Humans will not 'migrate' to other planets, Nobel winner says - <AUTHOR> https://phys.org/news/2019-10-humans-migrate-planets-nobel-winner.html <comment><USER2> Thank goodness someone is saying it

 _" We are talking about hundreds of millions of days using the means we have available today. We must take care of our planet, it is very beautiful and still absolutely liveable."

The 77-year-old said he felt the need to "kill all the statements that say 'OK, we will go to a liveable planet if one day life is not possible on earth'."

"It's completely crazy," he added._

You do the math on the energy, resource, and time requirements and it's pretty stark. Only 12 humans have set foot on a body other than the Earth. We have no permanent human settlements elsewhere in the solar system outside of low Earth orbit. We're more likely to set ourselves back hundreds of years in progress with warm or climate change.

<comment><USER3> Humans live in stories not in reality. In modern times we have figured out how to sublimate reality with stories, but this process is as old as civilization and propaganda.

So no matter how much stupid shit we do that makes no sense from any rational perspective we can tell a story about how it's good and make it all better. Then when someone like that 16 year old Thunberg girl tells a story that's against all the stories we have been telling we get angry about it going against progress, development, and technology... which are all stories of their own that obfuscate the fact that all of these things are not capable of co-existing with any sort of stable natural system here on earth... as they are meant to continuously destroy and recreate reality. They are in effect to turn reality into fantasy (we call it science fiction) by any means necessary.

<comment><USER4> it's true that each of us usually lives in a story and we all live in a collective delusion.

But. We all know the feeling in our own lives of suddenly waking up getting real.

<comment><USER3> You can't wake up as that's all also a story. It's turtles all the way down. All you can do is tell a different story, to change the script so to say. So far we have gone through a few scripts... Polytheism (many gods) -> Monotheism (one god) -> Economism (money is god and the way to reach god (get more money) is through science perhaps). We need to figure out the next story. I think Economism is terminal.

There is no science and epistemology without their drivers. They are in fact the political economy. You can not divorce how they are used from politics.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I don't even think travel time is the biggest problem; that could imaginably be solved with (far) future engineering.

The bigger problem is that our bodies, even our psychologies, are so finely- tuned for _this exact environment_. Even if we found another planet that could technically sustain us, our bodily rythms, our diets, everything, would be miserably unsuited to it for thousands of years. Not even getting into the possibility of foreign micro-organisms.

People have a hard enough time dealing with _the light cycles being off_ at extreme latitudes, or with _not seeing enough greenspace_ in daily life. You know what doesn't have greenspace? The entire rest of the universe, probably.

<comment><USER6> So you're willing to allow for far future engineering to solve the time problem, but not the problem of bioengineering the human body?

<comment><USER7> I think the issue here is that you rapidly get into some sort of absurd state in which you have no idea what to optimize for, or even if you do, you end up "evolving" another species entirely.

Imagine that we could do all of that on Earth. Imagine an individual that has no need for natural light, no need to green space. Go further - perhaps they don't need to socialize, they don't need a diet any more varied than a few pills, they don't need entertainment of any kind.

Combine those mental changes with physical ones (for example, who needs limbs that can support weight if you're in zero-g).

You easily get to the state in which what you're making is no longer a human being but some sort of 'creation'.

It's possible in the sense of "this is not against the laws of physics", it's just hard to really fathom what it means, it becomes a Theseus' ship of "is that thing really still human", I think.

<comment><USER6> > You easily get to the state in which what you're making is no longer a human > being but some sort of 'creation'.

So what? They're still our progeny. Natural evolution will change us just as it always has even if we do nothing. That some future descendant of a human is classed as a different species entirely is inevitable. All the engineering does is accelerate and direct the process.

<comment><USER5> It also sterilizes the process. Diversity and complexity and mess are not only beautiful, but robust. Artificial evolution would reduce us to mere mechanisms.

<comment><USER8> Artificial evolution, whatever that is, can still have randomness. Tom Ray's program Tierra is a simple and real example. There is no rule saying randomness cannot be introduced. And it can be situated in chaotic environments that further vary what happens.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> "If an elderly but distinguished scientist says that something is possible, he is almost certainly right; but if he says that it is impossible, he is very probably wrong."

Arthur C. Clarke

<comment><USER10> A lot of not so elderly and not so distinguished scientists would also agree with his statement though. All it takes is familiarity with the physical constraints imposed by the speed of light and the distances to the planets in question.

<comment><USER9> Our current belief is that the speed of light cannot be exceeded. Will we still believe that in a hundred years? A thousand? I have no idea.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Before anyone has their own opinions and conclusions over what may or may not happen over the next who-knows-how-many years, consider this:

We already have a planet with water, life, food, resources, ecosystems, and everything we need. Isn't it a hell of a lot easier to maintain and respect what we currently have than jump to "re-creating the Earth" somewhere else from scratch?

<comment><USER12> Europe already had a continent with water, life, food, resources, ecosystems, and everything they needed. Wouldn't it have been a hell of a lot easier to stay there rather than sailing off over the horizon?

<comment><USER13> European explorers and early colonist would write back letters or come back with stories about how lush, rich and plentiful the new world was. Walk up to any stream, and just scoop up a fish with your bare hands. Mountains of silver and gold, just under your feet. Of course you would want to sail off into the horizon for a place like that. And they weren't lying either, the new world was an untapped treasure trove. What's the likelihood that another planet is more than just a dull rock. Sure, we can go to other planets, but space looks incredibly dull and inhospitable to me. Compare that to the excitement and prospect of riches early European explorers must have felt, there's just no comparison.

<comment><USER14> I like that the argument is traveling to a new continent is more exciting than traveling to a new planet. Some of the first people to Australia and the colonies were criminals. The first settlers also dealt with disease and untimely death on a regular basis. You've glamorised it quite a bit when in fact it was miserable.

You are absolutely correct about one thing though. There were many people traveling for a new life. Just like the travels from East to West in the US during the gold rush people went there for wealth, opportunity, and land but not for easy living. I suspect the push for exo planets will be the same.

If we are able to unlock FTL and the time and finacial investment to get there is low or comparable enough to a human lifetime then I see people, assuming we aren't just digital intelligence by then, moving there to start a new life and get away from whatever society is going through. There is always a disenfranchised portion of the population willing to give up their life for a new one somewhere else. Even if the journey and new life is relatively harder to what the rest of society is living in.

<comment><USER15> There was certainly some very creative and fraudulent promotion going on, leading to families emigrating for the fabulous opportunity and finding themselves in indentured servitude or on some marginal land even worse than at home. Or, like early many colonists rapidly succumbing to new and interesting fatal diseases.

Course having got there they were mostly stuck without coin for passage home.

I too suspect the push to space might go similarly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I've always felt this kind of view seems rather bleak. Humans will only go down one of two paths. Either humans and human history will be entirely wiped out from the universe when Earth inevitably becomes uninhabitable, or human ingenuity will triumph and humans will be spread out all over the universe and not be just a blip in time confined to the lifespan of our solar system.

Why not hope for the latter? The argument being made here, "Earth is good enough and we need to take care of it, it's crazy to think that we'll ever live anywhere outside of this solar system", is essentially, in the long term, "the human species is doomed to die out when our sun dies, and probably much sooner than that". That feels so pessimistic to me.

Of course, protecting Earth is important, and probably a higher priority. But if you don't believe humans will make it off-world, then it's just delaying the inevitable. And if that's what you believe, I guess there's no point trying to convince you otherwise; it's not like any of us will be around to see that happen anyways. But if you do believe humans will survive longer than Earth, why is it "crazy" to start working on ideas to make that a reality? Even if it's not feasible, as Mayor says, "using the means we have available today", surely the path to inventing the means that _do_ make it feasible starts from improving the tech we have today? We can work harder on taking good care of our planet while also starting to think in earnest about the plan for the survival of humankind - there are plenty of people and resources in the world, working on this doesn't necessarily substantially detract from efforts to protect Earth.

</comment><comment><USER17> The article is about exoplanets, so Mars etc isn't what he is talking about.

That said, if we are talking about Mars, I would guess that by the time it becomes an economically viable solution to overpopulation, early 21st century technology will be insignificant. (sorry, Elon) We have an immense amount of space on Earth that is cheaper to populate, and will remain so for a long time. While it's sad to think of all the regions of Earth becoming densely populated with humans, its unrealistic to think we'll populate Mars prior to having all our oceans and deserts covered with people.

</comment><comment><USER18> Its too late for your pessimism - I was heavily conditioned by Star Wars and video games as a child, and you're saying "will not" which means "never" (only a Sith deals in absolutes). Therefore I will not stop wondering how we could better reorganize elements and people to the end of extra-terrestrial Earth- sourced-life-propagation.

To be fair - I interpret his statement as one that calls for us to not keep our heads exclusively in the clouds (pun). Fixing our current planet certainly requires priority, focus, career choices, and lifetimes. This is required of us to develop the Type 1 Civilization that can be handed down to the predecessors that will, in fact, "migrate to other planets".

"We used to look up at the sky and wonder at our place in the stars. Now we just look down, and worry about our place in the dirt." -Joseph Cooper, Interstellar (media propaganda meant to inspire current generations. Ad Astra is the most recent push)

Another good one, same character:

"We've always defined ourselves by the ability to overcome the impossible. And we count these moments. These moments when we dare to aim higher, to break barriers, to reach for the stars, to make the unknown known. We count these moments as our proudest achievements. But we lost all that. Or perhaps we've just forgotten that we are still pioneers. And we've barely begun. And that our greatest accomplishments cannot be behind us, because our destiny lies above us."

<comment><USER19> Wasn't Ad Astra the antithesis of Interstellar though? Ad Astra seemed to argue against horrors committed for the sake of achieving greatness, eventually destroying us when we lose sight for what it is all for—people. Interstellar seemed to argue _for_ the necessity of losing this humanity on the chance that it will work out anyway (an optimistic take on Murphy's Law)—Cooper abandoning his daughter; Brand pushing the artifice of Plan A; Mann sanctifying his survival instinct; all to "rage against the dying of the light".

For example, look at Clifford McBride of Ad Astra. He's the "best of us" succumbing to the same tests of character as Dr. Mann of Interstellar—even repeating his same poignant line "yes…yes…yes" to affirm absolute commitment to the mission: the fall of the brightest angels to evil committed for an ostensible good. The difference of messaging is in the _outcome_ of their missions: the failure in Ad Astra to find intelligent life, versus the success in Interstellar to save the species.

Also fun mentioning that Ad Astra ends like Blade Runner 2049, where the cold protagonist, employed as the system's greatest weapon, regains a sense of humanity after subverting the system's mission. Though Roy actually completes it for them, still pedaling the propaganda that you should ultimately still serve the oppressive system.

<comment><USER18> I saw Ad Astra as a story told with a backdrop of a near-future humanity that has established permanent settlements on multiple terrestrial bodies. At the time of your comment, I had not yet seen the movie - I'd only seen the cover poster displaying a well-known space-suit-clad citizen chosen by society throughout the past couple of decades to demonstrate ideas and experiences (Brad Pitt, same with Matt McConaughey). Movie, television, music, and now algorithmic news feed themes are my preferred methods of gauging public sentiment (programmed or natural). The final detail of the end credits says that there were "15,000 jobs created by this film". This verifies the interest and subsequent investment channeled into a theory and demonstration of the interstellar human experience.

Now I am fresh out of the movie theater, and have consumed the media in it's entirety. The first person narration of Roy began the film with this line:

"I always wanted to be an astronaut... at least that's what I told myself."

This seemingly confirmed my theory of "propaganda meant to inspire current generations". But then the protagonist's ailments became apparent post- primate-attack when he is conducting his psychological evaluation. He describes how he is familiar with the rage of the primate. He understands their pain, but unlike them he is able to discard it and carry on, "remain calm" as he says at the beginning (debrief psych eval describing the fall from the antennae). This is the first instance of violence committed by a life-form confined to a metal tube in a vacuum for an undisclosed amount of time (the Norwegian craft was meant for biomedical research, and perhaps the primate aggression was exacerbated by human experimentation).

Then there are the comfort rooms - a solution meant to simulate conditions on Earth so as to soothe the distressed extra-terrestrial-human.

To paraphrase one of the final quotes of the movie, Roy describes the need to "rely on others and share their burdens as they share his". The pain of solitude was not worth the prospect of discovering "other life". He has no children to orphan in the name of relentless exploration ("yes, yes, yes"), as his father did - yet he realizes he is living out a similar life while underwater on Mars sneaking his way onto the Neptune-bound ship...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> It should be exoplanets rather than planets in the title.

<comment><USER21> +1 to this. Article has no bearing on Mars development efforts, refers only to exoplanets. Also seems to attempt to dispel misunderstandings about exoplanet distances and feasibility - perhaps some people think that a solution to climate change is for us to move to an exoplanet?

This may be a common misconception outside of nerd circles, I'm not sure. And in that way, this take is correct. But it was my understanding that with mostly-present-day technology we could construct generation starthips and eventually one day create civilizations on exoplanets themselves. I see nothing stopping that - contrary to the statements in the article.

As a solution for problems on Earth? Sure, not possible. As something humans could do one day? Sure, very possible.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> If we can send people for generations in space, we believe we can live sustainably.

If we believe we can live sustainably, we should be able to do it here.

We aren't doing it here, suggesting we're dreaming if we think we can do it elsewhere. Even if we aren't, the best we to show we can do it is to live sustainably. We're not.

We could at least show we could live sustainably underwater or in Antarctica, but we can't, even with a world of resources and help, and they're easier than space.

It seems the best way to make other planets possible is to live here sustainably. I suggest we devote the resources we're using on those problems (space travel) on this problem (sustainability on Earth), since it will also help those problems, if they're possible.

</comment><comment><USER23> It would be easy to find thousands of people to volunteer to set forth on an ark that wouldn't arrive at another planet for generations. It'd be an enormous technical challenge, and cost a fortune, so it's unlikely to be funded any time soon, but there's no technical limitation if the will is there. Some day the will may very well be there.

I'm not endorsing the idea, nor do I think it's likely in my lifetime. It won't be necessary for the survival of the human race any time in the next billion years. That doesn't mean people won't want to do it eventually, if for no other reason than to explore. There was never any reason to climb Everest either, yet individuals devote their entire lives and fortunes to doing so.

Just because we don't have to do it doesn't mean it's not something people will want to do.

We'll probably become a hive-mind synthetic species long before anyone considers it, but if you call that human, eventually it'll get there.

<comment><USER24> We don't have experience dealing with the psychological consequences of certain death among thousands of people confined in a tin can without any chance of external help.

To prove your theory, we would have to gather these thousands of people in a dome in the middle of nowhere, not help, not let them leave at all costs, and maybe enforce a % of deaths to simulate what could reasonably happen in space. Find volunteers for that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> N.B.: He's talking about extrasolar planets, not Mars.

</comment><comment><USER26> "Never" is a word used by those with a poverty of the imagination.

</comment><comment><USER27> We still need some way to live on a planet other than Earth for the sake of insurance in case something happens to Earth that we cannot control.

</comment><comment><USER28> Humans may not migrate to other planets but our nonbiological descendents might.

</comment><comment><USER29> The problem is that we don't have the foresight necessary to know this. If we crack FTL or inertial propulsion, a whole ton of options open up.

<comment><USER30> > If we crack FTL

.. we can time travel.

But we don't see anyone from the future here, so it seems to be impossible.

<comment><USER29> Not if the Alcubierre drive works, which there's no reason to believe it doesn't. Cracking FTL doesn't mean just stepping on the gas really hard.

<comment><USER30> There is a good reason to believe that Alcubierre drive does not exist. It's allowed by Eninsteins equations if you have negative energy but quantum gravity would invalidate it.

Einstein's equations allow all kinds of weird solutions that physicists don't believe can really exist. Discovering them is just a way to study the equations theoretically. Alcubierre Warp Drive Metric or Gödel metric (rotating universe) are just two of them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> > Clarke's First Law: When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that > something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that > something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.

Transporting people with current human lifetimes might not be practical. But brain scans on a computer? Or people in some form of cryogenic state or with life extension tech?

I'd say that's a fair bit easier. Still not trivial, but manageable with a lightsail.

<comment><USER32> > Transporting people with current human lifetimes might not be practical. But > brain scans on a computer? Or people in some form of cryogenic state or with > life extension tech?

Or a generation ship. The most common approach proposed is a self-contained ecosystem that can grow the food and recycle the waste necessary to keep the ecosystem going and to support a breeding population of people, plants, and animals for the hundreds of years the trip takes.

That approach seems pretty far in the future. I don't think anyone has ever built a self-contained ecosystem that comes anywhere near close to being able to be self-sustaining for any great length of time.

Another approach might be possible that doesn't require a self-sustaining ecosystem, and seems much more in reach. The idea is to send most of the people as frozen eggs and sperm. Same for the animals that will be needed to establish a colony at the destination. Send the colony plants as frozen seeds.

The only already born people you would send is a small crew to operate the ship. They operate the ship for one generation, then make the next generation crew from some of the frozen eggs and sperm, train them, and hand off the ship to them. Repeat until the ship reaches the destination, and the final crew then uses the remaining frozen eggs and sperm to make and raise the colonists. Same for the animals and plants.

Because this approach only has a small crew on the ship at any time, it should be feasible to include their food upfront when the ship leaves. If you use food that has a large calorie/volume ratio, a lifetime supply of food for a person fits in a space that is probably smaller than you would guess.

For example, a typical protein bar is about 200 calories. If you need 3000 calories a day (space crewing is hard work!) for 100 years that works out to about 547500 bars. If each bar has a volume of 10 cm^3, you could store all that in a cube 176 cm on a side. Enough for a crew averaging 10 people at a time for 400 years would fit in the volume of a small single family house.

<comment><USER31> Why would volume matter at all when it comes to storing food? Space in space is the next best thing to free, after all.

The real thing to be concerned about is mass.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> It's not a great idea to just reject what could be the "great filter" for the species.

</comment><comment><USER8> "Humans" is a huge and unfounded assumption. It doesn't need to be humans as we know them today.

</comment><comment><USER34> If we destroy ourselves first, agree.

If we persist and advance technologically, disagree.

</comment><comment><USER35> Only a tech limitation.

</comment><comment><USER36> Reminds me of those who didn't believe atom bombs were possible of those who believed humans wouldn't have flying machines.</comment>


Delphi Dying? Think Again, Tiobe - <AUTHOR> https://jonlennartaasenden.wordpress.com/2020/03/08/delphi-dying-think-again-tiobe/ <comment><USER2> There was a massive FUD campaign back in the early 2000's which saw many Delphi Projects moved to C#, I am lucky to have always been in charge of what language to develop in so I have ignored stuff like this ever since and just got on with life.

</comment><comment><USER3> One thing that struck me about Delphi, is that the business model has stayed the same for decades. If you want to access a remote database, you have to go up to the Enterprise edition, which costs US $4000 [1]. That's the real turn off for me. Why should a dev product cost more than, say, $300 these days just because I want to use a 'real' database?

[1] [https://www.code-partners.com/offerings/delphi/](https://www.code- partners.com/offerings/delphi/)

<comment><USER2> Plenty of open source and paid for alternatives to this I use the mydac ones for $200 my other projects use zeos which are open source.</comment></comment>


Hacked Kinect is now a 3D video capture tool - <AUTHOR> http://www.adafruit.com/blog/2010/11/14/hacked-kinect-is-now-a-3d-video-capture-tool/

<comment><USER2> Here it is on the creator's website instead of a lame blog post: <http://idav.ucdavis.edu/~okreylos/ResDev/Kinect/>

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm not in this space or planning on investing time into this but I just wanted to say Kudos to Microsoft for creating something that developers are excited about again... even if they didn't indent to do that. I'd start hacking on this if I wasn't invested in a different direction.

<comment><USER4> I wouldn't give MS too much credit. They bought the hardware from the company that created it.

<comment><USER5> Yup, here's the reference design in case anyone is curious:

<http://www.primesense.com/?p=514>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> If money is no object, commodity stereo equipment exists with better range than the Kinect. From Wikipedia:

       The Kinect sensor has a practical ranging limit of 1.2–3.5 metres
       (3.9–11 ft) distance when used with the Xbox software.

The Kinect was limited by cost, size, and the need to work in poor lighting conditions. But by spacing your higher-quality cameras out (increasing the baseline), accurate depth at 10 meters is a reasonable goal.

One such device: <http://www.ptgrey.com/products/bumblebee2/index.asp>

Accuracy chart: <http://www.ptgrey.com/support/kb/data/stereoaccuracy.xls> [XLS warning]

<comment><USER7> Money is always an object. Any idea roughly what these go for?

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I hope he links up two or three of these to form fuller 3d models of a room.

<comment><USER9> The Kinect works by projecting an infra-red grid on to the room so you can't use 2 of them in the same space (unless you modify the hardware somehow)

<comment><USER10> Could you synchronize two Kinect devices on one clock and then toggle the display/capture of that grid every odd or even 10ms span? So, only one grid is displayed and processed during its 'slice' of time, with the grids strobing rather than continuously projected.

Software-only, or would that result in too jerky of a motion capture?

<comment><USER11> 10ms seems like a reasonably small period of time. I believe it is considered to be effectively instantaneous in UI.

Edit: Although, I suppose the "refresh rate" of the entire system would then be 20ms, which might be noticeable. Chop that down to 5ms per Kinect, and it might be viable.

<comment><USER12> Only one "eye" [Kinect] has to notice/process the movement; the other can infer, during the integration step, that the "rest" of a moving object comes with it, rather than stretching out.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Don't miss:

a) His other video of the system where he shows that measurements of 3d objects exactly match real counterparts: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f1ieKe_ts0k>

b) His homepage of other experiments: <http://idav.ucdavis.edu/~okreylos/index.html>

<comment><USER14> It's implied in the measurement video that he's feeding his captured data through a realtime 3D modelling/rendering tool. Does anyone know what that tool is?

<comment><USER15> On his page[1] it says "The 3D reconstruction code is entirely written from scratch in C++, using my own Vrui VR toolkit[2] for 3D rendering management and interaction."

[1] <http://idav.ucdavis.edu/~okreylos/index.html> (frame navigation?? ugh)

[2] <http://idav.ucdavis.edu/~okreylos/ResDev/Vrui/MainPage.html>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Wow, this reminds me of the holographic home movies in minority report. We have the camera, now all we need is the projector.

<comment><USER17> Exactly what I thought. Also, someone's made a side-by-side video: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=da3iq9fnyWs>

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> For the frequency of the news about Kinect hacking I get the feeling that the homebrew software for Kinect will soon boost with much more professional features than the official software, esp. since it's pushed with games.

As Microsoft sells these things highly subsidized to claim profit with on the games I see lot's of conflict potential.

<comment><USER19> I can see indie game developers using Kinect to do realistic motion-capture in games.

I recall seeing this issue pop up in the 'making-of' DVD for Alan Wake by Remedy. When they made their first big game, Max Payne 1, they did the storytelling in the form of a comic due partially to budget constraints. Using a hacked Kinect and cheap PC hardware, game developers could capture a huge range of motions and use video editing software to overlay the required graphics onto the captured motions.

<comment><USER20> The problem there, I worry, is once someone starts selling an indie game with third party support MS will go after them legally.

They don't have much standing with the hackers atm, but a commercial indie game is another matter.

Which is concerning :(

<comment><USER21> The point of the parent post was using these things in creating games, not as a game interface. That is, to make animation more realistic. Then again, given commercial motion capture systems are in the 5-10k range for pretty good stuff, I don't suppose that's a major concern for a game studio.

<comment><USER20> Bah, my comment was something I had in the back of my mind... so I looked at the parent and misread it as being on the same topic, sorry :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> It's rough but still pretty damn cool. Software that does this from footage can easily be in the thousands of dollars. Image the results if you pair a kinect with this: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vEOmzjImsVc>

</comment><comment><USER23> Idea: Please, someone somehow need to attach via software a Kinnect and a 3D printer.

<comment><USER21> I have a 3d printer, but not a Kinect. Range data is not very good at all at creating 3d models. What you really want is that plus a turntable so you can get multiple views. To get a printable model, you need a mesh with no holes. A single range image has lots of holes, so you can't really print the image without filling them by taking multiple images and matching them. That said, I do think I'll make a 3d scanner based on this thing.

<comment><USER24> Hi, I'm thinking of getting RepRap. Do you find your printer brings you any business opportunities ?

<comment><USER21> Well, I have been selling some parts, but mostly to other Reprappers. I'm looking for ways to develop something more extensive with it, but it's one of a stack of fabrication-related ideas I'd like to play with, each more attractive. The main problem is that printing is slow, and linear. You can't easily scale it. Some people are building botfarms, but even then their supply is linear, and limited by space.

Pop over on the #reprap channel on freenode and meet the rest of us if you want to know more.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Take 3 cameras and you get full 3D. Then project on a 3DTV, and you have a much more immersive video conference!

<comment><USER26> While that would be very very cool I don't think it would work with the current hardware. It works by projecting a bunch of dots on the scene in IR (so you can't see them) then tracking them with a camera. So multiple Kinects are going to confuse each other (probably, I assume so anyway).

Just got my Kinect in the post this morning, very excited about what I can do with it!

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I expect to see a lot of homebrew robots using Kinect for vision in the near future!</comment>


JuliaCon – June 26-27 in Chicago (1st Julia convention) - <AUTHOR> http://juliacon.org

<comment><AUTHOR> Nothing on the site except for a logo, dates and a pair of horns. But still, this is another positive development for the Julia language and community.</comment>


The State of Startups: Companies with –ai domains raise 3.5x more money - <AUTHOR> https://brex.com/blog/domain-ai <comment><USER2> AI is a new gold:)</comment>


Ask HN: What are interesting ways to make money other than a job as a dev? - <AUTHOR> So I am not looking to open a SaaS (though lemme know if you have any interesting problems at your place).
I am curious about ways in which being a programmer might help or be important. Something like automating trading or scrapping web for particular information to sell.
Things that help you learn more about a different field but let you apply your existing skills to solve. <comment><USER2> I know this sounds cliche but what you want to find is a niche market where theres still harvestable low hanging fruit or some original product/idea that might be useful and not saturated. I think automating trading and even selling scrapped data are already getting somewhat mature; it's not easy to compete with shops that have been doing it for some time by working solo..

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, I was giving an example since I don't have any good ones atm.

Maybe someone knows some regular work that isn't automated or will be incredibly easy for a dev.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Become a systems integrator that use other people's projects like open source to solve problems with a solution based on a database you create and make the UI to. Create solutions for people using free and open source software.</comment>


Ask HN: Meaningful jobs outside the office - <AUTHOR> After nearly 10 years of being in IT, wearing different hats: a software dev, lead, account manager and now a founder I feel like I want to leave the tech world. Firstly, I'm fed up with no-value-for-humanity, intangible projects. Secondly, I can't sit in front of my desk that many hours anymore. I just want to go out and feel the nature. Has anybody here left the IT and found a meaningful job, possibly at least partially including working outside? Looking for inspiration. <comment><USER2> I hear you. I've been in the industry for less than 4 years. I love coding, but not the industry. Last spring i burned myself to the ground building a project with unreasonable deadlines. I was sleeping less than 4h a night and couldn't keep any food down. In the end, the project was replaced by a newer shinier library. It all felt for nothing. I left soon afterwards and have transitioned from office work to fulltime remote freelancing & consulting while I attempt to bootstrap a small company that will hopefully cover my living costs and allow me to help my family. I haven't left IT but I'm hopefully getting closer to an arrangement where i can keep coding without and have a healthy balance.

<comment><USER3> How did you start into consulting ? I'm tired of the office.

About the software you wrote as wasn't even used said: that s __t happens, and we can 't get too attached to the things we produce - [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunk_cost](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunk_cost) right?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I would recommend you use your expertise wisely to the less areas to build tangible product outcomes that actualy help humanity. I recently brought a drone kit & raspberrypi and built one with a vision to use it help for farming/agriculture/seed-bombing etc. This required me to move out of my desk and play with the hardware and eventually go outside to test it. At fist you may think its impossible to learn robotics stuffs since you are just a programmer. But trust me, if I can do it with no experience in Robotics, you definitely can. That way you can make use of your existing skill, learn new ones and see tangible outcomes. IMHO I always wonder what happened to the future. There is a huge gap in robotics today. We should've built better things than facebook, twitter with computers by now.

</comment><comment><USER5> Sounds like you are burned out.

Think back of the times when you were actually excited and driven to write software. What was different back then? You probably had an awesome team and build some really cool and interesting stuff.

Take some time off, 2-3 weeks and change your environment. I.e. long cruise, backpacking through Europe or South America. Something that will pull you completely away from technology.

You need to rest your mind.

When you come back, if you think your work sucks, or your job sucks, then go out there and find something that aligns with your values. There's plenty of software to be build, and plenty of people building it, some of which align closely with your values. You just have to keep looking.

</comment><comment><USER6> Having basically the same feeling, albeit with different amounts of experience, I took up a moving job. Lifting things in and out of a truck. Most of the time it was much more satisfying, but I wouldn't call it fulfilling.</comment>


Facebook Loses Facial Recognition Appeal, Must Face Privacy Class Action - <AUTHOR> https://www.usnews.com/news/top-news/articles/2019-08-08/facebook-loses-facial-recognition-technology-appeal-must-face-class-action <comment><USER2> "...lawsuit claiming that it illegally collected and stored biometric data for millions of users without their consent"

I find this interesting in that it's a 3rd party who uploaded the photos (in this case, likely a friend of the person in the pictures) and that they aren't the ones liable, but Facebook is. The terms of service for Facebook are very clear in that they basically have unrestricted rights in what they can do for the photos - wouldn't the friend be the one violating the person's privacy because they're the ones saying Facebook is allowed to do a biometric scan/collection on the photo, even though they don't have a right to do so?

It feels like if a friend mailed you something you didn't want, and blaming the mail carrier instead of the friend. There's certainly some blame of Facebook for the sheer scale of what they're doing, but if the uploader isn't treated as an accomplice at the very least it feels strange.</comment>


Fwupd – S3 bucket takeover and CVE-2020-10759 signature verification bypass - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/justinsteven/advisories/blob/master/2020_fwupd_dangling_s3_bucket_and_CVE-2020-10759_signature_verification_bypass.md <comment><AUTHOR> From TFA: These vulnerabilities would have allowed an attacker who claimed the S3 bucket to offer malicious firmware updates to Linux desktops and servers running legacy versions of fwupd.

Some extra discussion can be found in a Twitter thread[0] from the person who discovered the issues.

[0] [https://twitter.com/justinsteven/status/1270113960021209088](https://twitter.com/justinsteven/status/1270113960021209088)</comment>


GoPro lays off 270 - <AUTHOR> http://www.latimes.com/business/technology/la-fi-tn-gopro-layoffs-20170315-story.html <comment><USER2> I think the most interesting quote is: ?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?

</comment><comment><USER3> I think its the knocks are starting to match their quality for 1/3 the price.

<comment><USER4> I think it's more that 99% of people don't need a gopro. I'm a damn good mountain biker and snowboarder but the footage i would get with a go pro would be pretty boring !!

<comment><USER5> Not sure. You don't have to be Christopher Nolan for it to be interesting.

You can use it as a kind of dashcam to document what you are doing, watch it after the fact to look at what you can improve, what went wrong, etc. and then discard the footage and start again.

Or if it was somehow streamable it would surely find an audience. Even marbles running down hills get crazy view counts on Youtube!

<comment><USER6> Yep, the 'you wouldn't believe what just happened' stories you trade with your skiing/boarding/biking/skating friends are way more interesting with 'check out this footage' at the end.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is from March 2017.

<comment><USER8> there is a layoff but the link here is wrong: [https://www.reuters.com/article/us-gopro- redundancies/gopro-...](https://www.reuters.com/article/us-gopro- redundancies/gopro-cuts-200-300-jobs-in-aerial-products-unit-techcrunch- idUSKBN1EU080)

<comment><USER6> mods, maybe update the link to the current one?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The uploaded title seems to be cut short, as the title of the article is "GoPro to lay off 270 workers in an effort to cut costs".

</comment><comment><USER10> never understood why they didn't market a dedicated dash cam variant. there are dash cams in their price range, certainly within the Hero5 and stripped of water proofing needs and such surely they could have banked on their name to push them. site security and more as well.

</comment><comment><USER8> this article is fro MAR 15, 2017</comment>


Serverless Architectures - <AUTHOR> http://martinfowler.com/articles/serverless.html <comment><USER2> By this definition, we've been running "serverless" on Google App Engine for most of a decade.

* We don't monitor how many instances are running and don't really care. Our "functions" are http endpoints. GAE spins up or down instances to meet the load. Our interface with "instances" is just the size of the bill at the end of the month.

* Async task processing is also just an http endpoint function. We even have a little bit of syntactic sugar so it looks like we're just adding functions to a queue.

* We have no ops or devops staff. We just deploy code that implements functions (http endpoints).

* Persistence is also scaled by Google; there's no database server, just an API to read/write data that scales infinitely (or at least, scales with linearly our bill, not limited by the dataset).

It sounds to me like the article is trying to distinguish between "serverless" and PaaS by describing PaaS done poorly. For the longest time, GAE didn't even expose the # of instances servicing your app. They've exposed a lot more of the underlying constructs since, but you can still ignore them unless you're trying to hyperoptimize your bill.

<comment><USER3> If GAE has had "serverless" for most of a decade, then why did Google decide to create Google Cloud Functions? [https://cloud.google.com/functions/docs/](https://cloud.google.com/functions/docs/)

<comment><USER4> Because Lambda/Cloud functions are meant for scripting tasks in your cloud environment, not for building full-fledged apps.

(Lambdas couldn't even be triggered with HTTP calls when AWS Lambda launched.)

<comment><USER5> I spoke to a solutions architect on AWS who said that their recommendation for building a new backend service (eg. a REST API) is to use API gateway and Lambda. I definitely got the impression that he meant full-fledged apps.

<comment><USER6> I have done some (small-ish) projects with API Gateway and Lambda. Lambda itself is pretty nice. The API Gateway is a pain, and has a lot of rough edges. Especially if you need to do anything other than standard JSON in and out. I've spent way more time than I'd like to admit futzing with mapping templates and models to try to get stuff to work the right way. And then dealing with errors from the Lambda function in a sensible way is a headache all its own.

I generally really like AWS and I use it for a ton of stuff, but I very much welcome competition and innovation in this space.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> loup-vaillant What kind of evil genius devised a term that suggests peer-to-peer, to describe something that relies more than ever before on central services and authorities?

It feels like "intellectual property" all over again —which suggests the rules used for rival goods can be used for ideas, hence ignoring the difference between moving and copying.

<comment><USER7> Because the main premise of "serverless" is function-as-a-unit-of-deployment, it's actually quite suited for distributed computing and works quite well in decentralized architectures. Using serverless, it's easier than ever to build "hybrid" clouds constructed of resources both locally and on public clouds (Google, Amazon, Azure, BlueMix, and others).

We can even deploy that code to IoT devices and embed it inside of desktop and mobile apps.

Serverless _frees_ us from lock-in, but it does not have its _own_ state, so it's easy to become locked into various web services. However, it's also easy enough to rely on your services (microservices) for state, avoiding lockin to other IaaS/SaaS products.

<comment><USER8> Unless and until there is a standard for function-as-a-service so you can move your functions between services at a moment's notice, you're very much locked in; and locked in without any guarantees of quality of service.

<comment><USER7> I am involved daily in precisely an effort to do just this. The differences between the big 3-4 providers is relatively marginal (call arguments and versions of interpreters such as NodeJS). Take it as a plug if you must, but being able to handle the former is one of the goals of [https://github.com/iopipe/iopipe](https://github.com/iopipe/iopipe).

The version of language runtimes is where the most lock-in will occur, and really, that's kinda marginal, too. Language runtimes should be as stable and standard as, say, the Linux kernel's userland interface. If language runtimes can't deal with this, then they'll fail.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> There are a number of things I find alarming about this (which is nothing new):

Firstly, the author is encouraging the conversion of traditional web pages to single-page web applications, which means that users would now have to download actual software to use the website rather than using the software that they already have and trust: their web browser.

Perhaps most alarming is the acknowledgement of this:

> One of the main benefits of Serverless FaaS applications is transparent > production runtime provisioning, and so open source is not currently as > relevant in this world as it is for, say, Docker and containers.

This highlights the major issue of SaaSS/SaaS, and FaaS takes it to the extreme:

[https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/who-does-that-server- really-s...](https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/who-does-that-server-really- serve.html)

Not only does the user not have control (as in the case of SaaS), but in the case of FaaS, the actual author is relinquishing the same control.

These suggestions all "make sense" from an architectural perspective (depending on who you ask, and depending on the software being written). But I plead for others to consider whether this is necessary in their particular instance; it's the default thinking now-a-days: want to write a program? Want a wide audience? Want it to scale? Put it on the Web, make it a service, store it and all user data on someone else's computer, and call it "the cloud".

I expressed my opinions and concerns at LibrePlanet 2016:

[https://media.libreplanet.org/u/libreplanet/collection/resto...](https://media.libreplanet.org/u/libreplanet/collection/restore- online-freedom/)

<comment><USER10> Hi Mike,

Article author here. Don't worry, I'll be laying on some cold, hard, reality later in the series. I definitely _don 't_ encourage SPAs universally and I'll be talking extensively about the concerns of handing over responsibility to vendors.

<comment><USER9> Thanks for the reply, Mike; I'm looking forward to reading your opinions, and I'm glad you'll be discussing it.

From a technical perspective, your article was very informative, and I did learn from it, so thank you for the information.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> It is misleading that the HN title suggests the author is Martin Fowler, but this is not the case for this guest article. The actual author is Mike Roberts, the article is hosted on Fowler's site.

<comment><USER12> Yes, but that's probably because the HN submission bookmarklet puts the site name behind the dash.

It annoys me every time I'm submitting something. But evidently not enough to finally edit the bookmarklet.

<comment><USER13> Ditto about the annoyance. Never thought about editing the bookmarklet... I'm going to do that now!

<comment><USER13> Here's is my slight change to the bookmarklet code. It's not fool proof and and I'll have to see if it actually results in me editing submitted story headlines less often or not. It basically takes the substring of the document title from the start until it finds the first hypen (-) or pipe (|) which are what seems like most sites use when appending the site name.

      javascript:window.location="http://news.ycombinator.com/submitlink?u="+encodeURIComponent(document.location)+"&t="+encodeURIComponent(document.title.substring(0,document.title.search(/[-|]/)).trim())

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Serverless = new name for PaaS.

VPS (virtual private servers) were available (and largely ignored) for quite a while before 2006, when AWS came along with the catchy word "cloud". This single word changed everything. Same technology all of the sudden became cool, and everybody started using it.

Maybe now it is the turn of PaaS [1] - call it "serverless" and folks finally start seeing all the benefits (true scalability, efficient resource utilization, timely and painless software upgrades, et c.)?

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

<comment><USER3> Since serverless is a kind of a PaaS, it offers many of the same benefits. However, unlike Heroku, Cloud Foundry, OpenShift, and other traditional PaaSes focused on supporting long running applications and services, serverless frameworks offer a new kind of a platform for running short lived processes and functions, also called microflows.

The distinction between the long running processes and microflows is subtle but important. When started, long running processes wait for an input, execute some code when an input is received, and then continue waiting. In contrast, microflows are started once an input is received, and are terminated by the platform after the code in the microflow finishes executing. One way to describe microflows is to say that they are reactive, in the sense that they react to the incoming data.

<comment><USER15> Sounds like inet.d, or CGI behind a webserver.

<comment><USER14> ...or socket-activated systemd service [1, 2]

[1] [http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/socket-activated- containers...](http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/socket-activated- containers.html)

[2] [https://developer.atlassian.com/blog/2015/03/docker- systemd-...](https://developer.atlassian.com/blog/2015/03/docker-systemd- socket-activation/)

<comment><USER3> That's true, but for a public cloud service, you wouldn't let random people run arbitrary code based purely on inet.d or systemd socket activation.

<comment><USER14> Why not? RedHat will let you run arbitrary binaries just fine on OpenShift - both long-running/worker/"PaaS" and on-demand/per-request/"FaaS".

Obviously this is tightly locked down with cgroups.

<comment><USER3> How would you modify systemd unit files for each user of your public cloud? How would you manage the sockets once you have more users than sockets on a server?

<comment><USER16> You can create systemd units using the D-Bus API instead of files, though I'm not sure those can be socket-activated.

As for having more users than sockets, is that really likely, considering there are 64000 available ports?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> The API gateway made me smile. In the 90's we had message queues. In the 00's we had service busses. Today we have API gateways. All they do is route requests - they're all the same thing.

There's merit in serverless, no doubt. There are many things that worry me. Not owning the infrastructure means I don't get the telemetry I'd like, making triage difficult. Direct access to the database is a good idea said nobody ever. And at what point does my own infrastructure become more cost-effective than cloud?

Those concerns don't invalidate the applicability or relevance of serverless though. I think its value as a protyping tool, or to validate a proof of concept is huge.

<comment><USER18> The vast majority of web sites on the internet today don't need much infrastructure, they're low traffic blogs, web sites for the hair salon down the street, or a landing page for a non software corporation. Facebook fills this role for a lot users, and they in turn sacrifice their data and privacy to a souless corporation. Don't forget the $billions dollars industry of shared hosting providers out there. A lot of businesses still pay $10 a month for a shared server, mysql, and php.

Why should this be the case? Why should it cost anything to have an online presence today? Why shouldn't users own their data? In my personal opinion, these types of FAAS (function as a service) and mBAAS (mobile Backend as a service) the article is talking are an enabling technology in this regard.

<comment><USER19> Even if it costs nothing, Facebook is a far better option for hair salons and other similar small businesses. Facebook drives engagement and views, while nobody will bother with a self hosted website. The oft repeated lesson here is that convenience trumps privacy for the vast majority of users. If you look at the last decade, in spite of there being robust, self-hosted solutions for syndication and engagement such as RSS, pingbacks, OPML etc, in the end closed systems won.

Maybe there is a secret ingredient to making it work again, but we don't know what that is. Yet.

<comment><USER18> I think the secret sauce may be in things like 'call ahead seating' or 'get in line, online' that some restaurants and hair styling places do now. You don't typical get that capability on facebook, and it's a differentiator.

<comment><USER16> Thing is, why would a hair salon (which presumably has no advanced technical skills) choose to write or purchase software to run on their FaaS service, instead of simply registering an account on a SaaS service that takes care of everything for them, and even integrates with FB?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> How did this came to be known as serverless? It just seems to be an extreme case of microservices running on someone else's computer?

<comment><USER21> I think it might have something to do with the fact that the payment model isn't connected to a server instance, but how often your code is run. Heroku, GAE etc. are server-oriented. Your code is running on a dyno or an instance, and you pay based on the number of instance-hours you use. In AWS Lambda, or Azure Functions, you pay for the number of requests you process and the time spent processing those requests, how many instances are spent processing those requests are irrelevant. It's a serverless payment modell.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Why not MTTaaS - Misleading Technology Terms as a Service.

<comment><USER23> See, I though it was Multi-Troop Transport as a Service ([http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Multi- Troop_Transport/Legends](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Multi- Troop_Transport/Legends)).

So +1

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> The serverless architecture appears to have many servers provided by different people instead of having no servers, as "serverless" leads me to think. Is this just trading wrangling a server farm for wrangling contracts with 3rd party service providers?

Am I missing something?

<comment><USER25> Serverless is just a buzzword similar to NoSQL to gain traction, nothing new!

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> If your PaaS supports scaling down to zero (Heroku free tier, Cloud Foundry somewhere in the future) and resuming on incoming traffic, it's basically a much better version of FaaS. The way you deploy code, the way services are coupled to the app etc is much better.

<comment><USER21> Heroku is much slower at resuming on incoming traffic, because it has to boot up a dyno to serve your code. A cold start on Heroku usually takes 30 seconds (for me anyways). A cold start on AWS Lambda takes 2-5 seconds, which the user won't notice on my services because the frontend is served from S3 and rendering is client side.

And the way services are coupled to the app is about the same. I've used both Heroku and AWS a bit, there really isn't that big a difference here, except that Heroku as a lot more third party services that can be connected.

<comment><USER26> Sure, it's designed to be faster to boot up, but Heroku could optimize their startup time.

<comment><USER21> Difficult to do. Cold start time is slow on the free plan because they have to start a "server". They don't need to do this with the paid plan, but then again, you're paying for uptime of a server. Serverless don't need to do this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> It's just outsourcing. It "depends on 3rd party applications / services ('in the cloud')" It's like Salesforce's "No Software".

A real serverless architecture would be federated, like BitTorrent or Bitcoin.

</comment><comment><USER28> Is Google App Engine an example of serverless? The user does not really think about servers, and the code is mostly written as event handlers. The abstraction is a bit leaky though, and you can tell that there are instances being spun up and down.

<comment><USER29> Uploading PHP scripts on a remote server provided by an hosting company is "serverless". I don't have to manage the server /s

That buzzword means absolutely nothing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> As someone previously noted about serverless architecture - [https://twitter.com/jf/status/739971456302350336](https://twitter.com/jf/status/739971456302350336)

</comment><comment><USER31> Ah, the PetStore example brings back memories! Wonder how many people remember it?

<comment><USER10> Welcome to Old Developers Club. :)

<comment><USER32> Not old, but seasoned with salt (white hair). :D

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> In regards to Stateless and 12 Factor...

> This has a huge impact on application architecture, albeit not a unique one > - the 'Twelve-Factor App' concept has precisely the same restriction.

While 12 Factor does say that processes should be stateless I've never thought it really meant it. Connection Pools and in-memory caches are pretty typical in 12 Factor (or all non-serverless) apps. And for me that is what makes serverless kinda silly. Some global state is actually pretty useful when you can avoid the overhead of initializing things or going over the network.

<comment><USER3> Serverless apps should be stateless but should work in conjunction with stateful apps. Unlike Heroku, Cloud Foundry, OpenShift, and other traditional PaaSes focused on supporting long running applications and services, serverless frameworks offer a new kind of a platform for running short lived processes and functions, also called microflows.

The distinction between the long running processes and microflows is subtle but important. When started, long running processes wait for an input, execute some code when an input is received, and then continue waiting. In contrast, microflows are started once an input is received, and are terminated by the platform after the code in the microflow finishes executing. One way to describe microflows is to say that they are reactive, in the sense that they react to the incoming data.

<comment><USER16> But how is this different from coding in, say, Django?

In Django you write a "view", which is just a Python function that is started when an HTTP request is received, and terminates by returning an HTTP response object. Then there are models, but these are just a translation layer between the Database and the view function, they don't keep state either.

I don't see how a Django view isn't a "microflow". It seems to me that the architecture is exactly the same, it's just that you don't get to choose the web framework.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> The article totally skips (serverless) _federated_ architectures, which are more interesting, in my opinion.

<comment><USER35> At the bottom of the article:

> This is an evolving publication, and I shall be extending it over the coming > days and weeks to cover more topics on serverless architecture including > some things commonly confused with serverless, and the benefits and > drawbacks of this approach.

You can send a tweet to the author: [https://twitter.com/mikebroberts](https://twitter.com/mikebroberts)

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> With this type of architecture, aren't you creating latency by separating out the "backend" from the database? In the traditional approach the backend server and database are in the same datacenter, but it seems that's often not the case in FaaS approach, what are the ramifications of that?

<comment><USER37> If you were on AWS, I would expect the Lamdba fn to be running in the same datacenter as the backing dynamodb table, or at least in the same region. dynamodb response times are pretty good - typically under 10 milliseconds.

<comment><USER36> Thanks, is this something you have to be aware of when setting this all up or does Amazon do this for you?

<comment><USER37> AWS is far from simple, and there is a lot to learn. For a start, you will need to know what a Region and Availability zone are: [http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/using- reg...](http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/using-regions- availability-zones.html)

Roughly speaking: A region is a geographic location (e.g. eu-west-1 is in Ireland and eu-central-1 is in Frankfurt, Germany) The "Availability Zones" are separate datacenter buildings in that region connected by fat pipes.

For fault-tolerance, it is common to make sure that all of app's parts run across multiple availability zones in the region. This will happen without much manual config.

Crossing regions is very different - it's not going to happen automatically, they're pretty much isolated from each other. Only a few extremely-highly- available apps (e.g. netflix) have engineered to cross regions. See [https://www.infoq.com/presentations/netflix-failure- multiple...](https://www.infoq.com/presentations/netflix-failure-multiple- regions)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> We sort of do this for a JVM with the exception that it is the JVM and you really can't be rebooting it all the time.

What we do is use a message queue and extreme thread isolation. Are internal framework is sort of analogous to an actor framework and/or Hystrix but is stateless through out. Messages are basically functions that need to be run.

That being said because our whole architecture is message driven and uses a queue with many client implementations we have been experimenting with OCaml Mirage and even some Rust + lightweight container because of the serious limitation of booting up the JVM.

</comment><comment><USER39> The one thing I haven't seen discussed in the serverless world is state as optimization.

For instance, if I have a machine learning application that has to access a very large trained model, I would like to load that model into memory at application startup. Loading from disk at every "function call" would be too slow. So would making RPC calls to some external "model cache" service.

Does AWS Lambda / similar have some sort of overridable "init"?

<comment><USER40> That would be a case where you wouldn't want to use a purely serverless model. You'd want a persistent server that loads the data and then exposes it as an API for your other serverless functions.

That being said, it's important to remember that Lambda doesn't reload your function for _every_ function call. It loads it on the first call and then keeps it active for a few minutes as long as there are still requests coming in, so you'd only have to deal with that initial load once in a while (or almost never if your function is active enough).

Unless you had a way of extracting your model into a very fast database.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> "1\. Often require vendor-specific language, or at least vendor-specific frameworks / extensions to a language"

...

"(1) is definitely not a concern for the FaaS implementations I've seen so far, so we can scrub that one off the list right away."

That point do not make any sense to me. You have to follow the AWS Lambda programming model which is specific to AWS Lambda, so either way you are tied to some libraries and patterns which are vendor-specific.

</comment><comment><USER42> I think the word serverless makes more sense in p2p/decentralized architectures, than in platforms using pre-built servers.

</comment><comment><USER25> [http://martinfowler.com/articles/serverless/sps.svg](http://martinfowler.com/articles/serverless/sps.svg)

Is there something wrong that the client browser is connecting directly to the database, so JS -> MySQL direct connection won't expose credentials ?

<comment><USER43> It doesn't say "MySQL database".

The client could conceivably connect to something like an ElasticSearch database (JSON API), setup with no auth/read-only permissions and appropriate rate-limiting.

<comment><USER25> You are really talking about a very small use case if you say the only database that could be used would be no auth/read-only considering most database requires auth for security and most apps need to write.

<comment><USER44> And then you use a "function" behind the gateway for the parts that need to write or need to see things that need authentication. Just like in the diagram...? Nothing says that you can _only_ allow public access to a database.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> Wrong. All wrong. Serverless is like what is the server standing on before the server? That is serverless. Peer to peer mesh discovery protocols, for example. Serverless implies no server. Buzzz buzzzzz buzzzz buzzzz. Sexless sex.

</comment><comment><USER46> So the web page now has to contact a lot of servers. That means more round trips and worse security - more endpoints means a bigger surface for attacks. Also you know what data is on what server - you just have to inspect the javascript source code. Is this a good idea?

</comment><comment><USER47> Trouble is most of these are completely single vendor and closed. If you build your app for Lambda, theoretically you've built it to run on _one_ computer: the AWS lambda "main frame."

<comment><USER48> That's not really true. Lambda apps are just a collection of node.js modules that are defined at the function level. I can and have easily port a Lambda app to a node.js express app, infact I did so for a Lambda app that was non- trivial (400 functions defined) in about half a day.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> s/serverless/zero-ops/g

</comment><comment><USER50> How does this work with WebSockets?

Like, a bit more than FaaS, but less than PaaS?

<comment><USER51> Raw WebSocket handling could be delegated to something like Pushpin [1] (disclaimer: author). This way, the backend doesn't have to maintain any long- lived connections of its own, but it retains a similar level of control over each connection that a full backend would have had.

As an experiment, we built a chat app like this (using Stamplay as the FaaS) and it actually worked.

[1] [https://github.com/fanout/pushpin](https://github.com/fanout/pushpin)

<comment><USER50> Interesting. But I need my own server to run pushpin?

<comment><USER51> That or you can use Fanout Cloud which provides Pushpin-as-a-service.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> Serverless now means "servers in the cloud" ? So what do we call apps that don't use servers!? I'm actually writing one right now...

</comment><comment><USER53> I feel blockstack.org offers the best serverless technology.

</comment><comment><USER54> #content { margin: auto; }

y/w :D :D

</comment><comment><USER55> shared hosting reinvented :) Name is way cooler though

</comment><comment><USER56> Torrent ?</comment>


Show HN: Make Firefox competely dissappear and reappear[Linux & Mac] - <AUTHOR>

Since this could have undesired side effects while quick browsing here is the url: http://www.christopherwoodall.com/peekaboo
It has something to do with either OS widgets and/or GTK(resizing a window >65555 pixels). Nothing special, i.e. code execution, but interesting to say the least.
I think the fact that the window and task bar item "disappears"(process is still running) then "reappears" after the timeout if neat. <comment><USER2> for me the window dissapeared and never reappeared, every time I killed firefox it restored an invisible window, I was close to wiping my profile before it suddenly went away.

If you are really curious then I would use a new profile to try it

<comment><AUTHOR> What version of FF are you using? It should only sleep for a bit and come back.

<comment><USER2> 4.0.1 on OSX</comment></comment></comment>


RebirthDB: community-developed fork of the RethinkDB database - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/RebirthDB <comment><USER2> Can someone chime in what is the reason for fork ?

The RethinkDB is open source some time albeit the development stalled.

Kudos to community, RethinkDB heavy and happy user

EDIT: more details here [https://spectrum.chat/rebirthdb](https://spectrum.chat/rebirthdb)

<comment><USER3> No 2.4 release happening despite code being ready. Nobody who wants to make a release happen having access to download servers, website, etc.

<comment><USER4> That sounds awful. Have the maintainers gone silent? Their co-founder Slava used to be pretty active here in HN.

<comment><USER5> According to the github issue, all attempts at contacting the maintainers or originals devs have fialed.

[https://github.com/rethinkdb/rethinkdb/issues/6659](https://github.com/rethinkdb/rethinkdb/issues/6659)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What to do when company takes Covid-19 as a joke? - <AUTHOR> Basically my company is only starting to consider the possibility of eventually having the thoughts of working from home... Based in London and things could easily escalate here to the same situation as Italy. Should I simply not come from next week and WFH regardless of what they say or be a patient lamb? <comment><USER2> You're obviously concerned so you might not like my (very subjective) advice.

If the official recommendation is that each company decides on their own, then there is not much you can do and you'll have to follow the company guideline. If the company insists on not doing anything, then their leadership is dangerously irrational. In that case, I'd seriously consider looking for another job now rather than waiting until the economic crisis hits. (It will likely hit hard, world-wide.)

If you're asking about the personal risk of going to the company versus staying at home, that cannot be answered in general. Are you going with public transport/the tube? That's a very high infection risk. Otherwise, going there and working there might not be a high risk, depending on the office layout and facilities for sanitizing. Does the building have air conditioning? That's probably a very high risk. How old are you? The younger, the less of a personal risk you have.

Without more information, it's impossible to judge or even attempt to quantify the personal risk.

</comment><comment><USER3> Unless it's a very small company, or you're very senior, you possibly just aren't aware what the company is considering.

I'm reasonably senior in a large global company (I'm based in the UK) and what we are doing, versus what we are officially allowed to say that we are doing, differ pretty widely.

We are also, largely, asking most folk to keep working as usual unless there are specific reasons not too. And we are tracking all those decisions centrally.

And, although I disagree with some of what we are doing, most of it is for very good reason. We have a duty of care, both legally and morally, and, as with the government, public safety sometimes clashes with individual wishes.

Having said that, I'd be pretty surprised if we get through next week without a much larger contingent working from home, but there's an awful lot of wood to chop before that will occur.

<comment><USER4> How does your comment help the OP?

Your company sounds like it's mishandling this. It sounds like you're dealing with secrecy and putting lives at risk.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Can you start working remotely on your own? Do you need permission? If not, starting that. The virus is probably already in London.

<comment><USER6> Well established some Londoners do have the virus, and the risk of transmission in typical London transport or offices is non-zero. But if he does need permission, the challenge might be that the UK government's stance is to pointedly _not_ instruct offices or schools to close yet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> The UK has 500+ confirmed cases. It's safe to assume the virus is widespread in the population. You'll have the same numbers as Italy in a few weeks. There is no way to avoid that outcome.

<comment><USER8> I think the general idea is not to avoid it forever but delay infections as much as possible so the healthcare system has time to process them. Essentially avoid DDoS'ing hospitals.

Yes, almost everybody will get this thing but let's not do it all at the same time (and before there's a vaccine or specific medication).

<comment><AUTHOR> People say it like it's a cold and we might as well get it instead of everything close for 2 weeks and get it over with. I don't know why UK think it's so much better and special than any other country in Europe. Only time will show.

<comment><USER9> The UK (and I'm not saying I agree with this) says that people are going to get covid-19 no matter what we do, so we want to get as many young healthy people to get now as possible. That means they stop being vectors for transmission, and it means we can manage hospital admissions and "cocoon" vulnerable people.

personally, I think this is a risky strategy that's going to cause hundreds of thousands of deaths and totally over-whelm our hospitals who are already struggling under winter pressures.

[https://twitter.com/iandonald_psych/status/12385183716516495...](https://twitter.com/iandonald_psych/status/1238518371651649538?s=20)

[https://thesmallplaces.wordpress.com/2020/03/13/cocoons/](https://thesmallplaces.wordpress.com/2020/03/13/cocoons/)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Antivirus software deletes itself - <AUTHOR> http://thenextweb.com/insider/2012/09/20/sophos-antimalware-software-detects-malware-deletes-critical-binaries/ <comment><USER2> The author of this article doesn't know what the term "bricking" means. If you delete key Windows files you will not "brick" a PC.

"Bricking" is the process of turning a physical piece of hardware into a device as useful as a "brick" (thus its name). It was coined to describe what happens when you try and flash a phone and it is unrecoverably damaged.

<comment><USER3> I thought "Bricking" is a relative term. For someone with an compatible in circuit debugger/programer that phone would be probably salvageable. For someone else a corrupted operation system could be indistinguishable from the "bricked" state, because of lack of experience, or skills to fix the problem.

<comment><USER4> True, I've "bricked" my Android phone a few times by flashing a new OS version, and always recovered it with ADB.

<comment><USER5> That's a 'soft brick'. It's a strange term, but necessary to differentiate from phones that will never turn on again.

It's difficult to brick a phone these days.

<comment><USER4> I know, the point of my comment was that it's almost as hard to brick a phone as it is bricking a PC. You've got to kill the bootloader to achieve this, which rarely happens, even when you flash a corrupt OS.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This was brought on by an unforeseen natural evolution of antivirus software.

1\. The software becomes sentient, learns to define, recognize and delete viruses on it's own.

2\. The software realizes that by every definition it is itself a virus and must delete itself. :)

<comment><USER7> 1.5 The software decides that Man is a virus and must be eliminated.

<comment><USER8> 1.25: The software gets distracted by its own self-awareness. Crisis averted. (<http://xkcd.com/1046/>)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Would this then be the first digital autoimmune disease? ;)

<comment><USER10> Or should we call it suicideware?

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> 65+ pages of sysadmin angst:

[http://community.sophos.com/t5/Sophos-Endpoint- Protection/Is...](http://community.sophos.com/t5/Sophos-Endpoint- Protection/Is-any-one-else-seing-this-alert-Shh-Updater-B-False- positives/td-p/29723)

<comment> johnx123-up This is why crowd sourcing alone might be a solution in AV industry to quickly push patches.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Nice, taste your own medicine AV companies!

Recent movement (last couple of years) by AV companies blocking everything which leads legitimate small businesses to take the stupid whitelisting route via AV companies or pointless customer calls to explain it's a false positive (and even when customer is convinced it's still not good enough because corporate doesn't allow them to exclude some binaries or disable AV).

</comment><comment><USER13> My employer got hit by this yesterday so I'm seeing occasional Sophos notifications. Sophos sucks just as badly as any other AV program: it slows down my laptop, shortens battery life, and has an uncanny knack for deciding to run a full scan right when I'm in the middle of something important.

</comment><comment><USER14> Sophos has been around for a very long time. I don't understand how an anti- virus company could not take action to prevent this time of thing from happening.

1) Why don't they have a secure hash of each of the files and add that to a whitelist of files never to delete?

2) "You want to ensure your secondary option (when cleanup is not available or does not work) to be set to 'deny access' and not delete or move." Is this not the default configuration?

</comment><comment><USER15> First case of autoimmune disease in the digital world?

</comment><comment><USER16> Finally an antivirus product I can approve of.

</comment><comment><USER17> Finally an antivirus that really works. Next in series: antivirus shows message "please install linux and get rid of me".

</comment><comment><USER18> What is life without death?

</comment><comment><USER19> I'm sorry...but I can't control my laughter...hahahahahaahahaha...seriously...best news I've ever read this week!

</comment><comment><USER20> Staging fail?

</comment><comment><USER21> it should delete Windows first

</comment><comment> johnx123-up Like this company <http://socialav.com/> crowd sourcing is the _future_. Good talents are really hard in antivirus industries.</comment>


Ask HN: Can you edit a YC application after the deadline? - <AUTHOR>

I'd like to make a significant edit to a field on my YC application (business model tweak after some user interviews this week), which I originally submitted on time.  Possible, two days after the deadline? <comment><USER2> i believe you can edit your application, although unsure if it'll be reclassified as a "late entry."</comment>


Giving away a ticket to Erlang Factory SF Bay (next week) - <AUTHOR> http://inakanetworks.com/blog/2012/03/22/inaka-erlang-factory-2012-ticket/

<comment><AUTHOR> It's technically a game of skill as you need to write an Erlang bot that plays "rock paper scissors lizard spock". That's either really easy if you know Erlang, or a great way to get started learning...

</comment><comment><USER2> Enjoyed! 10x ;)</comment>


Eric Ries interviewed on The Lean Startup methodology (with Q/A from HN) - <AUTHOR> http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2010/04/eric-ries-on-the-lean-startup-methodolgy.html

<comment><USER2> Gabriel, thanks for doing these interviews. They are very interesting and inspiring.

I don't know if you are very shy but I find it odd that you don't introduce yourself or say anything about why you are doing these interviews. It would be good to have a few seconds of video or slides with you talking about the book at the start and end of each interview.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Here's the thread where I asked for questions: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1267947>

The Q/A from these starts ~14:30.

</comment><comment><USER3> Gabriel, I've really enjoyed your series. Keep it up!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thx! Any improvement/interviewee/subject suggestions? I'm really trying to nail down every angle on getting traction in as much detail as possible.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Will an anonymous benefactor please donate the Mechanical Turk money needed for text transcripts?

<comment><USER5> I can set this up if Gabe wants it. It shouldn't be too big of deal. Gabe, let me know.</comment></comment>


HP-Oracle war: HP ditches Oracle CRM for Salesforce - <AUTHOR> http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/11/25/salesforce_oracle_hp/

<comment><USER2> Even with all the bad blood - migrating 40'000 users from one piece of software to another, while keeping all accumulated data intact is a huge and costly undertaking.

And while I'm sure that there is some recurring support cost for the currently deployed software, salesforce, while maybe cheaper in support, probably also comes with a huge initial license fee.

Is this fight over that one guy (albeit the CEO) really worth an investment of this size?

<comment><USER3> I'll bet Salesforce would have given them all sorts of freebies and concessions just for this publicity.

<comment><USER4> > _freebies and concessions just for this publicity_

And it's not just the publicity -- it's Salesforce.com's sales reps being able to say to Oracle's _other_ customers, one on one, that they should "be smart, do what HP did, rip out Oracle and go with us." That's not at all uncommon, from what my sales colleagues used to tell me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> HP still uses oracle financial internally. Let's see them ditch that...</comment>


FDA will allow 23andMe to bring some genome testing back to market - <AUTHOR> http://www.fastcompany.com/3051973/behind-the-brand/fda-will-allow-23me-to-bring-some-genome-testing-back-to-market?partner=hackernews <comment><USER2> As grandfathered user, I'm looking forward to others being able to get access to this type of information. It should be interesting to see what additional education on interpreting the results are issued. I felt the information they had provided was useful, and if I had questions I'd have asked my doctor anyway, but it should be interesting to see what more they've agreed to provide.

</comment><comment><USER3> This FDA decision happened in February: [http://www.fda.gov/NewsEvents/Newsroom/PressAnnouncements/UC...](http://www.fda.gov/NewsEvents/Newsroom/PressAnnouncements/UCM435003)</comment>


When Being Good Is Bad - <AUTHOR> http://simpleprogrammer.com/2012/07/23/when-being-good-is-bad/

<comment><USER2> Yeah, by all means, ship.

But be careful, because if there is a wall right in front of you, and you decide to ignore it, because "ship!", you'll hit it anyway, and it won't hurt any less. Viability estimation does not stop being impotant because people in HN are telling you to ship... But it's all meaningless if you don't ship.

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree, it's a careful balance. You have to know what the risks are involved. For example, I just started shipping YouTube videos, because, who cares. So what if people think I am stupid or don't like them. I'm learning and no harm done. But before you deploy that code that goes in the Mars rover, you might want to be a little more... sure.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> This cautionary tale rings painfully true to me.

I wonder when the perfection fallacy started infecting people's minds. Imo 500 years ago any artisan or common man would have laughed at the idea of achieving results by obsessing over theory. Learning by doing and practice was the obvious way.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yet, it's still something I struggle with every day. ;)</comment></comment>


Off Book | Generative Art - Computers, Data, and Humanity Arts - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x0OK1GiI83s

<comment><USER2> _... that delegates essential decisions to computers, data sets, or even random variables._

No. What good generative art shows is that the essential decisions are made at a higher level than what one might expect.

Indeed, pretty much most bad generative art (bad in the sense of being tedious, or unwatchable/unlistenable) comes about when essential decisions really are allowed to happen by pure chance or random input.</comment>


Watch Marissa Mayer Destroy Research In Motion In 23 Words - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/watch-marissa-mayer-destroy-research-in-motion-in-23-words-2012-11 <comment><USER2> Now I don't think she entirely killed RIM, as they have been trying for years to do it to themselves to little avail, but she certainly enumerated the largest problem with BlackBerries-they don't provide nearly the feature set modern smartphones have lead us to expect.</comment>


Ask HN: What are some fun / interesting datasets to analyse? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Real time event sources - [https://github.com/todsac/eventsources](https://github.com/todsac/eventsources)</comment>


The Scotty Effect - <AUTHOR> http://www.galaktor.net

<comment><USER2> Perhaps the biggest lesson here: never give someone a gut-level estimate of _anything_. The challenge is that a lot of clients/bosses/whatever will press you for one. Some people just need to hear a spot-estimate in order to feel comfortable.

In those cases, I've found a fairly effective verbal counter. It goes something like this: "Listen, Bob [assuming the client's name is Bob]. I don't want to mislead you here. I'd rather work up a proper estimate than throw out some number on the spot that might be incorrect. I want to do this the right way, for your benefit and mine."

If Bob presses you further, respond with "I've worked on similar projects in the past. Some have taken 2 days, and some have taken 10 days. It really depends on X, Y, and Z. I want to take a proper accounting of X, Y, and Z in this case, so that I'm not misleading you up front."

If pressed further: "Bob, obviously time is of the essence for you and for this project. I understand that, and I will do everything I can to ensure that I complete the project as quickly as possible. In the end, this will be much quicker if we get it right the first time. Give me a little bit of time to do some planning, and it'll save us a lot of time in the long run."

All of this is true, of course. It's better to aim twice and shoot once, as the saying goes. However, there will be clients or bosses who just won't accept this sort of conversation up front. It'll piss them off. So be it. FAR better to have a little bit of confrontation at the outset than a lot of confrontation later on (i.e., if you toss out a gut estimate and then have to crawl back and amend or delay it).

<comment><USER3> Addendum: If you absolutely HAVE to give a gut-level estimate, multiply your gut level estimate by 4 or 5 before you let it escape your mouth.

<comment><USER4> I roll a D12 then pick the units (hours/days/weeks) as appropriate.

<comment><USER5> "Awesome. We'll have that Perl-> Rails port with MySQL -> Cassandra conversion and 1 million paid accounts migrated in at most 12 weeks, ready to handle 5 million new accounts the day of our grand re-launch? Great! Then I don't have to worry about finding a SDET or QAE or Datacenter admin to help parallelize the work and hit our release date. Marketing has the press conferencne all planned, we just needed the word from you before we filled in the Octo..Nove..Decem..January 24 launch date! Thanks!"

<comment><USER4> Or months ;-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The lesson here, once again, is that _estimates are not commitments_.

[http://cwd.dhemery.com/2003/08/estimates_are_not_commitments...](http://cwd.dhemery.com/2003/08/estimates_are_not_commitments/)

"If you ask Fred, "When will you be done?" have you asked for an estimate or a commitment? What does Fred think you asked for? If Fred says, "Two weeks from today," has he given an estimate or a commitment? What might happen if you want a commitment and Fred thinks you want an estimate? What might happen if you want an estimate and Fred thinks you want a commitment? How could you make it crystal clear whether you're asking for an estimate or for a commitment? How could you make it crystal clear whether Fred is giving an estimate or a commitment?"

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree. That is also why some processes (i.e. Scrum) force you to make an explicit distinction between "estimations" and "commitments" (and that still does not keep some people from forgetting the difference).

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> this post completely ignores the secret scotty divulged to Geordi on TNG: he always told kirk things would take twice as long as they really would. "How else will they think you're a miracle worker?"

<comment><AUTHOR> Ha, good catch. But let's not get started on inconsistencies in the Star Trek universe :-)

Edit: I meant to add that Scotty obviously was a genius in many ways.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I was expecting this "Scotty Effect":

Lt. Commander Geordi La Forge: Look, Mr. Scott, I'd love to explain everything to you, but the Captain wants this spectrographic analysis done by 1300 hours.

Scotty: Do you mind a little advice? Starfleet captains are like children. They want everything right now and they want it their way. But the secret is to give them only what they need, not what they want.

Lt. Commander Geordi La Forge: Yeah, well, I told the Captain I'd have this analysis done in an hour.

Scotty: How long will it really take? Lt. Commander Geordi La Forge: An hour!

Scotty: Oh, you didn't tell him how long it would _really_ take, did ya?

Lt. Commander Geordi La Forge: Well, of course I did.

Scotty: Oh, laddie. You've got a lot to learn if you want people to think of you as a miracle worker.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> FYI I updated the post in response to the often quoted scene from TNG's "Relics" where Scotty tells Geordi he should always exaggerate his estimations.</comment>


LMFDB, a catalog of mathematical objects and the connections between them - <AUTHOR> http://aimath.org/aimnews/lmfdb/ <comment> nv-vn The idea is awesome, but it sort of loses its usefulness to people who aren't math experts. It's very clear by looking at the website that it's _not_ meant to be a Wikipedia for math. That's definitely not a bad thing, but I think that this website leaves an opening for something conceptually similar (but different in its implementation) that would be a sort of digital pathway through as many math concepts as possible -- for example, you can start on a page formalizing the idea of numbers and click links to navigate to addition, and then later on to multiplication, etc. allowing one to study math from the ground up. Or, you could start at a high-level concept and work your way down to the simple math. The purpose wouldn't be for researchers to better connect math, but for students trying to learn how math comes together in a broader sense. I think that a site like that could serve the same general purpose we see here of collecting math into a big catalog, just in a way that's more friendly to newcomers.

<comment><USER2> There is something like this already called Wolfram Mathworld [1]. As a mathematical laymen trying to solve the problems on Project Euler, Mathworld would often give me the insight I needed to find an efficient solution so it is a great tool for students.

[1] [http://mathworld.wolfram.com/](http://mathworld.wolfram.com/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> _Edit: Link since the link in the article is missing the protocol:[http://www.lmfdb.org](http://www.lmfdb.org) ._

This is somewhat similar to (and significantly more detailed than) something I've wanted for a long time:

      Feb. 26, 2009
      </comment><comment></comment><comment>-

      What the world really needs is a poster that teachers
      can hang in their classrooms with a map of the world
      of math.  It would essentially be a directed acyclic
      graph, with nodes representing mathematical concepts,
      and arrows linking those concepts to the next level
      of concepts one can learn, as well as real-life
      problems that can be solved with that level of math.
      For example, the chart would start with basic
      arithmetic, with addition and subtraction leading to
      multiplication and division.  The related tasks
      possible with addition would be things like grocery
      shopping, subtraction would be figuring change from a
      purchase or determining how much time remains before
      some event.  Multiplication would allow one to make
      simple designs, calculate taxes and tips, etc.  The
      arrows would then go through the concepts of algebra,
      geometry, calculus, and on to things like the Fourier
      transform.  The things one can do at a particular
      level could be represented as a bubble, with more
      math leading to a bigger bubble (and, if necessary to
      convince the kids, more money).

      This would also be beneficial to college students
      trying to convince their brains to remember all the
      seemingly-useless things they are learning in one
      class because they need to understand the concepts
      for next semester's classes.  In fact, such roadmaps
      would make life a lot easier in general.  "Want to
      become a $140000/year contractor?  These are the
      steps you follow."

<comment><USER4> Sounds like Khan Academy's knowledge map:

[https://www.khanacademy.org/exercisedashboard](https://www.khanacademy.org/exercisedashboard)

I think you have to be logged in, but you can see a screenshot here:

[http://i.imgur.com/3HyRRyv.png](http://i.imgur.com/3HyRRyv.png)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> The link to the atlas in the article isn't working. You can visit the atlas via: [http://www.lmfdb.org](http://www.lmfdb.org)

<comment><USER6> the authors forgot to add the protocol to the link

href="www.lmfdb.org" should be href="[http://www.lmfdb.org"](http://www.lmfdb.org")

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I would say that «a mathematical universe» would be more correct here, because they just cover some of the areas; for example searching for «Ramsey» will yield no results; «probability» will yield just one result where an algebraic construction happens to be useful for calculating some probabilities.

<comment><USER8> I don't know why it is being presented on the news as a catalog of the whole mathematics, when it is designed just a catalog of mathematical objects related to the Langlands Program [1] which is very broad as a mathematical theory (you don't usually find theories touching abstract algebra geometry, number theory and analysis) but of course does not consider _all_ mathematical objects.

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

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> This was discussed at [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11667487](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11667487), but since the article gives more background, we won't treat the post as a dupe.

(Submitted title was "Scientists Launched an Enormous Atlas of the Mathematical Universe", which was arguably editorialized and rather baity—please don't do that. We replaced it with a representative phrase from the article.)

</comment><comment><USER10> Might be related, are there any websites where you can learn knowledge/skills like a Skill Tree/Perk Tree in games?

I knew Duolingo had a design like that.

<comment><USER11> Doesn't Khan Academy have that?

<comment><USER10> Does Khan Academy have some kind of test, so when I finish it will automatically assess by present abilities and activate corresponding skill icons?

<comment><USER4> Yes

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Recent related discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11667487](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11667487)

</comment><comment><USER13> I wonder if it is possible to get a full dump of that db

<comment><USER14> It is. It's open source, and the backend is closely tied to the free math software sagemath (sometimes called sage). In fact, the site sometimes generates the data on request through sage instead of filling in large databases of static objects.

</comment></comment><comment> iso-8859-1 As a catalog of mathematical objects, it should be comparable to Metamath: [http://de.metamath.org/index.html](http://de.metamath.org/index.html)

But this project seems to be specific to number theory, and not really concerned with proofs at all.

Where can I find the webcast mentioned?

</comment><comment><USER15> It's great when scientists do stuff.</comment>