea of the distinction (I've done a bit of both, myself) -- I'd just be curious as to how you'd articulated it.

<comment><USER5> In my experience, independent contractors work on very tactical tasks for an hourly fee. Whereas consultants provide strategic direction and confidence for a fixed fee. Those 2 differences (and their corresponding incentives) create 2 very different worlds.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I don't find myself working more hours. If anything employees are (usually) salaried so making them work the extra hours while the consultants are expected to charge 40hrs a week.</comment>


Why I Gave Up A Million Dollar Consultancy - <AUTHOR> http://planscope.io/blog/giving-up-a-million-dollar-consultancy/ <comment><USER3> I'm a really big fan of Brennan, Patrick, and Amy. But there's a pattern here that makes me very nervous:

* Huge success with consulting and it seems quite reliable

* Huge success on information products, which are sold exclusively to developers/freelancers

* Impressive, but somewhat less success on actual apps (often sold to developers/freelancers)

So the disturbing part is products seem really fricking hard, unless you include information products in which case they are gold. I've been following (and rooting for) some of these people for a while and even after years it's a bit depressing that they couldn't make a decent salary off their best web applications. And what's worse is it feels like the only people we hear about finding success are those that are selling _to us_.

<comment><USER4> Their business model isn't creating software - it's selling "get rich fast schemes" and other information for high margins. You are the target of their sales channel. You can just see it in the financial Brennan posts: 12% comes from selling software, 88% comes from selling to you -- and he earned most from selling a $1199! course on how to build your own multi-million dollar consultancy. It should ring bells as it's a very common theme in most other markets (where you have a lot of people selling "how to get rich quick" - - and the only people that get rich by these schemes are the people that are selling them).

<comment><USER5> "the only people that get rich by these schemes are the people that are selling them"

Counter point: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4986168>

My company is making money with Brennan's Consultancy Class and it paid for itself literally within a week. Brennan's advice has significantly impacted my company's revenue in 2012, and will continue to do so in 2013.

<comment><USER4> I am sure there will be people that make money on the advice that's given. And I am sure most of the advice is valid. The question is: is it really worth $1000? Maybe you could have saved that $1000 and done these optimizations yourself (they seem pretty straightforward and you can find thousands of articles about retainer fees and fixed bids if you just search Google). I.e. maybe he is not selling anything extraordinary or "secret", it's just common sense packaged at a ridiculous price?

<comment><USER5> Is it really worth $1000? Yes it is.

Here's some simple math for you. It would have taken my business partner (he took the course, not me) more than 10 hours to find all of the advice Brennan shared. He can bill out 10 hours to a client for $1000. Therefore is it worth it to pay someone to gather all this advice and package it in a way that allows him to apply it? Absolutely.

It took me a long time to realize many businesses are looking to exchange money for time. They have more money than they do time. It's a hard notion to understand when you don't have more money than time. I suspect you can't truly know it until you reach the point of being able to make that decision yourself.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> There have been lots of negative comments on 'year in review' or 'launch result' posts like this (see [1], [2] and [3]). However there are a few reasons why I believe HN should respect these as valid, interesting and "On Topic" : 'Anything that good hackers would find interesting'.

\- Of Interest. It's hard to disagree that posts like this are of interest to hackers and HN readers. The four posts mentioned (linked, [1], [2] and [3]) are scientific and analytical. They go in to detail about how four technically/graphically minded gentlemen have failed or succeeded in their various startups and ideas. They offer an honest appraisal of their own decisions.

\- Honesty not Arrogance. Many self-absorbed posts are arrogant in their success stories. I see each of these as being honest and humble. This is certainly subjective but I believe them to be modest in their writings.

\- Education. HN can certainly learn from all three of these posts. I think patio11 put it well when he said: "I would hope that the six-thousand odd words of narrative in the post and copious linked material contains non- obvious useful tidbits such as "You can increase the sales of a mature, six- year old software company by over 60% solely by A/B testing while keeping all other factors constant."

\- Democratic(ish) Voting. Let's not forget that HN is largely driven by its readers.

\- Inspirational. I know that many people have taken great inspiration from these posts, particularly those wishing to move in to their own products or to write eBooks. One of those is <http://brianfran.co/wroteabook/> who dedicated his book to Sacha Greif (sgdesign). If HN serves as an inspiration resource to encourage creativity and success, isn't that enough.

Whilst not all agree, I would like to say A Very Well Done bdunn, patio11, sgdesign and nathanbarry and thank you for being honest, humble, educational and inspirational.

[1] <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4982416>

[2] <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4982649>

[3] <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4974121>

<comment><USER7> The negative reaction is more to do with the old community being invaded by these new types of posts - a lot of which focus on money (how I made $x in y days doing z), some sort of secret to being wealthy (top x tips on quitting your job and making your first million) or some sort of life shortcut.

There are many sub communities within the broader startups and entrepreneurial fields, but what HN used to be was a group of people who were hackers first with interests in stories about other startups, new technology, implementing technology etc.

There is an entire other subculture around working from home, the 4 hour work week, SEO, affiliate marketing, how to ship product online, how to write an ebook that can sell for $40 in 24 hours, the micro-ISV space etc.

That later group, who would prefer to talk about how they sold $50k worth of software or ebooks, is much larger than the group of hacker entrepreneurs who would much rather read about the latest Javascript library, security exploit or scientific breakthrough.

Business of Software, the forum that Joel Spolsky ran for micro-ISV's shut down and it seems everybody came flooding over to HN (or were coming over steadily over the past few years). This means more of that type of content.

There can't be more than a few thousand technical (or want to be technical) entrepreneurs, while the group who are interested in breaking away from their career and becoming an ebook affiliate likely numbers in the millions.

A lot of those negative comments are, I feel, from frustrated hacker entrepreneurs who _know_ you can make $100k a year online and who don't want to hear that story again. I didn't click on any of those links when I saw the headlines (no offense to the authors, but it just doesn't interest me) and the only reason I clicked on this thread is because I couldn't believe that _another_ thread that mentions an amount of money in the title had again made it to the top of HN.

I have gone from clicking on 60-80% of HN headlines to now hitting 10%, on a good day. I bet that if I did click on one of those headlines, that I too would have left a smart-ass cynical comment as well, but i'm passed that stage of protesting submissions that I feel don't belong here and now just move on (except this thread).

edit: I realize that I made some sweeping generalizations, I don't mean that people interested in SEO aren't hacker entrepreneurs, I just needed a way to define what are different groups of people in the audience here.

<comment><USER8> You think the HN community has a problem with these posts because it's filled with people who can already execute on the "million dollar consultancy" or "make 100k online" business models? That the backlash is coming from the "thousands" of "hacker entrepreneurs" resenting the "millions" of "microISV" people taking over the site?

Give me a break. The backlash is from people who are so intensely jealous that they find the idea of making any money outside a job unseemly and would get back to bitching about how evil Valley VC is.

<comment><USER9> "The backlash is from people who are so intensely jealous"

Behaviorally, I'm wondering if some of the jealousy is coming from the "aw shucks" tone of these posts.

After all, in high school, nobody was ever jealous of the cliche kid with horn rimmed glasses that studied all the time, never partied, went to medical school (or became a rocket scientist) and ended up making lots of money (and actually married a beautiful nurse). He worked hard he deserved his success. (Or the athlete who made it into the pros or pick your own example). I think it's human nature for people to see someone who appears to be naive/lucky and things just worked out.

A relative of mind recently commented that his college roommate "who had a lower GPA than I did" made it big on wall street and was living the life with a beach house and all the trimmings (while the relative was working for a bank doing just "ok"). It was clear he was jealous and that he felt he was smarter and had worked harder than this individual.

Just a hypothesis.

Edit: Emphasis on _appears to be_.

<comment><USER8> This is the same mentality that suggests that 37signals is supercar-successful because they lucked out and got a popular blog. As if blogs were harvested from comet shrapnel instead of simply being the result of posting regularly about your work.

There is nothing Patrick is doing that most people on HN couldn't do. That is, in fact, _his whole damn story_ ; it is literally his thesis. "I spent 5 hours a week building 'hello world' and hooking it up to a random number generator and then refining ways to sell it to teachers; here's what happened". LUCKY DUCKY! cries HN.

<comment><USER9> "There is nothing Patrick is doing that most people on HN couldn't do"

Sure if they applied themselves and put the effort in. Big "if" there though.

In any case I don't think Patrick falls into the "aw shucks" category at all. The post he did was long and detailed and I don't remember much (just rescanned quickly maybe I missed) about how he did it all and managed to still travel and have fun (he might have but I didn't see that). The sheer amount of detail in that post is great. I don't even have time to read it fully I can only imagine the effort that went into writing and editing.

There is also this sentence at the end:

"I think that, aspirationally, career/job/business/etc was never supposed to be my #1 priority, but be that as it may it sucked up a disproportionate amount of my twenties."

So Patrick did what he had to do to make it happen, this is no "boating accident" (it's a shark) and his success is the result of hard work. Not everyone has what it takes to do that. (I'm reminded of the Karate tournament that I was in when I was younger where I was absolutely blown away by opponent who clearly had put way more effort into preparing than I did.)

I'm not sure all, or even that most, HN'ers could achieve that because while they may be smart and they may read and learn everything they can they might not actually be good at applying that information, taking chances, having other things in their life suffer etc. or just plugging away.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I know how stressful working for clients can be.

Good story for a year of transition, good for you.

But not everybody can be a author or a trainer/instructor. but what I feel is, it is more like celebrities making more money by endorsement. Every president who leaves office can get a multi million dollar book deal not the other way round.

I converted my niche consultancy into an outsourced product development company, after 6 1/2 years I employ over 150 people, and still believe there is lot of scope for growth in my line of business.

If I were you I would spend more time with the product, if needed would create variants or complimentary products.

if your company or the product is the brand your business is scalable, but if it is "YOU" then potentially it is a bottleneck.

All the best.

</comment><comment><USER5> To counter some of the negative sentiment around "selling to developers" I'd like to share a bit of what Brennan's advice has done for my consultancy business. One of my partners took Brennan's Consultancy Masterclass and here are some of the outcomes:

* Took two of our "do work once a year" clients into a monthly retainer relationships which will bring in an additional $20,000+ revenue annually.

* Changed our estimating process to value-based, fixed bids. Projects previously estimated at $5,000ish are now closer to $8,000ish, and prospect clients are biting just as hard... harder actually.

* Hard data: two new clients are in the door grossing an additional $6,200 above what we originally would have grossed... and are both interested in ongoing retainers :)

Brennan knows his stuff. His advice has moved the needle on my business. And we've only implemented a fraction of that advice.

<comment><USER11> Those are some good numbers! It's key to have an open mind about learning new things to help improve your business or anything else for that matter.

I think what happens to most people following advice from others is that they are not "dumb enough" to go with it. They just look for reasons on why tactics can't work instead of really giving them a shot.

<comment><USER12> _I think what happens to most people following advice from others is that they are not "dumb enough" to go with it._

That or "suckers don't value what they don't pay for" (attributed to PT Barnum).

<comment><USER11> True. Good point.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Such a great story. Glad to see you making these changes. My favorite part of the article is your income graph (though it needs a legend). Two things are completely fascinating to me about your story:

\- The consistent, predictable growth of Planscope month over month. Even when you have roller coaster revenue from other projects, Planscope provides a solid base.

\- How you are using multiple products to feed off of each other. Selling the book to Planscope customers, then using the book as a gateway drug to get more Planscope customers and finally selling the class. Very well done.

Thanks for teaching me so much!

<comment><AUTHOR> Duh!

* Blue line - Planscope * Yellow line - Books * Green line - <USER2>

Thanks Nathan!

<comment><USER14> Out of all the lines you have there - the blue line is the more interesting (hopefully you'll be able to accelerate that growth).

<comment><USER13> If growth continues at those percentages revenue will start to look more like a hockey stick.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> When discussing this recent HN phenomenon, consider this:

Seniors in high school often have to be very conscientious when posting their college acceptances. In the age of Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr, students have developed a tacit moral code. That is, anyone who posts "I got into Princeton!" comes off as inconsiderate and oblivious to other peoples' rejections. That is not to say that they are those things; just that they _appear_ that way.

Fortunately, I've seen a promising trend where students will refrain from posting these self-lauding statuses. If anything, they'll wait it out before announcing their college decision.

With HN, the situation is more difficult. Entrepreneurs are _constantly_ failing. The holidays are an especially difficult time for many of us, as we reflect on the previous year and everything that went wrong.

HN needs to develop some sort of a moral code. Many of us are incredibly sensitive to subject matters like these. I'm not suggesting that people refrain entirely from posting their 'year in review.' Rather, I suggest people deeply consider the others on HN before they go ahead posting their earnings _to the penny_ or submitting their _own_ blog posts to HN, boasting their _million dollars_.

Evidently, it comes off as rude to many users. Rather than complaining that people are so _intensely jealous_ , maybe we should find a way to convey the same messages without evoking such jealousy. Believe it or not, it is possible.

</comment><comment><USER16> When someone says Million Dollar Consultancy I'm guessing that means over 1 Million Gross? If that is the case I'd be more interested in how profitable the consultancy was. 10 employees alone could eat up most of $1 million.

<comment><USER17> Good point - your answer is what I was looking for. I was wondering how on earth he could have little in the way of savings when earning a million a year. This might be how.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I recently got the book _Million Dollar Consulting_ and it takes a somewhat different approach to it, starting with "charge weekly for business value delivered, not by the hour." Weiss puts a strong emphasis on having plenty of free time, and is skeptical of hiring employees at all.

Probably doesn't work for all types of consultancy though.

<comment><USER19> I have that book on my reading list. Would you mind giving me an exec summary in the interim?

I would be very grateful.

<comment><USER20> Basically, charge for the value you provide, not for your time. There's a lot of other interesting tips & strategies in there, but that was my main takeaway.

<comment><USER19> Thank you. I'm covering the base on that. just had a read on the contents list. I think i should get round to it sooner than i had planned.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Kudos! To clarify, you still have the consultancy but someone else runs it? Because that should be every consultant's goal. Read the E-Myth.

<comment><AUTHOR> Correct. We're no longer as large as we once were, but I've taken myself out of operations and get a phone call once a week with a status update.

<comment><USER19> i don't understand why decent comments are being downvoted.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> As many others have stated, I appreciate the honesty and am inspired by the success. My question is how much of these revenues from products (info and SAAS) are paid out to affiliates? I would guess the numbers are significant.

<comment><AUTHOR> $0 - unless AppSumo counts.

<comment><USER22> Wow, that is impressive and thanks for the quick reply. Also, how did appsumo work out? Lots of sales?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> What struck me is that $1M in revenue from 10 people is low.

<comment><AUTHOR> It was closer to 2 million, but it could have been much higher. It helps to also be in a lower cost of living area, and included in that count were support people.

<comment><USER23> Thanks for clarifying. With 2M, and if support folks were included, you were getting nice output, actually.

What turned me off consulting eventually (even though the money was good), was the concept of wasting my life bringing other people's ideas to fruition, while neglecting my own. From the moment I realized that, it became an easy decision for me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Thank you for writing such an honest post. Your courage is great and your view of work to live rather than live to work which has obviously changed quickly is inspiring. I too had this revelation a couple of years ago, but have always thought it too risky. Which is funny. Riskier than a 4 person startup at 1/3 of my rate? Hardly.

I wish you the best for this upcoming new year and look forward to reading more about personal achievements.</comment>


Stereo to Mono Using the Side Channel - <AUTHOR> http://theandrewbailey.com/article/160/Stereo-to-Mono-Using-The-Side-Channel

<comment><USER2> The observation that an average sounds flat is a good one. The relative phase of sounds in each channel could do weird things and cancel each other out when averaged. However, most modern music is mastered in such a way that the stereo channels are highly correlated, so averaging is usually the best way to get a mono version.

That said, the solution in the article isn't really doing much...

given two tracks: L and R

      side channel = (L - R)/4dB
      mid channel = (L + R)/4dB
      final = (L - R)/4dB + (L + R)/4dB = 2L/4dB ≈ 1.26L

Since dB is a logarithmic scale, 4dB corresponds to around 1.58 times power. 2dB corresponds to around 1.26 times power. Audacity may be attenuating it further in each of the "Mix and Render" steps depending on how it's summing is implemented.

In the end, it looks like you'll up with just the left channel. And as a practical solution to the original problem, this isn't that bad of a result!

Edit: formatting

</comment><comment><USER3> Isn't this exactly the same as what you were doing before, averaging the channels and then amplifying?</comment>


Tom Delonge's UFO Research Center Is Making Politicians Demand Answers - <AUTHOR> https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/wjwqp5/tom-delonges-ufo-research-center-is-making-politicians-demand-answers <comment><USER3> I feel like a lot of commenters on here must first be hearing of this or have not even looked into the tic-tac case even a small amount.

You have a top gun pilot and his WSO on record saying they saw it visually along with a huge underwater craft. It moved in ways that nothing using conventional propulsion can. Hovering for example is extremely difficult, made all the harder with no wings, blades or visible exhaust.

Long form interview: Part1: [https://youtu.be/3L-XG1F_S7I](https://youtu.be/3L-XG1F_S7I) Part2: [https://youtu.be/f7XJD_54aNk](https://youtu.be/f7XJD_54aNk)

There are about 20+ interviews with him on cnn, Fox News, Boston herald, ny times, etc and he will be on joe Rogan soon.

I get the objections to the FLIR video or radar pings, but if you think it's a new jet or misdirection you have to say he and his WSO and many others are liars or confused by our own tech. Our own tech means we have something well beyond standard jet engines and fighter jet tech.

There are plenty more videos with even more details like the tic tacs (there were many of them on radar) moving 20000+ mph, dropping in from 80000ft to close to the deck. The details of the carrier fleet redirecting the jets to the position of the tic-tac is very interesting as it wasn't at their training position...until it showed up their later. The FLIR video is from another pilot who went after it, after captain fravor landed.

<comment><USER4> >he will be on joe Rogan soon.

Well, shut my mouth.

<comment><USER3> I meant, it will be a 3 hr interview, instead of 45 minutes or 2 minute sounds bytes, so it will probably cover all the parts of the story, as there are more than I wrote about. I wasn't saying that Rogan is some kind of badge of legitimacy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I reckon it's misdirection. "We'll say it's a UFO, but really it's a hypersonic plane in development."

Just like the SR71 had a cover story during its development phase. "The wreckage was recovered in two days, and persons at the scene were identified and requested to sign secrecy agreements. A cover story for the press described the accident as occurring to a F-105, and it is still listed in this way on official records." \- [https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the- study-of-intellig...](https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of- intelligence/kent-csi/vol15no1/html/v15i1a01p_0001.htm)

<comment><USER6> Its probably a system for "jamming" FLIR sensors an allowing the attacker to project targets onto the system. The pilots were guinea pigs. Which is made more plausible by the fact that the USS Princeton asked the Nimitz pilots first if they were armed, and only after they informed the Princeton that they were not that they were given the orders to investigate. There probably was a real object -- since one was sighted but it was a drone with the advanced jamming equipment (that they didn't want to accidentally get shot down). It did not move at supersonic speed, but it projected an image onto the FLIR sensor which did. The submerged object was probably a submarine that the equipment was launched from.

<comment><USER7> If that's the case, why not read the pilots into the test, even at a summary level?

If the Navy had told the pilots, "You just experienced an advanced technology test. Nothing to worry about" then they would have undoubtedly kept their mouths shut and not talked to the media.

<comment><USER8> I agree that would have prevented a lot of misunderstandings but Navy operates this way all the time. They prefer a somewhat "blinded" subject.

<comment><USER9> The subject would still be blinded though. You could tell them after the fact. Then you get the real experience of a pilot encountering your system plus you get the added benefit that they won't tell people about the "UFO" they saw.

<comment><USER10> But what about the next experiment?

How are you going to keep the other pilots from figuring out they're test subjects?

Especially if any word about the experiment got out. Swearing another pilot to secrecy versus letting them think you're nuts for the rest of your lives, I think they're gonna pick door #1.

<comment><USER11> Isn't that a bit paranoid?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The videos are of real aircraft recorded through a FLIR pod. When zoomed out far enough the aircraft simply look like fuzzy ovals as demonstrated in this video [https://youtu.be/jWjpnCKcj8M?t=136](https://youtu.be/jWjpnCKcj8M?t=136)

For some reason people in the military and government are trolling the public, perhaps as part of a campaign to discredit news agencies.

<comment><USER13> I thought we were over the fact that news agencies don't need any help to discredit themselves.

<comment><USER14> We are far from that point. On some things, they do fine. Others have conflicts of interest in play. We get messaged to.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Ever since the 1970's mysterious UFO and bigfoot style videos have turned up.

Always, ALWAYS, _ALWAYS_ distant, blurry, out of focus and "from an authoritative source". This is precisely the same as the 1970s.

Leonard Nimoy knew what was going on "In Search Of UFOs": [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LVFWJDPcPnk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LVFWJDPcPnk)

<comment><USER4> I took a sci-fi movie course in the 90s and the professor opened it by mentioning people used to see great clipper ships in the sky.

The other telling moment was when he asked why UFOs only appear in places "so small people have to take turns being the village idiot" and someone leapt up to day, "You can't prove it's not true!"

<comment><USER16> That's fascinating. I wonder if people thought the royal navy was hiding flying ship technology. Or, God forbid, the French had developed it first!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I think theres two possibilities that are believable for me. I dont think its 'aliens' or other extraterrestrials.

Either it is completely fake, made up by the navy to hide something else that they wanted to cover up, and could also serve as a confusion tactic for other countries aerospace programs, some sort of fake internal thing to tease out a mole or another situation like that.

The other possibility is that it really is some sort of new propulsion device being tested by a top-secret government agency or some other private party, and somehow they made the fatal mistake of being sighted by the jet. I simply dont believe the us military would release this video if it was actually a new secret technology they were trying to hide.

<comment><USER18> What about a third option, it's a visual artifact on the FLIR recording?

<comment><USER19> This. It fits a lot of aspects of past "UFO" sightings that were actually just a reflection. The major issue in this case is multiple witnesses, and also supposedly multiple instruments detecting it (I've seen this claimed in comments but not the evidence itself)

If the thing behaves as though it has no inertia and does all these amazing movements, what else does? A reflection or otherwise illusory object can do all that easily, in fact thats the default behavior.

<comment><USER3> How do you explain the pilots who said they saw it visually for 5 minutes?

<comment><USER20> And on other radar systems within the strike carrier group. The Nimitz event was tracked on multiple systems of varying technologies, for multiple days, not just the planes. FLIR was just one piece of the puzzle, of which video was released.

<comment><USER21> Because that carrier group was testing technology that combines sensor data from all different vehicles by transmitting it between them to create a unified view. Can't recall if that was a known fact or theory, but it's an entirely plausible thing for the military to develop.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> What I do consistently see uniting all of these articles is Tom Delonge and TTSA, which has a big "Invest" button up at the top of their website.

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to marketing in 2019. Looks like Tom Delonge is operating some kind of quirky investment scam. Next up, a Blink 182 reunion tour.

<comment><USER23> Nah, it's an Angels & Airwaves tour. His band, known as AvA has been around for more than a decade. He's been working this whole media conglomerate for many many years, and this is just another part of it, IMO.

If you're interested in actually funding research in extraterrestrial life, donate to SETI - [https://www.seti.org/donate](https://www.seti.org/donate)

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I'm still not buying how they could be on a big deployment off the east coast of the US and didn't have any other sensors pick it up besides two pilots next to each other with FLIR camera autotracking it momentarily.

Not to mention the constant satellite and aerial radar coverage and other networked stuff they have for these big deployments.

This isn't in the middle of the Indian ocean like the missing Malaysian plane.

At the end of the day we're left with another single location, single perspective anecdote which there were already countless before.

<comment><USER25> West coast right? Weren't there other similar stories from ATC and commercial pilots? [https://www.foxnews.com/science/ufo-evidence-recordings- reve...](https://www.foxnews.com/science/ufo-evidence-recordings-reveal-air- traffic-controls-confusion-at-strange-craft-over-oregon)

<comment><USER24> There was two videos released by NYT, one was over the east coast. I haven't dug into the pacific north west incident, like I did the other one. Didn't really hold my interest.

[https://www.cbsnews.com/news/navy-pilots-ufo-reports- confirm...](https://www.cbsnews.com/news/navy-pilots-ufo-reports-confirmed- new-york-times-military-unidentified-flying-object/)

> Lieutenant Graves still cannot explain what he saw. In the summer of 2014, > he and Lt. Danny Accoin, another Super Hornet pilot, were part of a > squadron, the VFA-11 "Red Rippers" out of Naval Air Station Oceana, Va., > that was training for a deployment to the Persian Gulf.

> The pilots began noticing the objects after their 1980s-era radar was > upgraded to a more advanced system. As one fighter jet after another got the > new radar, pilots began picking up the objects, but ignoring what they > thought were false radar tracks.

Note: new radar can suggest more than just better capabilities but possibly less experience and more complexity (harder bugs).

My question: where are the really smart people at NASA or w/e with deep understanding of spaceflight and theoretical physics? So I far I only see excited posts from military bloggers and a some guys who sell books about aliens.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I was a skeptic of a lot of things until I saw some flying orbs around Mount Shasta, California last October. I saw similar moving orbs again in upstate NY this year on two occasions. I don't know what I saw but they were not weather balloons, satellites, planes, planets, stars, or meteors.

Anyone here ever see something similar?

<comment><USER27> > I don't know what I saw but they were not weather balloons, satellites, > planes, planets, stars, or meteors.

If you don't know what they were then you can't rule out these other things.

<comment><USER26> I used an astronomy app on my phone to verify the satellites, planets, stars, meteors part.

They moved around in a non-linear fashion at will, they were intelligently operated. One of them disappeared in a flash...

<comment><USER28> How do you know they were intelligently operated?

<comment><USER26> What organic phenomenon moves around like that? is what we asked ourselves.

One of the people with me was from Columbia University and he is as 'rational' as they come, even he was baffled...

<comment><USER7> Next time you see it, break out your phone or camera and capture a video. Then we can discuss the actual video!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> There's this article that talks about how they could be radar reflecting balloons specifically designed to be seen by the navy to test their response and radar capabilities, like we have in the past against other countries.

[https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/28640/could-some-of- th...](https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/28640/could-some-of-the-ufos- navy-pilots-are-encountering-be-airborne-radar-reflectors)

</comment><comment><USER30> As a mundane note, what is the reason that the audio quality in this video is so poor? It sounds like they're using walkie talkies from the 1970s. How can the US military, which spends more money than anyone else, have _Navy pilots_ using heavily distorted audio communication systems that aren't even as good as a standard cell phone?

<comment><USER31> Practical voice comms do not require very high fidelity or resolution, so there is little reason to spend resources increasing the quality beyond the threshold of intelligibility. It works and works well. What point would an upgrade serve? They aren't singing through it.

<comment><USER32> So that you can actually hear what the other person is saying

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> This video shows the uncensored HUD from an FA-14, along with showing it's capabilities in automatically tracking fast moving objects.

THIS is the reason why the video should not have been released.

</comment><comment><USER34> I watched Joe Rogan interview Bob Lazar [1] which seemed mind blowing if everything he said was true. But then I went and researched it and seems more likely he came up with some fantastic stories to keep himself out of prison after he got caught taking a bunch of friends up to the mountains to watch some classified experiements of a particle beam device. It's not my field of study, but some opinions I read were that the government is developing, not offensive weapons, but devices to confuse enemy sesors (radar, FLIR and visible light sensors, including human eyes). They claimed that a beam of charged particles could be focused such that it would create a glowing ball of plasma(?) at a distance and sensors would interpret is a craft of some sort. Since it is a particle beam it can be moved around in ways no solid object could.

So these things are tests of this particle beam confuser, not alien spacecraft. I dunno. With my limited understanding is seems more likely.

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BEWz4SXfyCQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BEWz4SXfyCQ)

<comment><USER35> The idea that it's a guinea pig test of a submarine directed anti-FLIR system is the only plausible explanation to me.

But again Lazar has been a crank for decades (I think the first reference to an alien at Area 51 named Elvis is from him, later popularized in Perfect Dark), so even that theory is a bit out there.

<comment><USER36> oh i was always wondering where Elvis' name came from in that game. thanks for sharing a potential bit of provenance

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> My apologies in advance to any Stone Age Tribesmen in the audience or those otherwise triggered by this analogy:

Meanwhile on Totally Isolated Uncontacted Stone Age tribe of 1940s Hacker News:

Chief's Spear Chucking brigade confirms through song and ritual dance reenacment that they actually saw a thing flying through the air that looked like a very large bird, but appeared to be made of some form of advanced stone technology and had unusual round things on it that the great elders who first came up with breaking rocks to make them into sharp things imagine could be used, in the far distant future, to move large loads around with relative ease compared to current methods.

Posters on Stone Age Tribe Hacker News say that this is actually a trick by monkey spirit, a large bird, or possibly some sort of advanced flying machine that great elder came up with that's made from bird feathers and shiny rocks that he's not telling us about, the idea that other people besides our little tribe could be inhabiting the earth being completely ludicrous.

</comment><comment><USER38> What you will hear are actual U.S. fighter pilots, who are highly trained observers and weapons systems operators (WSO), in an excited state over the experience.

"What the [expletive] is that thing?" "Oh my gosh, dude"

</comment><comment><USER39> Time for me to burn some karma.

What evidence do we have that these phenomena are strictly natural?

There are some ingenious explanations in this thread of how you could create something like this effect with known technology.

If we don't a priori eliminate it on the grounds it is impossible (as a Christian, I do not, but many here do), I imagine that supernatural beings trolling humans (especially modern scientific reductionists) could look a lot like this and is also a plausible explanation.

If you have a grudge against the concept of the supernatural, maybe think of it as "graduate students got drunk and starting messing with the Earth- universe simulation".

<comment><USER40> When you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras.

The principles of science do not allow us to rule out the possibility that these events are the result of alien life or supernatural phenomena. But it does give us plenty of evidence that there are more mundane, more plausible explanations.

And when you're faced with a potentially world-changing revelation, like confirmed contact with extraterrestrial life, it is basic due diligence to speculate on and rule out those mundane explanations first.

When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth. But you have to eliminate first. That is how you arrive at new knowledge, and that is how paradigms are shifted.

Could it be supernatural beings trolling humanity? Sure. But such an extraordinary claim requires correspondingly extraordinary evidence. That it was a secret, terrestrial weapons system designed to confound FLIR also requires evidence, but it's a much more likely explanation, and can generally be accepted as probable with correspondingly less evidence.

<comment><USER39> I understand all that.

If the entities actually behaved as described (which is a big if, no doubt - people make mistakes and a military test might be trying hard to deceive them) - no visible exhaust, massive instaneous acceleration/deceleration, etc...

Sure, it could absolutely be a natural phenomenon.

But it's not crazy to say the claimed hoofbeats sound kinda stripey.

<comment><USER41> >people make mistakes and a military test might be trying hard to deceive them

A couple people have mentioned this in this thread and my problem with it is that a military test designed to deceive that same military's personnel seems dangerous in a way that could cause people to lose their lives. Unless you mean that a different military is testing?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> Reposting my comment from yet another HN post on these pretty mundane videos.

Gofast is just a weather balloon.

[https://youtu.be/PLyEO0jNt6M](https://youtu.be/PLyEO0jNt6M)

Gimbal is a jet. The perceived rotation is an artifact of the camera rotating on a gimbal.

[https://youtu.be/4X1PRDbtiF0](https://youtu.be/4X1PRDbtiF0)

Nimitz is also a jet. It's far away, and blurry.

[https://youtu.be/s1oTg0kxzDs](https://youtu.be/s1oTg0kxzDs)

It would be really cool if these were alien spaceships. They're likely not.

</comment><comment><USER43> Lots of people like to think about alien vessels, UFOs, in a positive light. But very few though about how would world powers would actually react to dangerous aliens, like something that could just drill into your advanced air defenses without leaving any trace all available sensors.

One possible outcome could be just to agree to keep their presence under plausible deniability, just till something lands somewhere infront thousands of witnesses (considering our simulated scenario, based in the current situation, "very public" actions are not the alien's playbook).

The other obvious outcome should be to precisely coordinate military presence in the planet, trying to cover any territory with some kind of military response - the ASAP one+highly guarded airspace close to key infrastructure/cities in the planet - in case of detections / ingress of UFOs.

Kind of obvious, you would need to agree with ALL the players, Russian Fed, China, India, and a dozen more. The nuclear players with missiles capable of targetting stuff in low orbits should be the premium resources,

Space related industry should be developed at accelerated pace, and attempts to reach close things in the solar system would be at some point almost a monthly thing.

There are a tons of ones, many which you won't find in any scifi book, because the scenario where you just watch UFOs (IF you can detect them), trying to do something on the planet without knowing WTF is going on for decades is not a compelling base for anything entertaining

<comment><USER44> the new york times had an article a few years back that touched on the issue of what might happen when we do make extra terrestrial contact: [https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/28/magazine/greetings-et- ple...](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/28/magazine/greetings-et-please-dont- murder-us.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> Anyone notice the pilot switched between BLK and WHT mode and on both occasions the designator was coming back as COLD! Shouldn't a designator with an exhaust or any machinery in motion return HOT? Or did I get this wrong?

<comment><USER46> Perhaps it was the brightness or contrast of the sensor autoadjusting?

<comment><USER45> Nah in the intro they explain all the parts of the display unit and one of those was the state of tracked objects between these 2 modes. So the pilot checked the heat from each object using 2 different sensors (BLK & WHT) and both returned cold. Weird.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> Anyone in this thread familiar with Electronic Warfare? Specifically, the EW arms race between a guided missile's "eyes", and decoy signals created by things that don't want to get hit by said missiles? (Or, better yet, between large-scale MIRV missiles, that don't want their warheads to get hit by interceptor systems, and the sensors on those interceptor counter-missiles. In that case, you'd call these techniques [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penetration_aid](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penetration_aid) s.)

Consider that we now have reasonably-cheap, high-quality cameras and feature- detection ASICs that we can plop into missiles. Oh, and wide-band software- defined radios, too, to cheaply range-find our targets all over the spectrum. (Remember, SDR radios are expensive _for consumers_ , but that's an artificial supply-limit, precisely because of their military applications.) Consider what sort of decoys would be required to _trick_ all that fancy sensor tech. Now consider what such decoy emissions would look like to human eyes, or any other sensor. If you can trick a Sufficiently-Advanced Missile, you can trick anything.

(For fun, also consider the modern menagerie of cheaply-available parts that you could shove into such a decoy: a laser rangefinder, a short-throw projector, an optical stabilization array, some negative-index metamaterial "scales" that can be flipped on and off—like those glittery pillows!—some more SDRs, a MIMO signal-shaping antenna array. Oh, and an ultrasonic humidifier, because emissions won't diffract off of thin, non-turbulent air.)

Presume you have a bunch of these mesh-networked together (or all slaved to a stealthed aircraft so far above that it's out of range of your instrumentation unless you know exactly where to look), and that they're built with hard real- time links to one-another such that they can execute perfectly-timed hand-offs of the emissions-signature they're working together to project.

In short, picture a bunch of projectors you can't find, working to create a moving multi-spectral hologram in the sky. Picture one of the projector-drones gliding into place "underneath" the projection, just in time to give off a sonar return—and then wandering away again.

None of this is impossible. None of this is even particularly challenging if you spend $100MM/yr on it. And this is just what someone who doesn't _know about_ any of the classified stuff can imagine.

<comment><USER48> Yeah, I watched Spider-Man:Far From Home as well.

Seriously though, the pilots reported visual sighting as well. Projecting a hologram is one thing, projecting one while flying at 800km/hr is another.

<comment><USER47> > Yeah, I watched Spider-Man:Far From Home as well.

I haven't; what was in the movie?

> Projecting a hologram is one thing, projecting one while flying at 800km/hr > is another.

Like I was saying: short-throw laser projectors (or rather, in this case, _long_ -throw projectors, but same diff, tech-wise.) Have a missile vanguard blow through the airspace first, making the air turbulent and perhaps "doping" it with some dyes so that the vapor-trail blends back into the sky. Then fly out your penaids, have them assume static positions _around_ the diffractive "canvas", and then start throwing emissions at the "canvas." Reorient some lasers a tiny little bit, and now it looks like you've got something glowy accelerating at Mach 6 along your "canvas." But it's not a violation of the laws of physics—it's just light (and RF, and IR, and...)

But my real argument wasn't meant to be a constructive proof about what properties penaids _should be able to_ have. My point was that, given the tech that's cheap enough for any nation on earth to put into each and every counter-missile, if certain nations (ahem) want to retain _air supremacy_ , they're going to want to develop something that can fool that sensor tech. The result would be the EW equivalent of a "deepfake": a decoy that fools cameras better than our eyes, feeding AI more discriminant than our brains. What hope do we humans have of telling such a decoy apart from a real UFO?

<comment><USER49> >I haven't; what was in the movie?

Pretty much exactly what you're describing haha (with obviously a fair bit of artistic license).

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j4onAJ-3FAM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j4onAJ-3FAM)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> Sounds like the equivalent of a cat chasing a laser pointer. What if this is an artifact of a space based weapon pointing at various points on the ocean?

</comment><comment><USER51> I suspect we won't learn what this is until there's another major armed conflict bringing all the latest toys out of the shed.

</comment><comment><USER52> If ultra-advanced space aliens can hide large spacecraft from the Earth's population, and also do whatever it is they do without having a noticeable effect on Humanity, then, well - I say _let them_.

Either it's all just a collection of circumstantial mis-understandings and mis-interpretations, or at some point they'll do something we notice. Just don't worry about it.

Remember civilization is in grave danger regardless of that from global warming, running out of non-renewable resources, and last but not least nuclear war. Try to focus on making sure the aliens still have people to mess with...

</comment><comment><USER53> ~same topic

now:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21008930](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21008930)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21008988](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21008988)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20997012](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20997012)

older:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19828448](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19828448)

<comment><USER54> Would just like to piggyback on this to say that the wording of what is "real" is very specific:

>[the Navy] designates the objects contained in these videos as unidentified aerial phenomena.

That is to say, the videos are "real" in that the source is genuine (captured by the U.S. Navy and not a doctored hoax), but the Navy is not making any other statement on what appears in the video.

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> I have always wondered why the US government never took advantage of this sort of thing to make serious money. Just think of a massive extraterrestrial- themed resort in the desert in the vicinity of Area 51. Think of all the licensing deals.

<comment><USER56> People don't actually want the government to be a for profit enterprise. It would mean the government being influenced by private interests with money.

<comment><USER57> They government prefers to grant franchise licenses to organized crime.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> Isn't that something that these sightings are always seen by USA pilots or military!

</comment><comment><USER59> It should be reminded that UFO means "unidentified flying object" not that it's totally unexplainable. Just that there wasn't enough to go on to figure out what they were at the time.

</comment><comment><USER60> Alternative discussion on the same subject matter: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21008930](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21008930)

</comment><comment><USER61> Before he passed away in the early 2000s, Peter Jennings did a really good documentary on UFOs called Seeing is Believing.

It's one of the most comprehensive and least weird/edge/conspiracy documentaries for its time and it's still interesting today. He goes into how pilots saw many unidentified objects going back several decades.

I think there are a lot of people who acknowledged these sightings do exist, but there has to be some explanation; some natural phenomenon we haven't identified and discovered.

</comment><comment><USER62> Y'all, UFOS aren't fucking stupid

Obviously their tech is vastly superior to ours, except for cloaking and espionage?

</comment><comment><USER63> Whenever I see "UFOs are real!" or "it must be a UFO!" I immediately in my head think, of course if it's flying and you don't know what it is, it's an Unidentified Flying Object, why wouldn't that be real??

So what I've done is accepted the fact that usually what people mean is an UNIDENTIFIABLE Flying Object, and it makes me feel a little bit better...

</comment><comment><USER64> I read somewhere that it's much easier to convince people of conspiracy theories once they have doubt in one. It is my theory that the UFO phenomenon is a means of injecting doubt into people's minds to make them a bit paranoid and question the reality of things. Once they believe something is going on or have doubts, it's easier to sell them on other half truths, lies and conspiracy theories. I have no proof of this but I suspect a vast majority of ultra conservative voters exhibit mental frameworks of people who believe in conspiracy theories. UFO coverage could be means of creating doubt and reinforcing conservative behavior. In short - it's a play to create, recruit and retain the ultra conservatives for the sole purpose of voting. Of course I realize the irony of my statement considering this in itself sounds like a woowoo conspiracy theory.

</comment><comment><USER65> Reading the linked Vice article

>"Based on pilot accounts, encounters with these UAPs (unidentified aerial phenomena) often involved complex flight patterns and advanced maneuvering, which demand extreme advances in quantum mechanics, nuclear science, electromagnetics, and thermodynamics." - <USER2>

> Republican representative Mark Walker of North Carolina

This is laughably stupid. QM and nuclear science? Can we call out politicians for just throwing in words that they don't know what they mean? Seriously, I think we should call these people out. I'll even laugh at the extreme part.

My bet is that these things are just some test drones. They might have advanced materials and so you can't trust a lot of the data coming into the FLIR sensor. I don't think it would surprise anyone here that the people making the "most advanced sensors _on the market_ " 1) have more advanced sensors being researched/tested 2) don't perform adversarial attacks on those sensors during testing. As for the visuals, well drones can pull Gs that pilots can't. So if we can't trust the sensor readings (speed and size) and we just see something zipping around, it shouldn't surprise anyone that a drone _could_ be the culprit.

As to the article, this is clearly misdirection. But that's part of warfare. [https://youtu.be/qOTYgcdNrXE?t=1281](https://youtu.be/qOTYgcdNrXE?t=1281)

<comment><USER66> If you're going to call his use of those terms incorrect, can you explain a craft travelling supersonic without jets or rockets, leaving no emissions, utilizing no airfoils, consistent with our understanding of physics?

<comment><USER67> I don't know, the video didn't show me that the objects traveled at any speed -- that's from the pilots testimony, but maybe it appeared to move against the backdrop as they were banking around it. I would expect fighter pilots to be a good judge, but maybe you lose some sense of velocity when you're surprised by something you haven't seen before.

Separately, radar operators saw something they didn't understand. It could have been noise as they are now looking out for tiny drones and very small radar signatures, they have sensitivity turned way up. Sometimes you see things that aren't really there.

I'm honestly going weather balloons on this one.

<comment><USER68> > I don't know, the video didn't show me that the objects traveled at any > speed

That's because you're watching a YouTube video that was filmed on a potato, instead of actually, y'know, _being there_.

<comment><USER67> Well my point is all the conjecture of this unexplained supersonic movement is all hearsay based off eye witnesses. I don't trust eye witnesses, maybe they saw something maybe they didn't, but I haven't seen anything that seems to hold any water.

<comment><USER68> I do get that. On the other hand, if you look at the believability hierarchy—while eye witnesses rank pretty low, drive-by internet commentators rank significantly lower still.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER69> Could this be the Russian nuclear-powered cruise missile?

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/9M730_Burevestnik](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/9M730_Burevestnik)

<comment><USER70> No, for a huge number of reasons - not least of which being timing (the cruise missile is in early development now, and these videos are 5+ years old) performance (cruise missiles can't do what the objects in the video did, even if nuclear powered - nuclear power is more an endurance feature anyways) lack of fallout (unshielded directly cooled reactors produce quite a few interesting isotopes) and location (why would the Russians fly a missile like that anywhere near the US?).

</comment></comment><comment><USER71> unidentified flying objects are definitely unidentified flying objects, an anonymous source at the US Navy reports

</comment><comment><USER72> [https://youtu.be/MMiKyfd6hA0](https://youtu.be/MMiKyfd6hA0)

</comment><comment><USER73> so those definitely weren't missles, no afterburners, no wake.

</comment><comment><USER74> I wonder what this will do to the "AREA 51 RAID" planned for September 20th. Weird times we live in.

<comment><USER75> It will not happen. It's just a meme. 2 people are already arrested, thousands of people are not stupid enough to raid an American military base.

</comment></comment><comment><USER76> Anyone feel like this is a bit of a troll move, especially given the viral Facebook event to storm Area 51 is supposedly happening in a few days? What prompted them to say this now?

<comment><USER77> Shhh it's an art project. Let people analyze it as science as if it were ever meant to be done so that way.

</comment></comment><comment><USER78> There's enough anecdotal material available now that I don't consider myself a scoffer. I'm curious about UFOs and don't really know what to think about them.

Also, several politicians have made curious statements about 'releasing information to the public'. If there was just nothing there, I don't think they'd be talking about it.

Looking forward to the day (I think) when we all know what's out there.

<comment><USER79> Historically UFO sightings spike at times of high and amorphous cultural anxiety. Sometimes they turn out to be radar quirks, or experimental aircraft, or nothing at all. But if anything, given the culture, I'm surprised we don't see more UFOs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER80> My theory is that these are old autonomous probes that are part of a system designed to prevent any civilization from developing technology which would threaten the origin.

It's a relatively inductive thing to assume that if humans get past any great filters we will look upwards for external existential threats by those other civilizations which do not get through, and whose failure may be due to development of tech which could harm us. A fair countermeasure would be to deploy autonomous probes that slowly blanket the galaxy and monitor and destroy threats. It would genuinely surprise me if we are here in 100 years that we wouldn't have created and deployed such technology as a way to protect our ancestors future from external threats. This only makes sense once all major x-risk is paid down due to manmade technology and natural threats, but once so it seems inevitable this is the next thing our civilization will seek to protect against.

My suspicion is that these are real, are inaccessible to us, and always will be, at least until we get close to any kind of galaxy-level x-risk technology like AGI. At which point, we will either be wiped out or will be warned.

It's actually quite a boring explanation since it doesn't require too many leaps of logic, doesn't break any laws of physics, and leaves us potentially alone in the present day universe (the origin of these may be long gone.)</comment>


Skyrocketing rice prices has Sam's Club limiting sales - <AUTHOR> http://www.cnn.com/2008/US/04/24/samsclub.rice.limits/index.html <comment><AUTHOR> I would like to suggest a moment of silence for all the people currently starving on the streets as a result of bad decisions made by people in the government.

<comment><USER2> . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .</comment></comment>


AOL Instance Messenger to Be Retired - <AUTHOR> https://aimemories.tumblr.com <comment><USER2> More discussion in the other thread: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15417019](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15417019)

</comment><comment><USER3> RIP sweet away messages... I've been with you since the beginning.</comment>


File manager ideas - <AUTHOR> https://www.evernote.com/shard/s158/sh/3768de51-a54e-43e8-bb8e-62de16acac61/e4bf827e4dd3b83140d7d993952d755f Some thoughts on nautilus file manager <comment><USER2> These are all completely obvious — idea 2, though, only in retrospect. For a long while I've wondered about how to combine path editing with hyperlinks. Numerous browser extensions have tried various methods: mode toggling, modifier keys, the direction whence came focus, and so on.

The OP's approach is perfect: always navigate to wherever the caret is placed. I would personally drop the ugly gradients in favour of hyperlink-style underlines, but seriously, thanks for an elegant solution to a simple problem.

</comment><comment><USER3> Hmmm. The Explorer in Windows 7 does this, somewhat better than proposed here (in my opinion) since it eliminates slashes.

There are additional operational semantics that are important, such how you bail out of a bad edit, what happens if you type in something non-existent, and so forth.

I hadn't realized how involved this UI is. People take a lot for granted.

<comment><USER4> > People take a lot for granted

I would say the average user doesn't understand correctly a good 70% of what's on his screen. Programmers sure do take a lot for granted.

Edit: missing "user".

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Mixing breadcrumbs with a text field is a dangerous thing to do. Take for example input selections. I click in the middle of the path and then shift-end the cursor. What should I see in the content pane?

Second thing to consider is how it's going to work on the file systems with lag. Anything over-the-network. Not only moving the cursor left and right would generate a lot of traffic, it would also fail to provide feedback comparable to that of local drives.

Third, take a step back and think who would actually use this. For example, the only time I use Location field is to _copy_ current path to be pasted elsewhere. I tried remembering when I actually typed anything except for c:\temp in there and I can't. I'm sure there are people who _do_ type in long paths, but the question here how many of them are there and if the UI should be optimized for their usage. If they comprise a percentage point, then clearly all this optimization is pointless -- it may very well still exist, but it should be off by default. In other words, as nice as this exercise is, it jumps to the design phase without first defining the problems it is trying to solve nor its target audience.

\--

As others have noted W7 has something similar in Windows Explorer, but the field switches between the breadcrumb and text input modes. This looks like a sensible solution, and yet I personally find it fairly annoying in a day-to- day use.

<comment><USER6> As for typing in the location bar, there is a kind of autocomplete/tab completion mode which is really useful. The behaviour seems to have changed in more recent versions, I think the tab key doesn't work now, as it's a UI control to move focus. I prefer the shell style tab completion, but nonetheless it's a useful feature.

Which reminds me that navigating around nautilus with the keyboard is really a bit of a pain. To be able to do this easily would really help. I noticed in Mint's nautilus the last time I tried it arrow keys would let me move back and forth between the sidebar and the file lists, it may not be the right key to do it - but makes using the file manager much easier.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Regarding search, something that always trips me up in Nautilus is the find as you type feature, which I also love.

If you are in the folder list and you start typing - you can select folders. Say you start typin P-i-c, it will select say your Pictures file or folder. I then go to copy the folder but I'm still in the find as you type box, but I don't notice. I move to another folder view and paste, and find I have done nothing. Then have to navigate back to where I just was. To get around it you have to hit escape first before the copy. I'm aware of how to do it correctly - but I repeatedly trip myself up.

The other issue is the text find tool overlay is hidden in the bottom right hand side of the window, which seems to sometimes escape your eye. And the interface then feels non-responsive. Love the feature, but there's something amiss in the interface.

If you start to type the name of a folder, and it matches something, hitting return will open that folder, which is great, but is slightly out of tune to trying to use say CTRL + C (which copies the text you are typing in the selection box.) The latter is something that you might want to do - not that I have ever done it. But there are two conflicting behaviours here.

</comment><comment><USER7> One of the main take-aways (clickable breadcrumb folders) is already present in both Windows and OS X. In Windows, the current path is represented as a series of clickable buttons, including dropdowns to the right of each folder to show their contents. You can also click to the right of the path to convert it back to text form. The new path bar was by far one of my favorite features of Windows 7, and I use it every day at work where I still have to use a Windows PC.

In OS X, you have the path bar, though it's not very obvious that you can double click each path element. You can also right-click or control-click the folder name on the title bar to get a menu of the path hierarchy.

As for the other point, searching paths, I can personally see that being very useful, but most people expect that a search in a file manager will, you know, search for files. This would introduce a jarring discrepancy.

<comment><USER8> It's also present in Nautilus, as the article pointed out. It's called "button view".

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Hum, IRIX file manager had both editable path and buttons in 1994 or 95. The buttons were thin,over the path. Seemed quite easy and practical back then, search for IRIX on this page : <http://www.guidebookgallery.org/screenshots/filemanager>

</comment><comment><USER10> I prefer the default existing. Its the top bar of a file manager, it should be as clear as possible to anyone using it. I don't want to see slashes, and If I want to search, I don't want to have to delete all the text containing the current directory I'm in to start doing so. 'Instant search' works on web- browsers because when you click on the title bar it automatically 'selects' all the text there, so the first letter you type will start a search (after deleting all the existing text in the title bar). This is not how a file manager would work. As you show, when you click on the title bar you want to 'edit' the current title...

I'd rather get rid of the 'back' and 'forward' buttons, which are quite extraneous for most users (browsing a file system is generally not like browsing the web). Agree that 'location' can go though.

<comment><USER6> Why would you prefer the non-slash version? The only reason I can see a use for it is to either make the path more readable (which could be resolved perhaps with a more readable font,) or that it's designed for a touch interface. The latter which makes more sense.

The button view (not the slash view,) kind of reminds me of breadcrumbs, having recently viewed folders showed (with shortcuts) would actually be a pretty useful addition to Nautilus.

<comment><USER10> Because it is more readable visually when its separated by whitespace rather than looking like a long string. Maybe I just have different preferences to anyone else in wanting the file manager of a desktop-aimed system to be simple and understandable rather than powerful (I have a terminal for that)...

The slashes aren't the main point really. Its the confusion of not knowing whats going to happen when I click somewhere and start typing that I really disagree with strongly.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Nautilus does change it's behaviour every once in a while. Sometimes for the worse. You used to be able to open folders ala Finder style I think it was Alt and right arrow on a folder, when pressed repeatedly you could open up the folders decendents. This feature has gone, which is a shame as it was great to get a quick overview of the file tree. I now have to resort to the 'tree 'command.

Another feature I always feel is missing is right click a folder, and have the option to create a new folder or file inside the highlighted folder.

Another feature missing from nautilus is being able to do multi-select with the keyboard alone. I think you can do this with the Kde file managers.

</comment><comment><USER11> These are the kind of ideas every software developer should practice with. Forget the technicalities: the programming languages, the databases, the frameworks. A good piece of software is not judged by its code, but by its interface.

Every software developer should answer questions such as "What can make the experience easier for my users?", and constantly practice with UI concepts.

I talk more about this in my post about how I think "Interface Is All That Matters": [http://www.pseudocodice.com/post/27983862986/interface-is- al...](http://www.pseudocodice.com/post/27983862986/interface-is-all-that- matters)

<comment><USER6> Agree. The difficult thing here though is that it's an intrinsic part of the desktop, and you need to standardize interfaces across the OS, and preferably if they are shit hot (in that you can navigate them easily and barely notice them,) across different OSs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> If you're interested in the development being done on Nautilus (which is bring renamed to "Files" in GNOME 3.6), see these two blog posts:

<http://blogs.gnome.org/mccann/2012/08/01/cross-cut/>

<http://blogs.gnome.org/mclasen/2012/08/30/on-nautilus/>

See the post discussed at <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4465904> for more changes in GNOME 3.6.

</comment><comment><USER13> I did this mockup a while ago... the list of buttons for the directory hierarchy looks a bit weird and I thought something like this would be better,

<http://holloway.co.nz/gnome-nautilus/>

And when it comes to monitor layout within Gnome I thought something like this would be good,

<http://holloway.co.nz/gnome-display-properties/mockup2.png>

</comment><comment><USER14> I hardly use file managers, but some of these points seem quite interesting, I dislike the idea of hiding the search button when you click in the middle of the search field though, this will most likely only make it confusing for the user. A better options is to disable the search button when the user interacts in the middle of the search field(I think that's possible in GTK, isen't it?).

EDIT: Ignore my comment above, I missunderstood the part about the search button in the article.

<comment><USER2> I think you misunderstood; the OP was saying that there should be no search button, ever, as in (e.g.) Chrome.

<comment><USER14> Oh, I'm sorry. I'm taking back that then.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The most useful thing you could do with Nautilus is to make it keyboard friendly without having to resort to Function keys, and other odd key combos.

How about Super key and arrows to move between panes of an applicaton side bar, location bar etc. And make it very clear which part of the application window has the current focus.

</comment><comment><USER15> My first thought was: You'd better not try making those changes if you want to run on mobile. After all, Apple invested sweat and imagination to innovate the idea of a useful user interface and now has many patents on it (US Pat #8086604, among several others).

Sad.

</comment><comment><USER16> Give dolphin a try : <http://dolphin.kde.org>

</comment><comment><USER17> While we are at topic of file manager - is there a file system manager for ios devices? I mean i want to browse disk of my iphone & see where and how it arranges files

Is it even possible?

<comment><USER18> They are correct. iFile works great for giving you a Finder styled file manager inside the idevice. iFile is also the best utility for doing things like decompressing etc.

If you want to see the files inside your phone in a file manager on your computer most people go with OpenSSH/Cyberduck. Personally I like Netatalk which makes your device just show up as though it was an external hard drive and breaks down the folder hierarchy the same any Linux distro.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> OT: why does this site render so poorly on mobile? You can't even properly scroll.

</comment><comment><USER20> buttons or shortcut keys to go to sibling folders</comment>


Show HN: SQL Injection Challenge - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/breakthenet/sql-injection-exercises <comment><USER2> _A Text-Based MMORPG Game based off Mccode Lite_

Is there a live demo?

<comment><AUTHOR> No - but it's two button clicks to deploy it onto a free heroku instance on your account (which you can then delete after you've completed the challenges)

<comment><USER3> free... but credit card required?

<comment><USER4> Yes, to discourage abuse. This is pretty standard for free trials of all kinds of products.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Measurement of the neutrino velocity with the OPERA detector in the CNGS beam - <AUTHOR> http://arxiv.org/abs/1109.4897 <comment><AUTHOR> This is the real paper (from the physcs preprint archive). 174 authors!</comment>


10 Business-lunch blunders to avoid - <AUTHOR> http://money.cnn.com/2007/08/22/news/economy/business.lunches.fortune/index.htm?postversion=2007082307

<comment><USER2> Manager Tools (a business podcast) has a very good podcast about this for those interested:

[http://www.manager-tools.com/2006/09/meal-etiquette- part-1-o...](http://www.manager-tools.com/2006/09/meal-etiquette-part-1-of-2/)

I know it may appear boring, but they're actually really good and I listen to them even though I'm a student.

<comment><USER3> I was actually just about to fire up my browser to find that cast. This article is watered down fluff in comparison.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> That article forgot the most important point: _you're not actually there to eat lunch_.

I.e. it's ok if you don't finish your plate (or even don't get a bite in your mouth) as long as you meet you goal (get a next meeting, close a deal, etc.).

</comment><comment><USER5> Does anyone here remember the three martini lunch? It seems ridiculous enough that I find it hard to believe it actually existed.

<comment><AUTHOR> very 1960's when business was uptight, formal. Guess they needed to loosen up a bit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I honestly hope I will never have to worry about stuff like this... Ugh.</comment>


Bill fighting online child sexual abuse while threatening encryption - <AUTHOR> https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-technology-encryption/u-s-lawmakers-introduce-bill-fighting-online-child-sexual-abuse-while-threatening-encryption-idUSKBN20S2HF <comment><USER2> Encryption is a form of free speech [1].

[1] [https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/04/remembering-case- estab...](https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/04/remembering-case-established- code-speech)</comment>


Does the US deficit dictate capital flows, or vice versa? - <AUTHOR> http://carnegieendowment.org/chinafinancialmarkets/70042 <comment><AUTHOR> Worthwhile subhead: "In a recent much-remarked-upon and very short op-ed, George P. Shultz and Martin Feldstein argue that the only way, or at least the best way, to cut the U.S. trade deficit is for Washington to cut the U.S. fiscal deficit. It is at least as likely, however, that cutting the fiscal deficit will simply increase debt or increase unemployment."</comment>


Explore Facebook with this filterable list of pages - <AUTHOR> https://specious.github.io/facebook-browser/ <comment><AUTHOR> List of pages pulled from my profile using facebook-cli ( [https://github.com/specious/facebook- cli](https://github.com/specious/facebook-cli) ) and made browsable with a simple #elmlang front end.</comment>


Metrics Showdown: Mixpanel v. KISSmetrics v. Google Analytics - <AUTHOR> http://artvankilmer.wordpress.com/2010/06/15/metrics-showdown-mixpanel-v-kissmetrics-v-google-analytics/ <comment><USER2> once upon a time I thought about making an analytics app.

doing the math though, it must be so hard to get traction in this space. it's an expensive / risky business to run (1 hour of downtime will piss off ALL your customers), but at the same time I think on the low end of the pricing scale, demand is going to be very elastic. If you're charging $50 a month for an analytics app, people will always compare you to Google Analytics, and side with the latter since it's free.

Getting into the analytics game is only worth it if you know how to sell to enterprise, IMO and you can sign up large organisations for 6-figure license fees. More likely to exit from that kind of scenario, too.

That said, I wish Mixpanel and KISSmetrics the best of luck. No doubt they have good products, I just wonder whether the SME market is receptive to boutique analytics apps like these at the kind of scale necessary to make the business viable.</comment>