Longest-running oil spill in history releasing more than 4,500 gallons per day - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2019/06/24/fourteen-years-after-it-started-federal-government-has-studied-longest-oil-spill-history/ <comment><USER2> >[Taylor Energy Company] claim that only one drop of oil per minute is being released from a small area covered in mud, amounting to less than three gallons each day.

.... 14 years later ...

Somewhere between 1,000 and 71,000 gallons have been leaking per day.

> Taylor Energy has disputed every outside assessment of oil flowing from the > site.

Welp hopefully now that there is proof, they will get to pay for their externalities.

From [http://www.taylorenergy.com/](http://www.taylorenergy.com/)

>Taylor Energy Company LLC sold its oil and gas assets in 2008 and ceased all drilling and production operations. Taylor Energy exists today solely to respond to the MC-20 incident.

Okay nevermind. Socialize the losses, concentrate the profits, the American dream.

<comment><USER3> So the company basically went out of business. Sounds about right to me. What more could you possibly ask for?

<comment><USER4> It doesn't really seem fair that a company can return profits to its shareholders for many years while being environmentally negligent, then once it actually has to respond to environmental issues, it can just goes out of business. One, those profits are basically ill-gotten gains, and two, you are encouraging this kind of behavior by letting the people who received the profits keep them.

I'm not sure how to implement this, especially in a way that's fair, but if the company is unable to cover the environmental damage itself I think those profits out to be paying for the damage before taxpayers.

<comment><USER5> The usual solution in other industries is to require all companies in the industry to pay a percentage of revenues into a common insurance fund. Then there would be a pool of money to pay for cleanup even after bankruptcy.

<comment><USER6> Insurance is a pretty dirty word right now. Especially when they are for- profit insurance companies.

US healthcare is a great example of insurance companies causing so much complexity that people willingly chose death over going bankrupt.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Link to actual report page: [https://coastalscience.noaa.gov/data_reports/an- integrated-a...](https://coastalscience.noaa.gov/data_reports/an-integrated- assessment-of-oil-and-gas-release-into-the-marine-environment-at-the-former- taylor-energy-mc20-site/)

PDF: [https://cdn.coastalscience.noaa.gov/publication- attachments/...](https://cdn.coastalscience.noaa.gov/publication- attachments/nccos-tech-memos/NCCOS-TM-260_Mason_2019.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER8> Here's your bimonthly reminder that fossil fuels also create toxic waste that lasts generations and affects huge swaths of the globe.

</comment><comment><USER9> [http://archive.fo/04vtS](http://archive.fo/04vtS)

<comment><USER10> whoa! This seems like an awesome tool to get around paywalls.

<comment><USER11> You using a PC? The link didn't work for me on my Android for whatever reason:( Maybe it's the app I am using or something.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> If one day we run out of oil, someone would go back and ask "what if we stopped all the leaks and perhaps we could have two extra days."

I don't understand and perhaps I missed it... it's only 450 feet below. Why can't anyone stop the leak?

<comment><USER13> It's not a question of if they can. It's a question of if they want to. Fixing it would cost money and it's cheaper to just leave it so here we are.

<comment><USER12> Cheaper? They could be selling.

<comment><USER14> Not for enough apparently

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I would mention there are a lot of natural oil leaks.

A friend of mine living in Santa Barabara has said there's a lot of 100% all- natural tar on the beaches there.

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

<comment><USER16> Also had one of the largest oil spills in history - [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1969_Santa_Barbara_oil_spill](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1969_Santa_Barbara_oil_spill)

and another one recently - [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Refugio_oil_spill](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Refugio_oil_spill)

A fair bit of that tar wound up there because of human activity.

<comment><USER17> (Long time Santa Barbara resident) The tar that washes up on the beaches is natural and not from those spills.

Also, if you need to get tar off your feet after a walk on the beach, baby oil works well :)

<comment><USER16> I went to the University. Baby oil was a necessity ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Every hour, hour after hour

<comment><USER19> work is never over.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> It's really weird how, if there's one thing that a large majority of Americans seem to _hate_ , it's forcing companies to take responsibility for negative externalities that they create by profiting off of something.

There seems to be basically no limit to how much damage the "America is open for business!!!" cheerleaders will support as long as

1\. Someone is making a profit off of it.

2\. It's happening in someone else's backyard (This one is sometimes optional, see the entire state of Louisiana [1] or flammable tap water in Pennsylvania and NY [2])

[1] [https://iaspub.epa.gov/triexplorer/release_geography?region=...](https://iaspub.epa.gov/triexplorer/release_geography?region=&REGIONINDICATOR=&p_view=USGO&trilib=TRIQ1&TAB_RPT=1&LINESPP=&sort=RELLBY&industry=ALL&FLD=RELLBY&FLD=TSFDSP&sort_fmt=2&TopN=56&STATE=All+states&COUNTY=All+counties&chemical=_ALL_&year=2017&report=&BGCOLOR=%23D0E0FF&FOREGCOLOR=black&FONT_FACE=arial&FONT_SIZE=10+pt&FONT_WIDTH=normal&FONT_STYLE=roman&FONT_WEIGHT=bold)

[2] [https://www.pnas.org/content/108/20/8172.abstract](https://www.pnas.org/content/108/20/8172.abstract)

<comment><USER21> You are 100% right and it has baffled me ever since I noticed it. Anyone have a hypothesis as to why this happens/is happening?

<comment><USER22> Because there is no social safety net. If you don't have a job you have to live on the street. Companies have the jobs. When the alternative is seen as living on the street, Americans see these issues with fear for their immediate well being. The environment being destroyed is a far-ish off problem. To many Americans, homeless could be a month or two of joblessness away.

<comment><USER23> What are you talking about?

EITC, SNAP, Section 8 housing, SSI, TANF, WIC, Medicaid, etc.

This site estimates over $700 billion per year spent on these programs: [http://federalsafetynet.com/safety-net- programs.html](http://federalsafetynet.com/safety-net-programs.html)

<comment><USER24> The question is about the quality of life people have when they are on such programs.

Also, it's not about how much is spent but how much people actually get. I read somewhere not too long ago that if you divided the amount of money spend on welfare programs by the number of recipients a family of three would be getting $60,000 a year. This is not the case. Welfare administration eats up the difference.

<comment><USER23> I just pointed out that $700 billion isn't nothing.

I'm well aware of the myriad of flaws in the existing programs. I certainly wasn't claiming that the $700 billion was being spent wisely but apparently that is what a number of people assumed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Paywall

</comment><comment><USER26> pay/privacy wall, why even bother posting this link...

<comment><USER10> If you press esc quickly after the text has loaded you can stop the pay/privacy wall from loading. It might take a couple of refreshes to get the timing right :)

<comment><USER27> I can't find the iPhone escape key

<comment><USER28> On mobile you can quickly hit the X in the address bar as the page is loading, it accomplishes the same thing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> "up to" 4,500 gallons per day. The two new estimates in the article are 9-47 barrels per day and 19-108 barrels per day. A total of 250-700 barrels of oil per day might be flowing into the Gulf from various sources, so this is a significant fraction but not a majority.

<comment><USER30> Without changing units to make the numbers seem smaller:

> "up to" 4,500 gallons per day. The two new estimates in the article are > 378-1974 gallons per day and 798-4536 gallons per day. A total of > 10.5k-29.4k gallons of oil per day might be flowing into the Gulf from > various sources, so this is a significant fraction but not a majority.</comment></comment>


MScSim – real-time flight dynamics simulation software - <AUTHOR> http://marekcel.pl/?lang=en&page=mscsim <comment><AUTHOR> Actually version _MScSim v0.2_ released & there are binaries for Windows (32-bit) and Linux (Ubuntu 18.04, 64-bit).[0]

Linux users also should install data package[1] (in Windows binary all data bundled)

FTR, I'm not developer of _MScSim_.

[0] [https://github.com/marek- cel/mscsim/releases/tag/0.2](https://github.com/marek- cel/mscsim/releases/tag/0.2)

[1] [https://github.com/marek-cel/mscsim- data/releases/tag/0.2](https://github.com/marek-cel/mscsim- data/releases/tag/0.2)

<comment><USER2> > _FTR, I 'm not developer of MScSim_

In that case please don't put "Show HN" in the title. That's for sharing your own work.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> The flight dynamics document is actually quite a useful summary: [http://marekcel.pl/docs/mscsim_doc.pdf](http://marekcel.pl/docs/mscsim_doc.pdf)

<comment><AUTHOR> > _mscsim_doc.pdf_

This (but under name ` _fdm.pdf_ `) and other documents located in separate repo.[0]

[0] [https://github.com/marek-cel/mscsim-docs](https://github.com/marek- cel/mscsim-docs)

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> As I understand, CFD analyze of aircraft models for _MScSim_ made using _OpenVSP_ 's _VSPAERO_ tool.[0,1]

[0] [https://github.com/marek-cel/mscsim-cfd](https://github.com/marek- cel/mscsim-cfd)

[1] [http://openvsp.org](http://openvsp.org)</comment>


Year-old iPhone 4S spontaneously combusts and oozes acid - <AUTHOR> http://venturebeat.com/2013/02/01/year-old-iphone-4s-spontaneously-combusts-and-oozes-acid-but-apple-refuses-to-replace-it/

<comment><USER2> " she panicked and tried to remove the battery by prying open the back of the iPhone. As she did so, the battery, she says, was "in the process of melting and oozing liquid (acid). "

You can't "pry out" the back cover on the iPhone 4S. It requires a specific pentalobe screwdriver which is not your garden variety Philips or torx one. It's very easily doable wih the right tool but I doubt she had it with her while her phone was "burning" lying around on her table.

She probably did something to cause it to burn up and is probably looking to get a free replacement by claiming "spontaneous combustion". There's an army of bloggers to assist with these endeavours.

</comment><comment><USER3> "Source: LinkedIn" ...

There's a reason why Kara Swisher of AllThingsD is so critical about the tech blog reporting scene's way of "breaking" stories at all costs - even if they're factually untrue.

</comment><comment><USER4>
       "(...), woman claims"

Serious tech journalism right there, folks.

A guy in the comments suggests that this was caused by spilled coffee. He could be wrong, but I just don't see why Apple should be the bad guy of a story by default, when the writers haven't bothered to investigate the matter.

</comment><comment><USER5> Who the hell would open the phone and remove the battery when its 'oozing acid' and is thermally unstable?

I don't want that LiIon flash in my face.

</comment><comment><USER6> I don't think there is any acid in a Li-ion battery.

<comment><USER7> As someone that has built many Li-ion batteries, there isn't any acid. The only liquid that could have possibly oozed out is the electrolyte, which is an organic solvent with lithium salts in it (which is somewhat hazardous).

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Holding it wrong?</comment>


Two 4000 ft plumb bobs hung down a mine shaft, with baffling results (1901) - <AUTHOR> https://lockhaven.edu/~dsimanek/hollow/tamarack.htm <comment><USER2> Skimmed, but what I gathered is:

The plumb lines diverged a bit. According to Palmer this means the earth is hollow, and everyone except him is chocking it up to air currents. Clearly, they can be pretty significant at that sort of distance. Few have been able to replicate the results all, and most get the expected results (parallel, with room for jostling / air currents randomizing).

Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong. It's too much to absorb right now.

<comment><USER3> That, and he completely ignored coriolis forces, which apparently explain the divergence nicely.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is long, but interesting so let me try to summarize.

In early 1900s, two lines measuring 4250 feet each were hung down a mine shaft on several occasions in order to calculate the radius of the earth. Scientists expected the bottom of the lines to be closer together than the top, but the opposite was found to be true. The bottom of the lines was 8.2 inches further apart than the top. Several theories were put forth to explain the reasoning behind this, but all failed to account for the large discrepancy from the expected results.

This was my favorite theory: _One central tenet of Teed's philosophy held that the earth is a hollow rock shell, and we live and walk on the inside surface of this shell. The entire universe, which is mostly an illusion caused by gravic and levic rays and light, lies within this shell. This complicated view was called the cellular cosmogony, the earth-cell theory or the Koreshan cosmogony._

<comment><USER5> Hmmm. I wonder want's on the outside then... Seems to cause more problems than it solves, even for the simple-minded folk who believe this (and I have met at least one guy who believed this).

<comment><USER6> Don't forget, that first space flight came 50 years later...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> this sort of story illustrates what a wikipedia type repository of knowledge misses. wikipedia will typically have the most up to date explanation of an event or phenomena, but it can be very illuminating to see past wrong explanations and the people and situations which gave rise to those incorrect explanations. this is even more valuable on topics where heavy revisionism has made it difficult to discern why the current explanation is accepted.

<comment><USER8> Eventually, Wikipedia will also be a source of past-wrong explanations, in the form of years-old page revisions.

<comment><USER7> i have a feeling that old page revisions aren't considered that valuable and significantly old ones may be dropped.

<comment><USER9> No, they're not dropped, as that would violate attribution requirements. They are, however, compacted and compressed to take less space (at the expense of more CPU to access, but the typical user won't notice this)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Divergences are given in so many units it's really hard to compare anything. Examples: 0.018 foot, 0.04 inch, 0.045 cm.

<comment><USER11> There are 12 inches in a foot, and 2.54 cm in an inch. What's the problem?</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How to study for open-ended design interview questions? - <AUTHOR>

Questions that involve designing a database schema for a certain situation, or how to test a distributed network of web servers for google.com, or how to design a mobile gmail app which already have back end REST APIs implemented etc.<p>What are companies looking for in these kinds of questions, and how can people study for them? How do software architects go about designing software systems? Thanks <comment><USER2> Its an interview question, so no-one is expecting you to solve the problem or think of everything in what should be a fairly short time.

What they want to see is how you work: do you ask questions if you don't know something? do you sketch everything out? do you start from model up, or from UI/UX? can you draw from previous experience to improve the design?

After you've done something there would most likely be a discussion about the design, which again is like how you work: how do you handle criticism, how you debate approaches, can you see areas which could be improved on etc</comment>


Send Letters, Not Emails - <AUTHOR> http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/data_mine_1/2013/06/nsa_surveillance_why_the_post_office_doesn_t_spy_on_your_mail_the_way_nsa.single.html <comment><USER2> I think that the government is trying to grab as much power as possible by exploiting old laws that were too specific. But of course privacy should remain.</comment>


Beijing Outbreak Grows to Nearly 100 Cases in Test for China - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-06-15/beijing-outbreak-grows-as-panic-spreads-through-chinese-capital <comment><USER2> This pandemic sucks</comment>


Director Wants His Film on The Pirate Bay, Pirates Deliver - <AUTHOR> http://torrentfreak.com/director-wants-film-pirate-bay-pirates-deliver-140724/ <comment><USER2> why only piratebay? let HN be part of the fun as well

magnet:?xt=urn:btih:14c1b2d6191c692f41c9021a9ca4201a98ab694a&dn=Suzy+Q+DVD5&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.openbittorrent.com%3A80&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.publicbt.com%3A80&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.istole.it%3A6969&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Fopen.demonii.com%3A1337

there just "uploaded" to HN the same anyone would "upload" to piratebay.</comment>


Clojure + Emacs - <AUTHOR> http://mdelaurentis.tumblr.com/post/421253627/clojure-emacs

<comment><USER2> This is great timing for me. I sat down a few nights ago with the intention of learning Clojure, but ended up spending the whole evening wrestling with Emacs and SLIME, trying and failing to get a usable REPL. Perhaps I should have given up and just used the REPL in a terminal window, but I already know from my Common Lisp tinkering how useful it is to have SLIME.

On my adventures I found plenty of blog posts like this one, but none of them very recent, and I couldn't get any of them to work. Hopefully I'll have better luck this time, with a guide matching the current state of Clojure's distribution.

<comment><USER3> I used Emacs Starter Kit (<http://github.com/technomancy/emacs-starter-kit>) and it set everything up for me in seconds.

<comment><USER4> I think these days the easiest way to getting a working Clojure+SLIME setup is to use ELPA.

<comment><USER3> Emacs Starter Kit includes ELPA and a bunch packages from there: it is precisely just a starter kit with some setup made for you and some "skeleton" for your .emacs.d.

So, if you already have your Emacs and ELPA setup, it's easier to just install a couple packages, but if you are starting from scratch with Emacs (as I was), the starter kit is better.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> With M-x swank-clojure-project, you don't have to slime-connect, just provide a project path.

<http://github.com/technomancy/swank-clojure></comment>


Don't Use Huawei Phones, Say Heads of FBI, CIA, and NSA – The Verge - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2018/2/14/17011246/huawei-phones-safe-us-intelligence-chief-fears <comment><USER2> very trustworthy sources ...</comment>


A 100mbs connection in Stockholm is $11 a month - <AUTHOR> http://cis471.blogspot.com/2009/04/why-is-connectivty-in-stockholm-so-much.html

<comment><USER2> The price $11 is probably the best market price they managed to find in Stockholn. It is not like you only need to pay $11 a month and you will get 100Mbps wherever you live in Stockholm. It is not socialism that gets you 100Mbps in Stockholm (but silly simpleton republicans: it is NOT NOT-socialism that gets it either). Sweden has always been ahead on telecom and we happen to think it is important.

The municipal owned black-fibre company is <http://www.stokab.se/>

For some sample prices: I currently pay 320 SEK for 10/10 Ethernet (my condo is 3 years old and is wired, but on a 5 year lock-in contract with the company that wired the condo). The cable company offers 8/24 for 319 SEK. No deal.

A friend of mine gets 10/100 for 239 SEK, also ethernet. It is rental apt, they all have been wired by the owners to stay competitive / attractive. This is quite common. Another variant is that the power-company wires apartments with ethernet. A collegue has that and gets 10/10 at 195 SEK or 100/100 at 235 SEK. This is usually combined with freedom to select operator, who bundles various non-internet services over wires, such as digital-tv or phone (and as such they compete with price AND service bundle).

If your house hasnt been ethernet wired you're stuck on ADSL or cable modems, and the price level is around 200-400 SEK (this is typically bundled with digital-tv and phone as well).

Most of the end-user prices that are in par with the $11 from the article are lucky bastards. One collegue pays 89 SEK a month for 100/100 ethernet, which is less than $11 with current exchange rates. His condo owns the last-mile wiring and can chose the lowest-bidding operator to connect them to inet.

In two years my condo's 5 year contract have expired, our last-mile wiring is ours to control, and I too hope to be in a similar sweet spot to chose the lowest bidder.

</comment><comment><USER3> Good deal. I'll pay 20k a year extra in taxes, but I'll save 30 bucks a month off internet

<comment><USER4> That's not the compromise. You pay 20k a year extra in taxes, and save 30 bucks a month on _pretty much every service you could be spending 30 bucks a month on_. It adds up, especially when you consider that some things that you'd pay less for here are just of absolute crap quality, and you'd likely pay to upgrade here (like, say, paying for extra medical coverage) to take you to the _base_ "free" level provided there.

<comment><USER5> Unless you don't want that service and are therefore subsidizing it for everyone else.

<comment><USER6> Oh god yes, if only I could opt out of that terrible $11 100Mbps internet! How dare they fulfil their basic governmental mandate to take advantage of natural economies of scale to offer high quality basic services at a low price.

<comment><USER5> The real cost isn't 11$, and it's debatable whether there is a government mandate to take advantage of natural economies of scale. I for one, don't believe that.

<comment><USER6> Got your own private sewerage line hooked up then, do you? Made a deal with a nearby power company to run some lines down to your house? Paid up your subscription to the Fire Fighters' Guild?

Delivering basic services _en masse_ is one of the core functions of government. Everyone going it alone is far less efficient. I struggle to think of a single example of a situation where organising utitily provisions individually is a better idea. Internet access is now a utility and it is being treated as one in progressive countries. How can you argue with that?

<comment><USER5> If you live outside of major population areas, yes you often have private water, sewage, and hell in some places you have to opt to pay taxes to a neighboring towns fire department if you want service. I see nothing wrong with that. Oh, and lots of cities have private energy and water companies so I don't see what the problem is there?

Why would you treat internet access differently than you would the telephone? Also, think of the massive improvement in telephone service once the government imposed monopoly of AT&T was broken up.

Delivering basic services en masse isn't one of the core functions of government. The core function of government is national and local security/justice.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Capture the flag 2013 - <AUTHOR> http://ctf365.com/

<comment><USER2> The apparent trouble with signup notwithstanding, this seems like great fun. The thing is, I didn't find out about those problems, because I didn't even try to sign up. I have no idea how I would go about getting started being able to do this.

Can anybody suggest resources for lowly web developers to make our way into security? Even if just for fun?

<comment><USER3> You may like [http://google-gruyere.appspot.com/](http://google- gruyere.appspot.com/)

<comment><USER4> Thank you. I had not heard of that before and it looks very helpful.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This will be interesting to see when finished, but it would be better if each 'Fortress" had to offer services, instead of dictating that each camp has to run POP + Wordpress + some bullshit plugins. Also, this type of activity definitely will break terms of service for internet service and hosting providers, as well as potentially several laws.

<comment><USER6> > "...this type of activity definitely will break terms of service for > internet service and hosting providers, as well as potentially several > laws."

How so? Is the activity itself inherently against TOS or laws? It seems to me that by running the competition, ctf365 intends to have users purposefully exploit sandboxed systems.

<comment><USER5> How do you define a 'sandboxed' system? What if I choose to run the Wordpress/Django/Drupal/Whatever-CMS on a shared host? Cracking tools don't often take into account the negative effects on non-target hosts, nor are they generally tolerated by shell providers.

For example, see 'Prohibited Usage' for Linode: [https://www.linode.com/tos.cfm](https://www.linode.com/tos.cfm)

Unless you're paying for raw bandwidth, you're subject to the ToS of each resource provider along the way.

<comment><USER6> Hmm. I think my confusion comes from the assumption that each "fortress" (server) is a virtual server hosted by ctf365.

From their rules:

 _Don 't try to conduct underground activities with your Fortress (system) from our platform in the Real World (e.g. using our platform to spam others, attack other servers on the internet and so on). We don't care who you are, but we do care what you are doing in our home (CTF365 Platform). Please remember that you are our guest and please behave accordingly._

I read this to imply that they will provide the "fortress". So when I say "sandboxed" system, I mean a system provided by ctf365 on their own infrastructure - infrastructure which permission is implicitly granted to attack.

<comment><USER7> Yes, we will provide the VPS and more, you'll be able to connect your own hardware as a fortress.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I don't think there is anywhere on the website that explicitly tells you what the objective of this is, nor exactly what a flag is (even if it is more of a concept). As much as I can infer from it, in game instructions, they should be explicit.

</comment><comment><USER9> Interestingly, they're using the same technique for the cloud effect as that Japanese energy drink site that was posted here not too long ago.

<comment><USER10> I hope their use of imagery from the Captain America movie is covered under fair use or derivative work.

[http://comicbookmarks.com/wp- content/uploads/2011/08/detail-...](http://comicbookmarks.com/wp- content/uploads/2011/08/detail-6.jpg)

<comment><USER9> Agreed!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Love it. But very janky website makes me worried about the quality.

<comment> grey-area It's a good illustration of a misuse of the webapp single-page formula for a simple informational site. This could have been simple HTML with a proper url for each page, so that you could actually link to the subpages, but instead they're trying to load the content in with js, and performing terribly with no feedback on clicks when I last looked.

The actual content is here (and loads pretty quick as it should):

[http://ctf365.com/pages/game](http://ctf365.com/pages/game) [http://ctf365.com/pages/rules](http://ctf365.com/pages/rules) [http://ctf365.com/pages/prize](http://ctf365.com/pages/prize)

Looks like a rails site, not sure what all the gmaps code is all about, perhaps backend pages?

A fun idea, but I'd prefer if they just specified a simple set of services that you have to support, say something like:

IMAP

Serve this json

Serve this html and let people edit it

Serve this information from any db and let people edit it

and leave the backends to people's imagination. It sounds like they're going to actually specify different CMSs etc, and installing browsers?!?, when they should be specifying what protocols and data are required - that would let you use whatever service and backend tools you wanted.

The maps on the blog look pretty though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Is there anything to stop me from signing up random people's websites?

<comment><USER13> Per another branch of the conversation, they set up the servers, you just control them, so the entire conflict happens in a relatively sandboxed environment.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> CTF365 It's a Startup on bootstrap mode (self funded) that will change the way Information Security is learned. We try to do our best with very few resources. No seed money, no Kickstarter money but full of passion and dedication.

</comment><comment><USER14> Tried to sign up and got the same message no matter what email/password I use: " Invalid email or password. "

<comment><USER15> Oh, btw, for sign up there is no password field. You must be using the sign in form (it could still be a bug, e.g. Clicking sign in shows the sign up form for your browser).

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Anyone interested in making a HN team? (possibly a few given that it's limited members/team)

<comment><USER16> I'd be interested in joining one if there is space for someone with limited administration experience.

<comment><USER13> Shoot me an email, firstname.lastname@example.com. I have [very] limited practical admin experience, but I will try to scare up a friend who can devote some time to it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Mobile browser fail

Edit: The signup/signin box is half off to the left of the screen.

</comment><comment><USER15> This is cool. Please hammer home the C&C nostalgia - we all love it.

</comment><comment><USER18> Looks like they got too much traffic...

</comment><comment><USER19> Really hard to read the text, but really nice homepage.

<comment><USER20> How is that possible? What's the purpose of the homepage?

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> wish I knew anything about hacking to play this, just know development :( setting up the server would be some work to me already

<comment><USER17> Hopefully they'll at least link to good configuration sites for each service, to give new players at least a fighting chance.

I wonder how long it would take someone to spin up a script to install all of these services...

 _SMTP, POP, IMAP, FTP, etc., one CMS + specific plugins, 2 different internet browsers, 3 web applications & at least 2 different databases_

So...a mail server, file servers, multi-webhost, databases, and CMS with many plugins. I assume that "different databases" means different database stacks on different clusters, not "both MySQL and SQL Server 2012" on the same server, right? (In Windowsville this would all be within an AD domain, I'm not sure what the Linux equivalent is.) Will there be a required volume of photo/social datamass to be stored on the server? Maybe instead of some kind of "flag file", we'll have to store embarrassing photos of ourselves?

Who installs a second browser on a server?

<comment><USER22> Who installs a first browser on a server?

<comment><USER17> 1\. They come preinstalled on some closed-source OSes

2\. How else would you connect to a datacenter server's integrated lights out (ILO) webpage from a bastion server within the datacenter and domain, to which you're only allowed an RDP connection?</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Internet Has Been a Colossal Economic Disappointment - <AUTHOR> https://hbr.org/2015/03/the-internet-has-been-a-colossal-economic-disappointment

<comment><USER2> More blaming of the Internet for something that's been in progress since the 1970s.

We shifted from progressive to regressive (e.g. sales and employment) taxes, cut taxes on the top 1%, and moved toward a financial and service economy.

</comment><comment><USER3> If you look at the internet and other modern technical achievements as a world wide phenomenon. Global gdp growth has been humming along at 4-5% since the 1950s.</comment>


Bringup is Hard [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://www.garbled.net/tmp/bringup.pdf <comment><USER2> My primary job for almost 2 years was bringing up boards. It is at the same time immensely challenging and absolutely unappreciated.

As an example of the challenge, My first task in the job was to port a ROM monitor to a custom StrongARM board. StrongARM had JTAG, but no run control, therefore, I could load and run code, but could not stop it or look at memory.

At first, I could only observe (with my eyes) when the board resets. Soon, I could toggle 4 LEDs on the board. That was enough for me to debug by streaming values one nybble at a time. Soon after, I could emit characters from the serial port.

That was the good old days.

<comment><USER3> Heh. For me, I used an IR thermometer to figure out when the board was running and when it quiesced. Thankfully most of the work was already done and I just needed to put some pieces together so I got a console shortly afterward. Then it was the normal development work of getting a more current kernel version running, etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> One thing to watch out for is when the board manufacturer changes its memory map without telling you. Boards built before April booted and the new ones didn't. Fortunately, the product was still in the development stage.</comment>


Ask HN:  How do you store patient information? (HIPAA Compliance) - <AUTHOR> I've recently been charged with the task of figuring out how to store the medical information of patients.  A client of ours is having us create online patient referral forms, and the data needs to be stored online for viewing by authorized office personal and doctors.
I know that information privacy is important, and I also know that if something messes up, I can be held personally responsible for it.  That being said, how do you transmit and store data in a HIPPA compliant manner?  What are some good resources on the subject?
Our development environment is PHP + MySQL if that helps at all. <comment><USER3> See the comments about Schneier's new book <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1113641>

Given that you are using a tool stack that, well, has historically had a large number of security issues and that is difficult to get clarity on be cautious.

It is possible to build capable and relatively secure systems using php but it takes a correspondingly greater effort to do so. You will want to pay special attention to the global php settings (if you turn on register_globals even in development you deserve to get sued for malpractice) and you will want to understand the different layers of encryption that support your application. You also need to engineer your applications workflow with an eye towards separating out different kinds of access. A patient filling out a form should not be able to access any other patient records. A doctor or clinical assistant should be able to view only those records their role requires; any patient record access should be recorded in an audit log that is not accessible to any user directly.

Also, drop mysql for postgres; php support for postgres is very good and postgres supports in database public key encryption which you will want.

<comment><USER4> Can you expand on the postgres public key encryption - is this a function that encrypts/decrypts based on some files on the server (or in a database column)?

<comment><USER3> pgcrypto is a set of extension functions that are available from within PL/SQL

<http://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/static/pgcrypto.html>

You do need to understand what the functions are doing and it doesn't handle key management for you.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> HTTPS. Firewall that prevents outside network access to servers with HIPPA data. Encryption of data in the db (eg, don't store plaintext social security numbers in a table). All backups are encrypted. Files with PII (patient identifying information) are encrypted. Data access strictly limited to small set of people.

Now that I've blown a bunch of stuff at you, I'll say that my experience is that most of HIPPA (and IRB study stuff, even stricter) is about defining and implementing a coherent policy to minimize risk. It is a colossal pain - <USER2> I work, we do medical research and integrate with actual clinical data collected from the hospital. It's not uncommon to find clinical staff keeping excel or word docs full of patient data on non-secured systems. Minimize the places where you get data from people so that you don't have to be accountable for those things - in other words, try not to have people emailing you excel sheets in the clear. We're putting https web apps in front of people to load data that way (parsing files on the fly) and not storing the files at all - during the parsing, we'll put the data into our backend and encrypt that data in our Oracle db. We're wrangling with key management right now - we want to load data automatically, but to not store keys in the db or on the OS in a way that would be easily accessed if the db server was literally loaded onto a truck and taken away.

I'm not a MySQL experienced person, but I'm sure it probably has something similar. You're right to be cautious - I've seen estimates that notifying people when data is leaked and handling the cleanup (providing credit monitoring, etc) is huge, $3K to $5K per client.

<comment><AUTHOR> This is what I was afraid of. The company I work for has never had to handle this sort of data before, and were VERY close to just dropping all the client info into a standard, non-encrypted database.

Thanks for your insight. I have a feeling we may hand this project off to someone that is experienced with HIPAA development so nobody gets screwed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I am a programmer/analyst in a hospital. I administer several systems and have my hands in most of the databases. Outside of work, I consult and write healthcare software.

You store it the same as you would any sensitive information -- behind a locked door with a ridiculous amount of audit data. It's more about identifying improper access (nurse A looking at patient B when she's not in his "circle of care") than it is about preventing it, for legitimate users of course.

You do not need to encrypt the contents of the database or any such extreme measures.

Something else to remember is that there is no bulletproof "HIPAA-Compliant" stamp. It's more a set of guidelines and best practices that you're trying to follow. Most vendors do not provide a row-by-row audit table for every single action, for example, but they should.

<comment><USER5> Interesting - our hospital written policy is that SSNs must be encrypted when stored. Other PII is somewhat less restrictive.

But, we had a high-profile case where a server with a file of SSNs and patient names was hacked. There was no evidence the person(s) who hacked the server ever knew this particular file existed, but it generated a bunch of headaches here. Maybe policy makers went off the deep end in response.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> HIPAA compliance is no joke.

Take a look at documentation provided by the Joint Commission (JCAHO) which certifies hospitals and CCHIT for generalized standards (no one ring to bind them all in terms of compliance for software), also HIPAA.org.

You may want to review the CMS HIPAA checklist (<http://www.cms.gov/hipaa/>).

As a best practice, I've seen basic "PHI" or personal health information (identifying info like name, Bday, sex, SSN) encrypted, but this is not 'required.' Some programmers/sites go further and encrypt everything, as stated by others below.

Careful with the email transmission; various legal concerns (and some regulatory standard interpretations) mean most 'sites' keep this info on LANs or HISs or perhaps on web hosted sites.

Take a look at Kaiser's KPConnect PHR portal, which is powered by Epic, as an example. You can dig up plenty of stuff about that system on Google.

Generic presentation of concerns, but worth a quick skimming: [http://npag.org/NPAG_images/NPAG%20Health%20IT%20Prez- Kenned...](http://npag.org/NPAG_images/NPAG%20Health%20IT%20Prez- Kennedy%20%5BCxompatibility%20Mode%5D\(1\).pdf)

For nifty open source stuff, check out popHealth (by Mitre), OMHE (for mobile) and hData (XML).

<http://code.google.com/p/omhe/>

<http://www.projecthdata.org/>

<http://projectpophealth.org/>

</comment><comment><USER8> You might want to look into data blinding, stronger/stricter permissions, and even audit tables (if data changes, insert a duplicate of the row into a separate audit table).

However as long as you have it internally set up (not on the Internet) and make encrypted backups (so stolen backups are worthless) your risk will be much less.

<comment><AUTHOR> I was reading through the HIPAA guidelines and it mentioned something about auditing almost everything that happens on the system. Is that standard practice when doing HIPAA development?

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I have a degree in Medical Record Administration and one of my past positions was Manager of Medical Records and Privacy Officer for a hospital. The Office of Civil Rights enforces the HIPAA Privacy and Security Rules. You can check out their HIPAA website at <http://www.hhs.gov/ocr/privacy/> You can also review the Security Rule which sets forth guidelines for protecting electronic data. This can be found on [http://www.hhs.gov/ocr/privacy/hipaa/administrative/security...](http://www.hhs.gov/ocr/privacy/hipaa/administrative/securityrule/index.html) \- click on "Security Rule Standards - Final Rule" under Security Rule History. It's a pain to read because it's written by the government, but it may have the info you need.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> As a sub-topic, if I were to catch some form data, write it to a file, compress and encrypt the file (password/key protected) and then email it to a health provider, is that viable alternative to actually storing information?

Of course, the temporary files would be deleted immediately.

</comment><comment><USER9> You can also find sample security rule compliance policies that different organizations have created. For example, University of California has theirs at [http://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/hipaa/docs/security_gu...](http://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/hipaa/docs/security_guidelines.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER10> You might want to look at some open source software like Open Clinica:

<http://www.openclinica.org/page.php?pid=97></comment>


3Blue1Brown: Hamming Codes [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X8jsijhllIA <comment><USER2> Interested viewers might also enjoy this free book: [http://www.inference.org.uk/mackay/itila/](http://www.inference.org.uk/mackay/itila/)

An early chapter talks about Hamming Codes.

I've only worked through the first few chapters, but I recommend it. It seems to be a unique book.

<comment><USER3> I recommend the book in general, and also his lectures. He has a quirky sense of humour, compares his book with Harry Potter here: [http://www.inference.org.uk/mackay/itila/Potter.html](http://www.inference.org.uk/mackay/itila/Potter.html)</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What are the best motorcycle riding teaching videos on YouTube? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Chill, Boop, Roll. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KnPgmSYlrwU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KnPgmSYlrwU)

And search YT for motorcycle crash compilations and study what not to do;

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ZZJdr7wiLA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ZZJdr7wiLA)

Also search YT for "survival reactions"</comment>


Darpa Open Catalog - <AUTHOR> http://www.darpa.mil/opencatalog/

<comment><USER2> Dr. White, who heads this up, spoke yesterday at Strata . . . it was the most bizarre talk I heard in the 3 days by a mile. At one point, he actually put a slide from a Wired peace that bashed him, then spoke for about 45 seconds about how the piece was wrong when no one in the audience really cared. He's just an odd duck.

On this, he put forth a really solid vision of what he sees coming out of this - a classic melding of Machine Learning dark arts with the ease of use of a traditional, modern web framework. It's a pretty bold vision, but he's got the cash to spread around to certain contributors.

</comment><comment><USER3> If I had piles of govt money to spent I would rather support the development of already established OSS projects with adequate teams and would try to influence further direction by contributing "scientific basis" and "rational reasoning" about functionality I think is necessary. That means I would enjoy "free" community testing and support and probably even bug-fixes.) The mantra for Open Source is "make something for others to [re]use", which, I think, govt officials could never understand.

<comment><USER4> XDATA participant here...

I completely agree with your emphasis on the community as one (if not the) defining attribute of what makes open source special. I think, however, that attitudes towards open source in government are definitely starting to shift. Events like the (3rd annual) Open Source Summit [1], and efforts like XDATA contribute greatly to overall awareness of the importance of understanding and embracing open source in government.

As far as supporting established OSS projects, this is definitely a big part of what XDATA is doing. Several of the projects on this list have well- established communities at the Apache Software Foundation (e.g.: OODT, Spark, Shark, Mesos, Tika) and others have strong ties to university research programs (Stanford, University of Washington, USC, UC Berkeley, etc.)

In a sense, what XDATA is doing is helping to connect these communities and funding them to come up with ways to collaboratively leverage their software and skills to solve data-intensive problems.

[1] [http://ossummit.org](http://ossummit.org)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Not surprising Julia is DARPA sponsored. Julia has a big future ahead of itself in the military and government. It has perhaps more of a future than any other modern language in those industries.

<comment><USER6> > Julia has a big future ahead of itself in the military and government.

Hmm, curious, why would that be? Or rather, what are the features that make you think Julia has that other languages and technologies don't have that would be killed in military and government?

I work within that area and if anything the military and government love their red tape, certifications, protection profiles, rubber stamps that it would seem like the last industry to jump on a new and largely yet unproven language. You wouldn't believe the number of Windows XP and RHEL 4 and 5 servers still running.

<comment><USER7> The list of features is impressive: [http://julialang.org/](http://julialang.org/). Concurrency, metaprogramming, efficient macros, generics, etc...

<comment><USER8> Too many features in a language sounds like a bad thing to me. Anyone remembers [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PL/I](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PL/I)

Trying to be everything to everyone just makes you lose focus and causes too much complexity. Better to be lean and mean and somewhat specialized</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Betty Shannon, Unsung Mathematical Genius (2017) - <AUTHOR> https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/voices/betty-shannon-unsung-mathematical-genius/ <comment><USER2> I've seen enough stories like this to wonder how many more there are. How many of the "great men" of scientific and technological history were great in part due to "hidden partnerships" with spouses or others who aren't listed as co- authors on papers and such? Seems like a book collecting a dozen or so such stories would be a great read.

Note: this is not to deny any scientist or inventor any credit. Most of those we celebrate deserve it. I'm just thinking there are even more great people we should know about.

<comment><USER3> Granted, I have seen other forms of this in creative partnerships, both marriage and also non-marriage, where there is a creative dreamer and an organizational genius.

n/naka, one of the best restaurants in LA here, is like that - the chef is a totally disorganized "Dreamer" and her partner makes it happen

Greene and Greene, the architecture firm that designed the landmark Gamble house, also appeared to operate like this, one brother was the creative dreamer and the other was the business guru.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is a story of the women behind a successful man. But no. Gender doesn't matter. Look at some successful start-ups. You need a founder like Claude Shannon to come up with a successful idea and another founder like Betty to fill in all the gaps and implement it. Such partnership is, IMHO, the essential formula for success. It is rare to have both traits in the same person.

<comment><USER5> Whilst your late part is great, the problem is the first sentence. It is not behind. It should not be. Woman are human too.

<comment><USER6> I think you misunderstood the parent. In this context, 'behind' means less visible, as in a person working in the background.

Example: 'Behind every "big break" is a lot of blood sweat and tears.'

Example: Giorgio Moroder was behind many smash hits of the 80s.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> >As Betty put it, "Some of his early papers and even later papers are in my handwriting...and not in his, which confused people at first." And not just his papers: Betty was a full partner in the gadgeteering, too. In fact, it was Betty—not Claude—who completed the wiring for Theseus the mouse.

I am a long-time Claude Shannon fan, and now his story makes a lot more sense. This is a great article to see.

</comment><comment><USER8> The title doesn't seem to match the actual article content: it's clear that Betty Shannon was very smart and an important collaborator with Claude, but "mathematical genius" is very strong language and I'm not seeing anything in the article to suggest it's justified.

(Which isn't to put her down; almost everyone is not-a-mathematical-genius, including the great majority of super-impressive people.)

<comment><USER9> I observed the same and the gist of the article is: "Two very smart people have healthy, happy, and productive marriage." For some reason the headline (but not the content) appears to be designed to elicit the belief that Betty was somehow unappreciated and forgotten. My understanding is that authors don't generally pick the titles their pieces are published under, so I would guess the editor wanted a punchier title for whatever reason.

It's a good piece though and I'm glad I read it.</comment></comment>


Apple Introduces the iPhone 6S and iPhone 6S Plus - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2015/09/09/apple-introduces-the-iphone-6s-and-iphone-6s-plus/ <comment><USER3> According to [0], these "phones" are 5.4 and 6.2 inches _tall_ (not diagonally). 5.4 inches should not be the "small" size phone. That's _huge_. I have reasonably large hands and I really hate this about my phone (I have a Nexus 5, which is around the same size as the iPhone 6S).

Please, let's make us some smartphones that are nice and compact and small. Or at least medium.

[0]: [http://www.apple.com/iphone-6s/specs/](http://www.apple.com/iphone-6s/specs/)

<comment><USER4> From what I see, Sony is the only manufacturer currently offering a high end phone at a smaller size with the Xperia Compact line. Still 5 inches tall though.

<comment><USER5> I went from a Nexus 5 to a Sony Z3 Compact and haven't looked back. The form factor is _so_ much more convenient, I really hope more manufacturers look at it again.

<comment><USER6> I love my Z3 Compact as well. Am still pulling a solid 1.5+ days of battery life, and the dock charger is really nice.

<comment><USER7> My one complaint with my Z3c is actually my dock, the magnetic pedestal design sucks. I've had to RMA seveal docks form Sony just to get one that worked most of the time. And even then, the magnet disengages and the power pins drop = no charging, which is an unwelcomed surprise in the morning. I've since moved to a magnetic cable and I'm much happier.

the Z5c is pretty tempting, but I'll admit the 6s+ is also tempting. I'm growing tired of Play Services killing my battery on a whim

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I hate the name, but the 3d touch is a nice interaction model. I really like peaking as a UI metaphor. It helps slice through layers of information without committing to the next layer.

 _edit_ and you have to be fucking kidding me with 16GB base models...

 _edit2_ oh, I get it, it's a push for iCloud storage, lame

<comment><USER9> Why not just call it force touch, like the macbook? Craig Federighi even had a slip and referred to 3d touch as force touch.

<comment><USER8> Side note along with this thought, I feel like Apple is going through some kind of naming transition in its lineup:

Mac<thing>: e.g. Macbook, MacBook Pro, Mac Pro

i<thing>: iPod, iPhone, iPad, iSight

Apple <thing>: Apple watch, Apple pencil

I think the Apple one is the worst, because <thing> seems to be common non- trademarked words and has a weird marketing exec "let's get the branding out there!" strategy.

And now it kind of smells like they might be thinking about going to a "Smart <thing>" naming scheme.

It makes calling things kind of hard and schizophrenic, most people just default to i<thing> when they don't know what to call it. I hear iWatch at least once a week.

<comment><USER10> They're copying the facebook-esque thing of grabbing the base word and making that the brand. IE facebook messenger is "messenger", compared to google messenger which is "gchat". Calendar vs "gcal", and so on.

Facebook effectively owns the word "like" at this point, has "internet.com", and so on.

Apple wants people to be calling the "Apple Watch" just "the Watch".

<comment><USER11> I don't think Facebook can make their messenger a memorable brand. The actual brand that people think about is Facebook. Messengers these days are a dime and a dozen, with Facebook's messenger being popular because it is "at hand", but that's due to people being active on Facebook. But it's not like Facebook has multiple products, their messenger being part of what Facebook is. Before Facebook my friends where using Yahoo! Messenger. And now it's pretty much dead.

"gchat" was actually Google Chat and was about voice and video chat. Now it was replaced by Google Hangouts. It's a pretty cool service, except that they have had two problems - their fuckup with Google+ and the popularity of Skype. Now Skype is a very memorable brand. And it has lots of problems, but people keep using it because it works for group video/audio calls and because it has good prices on calling phone numbers - like, Skype has a freaking monopoly on emigrants and their families or on companies working with remote consultants or employees.

In other words, I don't think the actual name matters that much, plus if you pick a weird word you might get more out of it. Googling is now a verb in the dictionary and tweeting should probably be as well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> It's 2015, they just added 4K recording and a higher megapixel camera and the base model is STILL 16GB? Is this a joke? I just can't understand that at all. That space is going to get used up so fast. Android manufacturers have the same issue so it's not like it's an Apple only problem.

The minimum at this point should be 32GB.

<comment><USER13> 16GB is fine. Lots of people don't even download apps.

<comment><USER14> _Lots of people don 't even download apps._

Would you care to expand on this? Thanks.

<comment><USER15> "The app asked UK mobile carrier Telefonica/O2 about iPhone storage space in the UK. What they found was pretty shocking: 91% of iPhones in the UK have 16GB or less of storage."

Source: [http://uk.businessinsider.com/iphone-storage-data-market- sha...](http://uk.businessinsider.com/iphone-storage-data-market- share-2014-12)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> >and all iPhone models are made with a brand new Apple custom alloy, the same alloys used in the aerospace industry.

"Brand New" and "Same as used in X" \- choose one. (I think this is just standard TechCrunch, not from Apple, but still rather irritating)

<comment><USER7> 7xxx series alloys are used in aerospace, Apple's alloying mix is apparently unique...making it a brand new alloy in the 7xxx series...

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Apple is going to make bank by turning into a bank. The installment plan with free upgrades each year is brilliant. The user lock-in is going to be unsurpassed and no competing phone maker has the mountains of cash required to match it.

<comment><USER18> Yeah that was the biggest thing for me too. We knew what was coming with the iPhone, Apple TV and iPad Pro. That upgrade program is going to be a big thing in my opinion.

One thing I wasn't sure about though was do you own the phone or are you just leasing it? When you upgrade after a year do you have to return your old phone?

<comment><USER19> If you upgrade after a year, that seems probable. After the full 24 months, I believe that it would be yours. Don't quote me on this, though.

<comment><USER20> At a $120 premium over a carrier's installment plan.

<comment><USER21> You gain AppleCare+ as a benefit, bringing the price a lot closer. It's also unlocked, which could be nice for some people.

Here's the big difference, though, at least with AT&T's Next: With Next, the "how often can you upgrade" and "how long do you have to pay" are highly mismatched.

The most frequent upgrade plan is once very 12 months ("AT&T Next 12"). To get this, I have to commit to paying 20 months (or ~3.33 years).

If I want to upgrade two years in a row, I've committed to paying 40 months (2 terms of the plan). That at least gets me 3 upgrades in that term. If I want to go for a 4th upgrade, we're now at an overall committed payment term of 5 years.

That's fine if you're doing this long-term, but Apple's appears much simpler: You pay for 2 years. In that time, you get 2 phones.

Verizon's program lets you upgrade "any time" you want, but only once you've paid off the cost of the new phone. Unless you pay a chunk of change early, this means one upgrade every 2 years, just like a contract, compared to Apple's once-a-year.

What I'm not sure about with Apple's is whether you can end your 2 year plan with a second phone, and then terminate and keep the phone. This is what I'd most like to know before considering this further. The Terms and Conditions page doesn't seem to be up yet..

Given that the upgrade is once every 12 months, timing also seems important. I'd imagine you'd want to activate the plan just after a new iPhone comes out, and hopefully time it so that you end the 2 years right after another new iPhone comes out, if you really want the latest-and-greatest.

Overall though, it _seems_ to be more fair compared to AT&T's Next and Verizon's Early Upgrade programs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> This rebranding of video as "live photos" ("they can have sound!") is cracking me up.

<comment><USER23> For the same price, a video (or a still from a video) doesn't look _nearly_ as good as a photo. The development here is packaging a high-quality still inside a video and doing compression in a way that doesn't kill the photo.

Think about it - why do professional photographers bother with shutters or try to time the perfect shots? Why not just constantly shoot video and pull frames out of it later? Because it would look like crap.

This wouldn't be hard to imitate. Record the live preview into a 3 second buffer. When the user presses the shutter, switch into still mode, take a real photo, wait 1.5 seconds, and then write both the buffer and the photo into the same archive. On playback, by default show the normal photo, but on whatever UI gesture, play the first 1.5 seconds of the video, then the photo for one frame, then the next 1.5 seconds of the video.

Only barrier I could see to re-implementing this on other phones is long wait times while the camera switches modes, during which information is lost.

<comment><USER24> >[W]hy do professional photographers bother with shutters or try to time the perfect shots? Why not just constantly shoot video and pull frames out of it later?

Photographers are doing this.

[https://news.creativecow.net/story/879117](https://news.creativecow.net/story/879117)

>"RED cameras allow Inez and Vinoodh to simultaneously capture high-resolution images for their photographs along with their artistic videos"

<comment><USER23> An entry-level RED (Scarlet Dragon) is $16k. A top-end Nikon (D3X) is $8k.

You _can_ get to comparable image quality, but it's going to cost you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> tldr: My mom has no idea what force touch is. She'd not going to get 3d touch.

I love all of this, but it seems to me that there is really becoming a divide in the type of people who can fully appreciate/employ the UI nuances? I'm not a photographer, and basically only use photoshop to crop and do bullish things. But I know there's a whole universe of things I could do, if I appreciated the power set tools.

I think that's where many "smart" products are going, but because they are distributed to the masses (unlike PS for instance), that divide means something else.

For some people this is going to make their "daily lives" more enjoyable. For another set of folks, perhaps equal in size even, I think a lot of this stuff will just go over their heads.

<comment><USER26> My mom also has no idea what right-click is. I showed it to her once and it blew her mind. Then she promptly forgot about it.

I figure as long as you don't hide essential functionality in your app's 3d-touch interface, and primarily use it for short cuts, you are probably okay...

<comment><USER25> Yes, it's not that it's not discoverable, it's that it's easy to forget and/or unnecessary to remember.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Interested to hear whether people think the fragmentation/differentiation of the iPhone line is a good strategy or not. Where there used to be 1 flagship phone, there are now 4 different models, possibly 5 if they make a (c) version.

> iPhone 6, iPhone 6 Plus, iPhone 6S, iPhone 6S Plus, iPhone 6c

What made the iPhone iconic was that there was one powerful and curated model, and that you trusted Apple to make design choices for you. You paid extra because you knew you were getting a quality phone, not the low-tier/hard to compare versions of the multitude of Android-based phone. Why move away from simplicity and curation?

<comment><USER28> iPhones, marked with "S" are successors of the previous model and doesn't include any changes in their case.

<comment><USER27> Yeah, I understand the naming conventions (S = same case, different internals, C = cheap case, Plus = large) but my point is: why? Apple is supposed to think these design choices through and give the user whatever is best. That's what they've done in the past, and that's why they have such a strong brand.

<comment><USER29> Turns out one size does not fit all.

Personally I'm sticking with my 5s until it dies at this point, the 6 is too damn big.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Who had to laugh when the guy was like 'live photos .... and they're not videos guys, really, believe me, repeat after me NOT videos, photos!'

Or when he was like 'this is based on revolutionary technology never seen before, and it's totally not half-a-vine, either, it's a new breakthrough, 3 second videos'.

I mean I don't even grin anymore when they say 'the iPhone 6 was the most popular iPhone.... EVER' or when they say 'the iPhone 6S is the best iphone... EVER' (no shit). I've gotten used to that level of hyperbole, but the rhetoric around the live photos was pretty ridiculous. (and I like it, too, I think it's a neat little feature that fits nicely in between photos and vines - <USER2> original massively-popular 7 second videos - the way it was presented was just way over the top.)

</comment><comment><USER31> These Harry Potter images have already been done by Nokie: [http://lumiaconversations.microsoft.com/2014/04/15/relive- th...](http://lumiaconversations.microsoft.com/2014/04/15/relive-those-moving- moments-with-nokia-living-images/)

</comment><comment><USER32> Higher resolution photos and video and somehow Apple is still going to have the 16 GB base model.

<comment><USER33> The 16GB is only there to make you buy the more expensive model

<comment><USER34> Or possibly, stats showed that a significant percentage of users don't even come close to filling up the 16 GB.

<comment><USER35> If that was truly the reason, there is no reason to not make 32GB the base option. A few people would be saved hassle and it would cost Apple pennies and do their reputation good.

It makes a whole lot more likely that the base model is just to get you to upgrade to the 64GB at this point.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> "Live Photos" They must really want more people to start paying for iCloud Drive every month. That sounds like a big data hog compared to a single photo every time I hit the shutter button.

<comment><USER36> Wow. They actually helped out and increased the storage on each plan along with that. Now I get 50GB for the same $.99 I used to pay for 20GB.

<comment><USER37> ... and kept the 16 GB base model.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Still no SD card slot?

So fucking irritating that more/less the primary way Apple does price differentiation for their product models is by locking you in at storage capacity sizes.

My life is a hell of iCloud + Dropbox backups & constantly deleting all media so I can keep all of 40 apps on my 16GB iPhone.

<comment><USER39> Computer makers, notably Apple although others are guilty of this too, have always shipped low end hardware to get you in the door. Like a car manufacturer offering low end engine for some models.

But in this case, how much is your time worth? If you're like most people hanging out on hacker news (assuming a tech career) its not unreasonable to expect your salary to be $100/hour.

If you're spending more than 2 hours mucking with moving things around, then perhaps your next phone purchase should consider how much time you're spending vs. the price of increased storage.

<comment><USER40> Base hardware is fine.

But the iPhone has shipped with 16GB minimum storage ever since the 4s four years ago. Since then the speed, resolution, and camera have all increased by at least one factor of two. All of these things also increase the storage requirements for photos and apps.

If I was the type of user who was satisfied with the base model of my old phone, and I buy the new base model and am not satisfied, then I am not going to be happy. I use my phone the same way I did four years ago. If I wasn't a 'pro' user then, why am I now?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> I'm curious what exactly they mean when they say Live Photos are 'not a movie, it's a photo!' So what's the file format? How does one encode sound to a moving photo and not call it a movie?

<comment><USER42> You probably aren't cut out for marketing then.

<comment><USER43> This, but they missed the opportunity to call it a single I-Frame with only P-frames in each direction, if they actually did some effort in terms of compression efficiency.

Another thing is that any 4k capable codec is also probably magnitudes more space efficient than baseline jpeg for stills, with or without added temporal information.

<comment><USER42> I wonder how long they tried to negotiate the rights to calling it "harry potter photos" but just couldn't swing it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> I think a lot of this is going to boild down to whether people give a shit. A nicer way to put it is: Are these solutions for non-existing problems?

Yes, yes, we teck-heads can geek-out at the idea of a force sensing screen. We are not the market. The maket is the average Joe or Jane. And it is my impression Joe and Jane, for the most part, won't give a shit. I know plenty of people with 4s's who have not updated the OS in a while, no longer get any apps --free or otherwise-- and feel perfectly served with what they have. When we ask them if they'd be interested in spending several hundred dollars to upgrade, the answer is often monosyllabic: "Why."

<comment><USER45> For a better camera

I use an iPhone 4. Battery life went to hell at one point now it's back to being decent. It was a software problem.

Wouldn't mind it being slightly thinner, lighter, bigger with better screen and far better camera. But now the screens got too big.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> I think once app developers fully adopt 3D touch and Apple refines the iOS UX in future iterations to take complete advantage of the tech, it's going to be a _huge_ improvement in how we interact with smartphones.

<comment><USER47> Not trying to offend you, but have you had your hands on one yet? I don't think you can say this until you do. It may be crap. Well, it's Apple, so it's probably not crap, but maybe it actually won't make a <i>huge</i> difference.

<comment><USER48> It's the first time we get a new interaction idiom since 2007 really. I think it will bring great changes and improvements to mobile app UIs. Adaption gonna take a while though, 2-3 years for it to be considered standard on iOS, another 1-2 years on Android, I'd guess. Also given it's from Apple the implementation will probably be rather solid.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Why can't they just list the prices? Does anyone still get their phone under a 2 year contract anymore? I have no clue what "From $199" means.

<comment><USER49> um.. yes? I can't imagine getting an iphone every year when you can just get one every 2 years for a third of the price.

<comment><USER50> I'm not the sort of person to update phones every year (I've had my current phone for almost two years and the one before that for six years), but it's often cheaper to pay the flat price when upgrading every two years than to pay the reduced price with the contract. It all depends on how your carrier structures their plans.

<comment><USER42> _with the contract. It all depends on how your carrier structures their plans._

Historically, US carriers don't change plan pricing based on having a contract. So, you can be month-to-month for $100 per month, or get a two year contract for $100/month plus they give you $500 up front towards the purchase of a $1,000 phone (as received by just discounting the phone up front).

<comment><USER50> I know this was the case historically, but I think it stopped being the case for my carrier (ATT) a couple of years ago. I believe our plan is cheaper by not taking the phone subsidy, and sufficiently cheaper to justify paying for the phone up front.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> Very curious as to the intuitiveness of the variations in tapping. 3D Touch seems neat.. but I'd have to use it personally to know whether or not its a revolution, or an Amazon Fire Phone-esque gimmick.

<comment><USER52> The shortcuts on the homescreen looked real useful (though they would depend on what the application developer decided to add as quick jumps), and I've done the "open message/back to list/open message/back to list" way too often

<comment><USER51> I have too but requiring my finger to be touched (over top of the message) doesn't seem like it'll benefit.

The shortcuts are nice, though.

<comment><USER52> The finger would obscure part of the display, but it would likely leave enough uncovered that you have the information you need to decide whether you want to actually open the resource, don't want to, or want to act (using the contextual gesture things)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> Why are all of the top links to TechCrunch? They're the worst.

<comment><USER54> It's usually pretty random which particular versions of a story get traction here, especially when there's a media burst of roughly equivalent articles.

If people suggest significantly better sources, we can edit the URLs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> All I wanted was more storage and longer battery life. Looks like I have another year to wait for those. Not to knock the other improvements, but storage and battery life are the two that bug me the most.

</comment><comment><USER56> How much RAM does it have?

I thought 16GB was bad in 2014 but it's just comical now considering the 4k and 12MP camera.

<comment><USER57> I think you're mixing up RAM with storage.

<comment><USER56> I was referring to the 16GB storage.

The RAM should hopefully be at least 2GB.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> Unrelated to the tech: a Warhammer 40k spin-off as a launch game?

Here's hoping that this excellent, science fantasy franchise will hit the mainstream!

</comment><comment><USER59> Is the 6s plus screen still 1080p down sampled from the native resolution?!

</comment><comment><USER60> Surprised no one here mentioned A9 and the updated camera. As a person upgrading from an iPhone 5, I'm pretty excited.

</comment><comment><USER61> Claims 23 LTE bands with up to 300Mbps, that means it is a category 6 LTE UE which means you will only get that if the carrier you are using has deployed Carrier Aggregation and you have a really really good signal and the you Carrier deployed backhaul that can handle that speed. So, don't hold your breath !

</comment><comment><USER62> To everyone here whose response to the 16GB model is that they are trying to push icloud, how do you transparently and painlessly free up storage on your device for photos/videos that are already backed up on icloud?

</comment><comment><USER63> I'm worried about what the 3D Touch does to the ruggedness of the phone. With two toddlers, I don't think this phone would last 3 months in my house, even with a case.

Or is 3D Touch somehow achieved with passive sensors?

<comment><USER64> My interpretation of the keynote: The screen flexes a tiny bit when you press on it (which my iPhone 6 does as well, so this doesn't necessarily imply new materials). They now have sensors behind the screen to quantify the flexing, and translate that into "force".

<comment><USER63> Interesting, didn't realize Gorilla Glass was designed to flex, but it seems that was an advertised feature of Gorilla Glass 3.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER65> It's nice to hear that the screen is becoming more durable. I've already broken one screen on my 6+ because I had it in my pocket and my jeans were a bit too tight and put a lot of stress on the phone.

<comment><USER42> Yeah, I was terrified of super-thin phone in super-tight pants and went with this last year: [http://www.urbanarmorgear.com/collections/apple- iphone-6-plu...](http://www.urbanarmorgear.com/collections/apple- iphone-6-plus-cases)

It doesn't add unusable thickness to the phone and as a bonus it gives you more friction so if your hands are sweaty you're less likely to drop your $1,000 magic pocket supercomputer (completely smooth rounded corners look nice, but sure are slippery and drop prone).

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> What is the iPhone 6 going to do with iOS 9 w/out the, cough, 3D touch? How will that be handled? For instance, app switching, will it stay the same (double click the home button)?

<comment><USER66> It's in-depth. So developers will have to design and implement a middle step, hence nothing is lost. You'll see all details on press, snapshot on semi-press

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> An auspicious name, the "iPhone Success"

<comment><USER42> [http://www.6smarketing.com/blog/weare6s/](http://www.6smarketing.com/blog/weare6s/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER67> Any improvements to Siri?

<comment><USER68> iOS 9 wasn't really spoken about, but yeah there are improvements coming.

</comment></comment><comment><USER69> No USB 3.0 data transfer speeds?

<comment><USER70> They probably want us to use iCloud.

</comment></comment><comment><USER71> 3D Touch - what does it mean?

<comment><USER72> It is force touch, basically.

<comment><USER73> Craig even used the term by accident

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER74> but... does it bend?

<comment><USER75> Everything bends, there is no spoon...

<comment><USER68> I re-watched the Matrix only two days ago, so well made for '99!

<comment><USER75> It was revolutionary at the time, it's really a timeless movie

I haven't watched it in years, time for a Matrix marathon :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER76> The lack of discoverability in these new interfaces is alarming. Maybe they're just for super-users, but still.

</comment><comment><USER77> Force Touch - I've had that feature for years - it's what I do when I get angry that the phone isn't responding fast enough.

</comment><comment><USER78> IDK, but really the Force touch adaptation, renamed 3D touch(surprise surprise) is a nice touch, but really, I wonder if it's worth buying a new iPhone. I guess, at least with me, it's a somewhat privacy issue. Imagine your favorite apps revealing 25% of what you do on an app simply by holding your phone's home screen. Moreover, I often hold/touch my phone in different manners, like, asleep, just-got-up, really angry, running-to-some-place. It'll be really irritating if this kind of a feature got in my way while working. Most of us do NOT always use our phone's the way the advertisements expect us to.

</comment><comment><USER79> So nothing new on the iPad, ATV and from what I can tell from this incomplete TC garbage, nothing new on the Iphone either.

Is that what we call a complete dud? Even worse than last year's event?

<comment><USER80> well, yes, not counting new iPad, new Apple TV with tvOS, not counting 3D Touch, there is nothing new. I just wonder, do people making these complaint even imagine, what new could there be?

<comment><USER79> All this has already been delivered in the form of a Samsung, Google or Microsoft product.

It's not new, except in the sense that now also Apple delivers it, a few years later than everyone else.

<comment><USER81> Is there any irony in the fact that variations of your comment get posted on any Apple-related article, or is that just poetic, or is it just boring?</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Open-source a startup? - <AUTHOR>

I've been building my startup for the better part of this year, but have come to a point where I no longer can afford to pay designers or programmers. However, I'm entirely focused on getting the site built, as I feel it is the perfect time for such a product and it will greatly benefit our world, especially in these tough economic times.
I've been considering ways I could finish it while not currently having the funds. One is getting a loan, but I'm quite adverse to the thought of putting myself in such debt, especially with other responsibilities like having a roof over my head coming in first priority.
Another is crowdsourcing, but the problem with that is that I'm worried if enough people hear about my idea, someone with bigger pockets and more connections than me may steal my idea and launch it before me. The third option I've though of is turning my startup into an open-source project, with only qualified people being allowed to work on it.
Has anybody ever thought of this? What are some pros and cons that I may not have thought of? Also, how would I make it open-source without giving up full control of the direction it goes in? <comment><USER2> Your last sentence has a conflict in it. You are thinking about open-sourcing the project, but you still want to control it? That doesn't sound very open.

Are you at a point where you can launch something? Do you have any feedback from potential users or customers?

Launch before you think it is done. You didn't provide enough details about progress so I will make some assumptions. Scale down your startup to a Minimum Viable Product. Do you have any data that points to this startup generating any income right away to pay off any such debt?</comment>


I'm a very slow thinker - <AUTHOR> https://sivers.org/slow <comment><USER2> For a long time this feeling was excruciating for me. Actually, sometimes still is, especially dealing with the "HN effect" of seeing very opinionated people from (usually) tech pop up from nowhere and discuss subjects that doesn't have much to do with their day-to-day lives.

Then I realized that's not a matter of quick thinking as it's of having lots of experience reading or discussing before. Of course, there are people that can draw reasonable arguments without much exposure just because they are wired this way, but that's not what's happening inside the majority's head.

Well, either way, mental models can come quite in handy when you need to speed up some things, but again, you need _some_ thinking before apply them.

<comment><USER3> First I need practical example walk-throughs. Like the stuff on egghead.io.

Then I need to do the stuff myself.

Later I need the theoretical explanations.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I am the same way, however I would not want it to be otherwise. A "slow thinker" sounds very negative but in reality there is just more gaps between thoughts, gaps in which you are true to yourself and this moment.

A new sight or sound arises, and in the first moment of perception, there is a brief cessation in the habitual stream of thinking. Consciousness is diverted away from thought because it is required for sense perception. A very unusual sight or sound may leave you "speechless", even inside, that is to say, bring about a longer gap.

The frequency and duration of those spaces determine your ability to enjoy life, to feel an inner connectedness with other human beings as well as nature. It also determines the degree to which you are free of ego because ego implies complete unawareness of the dimension of space.

When you become conscious of these brief spaces as they happen naturally, they will lengthen, and as they do, you will experience with increasing frequency the joy of perceiving with little or no interference of thinking.

Inner space also arises whenever you let go of the need to emphasize your form-identity. That need is of the ego. It is not a true need.

I would very much recommend Eckhart Tolle's "A New Earth" if you want to read more and achieve freedom.

</comment><comment><USER5> >(Can you imagine how the world would work if this was the norm?)

Probably fine as long as there are no emergencies.

</comment><comment><USER6> Slow thinking is a luxury you mostly can't really afford if you find yourself working in a hierarchy.</comment>


How the end-to-end back-pressure mechanism inside Wallaroo works - <AUTHOR> https://blog.wallaroolabs.com/2018/04/how-the-end-to-end-back-pressure-mechanism-inside-wallaroo-works/ <comment><AUTHOR> Howdy. I'm the author of both parts of this 2-page series on overload mitigation. Let me know if I've overlooked an important technique for handling too-big workloads or if you have questions (e.g., how we've stitched together TCP's sliding window protocol flow control with Wallaroo's internal flow control).

-Scott

<comment><USER2> I hope we hear something about this in your talk at DataEngConf SF!

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't recall which of us is planning on attending DataEngConf SF, but I'm asking around now.

EDIT: Ah, it will be Vid Jain, the CEO of Wallaroo Labs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Backpressure gets more "interesting" when you throw QoS into the mix. If the client has hard latency requirements, the server can't afford to "stop the world" when it gets backed up (à la TCP).

Keeping your queues shallow can be a solution, but only if your system doesn't need the benefits of batching that deep queues can bring. You then have to be a bit smarter about crediting the client, only handing credits out when you know you'll be able to complete that work within the QoS requirements, instead of simply whenever you have space in your queues. (Simply rate-limiting the source will work in a pinch too, at the cost of potential throughput.)

<comment><AUTHOR> No disagreement from me.

It's definitely not easy to keep queues shallow end-to-end. In my experiences with Erlang systems, queue management is an area where the BEAM VM's runtime is definitely not actively helpful enough. One anecdote: within the last few months, the weak scheme that the BEAM uses for runtime back-pressure was removed because it isn't effective enough to justify the complexity of its code.

When a system does have the ability to keep queues shallow end-to-end, then I think it's a good base to build on, adding additional features to allow deeper queues where and when we want them.

Regarding Wallaroo: Today, you can use Kafka as a data source, allowing Kafka to be your deep-as-you-wish buffer upstream and/or downstream of Wallaroo. Tomorrow (a.k.a. vapor, though we've discussed the feature internally) it's certainly feasible to add an option to (for example) `TCPSource` that would add a large buffer at the entry to a Wallaroo cluster ... with flexibility to queue in RAM, disk, or elsewhere. It would also make failure recovery more complex, and it's one reason why we've deferred implementing it.</comment></comment>


I Write Like - <AUTHOR> http://iwl.me/ <comment><USER2> Heh! I open sourced it: <http://www.codingrobots.org/p/iwl/index> (or <https://github.com/dchest/iwl>)

Shared traffic stats here: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2745555>

</comment><comment><USER3> After submitting some of my longer HN comments, I think the tool is more accurate about what I write than how I write. My comment on the Russian space program (which included the name of their moon probe (Luna) many times) was similar to Joanne K. Rowling (Luna Lovegood), another comment about TCP specifics is apparently similar to Cory Doctorow's writing.

For statistical analysis of writing styles as opposed to content it would be better to ignore all subjects (like Luna, TCP, ...) and only concentrate on the remaining words that are independent of the discussed topic.

</comment><comment><USER4> I tried three different writing samples and got:

David Foster Wallace (excerpt from blog post) Edgar Allen Poe (introduction to peer-reviewed journal article) Jonathan Swift (concluding paragraph from ibid)

I also tried:

The first few paragraph's of Wallace's Infinite Jest (he writes like himself)

The first few paragraphs of The Raven (Poe writes like HP Lovecraft), then the whole of The Raven (now Shakespeare), and first three paragraphs of The Masque of the Red Death (now Anne Rice)

The first three paragraphs of Swift's A Modest Proposal (Daniel Defoe).

I don't know much about literature--maybe e.g. Defoe's writing is similar to Swift's--but without seeing the reasons why I write like a particular author, I take these results with a grain of salt.

</comment><comment><USER5> "I write like J. D. Salinger"

I don't think I've ever read The Catcher in the Rye, or in fact any of his other books, so I don't know if this is 'good' or 'bad'. It'd be interesting if there was some sort of measure of public opinion on an author to see how I rate (that's my ego talking) and also a comparison in % to how many other people got Salinger.

</comment><comment><USER6> Just for fun, I put in the last paragraphs of The Sun Also Rises and got Douglas Adams.

</comment><comment><USER7> I got Cory Doctorow as well (from the intro to The Little MongoDB book and a few other posts). We were both school by more or less the same system (Ontario) more or less in the same timeframe (8 year difference).

</comment><comment><USER8> Interesting. Apparently I write like Cory Doctorow.

It would be nice if there was some easy/integrated way of viewing a quick excerpt of text from the author so I can see for myself the similarities.

<comment><USER9> I got the same result but yeah.. doesn't really mean anything unless they tell you how they come to that conclusion

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> 19/20 posts I checked from my personal blog, I got Cory Doctorow.

For my professional copywriting and various web service blog posts I got overwhelmingly HP Lovecraft and Cory Doctorow.

</comment><comment><USER11> H.P. Lovecraft. I aim for Hemingway but that's close so I'm happy.

</comment><comment><USER12> Apparently I write source code like Arthur C. Clarke.

<comment><USER13> I did the same thing. Apparently my code reads like an Edgar Allen Poe work. Maybe I should get a Vincent Price impersonator to do the voice over for my next demo.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> OK, I'll bite. I was hoping to learn a little something about myself, but I'm not sure I did. My results:

Blog Entry #1 (advice) - Arthur Clarke

Blog Entry #2 (humor) - Cory Doctorow

Blog Entry #3 (advice) - Stephen King

Blog Entry #4 (autobiographical) - David Foster Wallace

Blog Entry #5 (story) - Kurt Vonnegut

Blog Entry #6 (technical explanation) - Chuck Palahniuk

Blog Entry #7 (technical explanation) - Cory Doctorow

Standup Comedy Bit #1 (parody) - James Joyce

Standup Comedy Bit #2 (satire) - William Shakespeare

Standup Comedy Bit #3 (observational) - James Joyce

Standup Comedy Bit #4 (rant) - William Gibson

Standup Comedy Bit #5 (observational) - Stephen King

Poetry #1 - Chuck Palahniuk

Poetry #2 - Cory Doctorow

<comment><USER15> I ran my most recent 80 articles through iwl. Here are the results I got, grouped by author:

        David Foster Wallace: 22
        H.P. Lovecraft: 18
        Cory Doctorow: 8
        Edgar Allen Poe: 6
        Margaret Mitchell: 5
        Margaret Atwood: 3
        Dan Brown: 3
        Arthur Clarke: 2
        James Joyce: 2
        Douglas Adams: 1
        Oscar Wilde: 1
        William Shakespeare: 1
        Stephen King: 1
        Chuck Palahniuk: 1
        Isaac Asimov: 1
        Bram Stoker: 1
        Mario Puzo: 1
        George Orwell: 1
        Rudyard Kipling: 1
        Jane Austin: 1

Half of my articles apparently read like David Foster Wallace or H.P. Lovecraft.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Sounds great, but on one blog post i got Dan Brown, and on the other James Joyce. Seems a bit flaky :)

<comment><USER17> FWIW: I tried twice and got the same result both times. I'm jealous of the Lovecraft result someone else got. I keep getting someone I've never heard of. :-/

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Even better, I Read Like: <http://iwl.me/read/>

<comment><USER2> Some one asked me if the time is limited when it records voice, or it detects when you finish reading. April Fools worked!

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I got HP Lovecraft with this massive manifesto I wrote and never published a while back.

</comment><comment><USER20> Got J.R.R. Tolkien, pleasantly surprised.

</comment><comment><USER21> I write like David Foster Wallace

</comment><comment><USER17> David Foster Wallace, whom I have never heard of.

(Looking him up: He died at age 46 and I am age 46...bad omen?)

<comment><USER2> _..., whom I have never heard of._

This was the most pleasant outcome I got from launching IWL: people wrote that they never heard of some of the authors, or that they heard but never read them, and then told me that they'll go read their works.

<comment><USER17> I had a lengthy medical crisis, during which time I "didn't get out much" so to speak. I imagine that's a big part of why I hadn't heard of him. I also imagine my future will be richer. Perhaps at some point I will look into reading some of his stuff, though my plate is fairly full at the moment. :-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Arthur Conan Doyle.</comment>


Node.js about to surpass Ruby on Rails as most popular project on Github - <AUTHOR> http://nodejs-vs-ror.nodejitsu.com

<comment><USER2> <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3277377> no votes 3 hours earlier.. the internet is unfair ;)

</comment><comment><USER3> the numbers are more different now.</comment>


SpaceX Has Nearly a Full Uber Funding in Contracts - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2015/09/14/spacex-has-nearly-a-full-uber-funding-in-contracts/ <comment><USER2> Space-X has a big order book, but that's not investment funding. That's potential future sales. Space-X only gets paid when they deliver a successful launch.

Space-X has had a huge future launch manifest for years, but they've never been able to keep up with their announced launch schedule. Now they no longer put dates on their launch manifest. Compare the current manifest [1] with one from a year ago [2] They're about 15 missions behind their announced schedule from last year.

[1] [http://www.spacex.com/missions](http://www.spacex.com/missions) [2] [https://web.archive.org/web/20140917002523/http://www.spacex...](https://web.archive.org/web/20140917002523/http://www.spacex.com/missions)

<comment><USER3> Clearly since Russia messed with Ukraine SpaceX' well being now has a national security aspect to it. Government support will be there for it if for nothing else but a goad for NASA to work faster.

They might be behind schedule but Musk is known for setting unrealistically aggressive targets. His companies may missed the milestones but they're still streets ahead of anyone else.

SpaceX' track record has been nothing short of amazing so far and is likely to continue once it get's its supply chain wrinkles ironed out.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I get what "full Uber" is trying to mean but it seems like a pretty silly concept. And I don't see the connection between one company's bookings and another's funds raised.

<comment><USER5> On a personal note, I'd say it's pretty sad that a taxi company is raising more than a company attempting to further the technological front. Not popular to say anything against Uber here these days, but this is not against Uber specifically, more the perverted culture that we live in. Imagine these 8+ billion going to cancer research, for example.

<comment><USER6> If people can get around cheaper and more easily using Uber than they could previously using taxis, that's an enabler for better productivity and quality across the entire economy.

Not even to mention that Uber, in complete opposition to taxis, is massively incentivised to drive self-driving tech forwards as quickly as possible. That will be a huge, huge multiplier on the above.

Your use of 'perverted culture' in reference to demand for improvements in transport services puzzles me. Perhaps I'm misunderstanding your intent. People getting around, seeing other people, working with other people is the very basis of, well.. everything in our economy, and in our lives.

Even if only on an academic level, I really struggle to see how anyone couldn't be excited by the improvements companies like Uber are making right now, and the potentially more drastic improvements they could make in the future, in this sector.

<comment><USER7> You somehow think Uber is going to continue subsidize taxi travel forever? Is that what all these investors are putting money into, of course not. The technological mertis of Uber does not take that much money. They might be working on self-driving cars, but so are several other startups and car companies. Just not as some lofty future goal, but as actual incremental improvements.

I think most peoples excitment over Uber is reactionary. Because they clearly aren't as excited about all the other companies that are now using similar technology without the poor ethics of Uber.

<comment><USER4> I don't like some of Uber's ethics but its execution overall has been exceptional. There is one impressive technical component around matching up riders along the same route. Otherwise, the Uber service is mostly just well- executed technology. But where Uber is way beyond others is operations, scale, marketing, etc. All worthy characteristics even if they don't resonate so much with a pure technical crowd.

Also, on a gross basis, Uber's 20-25% take rate makes it wildly profitable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Here is the relevant link to the SpaceX press release: [http://www.spacex.com/press/2015/09/14/spacex-signs-new- comm...](http://www.spacex.com/press/2015/09/14/spacex-signs-new-commercial- launch-contracts)

and here is the page that has all their contracted future launches:

[http://www.spacex.com/missions](http://www.spacex.com/missions)

</comment><comment><USER9> So "one Uber funding" is now a unit of economic measurement?

<comment><USER10> What's going exchange rate between Uf's and $, again?</comment></comment>