Wanted to get into RC but didn't have the money - <AUTHOR> I wanted to get into the RC hobby but I didn't have $300 to drop on a Traxxas or other rig--I have a friend who had a really nice RC car and it made me want one--So I made my own!!
Its really cool!
People have been telling me none stop that PLA will never work for this...
The wear is actually so minimal that I haven't needed to grease the moving parts more than once--After hours of drive time, there is almost no wear on the gears--The only thing that wears are the dogbones, but that is because sand and dirt get into the joint and cause wear, but they still last much longer than you'd ever guess.
What are your thoughts?
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fneoYrtdVjo
Thingiverse: https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:3545173 <comment><USER2> How much did you end up spending on the parts that you couldn't print? This looks like a pretty sweet car, but is it really cheaper to build your own than buying a finished kit?

</comment><comment><USER3> That's the way to go. Great project. Hope to see a lot more innovation coming out of DIY projects. Great job!!!</comment>


I got a bad review from TechCrunch, lessons learned - <AUTHOR> http://www.joshliu.co/i-got-a-bad-review-from-techcrunch-lessons-le

<comment><USER3> _All tech entrepreneurs are hoping to get coverage from TechCrunch. It is the best way to get early adopters, early traction and recognition. It gives you a sense of pride as well. Once your start-up is covered by TechCrunch, you feel you are finally a proper tech entrepreneur._

Can I suggest caring less? You can take external validation from many places. Users are a good option: they pay money, care about the space, are less jaded, and are friends with people like themselves.

TC is not a good place to recruit early users, unless you are building an app for poor geeks with short attention spans. If you are, you have bigger problems.

<comment><USER4> I'd say, the review was actually good for Josh, as it gave him very honest feedback, probably much more frank than what he heard from people in person. People tend to say either "great, keep on going" or are very negative about a product, without being specific. It's easy to ignore the negative comments and write them off as 'hating'. I would venture that TC is an authoritative source, and therefore he took a hard look at what maybe needs to change.

<comment><USER5> Another point Steve Blank talks about this in Stanford series of talks on customer development: <http://ecorner.stanford.edu/authorMaterialInfo.html?mid=2060> [video]

He mentions any type of PR, Press including TechCrunch coverage shouldn't be sought after before contact with the customers and is part of a strategy and not a random tactic. And this is typically after you figure out what business you are in, who your customers are and how do you scale demand for the company (Product Market Fit).

A lot of the valuable lessons and negative comments that Josh took in that early TechCrunch post could have been gathered and learnt in a non-public fashion during customer discovery and development.

<comment><USER4> Absolutely, good point. It's hard to resist the urge, though - <USER2> coverage (to get confirmation or otherwise) is only natural when you are passionate about your start up and want to tell the world what you are doing.

Customer development is still massively undervalued, though.

<comment><USER6> Customer development is very much like the screening of a unreleased movie. A studio will get a nearly finished product in front of movie-goers before releasing it using that feedback to tighten plot points, editing, etc. The difference with a web-based product and a movie is that continually feedback loop never ends for the web-based product.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> > All tech entrepreneurs are hoping to get coverage from TechCrunch. It is the > best way to get early adopters, early traction and recognition. It gives you > a sense of pride as well. Once your start-up is covered by TechCrunch, you > feel you are finally a proper tech entrepreneur.

Rubbish.

Get users, get revenue. Ignore bad reviews/haters.

</comment><comment><USER8> First thing, TechCrunch isn't the be-all-end-all of tech sites. Number two, Mike Butcher's self proclaimed description of himself is "Butcher by name, Butcher by nature"

It's a real shame that a lot of people think TechCrunch is the place you need to go to "Make It"

So you got a bad review, pfff

My only advice would be, pick yourself up, dust yourself off and try, try, try again.

<comment><USER9> While that may be true, let's be real...being featured on TechCrunch is a step in the right direction. Some press is better than no press, etc. If you get on one tech site, you have a higher chance of getting on others, which means more traffic, which means more users for customer development.

Is it the difference between making it and not making it? Probably not, but it can't hurt.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I really liked your site, however while browsing a couple of things struck me as odd:

1\. The yellow "we're in beta" alertbar. The alertbar usually tells you that the website is trying to do something fishy you don't want it to, like popups.

2\. The inconsistent menubar. On the front page, if I just want to check out your site without signing up, there isn't one. When I click "Browse MinuteBox" a menubar shows up, but it disappears when I click "Profile" and forces me to hit the back button instead of going to another page.

On another note, I know you're beta and everything, but I see no requests. Which means I can't really check out what that (the most important) side of your site is about. I don't know what you could do about it besides making fake requests, but I can't really see what your site is about at the moment.

<comment><USER11> Hi there,

Sorry, we are waiting for Paypal's approval of using their new API, Paypal X. Therefore, we are now only recruiting experts to join us. That is why there's no requests there just yet. Once we are ready to go, we will push it and let people to post requests and arrange sessions.

Cheers

Josh

<comment><USER12> Is it realy a good idea to lure in experts to find an empty page? I took the time to register and so on to take a look, but only to find empty listings, now i will most likely forget the site and never come back.

<comment><USER11> sorry, I put the note at the end of my post. We have not launched our website yet and that is why the site is empty. I was just sharing a post in my personal blog and did not really expect great responses like this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> _At least that's the theory. In reality I think this site has about a snowflake's chance in the white hot cauldron of a collapsing star, and it'll probably be overwhelmed by porn merchants faster than you can say "charge for online video." Assuming they find it._

I don't remember reviews on TechCrunch being _this_ harsh. Wow.

There's constructive criticism. And then there's this.

<comment><USER14> What's wrong with being overwhelmed by porn merchants?

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> The stock photography on your FAQ has to go. Asap. In fact, the picture of the lady in the call center was recently used on a blog that makes fun of bad stock photography.

I think call center stock photography is probably one of the worst things you can put on a site.

<comment><USER11> Thanks for the comment. Will pass that to our designer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Thanks for all the comments.

Yes, I agreed that TechCrunch is not the place or only place to get validation. Probably it helps you to get the attentions from echo chambers. But, users are the real judge to decide if you are building a solid business or not.

<comment><USER16> I liked your lessons learned, but you should add a lesson 5:

/etc/hosts 127.0.0.1 techcrunch.com

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Honestly, fuck them. It's a blog with dubious editorial standards anyway.

Focus on finding users, marketing, generating revenue, etc. If you're worried about TC then you're wasting energy that could be used elsewhere. Once you get a few paying users, find a PR firm to issue a release that can be forwarded to smaller blogs and new outlets.

</comment><comment><USER18> Nice to see someone forging ahead instead of throwing in the towel and saying they failed fast. A startup is a long series of ups and downs, and bad reviews will be part of that.

</comment><comment><USER11> Hi guys,

Thanks a lot for your feedback and comments. Am thrilled with all the response. I will be very happy if the post is useful to you guys.

Josh

</comment><comment><USER19> TC especially europe is nothing to stress, it hasn't got many people watching it anyone, looks at alexa for traffic reviews. You'll get better feedback on HN

<comment><USER20> Totally agree, TC Europe seems to be lacking any real support from the TechCrunch brand.

<comment><USER21> There's a TC Europe? (I'm from Europe and I didn't notice.)

<comment><USER22> It looks more like UK TC and there's even a France TC ! I think nobody know about them.

[edit] Well not only UK, first page just happened to be very UK oriented but if you read further there is a bit more diversity.

<comment><USER21> Hmm, it's sad. We need a stronger start-up/tech entrepreneur scene in Europe. Everything is so valley centric :(

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I feel bad for the OP ... that was definitely a harsh review. That said, I notice that he called this a "Minimum Viable Product," which is a term of art from the Lean Startup methodology.

That very same methodology says you're _not_ supposed to have some big TechCrunch launch with that MVP ... precisely because it is almost certainly not ready for primetime. The point of the MVP is to get it in front of real customers, learn, and iterate.

Taking concepts, decontextualizing them down to buzzwords, and then acting on them is a path to fail.

<comment><USER11> Totally agreed that it was one of my mistakes. It was wrong to get TC review so early. Another lesson learned. :)

<comment><USER23> Awesome writeup, by the way, thanks for posting this!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> TechCrunch Article: [http://eu.techcrunch.com/2008/05/20/minutebox-does-not- box-c...](http://eu.techcrunch.com/2008/05/20/minutebox-does-not-box-clever/)

</comment><comment><USER25> Congratulations-- you did a nice job of deriving some useful lessons from this experience. And, as you no doubt realize, none of the lessons have anything to do with TechCrunch at all, but are things all start-ups should always be keeping in mind.

</comment><comment><USER26> "We cannot learn real patience and tolerance from a guru or a friend. They can be practiced only when we come in contact with someone who creates unpleasant experiences. [...]" Dailai Lama ;)

</comment><comment><USER27> There is no such thing as bad publicity, as someone once said. Now, that's not strictly true in general - but for a startup a bad piece of press does at least get your product/service out there. It also gives you a great opportunity to show that you listen to feedback by iterating on your offering. Fix the things people don't like and then put up a blog post saying: "Hey, we fixed it!"

<comment><USER28> _I don't care what they say about me, just make sure they spell my name right!_ \- PT Barnum

<http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Talk:P._T._Barnum>

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Thanks for writing this up—usually being TechCrunched is a very positive thing for a startup, but sometimes it's not.

I'd actually say that it was, in the long run, a positive experience. You improved your product. The negative press probably brought in a lot of users. And now you're in a better position.

Good on you. Keep working at it.

<comment><AUTHOR> OP here. Just to be clear, I'm not Josh, just saw this in his twitter feed and thought it would be of interest to HN.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Thanks for documenting this process. I appreciate the opportunity to learn from your experiences.

PS- I love the homepage video, did you outsource that? If so where? Design is also very good.

</comment><comment><USER21> > No, journalists will probably not do that.

What do journalists do anyway? I mean there has to be a reason why they call themselves 'journalists' and not just 'bloggers'.

I always assumed journalism would somehow include a little bit of research but ... nada. From my experience with the online "press" I just can assume that all those online journalist do not deserve that label.

Whenever I'm preparing a press kit I feel like I would be doing all the journalist's work and they only need (and most presumably will) take my copy 1:1, smack some Adsense on and republish it.

I have not much experience with print media so I don't know if the print journalists, too, are such a lazy bunch but online it's ridiculous.</comment>


Ask HN: What new/emerging technologies are you looking forward to in 2015? - <AUTHOR>

Many of them might be in R&D departments or being developed already, but what new technologies are you looking forward to being released/commercialised in 2015? <comment><USER2> More applications taking advantage of deep learning opportunities: perhaps in 2015, deployment of (Dr.) Watson and its derivates when its diagnoses are become credible.</comment>


Crysis 2, leaked 49 days early - <AUTHOR> http://www.facepunch.com/threads/1058902-Crysis-2-leaked-49-days-early.

<comment><USER2> Unsurprising, my mate is a tester in the UK and they gave it to people to play on their home PCs to test the multiplayer.</comment>


Top two Chinese video sites (Youku & Tudou) Merge in huge deal - <AUTHOR> http://www.techinasia.com/youku-buys-tudou/

<comment><AUTHOR> Just to create an analogy for people not familiar with Chinese web, imagine if there were 2 Youtube's in the US who were both far ahead of the competition but neck-and-neck with each other... and then one-day one acquired the other.

The deal is that big. Youku/Tudou is now THE video site of China's 1.6billion+ population.</comment>


3D-print a Norwegian fjord from your browser - <AUTHOR> http://terrafab.bengler.no/

<comment><USER2> Arthur Dent: Are you telling me you originally made the Earth?

Slartibartfast: Oh, yes. Did you ever go to a place - I think it was called Norway?

Arthur Dent: No. No, I didn't.

Slartibartfast: Pity. That was one of mine. Won an award, you know. Lovely crinkly edges.

</comment><comment><USER3> "genuine gypsum heirloom mantelpiece display replica"

3D printing is only going to get cheaper and more accessible - I think pretty soon that "heirloom" is going to look like a dollar-store trinket.

Still, aside from the hyperbole this is a pretty neat idea, and New Zealand certainly has some landscapes worth this treatment too (including fjords, even). Australia has some impressive cliff forms that would work; seems like thousands of areas worldwide.

<comment><USER4> Reminds me of the old aluminium cutlery...

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is really nice, I wanted to get a version of Nordkapp for my father, but I feel that $100 is a bit to pricey for a 10cmx10cm version.

Nice project, and very nice with their partnership with Shapeways.

Exporting their model, and uploading it on Shapeways gives me a price of 42.65 EUR ($57.59) including shipping.

<comment><USER6> We've deployed a fix for the pricing model capping markup at $20. Does that feel about right?

<comment><USER5> Yeah, that seems more right, thanks for answering so fast.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Heh, it says "removing trolls" when generating the preview (after clicking get it printed)

I walked Besseggen last summer [1] and the model [2] for that looks pretty accurate with the huge drop on both sides down to two different waters.

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Walking_on_Besseggen.jpg](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Walking_on_Besseggen.jpg) [2] [http://terrafab.bengler.no/preview?box=164077.08468046575,68...](http://terrafab.bengler.no/preview?box=164077.08468046575,6832040.627495152,167821.9149399036,6835785.44929775|18)

</comment><comment><USER8> So, how can I get the one with Slartibartfast's signature?

</comment><comment><USER9> Huh, one nice and _actually useful_ application of WebGL for once.

</comment><comment><USER10> Are all the models signed by Slartibartfast? [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slartibartfast](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slartibartfast)

</comment><comment><USER11> I love the fact that they generate the mesh for users that have their own 3d printers for free.

</comment><comment><USER12> Thanks for posting this! Very, very cool app :) I helped create the Shapeways API and just shared it with our dev team.

People are blown away, this is by far the best app we've seen using our API!!

Perusing your Github repo right now :D

</comment><comment><USER13> Google's 3D building data for some cities (e.g. here in Edinburgh) is incredible - I'd tempted to get a 3D printer and work out ways of printing interesting parts of town.

Maybe my favourite mountains as well from OS data...

<comment><USER14> I'd love to see this for Scotland. I'd be tempted to buy my favourite Hebrides.

<comment><USER13> What would be _really_ cool (at least for me) is to be able to print landscape models with geological data included as well....

[e.g. the Black and Red Cuillins of Skye]

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Not equatorial enough.

<comment><USER15> Downvoter: hand in your nerd card.

<comment><USER16> Your comment added nothing to the discussion so no. Such cheap jokes are really not interesting.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I like backpacking, and often spend money on topographic maps because of this (typically from mytopo.com). I do like this site's idea. It obviously wouldn't work as a map, but it might be nice to integrate a lot of standard topographic map features into the models themselves. Especially if you can do it on really small-scale areas, architects might really want it.

</comment><comment><USER18> Presumably landscapes with gentle gradients and fewer overhangs are going to be significantly easier to print than architecture.

<comment><USER19> That depends on the 3D printing technology. Some are perfectly fine with overhangs because the medium is self-supporting, and most can handle small overhangs at each vertical step without much trouble.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> It would have been really cool if trolltunga had shown up

[http://terrafab.bengler.no/?box=41148.01808864827,6694070.28...](http://terrafab.bengler.no/?box=41148.01808864827,6694070.280164548,42955.380242522224,6695877.163669086|19)

</comment><comment><USER21> Very interesting. But why restrict this to just landscapes? What's to prevent someone from allowing 3D printing of _any landmark_ in the world like the Taj Mahal, Machu Picchu, Eiffel Tower or London Eye?

Sigh, copyright I suppose.

<comment><AUTHOR> The dataset they use is the just-released public Norwegian map data. There are few man-made landmarks in the local topography. (c:

<comment><USER21> Oh, okay. But assuming we get there, in terms of the dataset, do you reckon it would be legal for a service to offer 3D printing of famous landmarks?

<comment><USER22> It would almost certainly depend on the country, but if the structure has some kind of copyright, miniature replicas would likely not be legal without permission.

In some countries, building facades and similar can be copyrighted, which is mostly discussed in the context of photography. Some countries have an exception called "freedom of panorama", which gives some fair-use rights for photographs of things that can be photographed from a public street. How broad such permission is varies: in some jurisdictions it's fairly broad permission, while in other countries it may only apply to photographs of a general street scene that contains the building as one element, but may not apply to detailed architectural photography focused on a particular building.

But that's only for photography, at least so far, not for 3d reproductions. To take an existing area where the distinction between the two comes up, in some jurisdictions you can take (and sell) photographs of sculptures that are installed in public squares under freedom-of-panorama, but still cannot sell _reproductions_ of the sculpture, whether full-size or miniature, if it's new enough to be copyrighted.

The above doesn't typically to things old enough to be out of copyright, like Big Ben, or Rodin sculptures, though I wouldn't be surprised if some jurisdictions have special-case laws about use of their famous landmarks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Very neat. I'm ordering a print of my home town. Then we can add pins to show where our house, where grandparents live, etc. I'm sure the kids will enjoy it.

</comment><comment><USER24> Sweet! The number of places I want to visit just increased!

</comment><comment><USER25> It'd be ace if I could 3d print the moon at some sensible scale. Or Mars.

<comment> T-hawk They wouldn't be that interesting. Planetary sized bodies are really spherical (oblate of course.) Even Olympus Mons at 22 km height is only 0.3% of Mars's diameter of 6700 km. If your Mars model was a meter wide, the biggest mountain would protrude for all of 3 mm worth of relief on the surface.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> I, for one, was expecting a horse.

</comment><comment><USER27> just saw the print in real life in the Bengler office, looks awesome

</comment><comment><USER28> Wow!

</comment><comment><USER29> physibles

</comment><comment><USER30> Not, I'm assuming, life-sized.</comment>


Ice bucket challenge: Why 'charity narcissism' is good - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20140902-is-the-ice-bucket-challenge-vain

<comment><AUTHOR> with regard to "viral ignorance," the author notes:

A sense of cultural righteousness often leads to oversimplification ([http://thesocietypages.org/cyborgology/2013/10/11/you- wont-b...](http://thesocietypages.org/cyborgology/2013/10/11/you-wont-believe- what-this-web-site-does-to-the-liberal-left/)) of complex issues, for example, as noted by PhD student David Banks in a blog post about feel-good clickbait phenomenon Upworthy. Sharing Upworthy videos to show your peers how compassionate you are can help the spread of false information. Many gloss over inequality, or present complex socio-political issues in a simplistic light, says Banks. "Ignorance goes viral," he quips.</comment>


Adventures in Smartness, Assassin's Edition - <AUTHOR> http://newyorker.com/online/blogs/hendrikhertzberg/2014/05/adventures-in-smartness-assassins-edition.html

<comment><USER2> The HN title (currently "Smart gun: can be fired only by an authorized person, such as the legal owner") does not describe the subject of the article, which is actually interesting, but in a different way.

<comment><USER3> Thank you. We changed it.

Submitters: please follow the HN guidelines and do not editorialize titles.

<comment><USER2> I don't think the submitter editorialized; I think he/she didn't even read the article -- or else deliberately mischaracterized it -- but more likely the former, I'd guess.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I second the statement that the HN link is mistitled. As for the article itself, I can't see what the writer is complaining about. Even granted that he's a lefty gun-grabber, what does he have against technology that improves marksmanship? If you're terrified of the thought of ordinary people using rifles, shouldn't you be happy that the machine is being made more "foolproof"?</comment>


5 Coding Hacks to Reduce GC Overhead - <AUTHOR> http://www.takipiblog.com/2013/07/18/5-coding-hacks-to-reduce-gc-overhead/

<comment><USER2> This article is way inaccurate. It recommends approaches that were maybe important in 1997. It also breaks the "profile before optimising" rule.

Currently the Java GC works splendidly with lots of short-lived, small immutable classes. Using this approach can be far better for performance than worrying about telling the ArrayList constructor how many elements the list will probably have.

<comment><USER3> While VMs like Sun's may be using techniques like escape analysis, I seriously doubt that Dalvik does (it seems like dx might, but that's going to be of limited value at compile time, and it isn't clear how it uses the information): a lot of people these days coding in Java are doing so for Android, where the garbage collector is a serious problem, sufficiently so that all garbage collections are logged to the system log (so as a developer you don't even need to go to much work to profile it as an issue: you just see the pain in your console and then likely seem out this article).

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> These kinds of optimization/"hacks" articles need to include benchmarks. How does using one StringBuilder compare to using the implicit three or five? How many strings does one need to append before you should've used a StringBuilder? Etc.

I imagine that there's going to be novice programmers whose takeaway from the article is "Hashmaps with ints as keys are slow" or "String concatenation in Java is slow".

</comment><comment><USER5> Perhaps it should be renamed to "5 Coding Hacks to Reduce GC Overhead in Java", otherwise it's not clear what it's about (in fact, even in the article, Java is not mentioned before the third paragraph).

</comment><comment><USER6> Articles like this make me believe that Java should have just gone with a model designed around fibers that each fiber gets a fiber-local heap and objects that survive the death of the heap or are accessed in a multi-fiber way are moved to a global heap.

It would solve the problem with "stop the world" GC dynamics and increase concurrent collecting performance while also adding native fibers to the JVM (and thus make it possible to write highly concurrent software in Java much more easy).

<comment><USER7> The DLG collector as used by Caml Light does what you describe.

Updating an object in the global heap to point to a thread-local heap can cause unbounded work to be done before that update as the entire pointed-to structure has to be copied into the global heap first. GC designers really hate write barriers (sections of code that are performed before a pointer is updated) that perform unbounded work.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> "use streams instead of buffers" is completely wrong. It is much faster to read off a file or the network into a buffer rather than byte-by-byte so you can assume that anything which takes a stream, buffers it internally.

What you should do: allocate one read buffer with a capacity > expected length, overwrite-read into it, copy the data into a fresh capacity == actual length byte array, parse the copy, empty and reuse the read buffer.

What you definitely shouldn't do, despite it being tempting: allocate a read buffer each time and pass the whole thing around.

<comment><USER9> An approach I've taken in .NET is to write a class that implements IDisposable and wraps a byte buffer of a standardized size. Behind the scenes it used an array of stacks for recycling the byte arrays. Normal use case would be something like:

        using (ByteBuffer buffer = pool.AllocateBuffer(128 * 1024))
        {
             // use buffer.array
        }

The pool used weak references to the buffers so they could eventually be GC'd. Dead weak references were cleaned out when found during allocation. Typically the byte arrays needed were big enough to need to go into the large object heap, the cutoff for which was 80k IIRC. The LOH was not collected until gen2 collection.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'm not sure 1. is relevant anymore. Almost all JVMs default to generational GCs, which would make all those allocations basically free.

<comment><USER11> Most of the 'hacks' were not relevant anymore 10 years ago. The blog is probably written to pitch the product.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Why should the manually managing your stringbuilders be preferable to having the compiler do it for you? The example given is:

      String result = foo() + arg;
      result += boo();
      System.out.println("result = " + result);

creates 3 StringBuilders. I would have thought that it wouldn't be particularly hard to track that the input to subsequent "+" was the output of a previous stringbuilder, allowing easy re-use?

</comment><comment><USER13> +1 for Trove. Recently when working with collections with 10s of thousands of primitive elements. We saw substantial memory savings by using Trove.

</comment><comment><USER14> I was hoping for something that would be general for most GC languages, but it seems to only talk about Java.

<comment><USER15> The general advice is to produce less garbage. Strategies for doing so are specific to the language and APIs involved.

<comment><USER16> It's not just that you need to produce less garbage - you want to produce less live objects in general, as a large part of the cost during GC is determining which objects are live.

<comment><USER17> That depends - if your code is mostly single threaded, and you're using the concmarksweep collector on a multicore CPU, determinign which objects are live is basically 'free'. On machines with a high number of cores, have all cores on 100% is very rare.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Unless an article like this is written by Josh Bloch, or someone of his caliber, I don't think you can really believe it.

</comment><comment><USER19> Another: buy more RAM if needed, and set -Xmx###M and -Xms###M to sufficiently high numbers so that the JVM never runs out of memory and forces a collection. You can also do System.gc() to "suggest" a collection be done soon, such as while you're busy doing something slow that's I/O bound like reading a file or getting network data. Though I wouldn't be surprised if most of the time modern JVM GCs already know when you're doing such things, making such a hint redundant.

<comment><USER13> Buying more RAM only gets you so far. G1 handles large heaps fairly well, but you can still run into issues with long pauses if you are not careful and those pauses increase with the size of the heap. Most real time services don't have the luxury of manually triggering GCs and must do whatever they can to limit the stress they put on the collector.</comment></comment>


The End of Coder Influence - <AUTHOR> https://zedshaw.com/2016/11/24/the-end-of-coder-influence/ <comment><USER3> I think Zed Shaw is immensely entertaining. I really enjoyed "Rails is a ghetto". I think he did good work on Mongrel/Mongrel2. I first discovered ZeroMQ because Zed Shaw spoke highly of it. He clearly knows some things.

But this essay is like something from the alternate timeline where Donald Trump became a computer programmer.

He pretends to be unconcerned with the issue, despite writing multiple posts this week, each the size of a short book:

"I was tired and not into defending myself so I just deleted Twitter off my phone and go sleep some more. Enjoy the sun. Did some painting. Hung out with friends."

He insults his perceived critics:

"Who gives a fuck about what a bunch of angry lonely coders think about my thoughts?"

He invents weird agglomerations:

"These groups of programmers used to have large sway over what was successful and chosen, but at the same time were horribly uninformed about basic computer science. They ran to Node.js because of "events are better than threads" and had no idea Hoare or coroutines existed. "

So, it is the older and experienced programmers who ran to NodeJS? Does anyone believe that to be true?

I suppose this is at least a refreshing reversal of stereotypes?

"For all their claims of superiority for having once bought a copy of The Art of Computer Programming the previous generation of programmers are sadly uninformed about basic shit."

He validates himself by how much money he is making:

"my sales were up and my traffic was about the same."

Seriously, this is the Donald Trump version of computer programming.

And I say this as someone who has learned a lot from Shaw.

<comment><USER4> I think that kind of nitpicking is exactly the thing he is trying to avoid.

It may not look like it from the inside but the HN crowd _is_ a very distinct, and very opinionated, bubble in the wider world of CompSci and Engineering. It looks like a lot of this crowd seems to enthusiastically cheer things that are not worthy of cheering (like overly-complicated solutions to problems, innovations that are really just repackaged ideas from 20/30/40 years ago, blind faith in the cloud, etc).

Now the HN crowd has its reasons -- things are the way they are because of team constrains and ever-present Business Decisions -- but I think a lot of the crowd has become very disconnected from the wider world of computers and engineering in their quest to churn out cloud businesses ad nauseam. There are entirely different communities rocking entirely different paradigms, and frankly they don't usually inflate the pace of change for innovations' sake.

<comment><USER3> If you have something you'd like to criticize, you should do so with specifics. Criticism this vague does not add anything to the conversation:

"It looks like a lot of this crowd seems to enthusiastically cheer things that are not worthy of cheering (like overly-complicated solutions to problems, innovations that are really just repackaged ideas from 20/30/40 years ago, blind faith in the cloud, etc)."

I don't feel like getting into a debate with you, but "overly-complicated solutions" was a criticism that was often aimed at Enterprise solutions coming from Oracle, Microsoft, Sun, IBM, Hewlett-Packard and others. Remember Struts? Even Zope was guilty of this, at least until Zope 3. When HackerNews was getting going circa 2005, it was very much part of the rebellion against all that.

The only specific that you offered was "blind faith in the cloud" and yet there have been several articles this month, critical of the cloud, that made it to the front page of HackerNews. So it seems you are either vague or wrong.

I offer this simply as general advice which you might want to consider for the future.

<comment><USER5> There's an almost Onion-esque level of irony in your reply having no sources for anything you said.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is getting comical. He's writing like he's prophesying the coming end of Python 3 and he _must_ be right because his book sales aren't down.

There's plenty of mediocre in Python 3 along with the good. A lot of things that can be done better. If he were spending his time actually trying to fix the problems that'd be great and everybody would be applauding him (and I'm sure more people would keep buying his god damn book). This attitude however, dismissing the criticism he's getting as "whatever, it's because of the Previous Generation", is fucking pathetic.

But hey, he stopped reading HN and proggit. Good for him, avoiding the big bad filter bubble. I'm sure only surrounding yourself with people who think Py3 is the work of the devil, and dismissing any and all criticism of your Word of God as "angry lonely coders" is a healthy, balanced approached to information ingestion.

<comment><USER7> > If he were spending his time actually trying to fix the problems

Let's assume he doesn't have the time or energy to dive into the Python 3 source and then learn the rules for contributions.

Then all he can do is list the problems he has with Python 3. Which he has done.

It seems like the Python 3 community is too defensive. Bad string error message seem to be a longstanding grip. They should focus on improving that instead of complaining about Zed's opinions.

<comment><USER6> Nonsense. There's plenty he could do other than "list problems". There's in fact a ton more that hundreds, even thousands have done than him for Python 3 specifically and Python in general. He, of all people, would be able to help a huge amount if he put his mind to it.

But I'm not here to tell him what to do. My problem is that his attitude is actively harmful to the python community. It's creating divisiveness where there isn't any. Take a look at most libraries: they're 2+3 compatible. Very few are _3-only_ , because the Python community at large understands how widespread 2 is for existing users, and how useful 3 is for new users.

No shit the community's defensive, he's literally painting a large part of it as "angry lonely coders" and "abusive previous generation".

 _No shit they complain about Zed 's opinions_, a lot of developers learned Python _with his book_. I'm a child of Dive Into Python, but I can attest that you feel emotionally attached to what taught you the language you love.

His attitude is the problem. As for "improving Python 3", I don't know if you noticed but there's been 5 major releases of 3.x since the initial one, with a 6th one approaching. Each and every one of them has improved backwards compatibility and the python 3 rough edges.

<comment><USER8> There may probably be a lot of things he could do to help Python but why is listing problems any less useful?

He says he gave it a try many times, too, so it's not just blind criticism.

I don't like how he disregards the opinions of communities and how he validates his, but that doesn't mean he totally wrong about the problems of Python 3.

<comment><USER6> Because nearly none of the problems he listed are real problems.

Please read through this: [https://eev.ee/blog/2016/11/23/a-rebuttal-for- python-3/](https://eev.ee/blog/2016/11/23/a-rebuttal-for-python-3/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Required prior reading: [https://eev.ee/blog/2016/11/23/a-rebuttal-for- python-3/](https://eev.ee/blog/2016/11/23/a-rebuttal-for-python-3/)

EDIT: Care to explain the downvotes?

<comment><USER10> > Required prior reading

I've not used python in years, I've read this post and the original one and still don't understand why python 3 is so terrible and is inevitably destined to fail.

I see just a few changes, nothing comparable to what happened for example with the Swift language.

<comment><USER11> The Swift ecosystem has never been half as big as Python's was when version 3 released.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I have similar emotional responses as Zed (who will never see this because he doesn't read HN :-) to what might be called programmer "taste." There was, and to some extent still is, a very 'fashionista'[1] vibe to writing code at times. And that is very sad indeed because there is so much to learn, and code is so varied, that there is room for everyone.

I hope today's new coders are moving past that but I worry there may be something in the emotional makeup of people that evokes these sorts of responses.

[1] Fashionista is a derogatory term applied to a person who fawns over things that are considered to be "in fashion" and is derisive of things that were either formerly fashionable but are no longer, or some influential voice in the fashion community has declared to be in poor taste.

<comment><USER13> Pretty sure i've been attacked by Zed Shaw on HN before. He dismissed me as a person rather than bother with the argument I was making.

Smart guy, sure, but it is difficult to pay attention to what he's saying at times.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> This is the same "Learn Python the hard way" guy, Zed Shaw, who was ranting yesterday.[1]

I'm not a Python 3 fan, but this seems excessive. Python 3.0 through 3.3 or so sucked for porting, but by 3.4 some of the porting headaches from syntax changes (such as disallowing u"abc") had been undone, the "six" package made 2.7 - 3.4 compatible code practical, and most of the important libraries actually worked both under 2.7 and 3.4.

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13019819](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13019819)

</comment><comment> nv-vn >These groups of programmers ... were horribly uninformed about basic computer science

Reading his previous post about Python 3, I think this description is more fitting to him. His last post discusses such topics as "statically typed strings" which are "not as statically compiled as they could be". You don't need to be an expert to understand the differences between static/dynamic and strong/weak typing (plus he uses both of these terms to mean two different things in the article). Remember that this is written by someone with apparently enough expertise to write a book about C. He states that Python 3 is not Turing complete because a virtual machine for Python 3 bytecode cannot run Python 2 bytecode (but makes no such argument when he mentions other languages that clearly don't run Python 3 bytecode). Yet he constantly references phrases like "it's all in the math!" or "it's basic computer science." All this article amounts to is a bunch of name-calling and damage control for the criticism he got for mistakes in his last article. That he feels so defensive about mistakes to go and bash the people trying to help him makes me much less likely to ever recommend his books. Look back at the "Learn Python the Wrong Way" damage control article, in which he "called out" a programmer who he had (secretly) offered to pay to help make corrections because that guy didn't have time to help out. Rather than going with the corrections from the original article, he attempted to publicly shame the other guy (repeatedly calling him a "beginner programmer" and claiming he has no skills, not to mention lying about his motives). If /r/programming was wrong in unlisting his book because of the contents of it, they were certainly correct in stopping their support of someone this toxic.

</comment><comment><USER15> He sounds exactly like the coders he hates, inventing a bunch of strange notions and attempts to validate the reason why he thinks his opinion is superior to others.

<comment><USER16> Looking at the traditional literary world is where everything becomes obvious to me.

To be a good writer you have to hold stubborn opinions until each work is finished or you have too many options and create something confusing, bland, unpalatable and inconsistent. If you hold the same ideas too long and too publicly then the market raises the volume on the jibes against your style since you offer no topics for discussion and it wants to recover your share.

To be anyone else in literary market, you have to fawn over every returning fad as if it were new and great, and be the catalyst for reinforcing the artificial drama in the differences in stubborn views the authors are holding. To do less is to hurt overall market sales and eventually be shunned.

I find it all very interesting to follow, but if you want to be a proper lazy programmer for the long haul then you must learn to stay bellow the radar so no one knows how boring and automatic your solutions are. Those are the authors we all know exist who quietly take ghost writing cuts on a book or more a year, but dont have all the crisises or neurosis to get the role of author on tv.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Wow. I must _never_ take what he's taking. So much anger. Yet strangely entertaining as only Zed, Linus and Andy can be, with only the slightest prod or provocation. Or anything really. It's unfortunate that it's often difficult to make one's way past this; I really enjoyed Lamson. But it just comes down to money and anger, so much anger and so little understanding and restraint.

I'm going to visit and give him SUCH A BIG HUG!!

</comment><comment><USER18> What I'd like to understand is: why did he publish the previous post? I mean, it was an opinion and he knew it's one that many don't agree with. If other people calling him out and disagreeing is a problem, then what was his original intention?

You can't publish your writing with things like "I don't worry about the vindictive assholes out there who feel any questioning of their tribal beliefs is an affront to their person." and expect that nobody will point out it looks like you just took questioning of your beliefs as an affront to your person. Maybe I'm missing what he tried to achieve...

</comment><comment><USER19> _" abusive previous generation of programmers"_

It was interesting for me to read that because I'm from that previous generation of programmers, and I've always felt that it's the current generation that's abusive. :)

<comment><USER20> My thoughts as well. The previous generation I have found to have constructive criticism. The current generation cares very little about actual engineering quality and just MVP and failing fast. That's of course an over simplification but the new generation has yet to prove they can build anything reliable or that will be around for more than a few years (see: emacs, bash, etc)

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> _To put it bluntly, the reddit community responsible for teaching beginners to code censored my book as a power play to get me to force Python 3 on unsuspecting beginners._

This book hasn't had offending passages removed or bowdlerised. It's not been removed from bookshelves and the publisher hasn't been order to pulp all remaining copies. "Censorship" is not what's happened here.

</comment><comment><USER22> I was a bit offended because I think "events are better than threads" but then I had no idea of coroutines or Hoare. When it comes to parallelism I think it will always be hard, as you have to micromanage to prevent locks, congestion and race conditions. The solutions are the same but different, neither is _much_ better. Where coroutines seems useful I rather use queues though, where "next" shift the queue. I could probably also name drop and I bet not even Zed would have heard of her, or the HN community deeming her not relevant (smile). You can not know everything though, and the point of this comment is that I do not know shit but neither do you, so please be humble.

</comment><comment><USER23> I think that Zed often offers good criticism for many issues... but sometimes is unable to accept the fact that a lot of people will yell at him. That's life, don't get angry, man. I've criticized Python many times as a speaker at Europython, and people looked strangely at me ever after... but in the end, such things happen. They never kicked me.

</comment><comment><USER24> The amount of pure salt and hatred in this thread only proves his point, guys. I thought this was hacker news. Where's the substantive discussion on the impact of hacker news and reddit on the newest generation of programmers?

<comment><USER25> Zed Shaw's article isn't really about the new generation of programmers, or else I'd have more information on this new generation by the end of his article, but I really don't.

I used to defend Zed Shaw, but then I realized recently that he just shoots himself in the face too often. The very public criticism he cannot stomach is often <self-inflicted>.

Telling beginners that Python 3 maybe isn't a real programming language because it's not Turing complete is dishonest.

Zed Shaw used Turing completeness as a launching point for talking about how the Python core devs are incompetent, and how a specific person shouldn't be trusted to understand threads and processes.

The difference between 2 and 3 is <not> such that while Python 2 is the darling of introductory languages, Python 3 is unusable and not a real programming language.

Zed Shaw has accrued reputational currency, the kind that can corral change, but he continually wastes it, and the blowback is mostly self-inflicted.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Angry Programmer attacks straw man.

</comment><comment> nv-vn >This industry sucks, and largely because of the abusive previous generation of programmers.

Sorry to inform you Zed, but the previous generation of programmers are not the ones on HackerNews and (especially) Reddit. Considering the average age of redditors, I doubt most /r/programming readers are <25, with many (maybe even a majority) <20.

</comment><comment><USER26> The second half reads like this guy believes he is the center of the world. I don't understand the "Well, he's entertaining", it just reads like narcissism and anger. But maybe I don't know enough about this person and his particular situation.

</comment><comment><USER27> From an outsider's perspective, the rift between Python 2/3 that's been going on now for so many years indicates that the language has completely stalled and stopped as far as progress goes. I don't see any reason to pursue a dead language that can't resolve its own problems over the course of almost a decade. Think about what that says about the community! People talk about community in the abstract, but here is a concrete example of a divided community that cannot figure out how to move forward. And that's with a dictator leading it!

I can't think of anything holding people back more from trying and adopting Python for serious projects. Before you can even begin to play with the language, you're forced to make a choice that _the most experienced Python developers cannot agree on_. If that's not user unfriendly, I don't know what is. Note also that it doesn't matter if my perceptions are right or wrong. You can't expect a Python beginner to have good perceptions about something he has not learned. However, I've read enough information to know that making this decision is not easy, nor is it really doable for a beginner. If I'm going to consider Python as a language for my next project, I have to be able to evaluate it properly and the rift basically now forces me to treat Python as two separate, incompatible languages that have no opportunity to grow, change, or adapt for the future.

No thanks.

<comment><USER28> This is why people got upset about the original post from Zed. One dude whining in a blog does not equal mass dissent in the community. The choice is inconsequential for 99% of programmers and hardly a difficult decision - <USER2> a damn coin if you cannot decide. I make 100x more decisions when it comes to front-end development than I ever have with python 2 vs 3.

<comment><USER27> That's exactly why I decided to choose anything BUT Python. If it really was inconsequential, the community wouldn't be split. I'm also not going to select my programming language with a coin flip. That's ridiculous.

There are so many alternatives these days that it's simply not worth dealing with this type of bullshit.</comment></comment></comment>


The Hardest Part of Startup MVPs - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@alexdevkar/the-hardest-parts-of-mvps-4c8241668013

<comment><USER2> I wasn't able to read this article at all on Chrome, it was one big black blob. Firing up trusty IE :<) I think what he says is of value and mirrors some of my experience.</comment>


OS News Just wants to get hits and create a sensation - <AUTHOR>

This is regarding this article on the fromt page of HN yesterday. http://www.osnews.com/story/27416/The_second_operating_system_hiding_in_every_mobile_phone<p>I would like to say really? I am engineer and die everyday, have major issues because of crazy security on sub systems to access memory else where, sometime even the ones allocated to the sub system. OS new guys please read  http://www.arm.com/products/processors/technologies/trustzone/index.php <comment><AUTHOR> I will write in detail about each of the things they have said, which are outrageously misleading for folks not in companies making the chip! Disgrace..

<comment><USER2> \- I would love to hear your opinion. Do you have presently own a blog that talks about technology issues?</comment></comment>


FaqBot: An Open-Source Email Answering Tool from HackMIT - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/hackmit-stories/faqbot-an-open-source-email-answering-tool-from-hackmit-fb395e93589d <comment><USER2> Interesting! Can anyone recommend similar tools/projects? Anything in Java?</comment>


When I died - <AUTHOR> http://blog.maryrosecook.com/post/23429666/When-I-died <comment><AUTHOR> I posted this because I thought the HN community might find the doctors' problem solving approach interesting.

<comment><USER2> No kidding - it sounds like House MD was on the case. She was lucky to survive.

It is interesting that she had cardiac surgery as an infant. It does remind me of the situation of an acquaintance where the patient had cardiac problems as an infant/toddler that were fixed and then essentially moved on until they suddenly dropped dead (while apparently fit and healthy) in their early twenties. One one hand you'd think gee, maybe if you had such a rough start they would follow you up with a super-duper checkup every few years or so. On the other hand, I guess when the invincibility of youth sets in, no apparently healthy person wants to go to the doctor and relive their past.

Edit: sorry - s/she/you, didn't realise the HN comment was by the original author.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm terribly sorry to hear about your friend.

I have had cardiac check-ups at least once a year for my whole life. In several instances, new problems were found at one of the check-ups and the wheels were set in motion to mend things. Further, when I was in hospital for the cardiac arrest, the bulge in my aorta was discovered by accident.

I live in the UK. Perhaps the NHS are more will to keep tabs on people than private health services in other countries.

<comment><USER3> Doctors in the US usually over-test people due to lawsuit fears.

<comment><USER4> Getting paid more for over-testing probably has something to do with it too.

<comment><USER5> Not really. My parents (both physicians, just like a sizable part of my extended family) do not believe in unnecessary medical procedures, much like almost every other doctor. You don't become a cardiac physician unless you actually care about the people and what you do, trust me. Cosmetic surgery pays much more, holds less risk, and is less demanding if you're just in it for the money. In addition, most cardiac tests don't award the physicians any monetary value aside from decreasing malpractice risk through negligence.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I am 29. I have had two open heart surgeries, three valve replacements, one valve repair, and an ascending aortic aneurism repaired with a Dacron graft. I can't really explain why, but it's always somewhat comforting to find other people with the rare experience of having dealt with their mortality at a relatively young age. Thank you for sharing this. You are not alone, and your experiences are appreciated.

<comment><AUTHOR> I also find it comforting to discover other young people who have weird hearts. Even cardiac doctors and nurses remark on my age.

Further, there is a medical unit in London called GUCH (Grown-Up Congenital Heart) that was created specifically for people like us who had heart problems early on in life. The need wasn't there before because, in the past, we'd all be dead by adulthood.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I know Mary outside of cyberville and shes a wonderful, talented person, who's been part of this community for a long time. Hope you recover quickly and get back to those crazy start-up ideas!

<comment><AUTHOR> _blush_ Awww, thanks, Kem.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Thank you very much for all the well wishes.

<comment><USER8> You deserve them! It must have been incredibly traumatic to go through something like that out of the blue...

Best of luck! I hope the rest of your recovery goes smoothly!

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Thanks for sharing your experience. An online store of which I have a high opinion sells a product called SutureSafe which they say relieves tension on stitches and staples. Maybe they would be helpful to you: [http://www.leevalley.com/gifts/page.aspx?c=2&p=61673&...](http://www.leevalley.com/gifts/page.aspx?c=2&p=61673&cat=4,104,53218)

<comment><USER10> Owtch. This post would probably have a better score of people knew Lee Valley didn't have an affiliate program.

<comment><USER9> Is that what people are thinking - that I'm angling to rake in 10 cents on some kind of business relationship with Lee Valley? I sure am curious what they have in mind.

<comment><USER11> As one person who downvoted it, I apologize. My subconscious spam detector went crazy when I read that comment, and I just instinctively clicked the down arrow. I quickly realized my mistake after reading the reply, but unfortunately we can't undo votes here.

The good thing about HN, however, is that incorrect scores for comments are corrected pretty quickly by others.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Hello there Mary,

I'd never even heard of you before today but your account has moved me quite a bit.

It's really nice to see you hanging in there and having the strength to go out and tell the world what happened.

Is the disorder you have a genetic one ?

best regards, & I hope you'll be back to your old energy level soon.

       Jacques Mattheij

<comment><AUTHOR> Aww, thanks very much. I have a few heart defects, but things had been quiet for about five years until I had the cardiac arrest.

</comment></comment><comment> old-gregg Fascinating.

On a side note: if that happened to me I suspect I'd be ruined financially. Even though I have an insurance: they would have decided to pay for only one or two of those MRI scans and angiograms, because they'd think that should have been enough for a doctor to figure it out.

I have a couple of friends involved in cardiology and I suspect those are pretty accurate predictions.

<comment><USER13> Having grown up in the UK, I've always taken for granted that this level of healthcare is readily available to me whenever I might need it, money no object. The concept of having to consider the cost implications of treatment like this seems very alien to me. I'm now contemplating moving abroad and this is something that I've been thinking about lately. Not having the NHS around would have made me hesitate more before starting my own business, I think.

<comment><USER14> You should always consider the cost implications. The money has to come from somewhere — it's just that on the NHS, other taxpayers are the ones responsible for your health problems.

(I'm a Brit who's had a little too much social liberalism today. Sorry.)

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, I certainly know how lucky I am to live in a country with a nationalised health service. And I am eternally grateful to the rest of the population who have contributed to my healthcare via their taxes. I know that if I live to be a hundred, the taxes I pay won't get close to covering the cost.

<comment><USER13> I can only speak for myself, but I'm glad some of my taxes get spent of things like this, even if I were never to benefit, it's still an absolute good.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


It's not data, It's insights that underscore a data-driven business model - <AUTHOR> http://datorama.com/2016/09/02/data-driven-marketing-insights/ <comment><AUTHOR> Designated a Deloitte Fast 50 Rising Star for the Second Consecutive Year. Datorama is currently has 2 openings in our NY office for an Account Manager and a Business Development Rep. Apply right meow!

for more info; [https://twitter.com/Datorama/status/804783964212916224](https://twitter.com/Datorama/status/804783964212916224)

or email me at firstname.lastname@example.com</comment>


TeamTalk5, a free, self-hosted conferencing system with high-quality audio - <AUTHOR> https://bearware.dk/?page_id=327 <comment><USER2> Seems like you can't enable encryption without owning a SDK license which costs between €990-€1600: [https://github.com/BearWare/TeamTalk5/issues/471](https://github.com/BearWare/TeamTalk5/issues/471)

<comment><AUTHOR> No longer true. New server versions let you enable ssl.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Interesting alternative. But on prima facie, its GUI is several years dated and there's no web client which is a significant disqualifying factor for most users comparing against the likes of Zoom, Hangouts, Skype and Jitsi.

While I'm impressed that its GUI client isn't Electron which some clients burn up my MacBook and it can be self hosted, it is not enough to attract users to use this without a 1-click create and join meeting functionality like what the rest of the competition has done.

I think I'll skip this for now.

</comment><comment> ha-ckernews Not free for self-hosted at all: "Building a TeamTalk 5 server requires TeamTalk 5 Professional Edition."

<comment><AUTHOR> You don't have to build it though. Binaries are available for download.

This is the business model of TT. Standard functionality is available for free, but if you want to build custom workflows for it, you need to pay.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Reminds me of TeamSpeak. From 2004.

<comment><USER5> Yes team speak with video rooms and collaboration tools.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> what about mumble?</comment>


A Systematic Impact Study for Fuzzer-Found Compiler Bugs (2019) - <AUTHOR> https://arxiv.org/abs/1902.09334 <comment><USER2> 'Given the rather limited impact of all the bugs considered in this study, one hypothesis to explain this unexpected result could be that, in a mature compiler like Clang/LLVM, all the bugs affecting code patterns that are frequent in real code have already been fixed, so that the remaining bugs are corner cases that do not appear more frequently in real code than in artificial code.'

There's also the security angle: the major application of fuzzers is finding security holes (since if it found bugs in common normal user activity, why didn't the users already report them?), but compilers are typically not exposed to security problems the way a, say, TCP/IP stack or image library is.

<comment><USER3> > compilers are typically not exposed to security problems the way a, say, > TCP/IP stack or image library is

Not typically, but I can think of at least one case where being able to control the output of a compiler would give you quite powerful abilities on a certain mobile OS.

<comment><USER4> Another example of compilers at risk was back in the very old days when compiling on time share systems was something people paid for.

Confused Deputy problem gave rise to the Capabilities [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confused_deputy_problem](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confused_deputy_problem)</comment></comment></comment>


My Favorite Math Party Trick - <AUTHOR> http://cornellmath.wordpress.com/2008/01/12/my-favorite-math-party-trick/

<comment><USER3> Remind me not to invite that dude to my party. One math trick and all of the women are out the door.

<comment><USER4> Remind me not to invite you to my next math-party.

By the way - about half of my fellow math students are women. Geeky - <USER2> female.</comment></comment>


Getting a Ph.D. will turn you into an emotional trainwreck, not a professor - <AUTHOR> http://www.slate.com/articles/life/culturebox/2013/04/there_are_no_academic_jobs_and_getting_a_ph_d_will_make_you_into_a_horrible.html <comment><USER2> literature PhD</comment>


Cracking the Crypto War - <AUTHOR> https://www.wired.com/story/crypto-war-clear-encryption/ <comment><USER3> Matt Green has a very readable critique of this proposal here:

[https://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2018/04/26/a-few- th...](https://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2018/04/26/a-few-thoughts-on- ray-ozzies-clear-proposal/)

Edit: My own take is that the proposed scheme is nothing particularly special, but the article's criticism of the crypto(graphy) and security community's approach to this problem is pretty well spot-on.

<comment><USER4> Ya, looks just like other escrow proposals that have been put forth - <USER2> level, there's no real escrow mechanism that won't, or can't be abused.</comment></comment>


WAAS Up? - <AUTHOR> http://www.cringely.com/2009/05/waas-up/ <comment><USER2> Minor points in the comments:

 _The reason this doesn't matter is that we don't land airplanes with GPS really. We direct them down a path to the airport and then the pilot flys at minimum the last 200 feet with the runway in sight. If he can't see it, he doesn't land. Airliners are a different animal but they don't use GPS for that either._ (Mike C)

 _I couldn't imagine anyone being silly enough to think that planes rely on GPS to figure out their altitude above the runway._ (P)

 _WAAS-qualified avionics like Garmin's 430W, 480W and 530W receivers are approved for precision instrument approaches based entirely on GPS._ (Robert X. Cringely)

There's some truth mixed in with some misunderstanding there. While GPS is able to measure altitude, aircraft systems don't rely on it for a primary altitude measurement. They already have perfectly good barometric systems which measure air pressure and are adjusted for field conditions every hour (or so). On a GPS precision approach (that is, one with both horizontal and vertical guidance) the computer combines the (x,y) information from the GPS with the altimeter's data to produce ILS-type course and glideslope deviation indicators, showing how far from the desired approach course the aircraft is in the left/right and up/down axes.

So, while you can in fact fly an approach where your position data is based solely on GPS, that z-axis is still being measured by an altimeter. (Unless Mr. Cringely is certified to fly cat II or III approaches, in which case he needs a LAAS-certified receiver and suitably equipped airport, as unlike WAAS, it is ground-based: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local_Area_Augmentation_System>)

</comment><comment><USER3> Except that the WAAS geostationary satellites are so widely separated that you can't see both at the same time, and in most locations the one visible is also very low in the sky and easily obstructed.

Edit: apparently my info is out of date, the two new WAAS satellites have better positioning.

</comment><comment><USER4> Sounds like dueling bureaucracies. There is also the LORAN system, which was resurrected a few years back and is reportedly now on the chopping block again. Even if the GAO's dire predictions aren't true it would probably be wise to have a redundant system in place. Shipping also depends heavily on GPS, now that it has been certified as a primary navigation tool.

<comment><USER5> _> Even if the GAO's dire predictions aren't true it would probably be wise to have a redundant system in place._

Good thing then that the EU is building its own system. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galileo_(satellite_navigation)>

<comment><USER6> despite:

<http://www.hajnalka-vincze.com/Publications/132>

[http://126.96.36.199/search?q=cache:bbg0mOuVSmgJ:www.hajnalk...](http://126.96.36.199/search?q=cache:bbg0mOuVSmgJ:www.hajnalka- vincze.com/Publications/91+European-American+space+battles)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> _But I couldn't find any stories that put the whole thing together and questioned whether there was any news value at all._

Isn't that kinda like proving a negative? Why would anyone write a story about something they have concluded has no news value?</comment>


Engines of Creation: The Coming Era of Nanotechnology - <AUTHOR> http://e-drexler.com/p/06/00/EOC_Cover.html

<comment><USER2> This is one of the few books that really changed how I think about the world in a big way. If you haven't read it do so.

</comment><comment><USER3> Despite it's age (1986, I haven't seen the newer edition and don't know how it may have been changed) this is still the best general discussion of nanotech I have seen. Broderick's "The Spike" from 2001 is more generally singularitarian but with a lot of discussion of nanotech and is more readable than Drexler. More technical works are Drexler's "Nanosystems" from the 1990s and "Kinematic Self-Replicating Machines" which is online here - <http://www.molecularassembler.com/KSRM.htm>

</comment><comment><USER4> I read this book last year. Even after more than two decades, it's still a must read. Highly recommended.

<comment><USER4> I also recommend checking out Eric Drexler's blog:

<http://metamodern.com/></comment></comment>


Why Modern Makers Are Bringing Back Ham Radio - <AUTHOR> https://www.yahoo.com/tech/why-modern-makers-are-bringing-1363811879927862.html <comment><USER2> Also I would like to mention that the lack of interest in _packet_ radio is quite sad. I hope the trend will reverse at some point.

How long has it been since you could solder your own transceiver for a practical purpose? I'm talking DIY "wifi" with a range of tens of kilometers (of course ham radio restrictions apply).

AX.25 is ancient and slow, I want to watch youtube over packet radio internet with my ham radio license. Because... why not?

The only guy working in this field I am aware of is this one [http://lea.hamradio.si/~s53mv/](http://lea.hamradio.si/~s53mv/)

<comment><USER3> Internet is much less useful without encryption, when you can't even log in to any web application.

<comment><USER4> I may be wrong on this one, but I'm sure I've read in several articles over the years that encryption is permissible _if_ you host the keys publicly/online somewhere.

Now I know what the immediate response to that is, because it's mine too, but your problem with drive-by, opportunistic eavesdropping is semi-solved if the location of your keys is only known to your logbook and any inspectors who come knocking.

Besides, there may be wiggle-room for allowing encryption on new bands in the future, given that all mobile and most home internet use is over radio now anyway. Exciting times. I'm just about to take my test for the Intermediate license in the UK and this is the direction I want to research. 5G area-wide networks, micropayments, etc.

As a side-note, I hope I live to see a true zero infrastructure meshnet internet, where every house or device has an omnidirectional HF/VHF/UHF antenna to connect to the completely decentralised web, at speed, for all comms. That'd be neat.

\--

EDIT: Some resources I've dug up:

\- [http://www.qsl.net/kb9mwr/projects/wireless/Data%20Encryptio...](http://www.qsl.net/kb9mwr/projects/wireless/Data%20Encryption%20is%20Legal.pdf)

\- [https://rietta.com/blog/2009/08/17/authentication-without- en...](https://rietta.com/blog/2009/08/17/authentication-without-encryption- for/)

\- [http://rsaxvc.net/blog/2014/2/1/Encryption%20and%20Amateur%2...](http://rsaxvc.net/blog/2014/2/1/Encryption%20and%20Amateur%20Radio.html)

Clearly much room for discussion and interpretation still. And these rules vary per country, so you can imagine picking up broadcasts from more lax countries that _were_ encrypted...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I was originally licensed when I was 12, and was active on HF, but slowed down in college a bit. A few years ago I got back into it and it's been incredibly fun.

There is so much exciting stuff going on. My current "maker" interest in ham radio is designing a distributed SDR system using FPGAs. I'm still a ways out from a prototype, but the chips keep getting better.

I do a fair bit of HF contesting and CW as well. When I was first licensed I had to take three separate CW proficiency exams, but these days it's no longer a requirement. The beauty of CW is the simplicity of it and the way it's a highly effective weak-signal mode.

I strongly encourage anyone with an interest to dig deeper. It is a very broad hobby and so you might find an entire club doing things that you have no interest in, but keep trying, as there are so many highly active niche areas to choose from.

There is also (thanks to the maker movement) a tremendous amount of great learning material about electronics. W2AEW has a superb youtube channel, and 4Z1UG has a great podcast for anyone getting into it (though he's currently interviewing the older people to capture their stories while they are still around).

<comment><USER6> I tried to get my kids into amateur radio and failed miserably. When I described being able to wirelessly talk to people around the world they pointed out that they already do this - on their phones. The only thing I could come up with that they didn't instantly shoot down is being able to communicate in the event of an emergency when the cell system is down. It didn't really resonate with them.

<comment><USER7> I think my inspiration for writing the story on the maker movement and ham radio was my daughter, who decided to get her ham license when she was 8. Since then she's become deeply involved in the maker movement and wearable electronics. These days she's an engineer. But what really motivated her wasn't the fact that she can talk to people around the world, but rather that ham radio is the only way she can build the gear that she wants to build. You can't do that with your cell phone or a WiFi router unless you have the right license.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> David Rowe is creating fully open digital voice hardware, including a TDMA repeater system. He presented his latest work at linux.conf.au 2016 and it is pretty amazing. Worth learning about even if you aren't into radio:

Open Source Two Way Radio: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xDeMT7eUf4c](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xDeMT7eUf4c)

BTW, anyone likely to be reading this in the US can earn an FCC Technician license granting full privileges to the VHF/UHF bands David discusses here in maybe 5-6 hours of study.

<comment><USER9> Do you have any book recommendations?

<comment><USER10> This book has everything you need: [http://www.amazon.com/ARRL-Ham-Radio- License-Manual/dp/16259...](http://www.amazon.com/ARRL-Ham-Radio-License- Manual/dp/1625950136)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Not sure that it ever left. But I'm seeing more makers get into software defined radio due to the very low cost and the growing base of hams to exchange ideas with. There are also new digital modes that require less power to complete back and forth messages. Lots of cool things to work with, easier than ever licensing, have kept the hobby active.

</comment><comment><USER12> It seems like not allowing encryption for amateur radio bands is a showstopper for a lot of people, it would be nice if the FCC would change their position on it. Does anyone know if there has been any movement in this area?

<comment><USER13> Ham radio is about communicating with others. How am I supposed to respond to your digital "CQ" if it's encrypted and I can't read it?

There has not been any movement in this area and I hope that there never is.

<comment><USER14> Private communication is a form of communication. Public key cryptography makes it relatively easy.

<comment><USER15> But the whole point of amateur radio historically has been making contact with strangers and/or being welcoming to new people to the hobby.

I'm a privacy zealot, but the spirit and discoverability of amateur radio would be diminished if all the traffic was just static.

PERHAPS a small band could be allocated for secure comms experiments... but I don't know. Besides, wouldn't encrypted noise over the air be confusing to others? Wouldn't people just broadcast over each other?

<comment><USER14> The internet allows for encrypted communication, yet you can talk to me, a stranger. Allowing encryption doesn't mean that all traffic necessarily needs to be encrypted.

<comment><USER15> Decentralized transmission with no easy attribution on a limited resource is different than posting to a central server via a virtually unlimited resource (the Internet).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Ask HN: What value can makers add to ham? I feel I belong to this "new makers" wave and I'm thinking about using Artificial Intelligence to model noise (and cancel it) so as to use cheap SDR dongles more effectively.

What do you think about this?

<comment><USER4> I think you should try it out! It'd be a great patch to gqrx or similar.

The extent of my calibration of a cheap SDR dongle is just adjusting the PPM to correct any offset.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Ham Radio was always there.

<comment><USER18> There's a meme in ham radio that's been around over half a century that "ham radio is dying woe is me". Its funny reading impassioned letters to the editor in 1950 about this being the last generation of operators, nobody new will ever enter the hobby, etc.

Its useful for non-hams to know this is a very old and unkillable meme.

There are other long lived memes in ham radio such as its impossible to build equipment at home anymore, its impossible to install/solder whatever connector everyone is using at this time (anderson powerpole for DC, PL-259 RF connectors, hardline connectors, etc), its impossible to do surface mount at home, my antenna system is great but anyone who spent less than me has a "compromise antenna" because they didn't spend as much as me, all frequency bands above which I operate are line of sight only (no matter if that's 80 meter phone band or 47 GHz the ops say it the same way). There's been trolling on the voice band segments of 80 and 20 meters since at least the 50s. Another popular meme is ham radio might be an infinitely large map to explore for a lifetime but my favorite activity is "real ham radio" with a side dish of the map may be infinitely large but how far I've gotten, no matter how small, is as large as the whole thing is. Hams do have amateur physicists who understand radio propagation vs the ionosphere as well as any professional, but there's probably two guys disseminating pure bro-science for every reality based amateur physicist, I donno if broscience counts as a meme, I guess so. There are a lot of weird memes about age and ham radio because to some extent money and time result in a longer ranged station, therefore most of the guys you'll talk to have the longest ranged most expensive stations therefore you'll get the peculiar idea that all hams are 70, whereas what it really means is if you spend a lifetime building up your station you tend to end up with a really impressive station just before you die.

I refer to the 50s alot above not because it started then, but as a third generation ham, my ancestors had a lot of old magazines and books to read when I was growing up. The hobby mostly being male and often transmitted from father to son is highly susceptible to the overall cultural trends WRT single parenthood and boys growing up without male role models.

<comment><USER17> "The hobby mostly being male and often transmitted from father to son is highly susceptible to the overall cultural trends WRT single parenthood and boys growing up without male role models."

I grew up without male role models. I turned to Doom and Linux. Needless to say, I didn't score until my teens were over.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> How accurate is this? How high powered?

 _They are able to, among other things, hack together Wi-Fi routers that can operate over longer distances and use more power than standard, commercial Wi- Fi._

<comment><USER4> Fairly accurate, from what I've read about previously:

[http://www.broadband-hamnet.org/just-starting-read- this.html](http://www.broadband-hamnet.org/just-starting-read-this.html)

 _" Mesh nodes can easily have a range of 10 miles or more using stock power and gain antennas if you have true line of sight"_

 _" Mesh nodes on channels 1-6 use FCC part 97 rules instead of part 15. This allows big antennas, more power, other changes"_</comment></comment>


After overwhelming interest from the community, Keys.run is now Production-Ready - <AUTHOR> https://keys.run/ <comment><USER2> So Starbucks could make you their backend, for $15/mo... yeah, that's going to scale...</comment>


New Sputnik - <AUTHOR> http://www.h-online.com/open/news/item/Dell-Sputnik-now-being-sold-in-Europe-1814767.html

<comment><USER2> Why can't computers have names that sound like computers. Thought this was gonna be about SpaceX or something.</comment>


Testing the June Intelligent Oven - <AUTHOR> https://www.cooksillustrated.com/articles/1247-testing-the-june-intelligent-oven <comment><USER3> Can we talk about commodity kitchen hardware?

A brand new microwave seems to have the same halfassed, user hostile firmware they shipped around 1999, oriented around a fixed segment display. I would like to see some simple additions that would make a world of difference.

* Add some IR temp sensors, for what $5 in parts, that can heat to an approximate inside temp.

* Update the firmware, for example, to stop beeping when you hit Stop. The commands could actually be far simpler than currently: you really just need "boil", "warm", "defrost" and "reheat" commands - let it figure out the energy needed.

<comment><USER4> My cheap unbranded microwave has a dial to set the power (which is always on max) and a clockwork dial to set the time, which also starts the oven when turned.

This is the best UX of any microwave I've ever had - I can start it with the correct time in a single action just by feel - I don't even have to look at it.

I very much doubt it has any firmware to speak of, or what feature such firmware could possibly offer that would improve my experience.

<comment><USER5> I agree completely. Knobs are very intuitive and self-indicating. The very first microwaves used that UI:

[https://www.radarange.com/](https://www.radarange.com/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Wow, what good timing. My wife and I don't cook a whole lot so we don't want a full size oven, but were thinking about getting one of these smaller toaster- oven footprint appliances. We were looking at the June oven and, e.g., the crazy Brava Light oven (which seems cool, but I can't get over the woo-woo marketing materials).

Cook's Illustrated is a really respectable magazine, so this recommendation carries some substantial weight for me.

<comment><USER7> I got one of the 2nd version June's as soon as they came out and I cannot recommend it enough. It makes so many things an absolute breeze.

Salmon is surprisingly good, though the June does not get the skin crispy - <USER2> you like crispy salmon skin on your salmon fillets you'll still need to do it on the stove.

I also really love how good it is with frozen pizzas. If I want a light dinner, I'll toss a frozen pizza in there and 20 minutes later it's perfectly done and anywhere from 600-900 calories per pie.

I literally have not turned on my real oven since I got it and likely won't until Thanksgiving. I doubt a big turkey will fit in the June.

<comment><USER6> Neat, thanks for the hands-on report! Have you had any maintenance issues with it? My only hangup at this point, I think, with a fancy "smart" oven is that there are more things that can break or be buggy. And how is it to clean?

<comment><USER7> So far, no issues. I've seen a few scattered reports of problems in the owners facebook group but it's impossible to tell from that overall reliability. I can say their support has appeared to be top notch.

The pan is insanely easy to clean. It's the best non stick pan I've ever owned. Inside the oven can be tougher. My fiancée likes to make cheese on toast and often it drips to the drip pan and crusts up, but if you keep on top of it it's not too bad.

Feel free to ask any more questions you might have about it.

<comment><USER6> Awesome, thanks for the info! I'm pretty sold on it, but when I went to their site to order it looks like there aren't any available for another month or two. In that time, I think the Brava infrared oven should come out, so I'll probably see the reviews on that thing and then get one or the other.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I think I would pay $100 for a toaster oven with a decent PID controller, controls that made sense (what does "200F" on dial 1 and "Toast" on dial 2 even mean?), and had a decent chance of working in 20 years. I've already got a pretty decent set of sensors + heavy duty, self-updating neural network between my shoulders, thanks.

<comment><USER9> If you would be OK with a little DIY work, Google for things like "reflow soldering with toaster oven". There have been many conversion projects to adapt cheap toaster ovens for hobbyist reflow soldering.

This involves putting in some good temperature sensors, and bypassing the built-in controls to put the heating elements under the control of an Arduino or similar controller.

Some even add a cheap graphical LCD that can show a graph of temperature over time, and a simple interface to let you enter temperature profiles to follow.

<comment><USER10> I've built one of those. They also need a bunch of insulation, heat spreading plates and another heating element to get reasonably even heating.

You can drop the insulation for food use, but thats one of the cheaper parts of a build.

Since temperature is important for reflow (melt the solder without melting your leds and connectors) they have good ways to calibrate them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I really like that this oven has a camera, as well as temperature probes, and that it's all integrated into the oven's experience through a app on the phone. Do they have any competitors doing this stuff, or are they alone in doing this right now? I am impressed - they've decomposed the idea of what an oven experience usually is (stationary waiting and checking) and shifted it to what it could be (check on it from a distance, data driven shutoff from measurements). Very compelling use of simple features. That's exciting design!

This enables "Put a turkey in the oven, and run to the store and pick up the frozen green beans you forgot to buy - you always know how the turkey is doing."

<comment><USER12> There are www.brava.com as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I don't know how they compare to the June but there are many models of convection ovens in Japan that claim to figure out what you put in them. Many of them will optionally add steam and nearly all of them will also do microwaving as well.

Here's a few from Panasonic

[https://panasonic.jp/range/](https://panasonic.jp/range/)

and Sharp

[http://healsio.jp/](http://healsio.jp/)

<comment><USER14> Are they only available in Japan?

<comment><USER13> I don't know. I'd assume they are only sold in countries where it's not common to have an oven. In the USA I've never seen a house or apartment that didn't have an oven included so if my experience matches reality than at least in the USA it doesn't seem like there would be any market.

What other countries is it not common to have an oven?

One top of that there is the issue that if it's not common to have an oven then it's also not common to cook things that would require an oven. So, I have no idea how common these ovens are in Japan in general. Given so many models by so many companies and given they can also be used as a microwave I'd kind of assume they are gaining in popularity. Foods that require an oven are also slowly getting more popular over time but I suspect it's still not common.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I've had a Breville countertop convection oven for 9 years and it has been used daily multiple times since I got it. When I saw the June oven I was skeptical, but cooks illustrated giving it a positive review is actually quite an achievement. I may decide to get one now as my Breville is finally starting to give up.

<comment><USER16> Likewise. The brain got fried and my convection button now toggles Celsius on and off.

This looks like the spiritual successor to the Breville.

<comment><USER15> You too?!

My start button turns convection off and on 50% of the time. Annoying, but I just hit it again.</comment></comment></comment>