The Government's $200,000 Useless Android Application - <AUTHOR> http://gun.io/blog/the-governments-200000-useless-android-application/ <comment><USER3> Fine. "6 hours maximum", says the author, for an app translated into English and Spanish that interfaces with a remote database and performs some user- initiated calculations, and also has a bunch of static pages. Before starting you must consult with at least a dozen people who know very little about Android and succinctly describe the capabilities of the smartphone and what sorts of applications are even possible. Finally you must provide documentation.

Ready? Go! Keep track of your hours...

I installed the app. It works fine. Responsive, fast, no problems. I have two minor quibbles with the design, but they are minor. Does what it says on the box. Not an exciting piece of software, but... Has even one person commenting on this thread installed it except me? No? Didn't think so. "It's a piece of crap" says a highly self-interested blogger, and Hacker News jumps on that like starving dogs on Alpo.

<comment><USER4> I was actually just going to mention this. With all of the in-bundle resource differences required for two iPhone resolutions, different .xibs for iPad, etc, we're talking about much more than 6 hours worth of work here.

The source code (for iOS, at least) is also pretty clean and decently commented for what it is.

$96k is still outrageous, but for work-for-hire it's off by a factor of 2-5 rather than a factor of 10.

Nevertheless, it's crap. The quality of the constructed software is irrelevant because the feature set is a no-op. It's a graphical front end for a NOAA web service that returns temperature and humidity. If the public isn't living and breathing the content of that NOAA web service, maybe it's because there's no graphical tool to access it, but maybe it's because they have 50,000 other ways to determine temperature and humidity at their current location. Like, say, existing in a conscious state at their current location.

<comment><USER5> >but maybe it's because they have 50,000 other ways to determine temperature and humidity at their current location. Like, say, existing in a conscious state at their current location.

Most of us can say "it's cold" or "it's humid" -- but we rely on more mature data services so we can know exactly how cold or how humid it might be...

You've essentially just argued that NOAA stat tracking is pointless because "you can stick your head out of a window".

<comment><USER4> >You've essentially just argued that NOAA stat tracking is pointless because "you can stick your head out of a window".

I've argued that the translation and re-display of these particular NOAA stats on a smartphone, for the viewer's location, is pointless because I can stick my head out of a window.

When operating an aircraft, I _love_ NOAA stat tracking. I think NOAA and the National Weather Service are probably two of the best deals the American public can ever expect to get for their money.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> In the government agency where I work, $200k would actually be considered very reasonable for a steaming pile of shit. We've paid many times that amount and sometimes the shit wasn't even lukewarm, let alone steaming. Believe it or not, we often spend $150 to $200k or more just to make the decision about whether or not we're going to invest in a particular pile of shit.

<comment><USER7> This is double-plus not good.

<comment><USER8> Watch your newspeak, citizen.

You meant doubleplusungood, right?

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newspeak>

<comment><USER7> Doubleplussorry!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The problem with the government trying to do something is that anyone who's really really qualified will find the paperwork, compliance, and bidding procedures way too complicated for the sums of money involved.

The Android app cost 106k btw. So looking at this guys hourly rate, it would take approximately 6 months of 40 hour weeks for him to cost that much to do the app.

So if he:

Learned out to submit the forms that got him into the bidding

Made changes to his company required to make it seem a valid bid target

Filed the correct forms to put in his bid

Factored in correctly the amount of oversight and travel that would be required to get even a simple app done according to the whims of the people hired to get it made

Used server technologies compliant with government desires, including ones he may never really willingly touch with a 10 foot pole

Then MAYBE, just MAYBE, he'd be able to go as low as say, 60k or so. And that's for a small indie dev. Now look at a bigger company doing this app (as the government likes support, unlike a single freelancer can necessarily provide), and you easily hit the 106k range.

Does it not work well? Sounds like it works like crap. But complicated crap still can be expensive to make.

<comment><USER10> If someone is interested in how the government procurement process is gamed, "The Stoner Arms Dealers: How Two American Kids Became Big-Time Weapons Traders" in Rolling Stone is a good read - [http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-stoner-arms- de...](http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-stoner-arms- dealers-20110316)

It sounded to me like the whole business was getting the contract written correctly. Once the contract was procured, fulfillment it was more of an after thought.

<comment><USER9> That is not accurate in my experience. Their contracts were even mentioned to be in the piece to be for foreigners, so no one cared, etc.

Sponsers care a hell of a lot that things do the right things when it's important.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Outstanding piece of marketing on Gun.io's part with a clear "here's how my biz solves this" at the end.

#1 on Hacker News is a feat, but this thing has legs on every political and general fluff channel - HuffPo, FoxNews, Conservative Radio, CNN, wire services, etc.

I learned from our own blogging efforts when you have a winner, take it to the bank.

EG - Hit every PR angle you can think of to get redistribution while you've got the momentum.

Any PR gurus out there that would comment on the top handful of ways to fan the flames on PR for a story like this?

I'd love to understand the process when you've got this ripe of content.

<comment><USER12> Right, was thinking that the writer could file a petition on change.org, great way to build the buzz (aside from the main purpose)

<comment><USER13> The irony would be that whatever legislated change the government would make to publicly "fix" this problem would in reality just add another step with another form to the process.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This is definitely hacker-bait. Cue up all the folks complaining about wasteful government, then cue up the hotshot programmer folks who will tell us they can code this in 2 hours while drunk, then cue up the FOIA folks, then the folks who feel any critique at all of government is indicative of right- wing extremism, and so on.

I remember when the IRS spent 4 Billion on a new computer system _and had nothing to show for it_. The joke I used for a week was "Hell, they could have paid me $2 Billion and still not had anything to show for it -- and saved half their money."

The problem those of us with lots of internal government experience is that most "normal" folks have literally no idea how much waste there is. Yes, it's like a big university. Yes, it's like BigCorp. But no, it's so far beyond those concepts that if that's the only frame of reference you have, you've missed it.

I love my country and love paying taxes for it to do useful things. But there simply is no system in place for shutting things down. It just keeps growing. In the private sector the measurement is "does it do something that folks will pay us for?" because if it doesn't, folks eventually stop paying, and the company goes away (although it might take decades). In the public sector the metric is "does it make a politician look bad?"

There's a reason Congress delegates all these powers to all these agencies. It's the same reason we have so many "Tsars". Nobody is directly accountable. It's all set up so that if there is a problem, some poor schmuck gets hauled before an investigative committee to get the riot act read to them. That way the guys who are supposed to be really responsible -- the Congressmen -- get to play the part of the person looking to fix things. Politics. It's a beautiful thing.

So at the end of the day I'm not really sure this is newsworthy. I could tell similar stories involving tens of millions of dollars, and I bet we could come up with a list of hundreds of these things. Anybody remember the FBI case file system? This is just way small peanuts. Perhaps the "Android app" part of it is enough to be newsworthy, but in my mind that's a benefit: today there are a lot of people pleading to move away from COBOL systems in some government agency -- and losing. I feel really sorry for those guys.

<comment><USER15> Also, this $200k app is probably an example of good government spending. Arguably, it's UK style Fabian socialism, in which government spending is making it impossible for better private solutions to flourish. Libertarian fanboys will whinge no matter what the government does, unless it does nothing.

200k is a small amount (for any big org), and it's actually going to something public facing, unlike 90% of government work which is simply faceless men putting obtuse reports in each other's pigeon holes. Do we really want to attack one of the few times the government actually tries to make their work relevant to the public?

You could equally argue that the 1% is wasting billions on stupid sock puppet ads for online pet shops, photo sharing apps, and AOL. Or on stock options for chefs and masseuses. Or on million dollar teams that do nothing more than re- invent wheels, badly.

It's arguable that the government should be doing this at all. But I certainly believe that if government should be doing anything, they should be making their work available to the general public. I don't think they got screwed - 200k for an app is not a giant rip-off. They might have been able to do it cheaper, but it's not totally out of line with the sort of crap industry does.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I'm curious if this really surprises anyone here that the entire process for the government purchasing three mobile applications (Android, iOS, and BB) was ~200k. This seems pretty ordinary/normal to me.

<comment><USER10> In the governments defense, I think big corporations routinely overpay for web development and marketing expenses.

Aanecdotally, a girl I know who works for a pharmaceutical company said they spent $60,000 on a three page web site.

Then I sit in Starbucks and listen to some freelancer get reamed for charging $1,000 to build and manage some guy's website. One would think that the price discrepancies for the same product among different buyers would not be so extreme in a capitalist marketplace.

<comment><USER17> Neither the government nor large corporations qualify as the kind of free and ideal market you're referring to.

<comment><USER10> How does the term "capitalist marketplace" infer "free and ideal market?"

The purchase and sale of cocaine occurs in a market where virtually all sellers are capitalists. It is neither free nor ideal.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I have worked for one of these "green energy"/"smart grid" companies. My conclusion about that company (after about six months of working there) was that its core competency wasn't writing software. The software was a shoddy pile of half-working crap written in a proprietary programming language made by another company that didn't exist any more. No, their core competency was 1) navigating government bureaucracy and 2) filling out government forms. These two competencies ensured that there was never a need to actually produce good software because few competitors would have the time and contacts to even bid on the contract, much less secure it and write good software.

</comment><comment><USER19> The code was actually released November 2nd: [http://www.muckrock.com/foi/view/united-states-of- america/so...](http://www.muckrock.com/foi/view/united-states-of- america/source-code-of-heat-safety-tool/766/)

<comment><USER20> Good find! I need go find the dailywtf submission form. I've only glanced at the code but my favorite part so far is using integers 0/1 as booleans and putting "myValid1 == 1" everywhere they want to check if it is true. Didn't they list in the billing that they internationalized this? it's full of hardcoded english strings and nothing is done with the resource files.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> In the European Union, governments are legally required to open public works and supplying contracts to competition through an open tendering process. I'm surprised that this doesn't happen in the US.

There's a fair bit of criticism levelled against the EU tendering processes, though. Many feel that the process emphasizes price at the expense of quality, resulting in a "race to the bottom" as another poster mentioned.

Public contracts currently open in the EU can be found on a website: <http://ted.europa.eu>

Looking quickly through the site, the contracts seem to have a huge range -- everything from large architectural projects to supplying a small Swedish town with photocopier paper...

<comment><USER22> I was surprised by this and decided to check it out, and it looks like they're not really.

 _the implementation of EU government law by national governments is far from uniform and sometimes weak – in 2002, for instance, only 16% of governmental calls to tender were published – government procurement has been called "the weakest link in the common market".[2]_

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_procurement_in_the_E...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_procurement_in_the_European_Union)

Also check the minimum amounts this applies to, this probably wouldn't have been necessary to put through the process anyway.

<comment><USER21> Indeed, the minimum amounts (known in EU jargon as _de minimis_ tresholds) are higher than I had assumed.

As the Wikipedia article states, these _de minimis_ tresholds "provide an incentive for authorities to divide contracts into separate lots", which is thought to be the reason for the small amount of public contracts that go through the tendering process.

I think individual member governments are free to set stricter limits, though. At least in Finland, some public contracts as small as 15,000 € are required to be openly tendered. (Last year there was a well-published scandal when a high-level Helsinki city administrator ordered some 70k€ worth of office furniture without official tendering.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I am not the least surprised.

My girlfriend works for the Health Department in my home state. They paid two consultants $100,000 to convert paper documents to digital form. The contract lasted one week.

The consultants literally put documents into a scanner and converted them to PDF. At the end of the week they took their money and left, leaving the bulk of the documents unscanned.

An intern could've done this work for $10 an hour. And he/she would've actually finished the job.

</comment><comment><USER4> These guys are clearly elite:

<code> \- (float)getHeatIndex:(float)temp:(float)humidity {

        NSLog(@"[getHeatIndex] temp: %f, humidity: %f", temp, humidity);

        float hIndex =
        -42.379 + 2.04901523 * temp
        + 10.14333127 * humidity
        - 0.22475541 * temp * humidity
        - 6.83783 * pow(10, -3) * temp * temp
        - 5.481717 * pow(10, -2) * humidity * humidity
        + 1.22874 * pow(10, -3) * temp * temp * humidity
        + 8.5282 * pow(10, -4) * temp * humidity * humidity
        - 1.99 * pow(10, -6) * temp * temp * humidity * humidity;

        //hIndex = round(hIndex);
        NSLog(@"-Heat Index: %f", hIndex);
        return hIndex;

} </code>

</comment><comment><USER24> I've dealt with some Government agencies before in a few different capacities, and they actually WANT To spend their money. The actual cost doesn't really matter, as they are trying to get as close to their budgets as possible, as to not have them decreased the next year.

This is especially true in the last 30 or 60 days - to the point where you invoice and are paid before the job is done just because it "has" to be in the billing period.

</comment><comment><USER25> Is this really much different than outsourced projects for huge corporations? Seems like large organizations get charged a premium for the same amount of work.

Government can hire technical people who can do the work in house, or who are qualified to evaluate the work. But because of the pressure to keep government small, qualified tech people go to the private sector and overcharge the government. Seems like one can't win here.

<comment><USER26> No, its not.

Its also worth pointing out that sometimes, just sometimes, it works out the other way. I was the lead on a team that took $150k in funding and produced an open-source implementation of some CDC specifications (<https://github.com/talho/openphin>), and became the first software in the country to be certified with it. We developed it in about 12 weeks, and the first milestone certifications were actually complete-able (meaning we had the features, though the paperwork took longer) within 2 weeks. We were up against companies used in other states like Northrup and SAIC that literally spent millions on the implementations (and don't even get me started on how much those same companies spent coming up with the standards in the first place, which is a whole 'nother problem) and beat them handily at their own game.

We did use private contractors as additional assets starting out and while they were more expensive than hiring additional developers, they had two great attributes: temporary, and good at what they did. Its worth it to pay for competence, every single time. And when its a one-time expense for a project, its much, much easier to deal with than something that incurs year-over-year expenditures.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> The $200k price tag is unsurprising if you factor in the cost of non-coding work like requirements gathering, travels, expenses, benefits, etc. This seems like a simple app but when you have a design by committee, approvals, etc it can be quite manpower intensive.

The OSHA document is not rendering for me so I can't tell if there's a cost breakdown.

<comment><USER28> The sad thing is the amount of non-coding work that exists.

But that's government. Still want to move more things under their purview?

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> I think the author is also forgetting that any programming work done for the government/state is always contractually bound by a multi-year code guarantee. This means that if any bugs are uncovered within that time period, the vendor must at no cost to the government fix them. That leads to drawn out negotiations over if something is a bug or enhancement. These code guarantees typically range between 2 - 5 years during which you can't charge a dime for anything related to fixing actual bugs.

</comment><comment><USER30> I've been on a govt project for the last four years and can't begin to tell you how much money is wasted on IT projects during the entire year. Hearing in the News that the administration is trying to save money by cutting on office supplies makes me laugh! The "Supercommittee" could have at least put a dent in the savings by literally just reviewing the IT projects that the Govt contracts out and the process they follow to manage those contracts.

In the agency I work in, there are 9 IT systems that go to production twice in a year. For the entire year the total development time provided (when environments are open for programmers to develop) is about 2 months. Yet the govt is paying the developers and complete IT teams for the entire year.

It really is ridiculous. Big boys like BAH, SAIC, CSC, CACI etc. etc. are milking the system and taking advantage of incompetent and gullible govt employees.

</comment><comment><USER31> The title should be edited. It's 200,000 for all versions Android, iPhone and Blackberry. The Android one was 100,000.

</comment><comment><USER32> There's probably a good startup to be had in managing the government procurement bidding process for small developers, and thus lowering the barrier to bidding, and reducing the likelihood that contracts will go to folks like this.

</comment><comment><USER33> Whoever runs ERG is getting very rich by making crap that doesn't even work. It's like a negative programmer. Except we're all paying for it.

And this is the 'obvious' case, in which it's easy to tell it's crap. What about those times when I'm relying on the experts at these agencies to find solutions to difficult problems without a clear indicator of success? I'm not anti-government by any stretch, but man. The legalese sounded so good: "critical, real-time hot weather information"...

Sure, I know that's BS, but what about when I'm not qualified to judge it (i.e. military decisions in Afghanistan based on intel that I'm not privy to).

</comment><comment><USER34> I would like to point out that SAIC more or less stole VisTA source code from the VA under FOIA and then sold the same code to the Department of Defense for billions. We still can't get the source code they've modified. Why is it that if a government employee writes the software, it's FOIA'ble, but if the government pays someone else for it, it's not? The government is just stuck with some crappy binaries?

<comment><USER35> SAIC also screwed up the FBI's Virtual Case File, NSA's Trailblazer, New York's CityTime (with a extra helping of fraud thrown in). It would be interesting to hear of any software project they did do which was not a multi hundred million dollar software engineering disaster.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> It's also worth noting that Congress is threatening to cut the budget for the project that tracks overspending on IT projects - the IT Dashboard. While the IT Dashboard tool was properly open sourced and the codebase is doing well out in the wild, the continued use of it for the Federal Government isn't totally free, but the very small budget required to keep something like this running can prevent spending hundreds of millions of dollars on excessive IT projects.

For more info on budget cuts that could effect projects like the IT Dashboard, see: [http://sunlightfoundation.com/blog/2011/11/16/crunch-time- in...](http://sunlightfoundation.com/blog/2011/11/16/crunch-time-in-senate- for-flagship-transparency-programs/)

For information on the open source IT Dashboard project, see: <http://civiccommons.org/2011/05/it-dashboard-six-weeks-in/>

</comment><comment><USER37> I've looked at the source code for the application (which is available), the claim that this can be done in 6 hours is absolutely right.

Another thing. It seems like the company outsourced the development as well to these guys pixelbitcreative. The entire application contains ~1400 lines of code. I wonder how the money got eaten as we went up the chart.

</comment><comment><USER38> Brilliant article. Couple of key takeaways:

1\. "The shocking part about this isn't even that it happened, but rather that it is incredibly routine. This is just one FOIA request to one tiny department for one tiny, single use application that will perhaps be used by, at most, five hundred people.. and it cost as much as a house. You can imagine what the waste must be like in other government run sectors..."

2\. "The other issue is the source code. In my opinion, since we taxpayers paid for the development of this piece of shit, we should at least be able to modify and redistrubute the code. Apparently though, the Government doesn't have to supply any information which it considers to be a "trade secret," and OSHA has determined that this crappy source code is somehow a privileged secret. "

I wonder if the denial of showing source code was because they really DO think it is a trade secret. Or they are too embarrassed to show it?

<comment><USER3> > The shocking part about this isn't even that it happened, but rather that it > is incredibly routine. This is just one FOIA request to one tiny department > for one tiny, single use application

You realize that these two sentences oppose each other, right?

<comment><USER38> You have to click-through to read the entire paragraph (sorry, wanted to abide by fair use). The sentiment is that if this kind of low-standards wasteful spending happened in one small department, then imagine what happens at the Dept of Defense.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> In my experience (over a decade consulting to government in Canada), not charging enough can sometime put you at a competitive disadvantage. The purchasing decisions are often made by someone who doesn't understand the technology and their prime concern is risk. They don't want to be "the guy who chose the vendor who screwed up". In government, as often as not, you may not get promoted for doing something great so much as by not doing anything bad.

A lot of cost can be added through management of non-technical aspects. The wording may have to go through rounds of approval, goals and features may shift, etc. The cost of writing endless detailed RFP's and the long sales cycles increase the cost.

That said, there are also a lot of "consultants" who really are just crap. It made me embarrassed to be in the same business and that is part of the reason I don't work for government clients anymore.

</comment><comment><USER36> We hope the traditional procurement story will be improved with the help of Civic Commons, an organization which is very much aimed at leveling the playing field for government software. We want to make it easier for more developers and smart spry development shops to work on software projects for government. We want to give open source the same exposure as proprietary software and generally facilitate software co-creation and reuse across government to make sure things don't get paid for more times than they need to. You can learn more about us at <http://civiccommons.org>

The Civic Commons marketplace is currently still in closed beta, but it will be opening up very soon. Please sign-up: <http://marketplace.civiccommon..>.

</comment><comment><USER40> Please get this off the front page:

1) $200K is for Android +iOS + BB apps

2) Source code is available

3) App works as advertised and does not Crash (installed)

4) Selling to big Gov. is expensive (not 10X but surely 2-3X)

5) The poster wildly underestimates the total project cost and puts in some arbitrary coding estimate

Linkbaity title + Misleading facts + Moral outrage at big Gov != HNews Frontpage

</comment><comment><USER41> Amidst all of the government-bashing comments, I note that no one has remarked on a few things:

      * we don't have any actual evidence to support the author's claim that this sort of bloat is routine  (remember, plural of anecdote isn't data)

      * we don't know what kind of wasted money gets tossed around in major corporations (assumptions about how corporations must be lean do not constitute actual evidence)

      * we don't even have a way to find out what sort of bloat and waste takes place in corporate america - the government at least lets us find out

so it maybe doesn't make a lot of sense, in an observable-evidence sort of way, to make with the government-bashing..

</comment><comment><USER42> Thank you for the info on MuckRock! Never knew about the site. hopefully one day my country will pass the freedom of information act and we the citizenry can request this kind of information.

</comment><comment><USER30> Check out this RFI from IRS for JAVA Open Source. It makes no sense why they would want a team to consolidate all the open source libraries they want rather than just going out and getting those libraries.

[https://www.fbo.gov/index?s=opportunity&mode=form&id...](https://www.fbo.gov/index?s=opportunity&mode=form&id=a479da77b849e4946272d9bf0aa1bfb3&tab=core&_cview=0)

</comment><comment><USER43> I strongly recommend Yes, Minister. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yes_Minister>

</comment><comment><USER44> I agree with his point regarding source code. Often I have interacted with web applications supplied by parts of the UK Civil service and they have obvious bugs that I often feel _should_ be fairly easy fixes.

I often feel that I would happily fix them for free as a public service in a fairly short time period, but no doubt it takes months and lots of $ before they are addressed.

</comment><comment><USER45> Years ago my employer was given a much larger grant from NASA to throw a few web pages on a Windows tablet computer and use Dragon Naturally Speaking to navigate between them. We received this grant because of political connections.

</comment><comment><USER46> The problems with opening up big government contracts to multiple bidders is there is then a race to the bottom. However, outsourcing it one component at a time is definitely an interesting idea. Deliverables!

<comment><USER47> Isn't a race to the bottom on _price_ the desired outcome?

The presence of a race to the bottom on _functionality_ is independent of whether or not the contract is open. If they don't have anyone competent who is vetting the proposals or evaluating the progress and deliverables, then they will wind up with shit no matter how they arrange the contracting. But if it's open to normal software shops, then at least they probably won't wind up with $200,000 shit.

<comment><USER9> >Isn't a race to the bottom on price the desired outcome

Cheap yet sufficient is the desired outcome in government work.

I'm guessing 'sufficient' was defined too broadly or too specifically, and therefore was not correctly tested for on delivery.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> Apart from bureaucratic tangles, process overheads and bidding issues, is it possible the artists' fees for illustrations and health related research and verification played a role in the bloat up?

</comment><comment><USER20> I can't help but get warm fuzzy job security feelings when I see something like this, someone actually paid money for that. Well specifically I paid money for that, warm fuzzies taken care of.

</comment><comment><USER49> There's a Thumbs.db file in the iOS Sources... _scared_

</comment><comment><USER50> So it's been more than 6 hours since this was posted. There must be a few clones of the Android version by now. Links, anyone?

<comment><USER50> Six hours later: yeah, didn't think so.

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> It is the green-eyed monster which doth mock

The meat it feeds on; that cuckold lives in bliss

</comment><comment><USER52> Great FOIA work. Putting all the re-blogging "journalists" to shame.

</comment><comment><USER53> I guess none of us should be surprised by this...But the real question is how do I get a government contract? What a joke...

</comment><comment><USER54> "broken proprietary software which the public isn't even allowed to fix."

This is recurring theme that traces back at least as early as the 1990's.

What's different now is that there is historical evidence that open source projects can produce higher quality software than proprietary ones.

<comment><USER55> Really? It's clear that open source projects can produce excellent quality software. It's also clear that proprietary software can be excellent quality. Both can also produce garbage.

If you have evidence that open source can produce generally better quality software, or is consistently better for the same kinds of problem, I would like to see it presented.

<comment><USER54> Thanks for the reply.

Did you notice my choice to use the words "can produce" (as in "sometimes") not the word "produce" (as in "always")? I would never make the later statement: open projects always produce higher quality software than proprietary ones. That's not my belief.

As such, you are asking me in your last sentence if I have evidence to support a statement I would never make. Of course, the answer is no, because I would not bother to look for it.

But I would be interested to know why you would like to see such evidence if it exists? I could take a guess as to the reason(s) but I do not want to make assumptions.

<comment><USER55> I did notice.

I don't think you're claiming that open source software is always better.

I do think you're claiming that overall open source software is systematically better in some way than proprietary software, obviously not in every instance and subject to noise and variance. Feel free to correct me if you not making any such claim.

I'm asking for evidence because you stated catgorically that evidence exists but I have personally never come across it.

What is the evidence you referred to in your original comment?

<comment><USER54> I'm not making any such claim. But I'm curious why you want to see me as making that claim. Why would you be interested in evidence that open source projects produce generally/consistently better software than proprietary projects for the same sort of problems?

As for evidence that open source projects can (sometimes) produce "high quality" software, TCP/IP is the first example that comes to mind.

Once upon a time, there was a government software project, a government contractor and a grad student...

Assuming the usual kernels, we're all using that code, or derivatives of it, right now.

<comment><USER55> It should be obvious why I think you're making such a claim - you said: "What's different now is that there is historical evidence that open source projects can produce higher quality software than proprietary ones."

By using the word 'higher' you clearly indicate that you think that there is a quality advantage to open source software.

If you don't think there's an advantage to open source development, then I don't see what meaning you were trying to convey in your original comment.

It seems bizarre that you don't know why I'd be interested in evidence that open source projects have systematically better quality. It would be a major result with implications in project planning, system architecture, organizational philosophy etc. To date, I have never seen such evidence - <USER2> reasoned opinion which is valuable but inconclusive.

If you had evidence, I'm sure you'd have produced it by now.

It's obvious (as I stated in my first reply) that open source can sometimes produce high quality software. Another great example would be webkit.

I thought you knew of some evidence that might show _why_ governments should choose open source, other than opinion and dogma.

I'm disappointed that it doesn't exist because it would be powerfully persuasive in furthering the cause of open source.

<comment><USER56> You have made assumptions about what I meant with my original comment. Your assumptions are incorrect. Why not just ask me: "What do you mean by that?"

Here's what I meant. I believe there were naysayers in the 1980's and early 1990's (and maybe they are still around today) who argued open source would never work. I believe history has proved them wrong.

As you pointed out, open source, like proprietary, can produce good results or bad results. It can produce "high quality"[1] results. It can even produce "higher quality" results.

I believe the reasons why open source is as good a choice as proprietary are very simple and quite obvious: If the user of the software can read the code, then 1\. it is easier to evaluate the author's skill and programming sensibilities and 2\. it is easier to fix errors and make improvements (without having to pester a proprietary software vendor).

You were also hoping that I would make an argument that the results obtained are somehow related to whether a project is open or closed. As I said, I won't make that argument. And as such I won't look for evidence to support it. That's because I do not believe it.

You have set yourself up for disappointment. I played no part in it.

If you want to know what I believe in terms of how "high quality" or "higher quality" software is achieved, just ask me and I will tell you[2].

But please do not make assumptions about what I think.

All the best.

1\. Quality is a subjective determination.

2\. I should warn you it is nothing revolutionary. I will only state the obvious.

<comment><USER55> So you don't think open source can produce higher quality software, and you don't have any evidence for anything.

Fair enough.

[edit - changed "produces" to "can produce"] - doesn't change my point.

<comment><USER56> No. I explained what I meant and you still don't seem to get it. Read what I said about the naysayers again.

You asked for the historical evidence I mentioned and I gave you the example of the TCP/IP stack we're all using.

I shouldn't have to say it but "open source" does not produce software, developers produce software. They might be working on a closed project or they might be working on an open one. The open/closed status of the project does not determine the quality of the software. The developers do.

You appear to be making the same mistake as the naysayers did when they said open source would never work. They believed the closed/open status of a project was somehow tied to quality. They were wrong. (Developers working on) open source projects can produce high quality software just as well as (developers working on) proprietary ones can. You cited the example of KDE's webkit to indicate you agreed.

If this is still somehow confusing to you, then I'm afraid I cannot help you.

<comment><USER55> Earlier you said: "What's different now is that there is historical evidence that open source projects can produce higher quality software than proprietary ones."

Now you say: "The open/closed status of the project does not determine the quality of the software. The developers do."

So mentioning open source was irrelevant then?

<comment><USER56> One more try to get through to you then I'm giving up.

Here goes.

What are the arguments _against_ open source?

What if someone says, "Open source means poor quality"?

You can look back on the last 15 years, choose some examples of open source software and rebut that with evidence.

I would make this rebuttal.

You apparently would as well.

Now, what are the arguments _for_ open source?

You could say "Open source produces high quality software." Note: Not "can produce" but "produces". As in always.

You could say that.

I wouldn't.

I wouldn't make that argument.

I would argue open source make sense because the source can be reviewed and corrected if necessary, without being dependent on a proprietary vendor.

Hope this is clear.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> Govt = epic fail.

</comment><comment><USER58> This kind of nauseus bloat is a big factor why I'm trying to stay away from iOS and Android development. So many projects out there could be much more quickly, cheaply and freedomly (my word) done as a simple web app or even as pure static HTML website in some cases. So much foolishness, hype and hipstering going on.

<comment><USER45> You are staying away from iOS and Android because the government overpays for low quality software?

</comment></comment><comment><USER59> And people wonder why the US has a deficit problem.

</comment><comment><USER60> What's really sad is the money went to a foreign company (aeat.co.uk)

It didn't even stay in the American economy which should be a minimum requirement these days if a US solution is available.

</comment><comment><USER61> How does this further the proper mission of the government, which is to protect individual rights?

I can't fathom a way that this could have anything to do with the government doing the one essential job it actually has to do! It's not just that it's a badly made app. I think the entire fact that the government making apps like this is absurd.

Given what the government actually is (the only agency with the legitimate, legal monopoly on the use of _force_ ), it is no wonder that it fails so miserably at doing stuff like this.

<comment><USER62> This is an app specifically designed to help protect your life (one of those rights) from unsafe employment. I get the dig you're making but this seems a weak target for it...

<comment><USER63> The government's duty to protect your life does not extend beyond protecting it from the use of force by other people.

If you choose to work in a place, that's your choice. Even if you fail to make sure it's safe before you work there, or decide to work there despite the risk.

Anyway, even if OSHA were legitime, this app is not effective at achieving anything, even if executed well.

<comment><USER64> Your definition of "government's duty" is not universally agreed upon, and it's intellectually dishonest to predicate an argument on the presumption that it is.

<comment><USER63> I didn't present any argument. I just made a statement, without presenting (here) any supporting evidence.

Yes, I realize most people won't agree with the statement.

My hope is that by providing it as food for thought, some people may thinking about it and decide that they agree, or may at least be more open to the idea when it comes up in some other context.

Isn't it intellectually dishonest for you to call someone intellectually dishonest, when you don't know all the relevant causal factors? (Answer: no, it's just a mistake.)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


CoDel (Controlled Delay) For Alleviating Buffer Bloat - <AUTHOR> http://lwn.net/Articles/496509/

<comment><AUTHOR> There is _much_ nicer discussion of this at acm-queue here: <http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2209336></comment>


Sartre and Borges on Orson Welles - <AUTHOR> http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2014/08/12/sartre-and-borges-on-welles/ <comment><USER4> Love the line:

"Sartre reviewed the film in 1945, meaning he took four years even to bother seeing it."

One would think German occupation of Paris and wartime censorship might have contributed to that delay.

<comment><USER5> That was my thought, too - when your country is at war, you most likely have more pressing things on your mind than going to the movies.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Synchronistically, I just read a brief discussion of the same pair of quotes in Simon Leys's anthology _The Hall of Uselessness_:

'Talking of Orson Welles, I wonder if many people still remember how, soon after the Second World War, his artistic reputation in Europe was nearly wrecked for a while by a blistering attack which Sartre launched against _Citizen Kane_. The profound silliness of this diatribe is startling half a century later:

... [same quote as in op]

The impact of this condemnation was devastating. _The Magnificent Ambersons_ was shown soon afterwards in Paris but failed miserably. The cultivated public always follows the directives of a few propaganda commissars: there is much more conformity among intellectuals than among plumbers or car mechanics. A few years earlier, Jorge Luis Borges (who wrote superb film reviews) had also expressed a critical opinion of _Citizen Kane_, but whereas Sartre's censure now appears odious and ridiculous in its self-importance and dogmatism (it was actually dictated by a "politically correct" anti-American prejudice), Borges made a point that should retain its validity—even for the admirers of _Citizen Kane_:

"We all know that a feast, a palace, a huge enterprise, a lunch of writers or of journalists, a cordial atmosphere of frank and spontaneous comradeship are all particularly hideous. Citizen Kane is the first film that made conscious use of this reality ... It is not an intelligent film, but it is the work of a genius—in the most nocturnal and Germanic sense of this ugly word."

Sartre had an unquestionable genius (and we just learned what this means)—which may not be enough to reach posterity; in this respect, Borges was perhaps better equipped: he had a sense of humour—which is also the other side of a genuine humility.'

</comment><comment><USER7> Whether you agree with Borges' opinions or not, you gotta give the man credit for being a great writer, whether short story or film review.

<comment><USER5> I've noticed over time that great writers - at least the ones I admire - <USER2> the ability to make almost anything interesting by writing about it.

I remember reading a review by David Foster Wallace of a biography of some tennis player I never even heard of. I still would not touch that biography with a ten foot pole, but that review, and Wallace's reflections on professional sports and athletes' biographies, was fascinating to read.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Borges was not wrong about the endurance, and the reasons. I'd guess that few under-30 year olds, even here, know of the movie, and even fewer have seen it.

But then, Borges' reasoning would apply to most anything not made recently. There's a very small cadre of writers/creators aware of anything not produced in their lifetime.

(Furthermore, Borges could not guess at the time that Citizen Kane would be anointed as one of the show pieces of "the seventh art" for a few decades - <USER3> fate that could probably have been bestowed upon a few other contemporary movies, but was not.)

<comment><USER9> Much of the praise for Kane is because it used groundbreaking cinematography, which have influenced many later films. But to appreciate that, you have to know that Kane was the first movie to use these techniques. The movie (like many historically groundbreaking movies) will be underwhelming when seen without this knowledge.

A popular classic like Cassablanca have endured due to strength of story and acting, something which ages much better than "groundbreaking at the time".

<comment><USER10> Interestingly, I use Casablanca as my go to example of a classic that younger audiences find boring, predictable and cliché.

By the time most viewers today see Casablanca they'll have already seen most of the scenes ripped-offed, parodied, homaged, or referenced. For the first time viewer it won't feel like the original and instead will feel like an old black and white copy with a strange style of overacting.

<comment><USER5> For me, it was quite the opposite - when I saw Casablanca for the first time, I remembered all the scenes from it being parodied or quoted, and I thought, "so _that_ is where those came from".

The same happened to me watching The Wizard of Oz. Suddenly I remembered all those scenes from the Simpsons which I did not get before and was like, " _now_ I get it".

There is an episode of Star Trek DS9 where a character almost literally quotes the speech at the end of The Third Man (given, incidentally, by Orson Welles). Had I not seen The Third Man, I would have thought it was just a stupid monologue, but knowing where it came from changed the tone and gravity of that scene completely.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> If anyone in the Minneapolis / St Paul area wants to see Citizen Kane for themselves, in a theater, it's showing this weekend at the Trylon Microcinema:

[http://take-up.org/series/123/](http://take-up.org/series/123/)

</comment><comment><USER12> Borges at least made some interesting points (most of which are spot on, e.g. the film being too grand, etc.) but Sartre's review is populistic:

"Kane might have been interesting for the Americans, [but] it is completely passé for us, because the whole film is based on a misconception of what cinema is all about."

What does that even mean, assuming "us" means the French and not film connoisseurs anywhere in the world? Note that Truffaut, who was himself heavily influenced by Hitchock, later heavily criticizes general tendencies of French film of this era in a famous essay on (PDF: [https://soma.sbcc.edu/users/davega/FILMST_113/Filmst113_ExFi...](https://soma.sbcc.edu/users/davega/FILMST_113/Filmst113_ExFilm_Movements/FrenchNewWave/A_certain_tendency_tr%23540A3.pdf))

This xkcd strip seemed to be relevant in this case: [https://xkcd.com/1112/](https://xkcd.com/1112/)

<comment><USER13> Remember that Sartre was an existentialist. He therefore _defines_ cinema to be an existentialist thing, and then criticizes Kane for not fitting into Sartre's definition.

But to paraphrase Shakespeare: "There are more things in cinema, O Sartre, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."

<comment><USER14> Welles' _F for Fake_ is practically a treatise on phenomenology, and it's nearly all in the present tense.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> If all I had ever read from Sartre was this excerpt from his review of 'Citizen Kane', I would think him simple-minded.

</comment><comment><USER16> I really like 'Citizen Kane', but to be honest, when it comes to films involving Orson Welles, by far my favourite is 'The Third Man'.

Though many of Orson's scenes he isn't actually in as he refused to leave the hotel until they tempted him out with a magician, so he is often represented by shadow.

<comment><USER5> The Third Man is one great movie. As the saying goes, they don't make 'em like that anymore...</comment></comment>


An EVO 4G Salesman Confronts An iPhone 4 Shopper (NSFW) - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O2v-MrZeqVU

<comment><USER2> This is so priceless and SO true, ive had this convo many of times! i mean some of it is a little over the top, but a vast majority of apple fan boys, or wanna be cool people will buy anything just for the brand, coming up with fake or worthless arguments for it, not even understanding what they are stating.

I have to give it to Apple, they have really made it an art to sell cult status with anything they make, no matter if its over prices or behind the curve. They have managed to make it into the realm of kleenex and chap sick, where their product name becomes synonymous to the type of product they are selling.</comment>


Why Video Discovery Startups All Fail - <AUTHOR> http://www.hunterwalk.com/2013/04/why-video-discovery-startups-all-fail.html

<comment><USER2> This made me think.. and I believe you're correct. Got this video discovery site I've been working on for some time on videowatchr.com and it's going nowhere. Thinking of abandoning it.</comment>


Revisiting stable-kernel regressions - <AUTHOR> https://lwn.net/Articles/812231/ <comment><USER2> Does the Linux Kernel has some sort of Unit Testing Framework? Is it being used? If "no", then why?

<comment><USER3> Yes, it is used, but of course it is not all-inclusive to handle all hardware types out there in the world. That takes actual real-world usage to exercise that, although kernelci is starting to pick up the slack in that area.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What is a typical startup job interview like? - <AUTHOR>

Can anyone share their experience of interviewing at a startup? What is the process? How long does it usually take for them to make a decision? Are the technical questions asked as hard as Google interview questions or TopCoder's top level questions?<p>One important thing would be, what is the different between interviewing at big companies (Microsoft, Google, Amazon) vs startup companies? <comment><USER2> It depends (on the particular startup). In my experience there isn't an average startup, they all vary quite a bit.</comment>


Use of Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR) Technology in Toshiba Consumer Drives - <AUTHOR> https://toshiba.semicon-storage.com/ap-en/company/news/news-topics/2020/04/storage-20200428-1.html <comment><USER2> Adjacent to this, there was a lively discussion about a Tom's Hardware article on SMR just under a week ago.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22967559](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22967559)</comment>


Ask HN: Is .io domain unstable? - <AUTHOR> After searched on HN, I found many people were not satisfied about the stability of .io domains.
https://hn.algolia.com/?q=.io+domain
So, should I use a .io domain for my site? Or I should use something else? <comment><USER2> The DNS for .io is (now) operated by Afilias on their anycast network. It is the same network of servers that are operating .org, .info, and a few dozen other TLDs.

Despite any support or administrative issues you may encounter, the technical infrastructure is sound.

</comment><comment><USER3> How are some TLDs less stable than others? Isn't DNS distributed? (I'm not a networking engineer.)

<comment><USER4> Each Top level domain has an administrator responsible for running that tld. Including running it's DNS. The root domain ".", routes the request to the correct TLD DNS server. So technically, first you ask the root server for the DNS server of .com, then ask .com for google.com, etc. (Technically the DNS entry is google.com. )

.com is administrated by Verisign.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Internet_top- level_d...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Internet_top- level_domains) has more info.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> They've had multiple large DNS outages during the past couple of years.

Stable is relative, of course, it's still going to be online more than 99.9% of the time, but compared to e.g. .com or the myriad of other ccTLDs they've been fairly unstable.

We ended up switching domain for our service, because they (.io) caused our only two outages during a one-year period.

</comment><comment><USER6> I've been using it for years and never noticed anything. But I think it's a good idea as a precaution to leave only things like landing pages in the IO domain, and setup the API or dashboard app in a separate .com domain.

I remember reading in some comment here on HN I think that their support does not reply on weekends.

</comment><comment><USER7> Good article on keeping DNS resolution more stable: * Longer TTLs * Secondary DNS

[https://medium.com/@brianarmstrong/youre-probably-doing- dns-...](https://medium.com/@brianarmstrong/youre-probably-doing-dns-wrong- like-we-were-6625efaed390)

</comment><comment><USER8> The io cctld authoritative dns servers are not very competently run. There have also been security issues like [https://thehackerblog.com/the-io-error- taking-control-of-all...](https://thehackerblog.com/the-io-error-taking- control-of-all-io-domains-with-a-targeted-registration/)

'tptacek would add that a cctld that is under control of the five eyes governments is less secure because the registry can be interfered with more easily than .com, though I think that's kinda theoretical.

</comment><comment> em-bee there are now hundreds of top-level vanity domains. plenty of good ones that rival .io. pick any you like.

<comment><USER9> Any suggestions?

<comment><USER10> Check out this list as a starting point: [https://www.namecheap.com/domains/new- tlds/explore/](https://www.namecheap.com/domains/new-tlds/explore/)</comment></comment></comment>


Israeli Startup Is Making Beer (Yes, Beer) Smarter With The Beer Analytics - <AUTHOR> http://nocamels.com/2013/07/israeli-startup-is-making-beer-yes-beer-smarter/

<comment><USER2> Making Beer smarter isn't actually that surprising. Guinness did a huge amount of work in statistics for quality control, in particular:

"The breweries pioneered several quality control efforts. The brewery hired the statistician William Sealy Gosset in 1899, who achieved lasting fame under the pseudonym "Student" for techniques developed for Guinness, particularly Student's t-distribution and the even more commonly known Student's t-test."

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guinness](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guinness)

</comment><comment><USER3> I thought this was going to be something geekier like brewpi.com but alas it's for tracking sales. I disagree with the assertion that this "makes beer smarter," though it may make _selling_ beer smarter.</comment>


T-Shirt Company Picks A Fight With Anonymous - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2012/08/01/t-shirt-company-picks-a-fight-with-anonymous/

<comment><USER2> 'How to commit internet suicide - Beginners edition'</comment>


Ilo sitelen, a handmade computer for Toki Pona - <AUTHOR> https://toki.increpare.com/ilo-sitelen/ <comment><USER2> I made a manual translation of this text into English further down in this thread, at [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22788461](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22788461).

</comment><comment><USER3> There is an Anki Deck for the words / meaning / pictographs... [1] I am fascinated that this is a 14 character alphabet. I imagine if a CS major or mathematician made this they would have been strongly inclined to base 16 for instance. This feels a lot like a language version of lisp...

[1]: [https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/1548566798](https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/1548566798)

<comment><USER4> I tried two anki apps. The first didnt have file import. Some sort of cloud solution that didn't explain how it was supposed to work. On the second one, import was broken. Recommendations?

<comment><USER5> The official Anki apps are at [https://apps.ankiweb.net/](https://apps.ankiweb.net/) Your description doesn't make clear whether you tried to use two of those or some unofficial apps instead.

<comment><USER4> I wasn't aware of there being an official anki entity as the concept seems relatively generic.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Oh, hello! I made this. If you've any questions just shoot :)

<comment><USER7> If you share this on r/mechanicalkeyboards, you will be loved.

<comment><USER4> My favourite hn comment of all time. Finally, engineering and humanity meet at a sweet spot. (Yes, I'm enjoying this a bit too much.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Here's some kind of automatic translation: [http://inamidst.com/services/tokipana?uri=https%3A%2F%2Ftoki...](http://inamidst.com/services/tokipana?uri=https%3A%2F%2Ftoki.increpare.com%2Filo- sitelen%2F)

<comment><USER8> The machine translation is not completely comprehensible, but there's some beautifully strange things that came out of it. I emotion she strongly!

<comment><USER2> I speak toki pona so I just made a manual translation, as follows:

== Writing machine ==

* What am I trying to do?

All computers are supposed to speak English. I dislike this. I wanted to make a toki pona-only computer.

First I asked myself this: what do I want to do with my computer?

jan Sate made a calculator. That calculator can work with toki pona numbers. It's a great tool, really fun!

I felt like I wanted to be able to write my language using my machine.

With this idea in mind I didn't say "computer" in the future. I said "writing machine". I wanted to make a writing machine.

* Writing system

Next, I thought: what kind of keyboard will people use to write toki pona?

Toki pona has few words and few sounds. Its keys can likewise be few!

This made me happy. But I thought - I can make it smaller!

I had created a writing system called "multisound lines". With it, you can write toki pona using six keys!

I could make this machine using only six [keys]! Awesome!

* The controller and the display

I bought a Raspberry Pi controller and this display.

The display is good - I can send images to it:

I attached the controller to the back of the display. Look at it:

I bought a small keyboard ⌨ . Subsequently I would change it and improve it a lot!

Now I had everything. I could begin work!

* First keyboard version

The keyboard had round keys. I didn't like that. I gave it other keys and I put stickers on top of them:

This is decent! This way I could pause the task.

* sitelen pona

I felt that I wanted to write in the sitelen pona [writing system]. This way, I could write all of the words of toki pona.

I put a tool for this writing method into the controller (you can see it on GitHub).

This was really fun! (It was really fun, but it was a lot of work too ).

But, was the work over? Nope!

I wanted to improve it:

\- I wanted to give it a case. \- I wanted to improve the keyboard.

* The case

The writing machine was definitely good, but it didn't have a case:

I wanted to figure out what a case could do. So I made a case using a bunch of boxes:

This helped me.

Mr. Luca had various measurement tools:

Using these I learned a lot about measurements!

I put these numbers into the Fusion 360 tool.

This tool is really powerful and really useful. It gave me two schematics:

Then, I bought some really strong boards.

I felt that I could make a good case using these.

But when I prototyped a case with them, a lot of mess-ups happened:

I sure learned about what the boards wanted to do, heh!

But, with the second attempt, everything was good.

Was the case done yet? Nope!

There was nothing in the bottom part of the screen. I wanted to put the machine's name in this region. I bought a name label from the Schildermax shop.

When it arrived at my home, I put it on the bottom of the screen.

This made me happy. The case was done. Awesome!

* The keyboard

I was unhappy with these keys:

I wanted to improve it. But how?

I bought these sticker sheets:

I could put these images onto the keys.

But this was terrible. I could remove the images with my hands.

I wanted to have good keys. But how?

My friend Tralamazza told me: "I have a machine for making stone. (This machine can make stone out of liquid.) This machine can make keys! If you send me the model for the keys, I'll make the keys."

I used another person's key models. Using them, I could make models for my own keys.

I sent these models to my friend. He made them and sent them to me:

They looked great! I removed the supports from them and I put them onto my machine:

But I felt like having them be composed of just one color was not that great. I wanted to color them.

I colored them using a marker.

But how did this coloring work?

First, I put black all over the top of each key cap:

Then, I removed it using alcohol wipes. But the black remained inside the openings:

But this black was way inside the grooves and it would stay. :) This looked good to me. I blackened each key this way:

I put it on the keyboard and the work was done. The computer project was done!

* The writing machine is done!

I am really happy with this machine. I use it every day.

Now you know: making this machine was a lot of work. I don't want to make many writing machines!

Big thanks to Tralamazza and Mr. Luca. They improved my project a lot and taught me a lot. Thanks to them!

<comment><USER9> I think _machine for making stone_ is a 3D printer? I guess toki pona doesn't have a word for that.

<comment><USER2> Yes, the original text links "machine for making stone" to [https://www.creality3dshop.de/collections/3d-printer/product...](https://www.creality3dshop.de/collections/3d-printer/products/creality3d-ld-002r-uv- resin-lcd-3d-printer) and "this machine can make stone out of liquid" to [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n_muoXfXlEg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n_muoXfXlEg), but I didn't preserve any of the links or images in my translation here. There are several other links in the original text to specific technical resources or details. :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> A conlang designed to be minimal and thus super easy to learn.

Why on _Earth_ would one then make a unique character/glyph set? Any conlang that does not fit neatly into 8859-1 is a nonstarter for wide adoption.

The "you can write it in latin or in hieroglyphics" aspect of TP seems insane and contradictory to me. That's the opposite of minimalism.

<comment><USER11> It's not a conlang in the sense that anyone expects it to be taken up as an international auxiliary language. It's a conlang created for creative and artistic purposes. It's not meant for "wide adoption." It's meant for fun.

<comment><USER10> The cost/benefit ratio of investing the time to learn a new language goes up as the number of people with whom you can speak it increases. Even for fun.

<comment><USER12> nitpick, I think you mean the cost/benefit ratio goes down, as the cost remains fixed and the benefit increases?

<comment><USER10> is 1:10 to 1:500 not an increase in ratio? do i have it backwards?

<comment><USER12> The former is 0.1 the latter is 0.002

<comment><USER10> My cursory research on the topic suggests that while the ratio itself is a fraction, the "size" of the ratio refers to the inverse: the magnitude of difference between numerator and denominator, with 1:1 being the lowest ratio.

This seems to be more of a linguistic thing than a math thing, which makes this thread on-topic again. :D

<comment><USER12> If we are going to talk linguistics, then saying "the cost/benefit ratio _improves_ " is probably more clear than saying it gets larger or smaller then.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Not a duplicate, but related from 11 days ago: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22689959](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22689959)

2015: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9914534](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9914534)

2016: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11153406](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11153406)

2017: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14191186](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14191186)

</comment><comment><USER14> Could someone explain, preferably in English, why keyboard is so strange? Is this an art piece?

<comment><USER15> the Toki Pona conlang uses only 14 letters, and has a philosophy of simplicity/minimalism, so this is a tiny computer with a reduced keyboard specifically for the language

it's more or less an art piece, yes

<comment><USER6> The input system is a bit fancier/more obscure than that. Toki Pona uses 14 letters when written with the Latin alphabet (on screen, for those confused, it's displayed as Sitelen Pona, a hieroglyphic writing system for Toki Pona - [http://tokipona.net/tp/janpije/hieroglyphs.php](http://tokipona.net/tp/janpije/hieroglyphs.php) ). But because there are 120 words in total, you can merge letters without any ambiguity arising (merging 'b' and 'p' in english lets you still distinguish 'bell' from 'potato'). Because there's a closed list of 120 words you can bring this to an extreme of requiring only six input-buttons for the characters (so, e.g. 't', 'o', and 'k' are all on the same button), and the computer can disambiguate.

(This approach was inspired by Book Pahlavi - [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pahlavi_scripts#Book_Pahlavi](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pahlavi_scripts#Book_Pahlavi) ).

It's a bit of an art piece, but I also still use it daily for journalling :)

<comment><USER16> Thank you for sharing.

The example of B vs P is interesting, as modern Korean has the same. The airport code for Busan (South Korea) is PUS because there is no practical difference between B and P in Korean. Same with G/K, R/L, and D/T: each pair is interchangeable and has been subject to changing fashion over the years in Gorea.

<comment><USER17> The sounds are different in this case. You can use a single letter to denote both, because the sound is unambiguous from context.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Wonderful to see increpare making this. If you've never checked out his other work I highly recommend it.

</comment><comment><USER19> Some context: [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toki_Pona](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toki_Pona)

Tiki Pona is a constructed language with a vocabulary of about 125 root words, and 14 phonemes (allowing a very economical keyboard, from the looks of it).

So presumably, we could read the page with a couple afternoons of practice? I'm curious how long it takes to pick up the language, if anyone can chime in. If it's something you can matter in less than a month it could be amazing...

<comment><USER20> I think your assumptions are correct (I haven't learnt it but have read quite a bit about this and other artificial languages). It's very cool! The people who have learnt it talk wonders about it. However, I find it too limited to be practical. For example, it does not have words for numbers, or for left and right.

Does anyone knows of some kind of slightly extended version of Toki Pona?

<comment><USER6> >For example, it does not have words for numbers

It has two official number systems (described in the official Toki Pona book - [https://tokipona.org](https://tokipona.org) ). They're not practical for big numbers, and they are a bit cumbersome, but they're there.

>left and right. I've never had it be necessary to use these words. Often "on my/your side" if I'm walking with someone, or "beside/towards X" if there's a feature there.

(it has deficiencies, and can be cumbersome, but these aren't them)

>Does anyone knows of some kind of slightly extended version of Toki Pona?

certain people add/coin words to do certain things, and some people use obsolete/archaic ones, but nothing's caught on generally. More generally think there's a world of minlangs (minimalistic languages), but I don't know much about it, alas.

<comment> jean- >> left and right.

> I've never had it be necessary to use these words. Often "on my/your side" > if I'm walking with someone, or "beside/towards X" if there's a feature > there.

> (it has deficiencies, and can be cumbersome, but these aren't them)

Surely the lack of words for left/right would make it pretty cumbersome to describe, say, the vehicle code, or to give driving directions, no?

<comment><USER6> Yeah.

Vehicle code is a good example. Having a limited vocabulary hits you hard when it comes to technical/legal texts, and when you don't have context to refer to (The text on the page linked to doesn't make sense when you can't see the pictures). If a very specific word isn't in the language, and can't be easily described using other words, it just gets very messy/unpleasant (even if you can technically do it, nobody's going to want to read it).

You can often give directions in english pretty well in many places using landmarks "go to the crossing, you'll see a church - go there, then...etc." . But yes, not having left/right is a bit cumbersome for this application. If I was giving directions in Toki Pona to someone, I'd probably just draw a map if it was in any way complicated ... .

On the other had, as you can see by the translation someone made in the comments here of my page, you can talk about some technical things just fine, like building a computer! (if you have enough photos to refer to).

Edit: Oh, here's what the creator of the language had to say about it:

"Toki Pona has a rather narrow range of functions. Although it is very easy to meditate and communicate honest thoughts and everyday activities in Toki Pona, it is impossible to translate a chemical textbook or legal document in the language without significant losses. Such texts are products of the complex, modern civilization we live in and are not suited for a cute, little language like Toki Pona.

As an artistic language with limited means of expression, Toki Pona does not strive to convey every single facet and nuance of human communication. Nevertheless, the results we can achieve with so few elements prove to be very interesting, if not spiritually insightful."

<comment><USER19> It might be interesting to explore what a minimalistic language explicitly for technical concepts might look like. It's easy to imagine falling into 'import blocks' declaring what particular variable jargon placeholders will refer to... But probably there's a more elegant way to deal with the problem of an explosion of concepts as you get into the weeds of a technical area.

Or to go full Sapir-Whorf, one could ask what it would look like to design a language where (say) linear algebra is intrinsic, and thus intuitive.

<comment><USER20> This is something I would be very interested in.

I think that the combination of an array language (like APL or J, but smaller like K) which intrinsically incorporated geometric algebra so that concepts like complex and imaginary numbers or trigonometry are not essential, and a minimalist artificial language like Toki Pona, would make an excellent tool for communication of technical concepts.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> More like an electronic typewriter. Seems like outside of that one application, all the other software running on the Raspberry Pi is still the standard Linux stack. According to the translation in the other comments, the article likewise only calls it a "writing machine".

<comment><USER6> Yeah. I had originally mocked up a command-prompt, scripting language etc., but in the end I realised the only thing I actually wanted to do with it was write, so I focussed on that as my goal :)

<comment><USER21> The keycaps are beautiful. What switches did you use?

<comment><USER6> Thanks!

The base keyboard is a commodity koolertron one-haded keyboard ( [https://www.amazon.de/gp/product/B07WC4YBVY/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_...](https://www.amazon.de/gp/product/B07WC4YBVY/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_search_asin_title?ie=UTF8&psc=1) ), and the switches it uses according to the spec manual are OEM Outemu switches (and according to the box red ones :) ).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Offtopic:

I stopped reading an introduction to Toki Pona when I learned that "complicated" also means "bad" or "evil".

How I see it, lots of things can be complicated. Calculus equations. Some emotions. Some recipes. Etc.

It's hard for me to call them bad at the same time.

How others are looking at this?

<comment><USER23> It's all about context, in this context the reader won't read something like calculus as "bad" but rather as "complex" unless your phrase clearly goes towards that direction

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Very nice. One question though: as far as I understand, it relies heavily on the fixed-size vocabulary to reduce keyboard size. Is it still able to handle names (of persons, countries...) which are not part of the vocabulary?

<comment><USER25> Most languages deal with that problem by simply taking names as they are, sometimes transliterating to fit the alphabet available. It doesn't matter if I'm speaking dutch or english, my name is unchanged.

The only wide exception to this tends to be country names which mostly seem to get a global and a local name. There's no real reason to do this when using toki-pona.

you could go for constructs like "ma pi suno tewi sewi" which'd translate to "land of the rising sun" or more literally "land of the sun going up" but I fail to see the point. Any toki pona ''native'' would be able to read and pronounce "japan" since all the letters are available in the toki pona alphabet, the pronunciation even matches well enough. If someone doesn't know japan they won't know what "land of the rising sun" refers to and you'd need to reach for more descriptive language in any case.

Disclaimer: my grasp of toki pona grammar is tenuous at best, I'm sure there's better translations for "land of the rising sun".

<comment><USER6> The official Toki Pona book details a procedure for word-borrowing (and also has a suggested list of translated country names). The online the only source is a way more linguistically-flavoured article by the creator of the language, that goes into way more detail than the official book itself:

[http://tokipona.net/tp/janpije/tpize.php](http://tokipona.net/tp/janpije/tpize.php)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> look finish [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toki_Pona](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toki_Pona)

<comment><USER6> Toki Pona takes lots of words from Finnish! - [http://ucteam.ru/toki- pona/](http://ucteam.ru/toki-pona/)</comment></comment>


Show HN: Is my NGO app something needed? - <AUTHOR> http://blog.foraid.org/dev.html

<comment><USER2> The first strike is that you should put the money amount input after the input for what cause they want to support.

Strike two is that greenpeace really doesn't help the world. Their attack on Golden Rice is especially heinous. Golden Rice would save thousands of lives of children in SE asia. Greenpeace's volunteers, these first-world college- educated white kids, haven't taken enough sciences classes to realize that GMOs are a tool that can be used well or used badly. They would like us to believe that all GMOs are vile. And they don't have empathy for people who are living on the brink of malnutrition.

[http://www.goldenrice.org/Content3-Why/why.php](http://www.goldenrice.org/Content3-Why/why.php)

Here's a podcast that goes into the Golden Rice issue more, as well as other places where the political left are wrong on science. [http://thecapitolhilltalks.com/alex-berezow-author-of- scienc...](http://thecapitolhilltalks.com/alex-berezow-author-of-science-left- behind-and-editor-of-realclearscience-com/)</comment>


3 New Scandals Show How Pervasive and Dangerous Mass Surveillance Is in the West - <AUTHOR> https://theintercept.com/2016/11/04/three-new-scandals-show-how-pervasive-and-dangerous-mass-surveillance-is-in-the-west-vindicating-snowden/ <comment><USER2> ...then you have some say "security come with a cost to liberty". if selected officials are going to abuse the power given to them to take away liberty of innocents, then I would definitely give up security to have my liberty!</comment>


Fashion aggregator that finds clothes that will fit you - <AUTHOR> 58% percent of returns when buying clothes online are because they are the wrong fit so if you are looking for clothes online, you are probably looking at brands that weren't made for you.
I'm the co-founder of https://www.shopyourfit.com/ , the first fashion aggregator that shows you clothes based on your body shape (both new and used).
How does it work: You scan yourself from your phone and, based on your body-shape and measurements; we only show you clothes that will. fit you (and we tell you were to buy them)
Some SYF features: - Find clothes that are for your body shape and where to buy them - Discovery high-quality, low-price brands that you've never heard of (and are for your body). - Sell used clothes you have at home at 0% commission. - Buy used clothes (you will only see clothes from sellers that have a similar body to yours to ensure clothes fit).
SYF allows you to find clothes that will fit you in minutes (when you are probably taking hours browsing right now).
We have launched it recently and I'd love to hear your feedback. Try it (preferably on mobile) at https://www.shopyourfit.com/ <comment><USER2> Why do you have to scan me? Why can't I just give you measurements and tell you my body shape?

The rest of the service seems like it should be fine, but there's no way in hell that I'm going to let yet another unknown app or website scan my face or my body.

<comment><AUTHOR> By scanning users, we have the ability to determine your exact measurement. That being said, we don't keep (or have access) to any pictures that people use to get scanned.

We tried asking for measurements in the past but very few people know this info (or want to take the time to get it).

By clarifying that we don't store photos, would you use the app?</comment></comment>


My GF and I finally completed our first ever game - <AUTHOR> So my GF and I made an Android game in our free time. We wanted to keep it simple, since this was really our first big programming project ever. I'm a huge space nerd myself so I decided to make a space-themed rockety game. GF did the graphics, I did the programming (using Corona SDK). Despite it requiring knowledge of Lua and me having no experience with Lua, everything kinda went. In a couple of weeks we realised that we'd made something worth publishing, so we bit the bullet and bought a Google Developer Account ($25 is kind of a big deal when you are a student in a third world country). We would have uploaded it to the Apple store too, but their hardware requirements (and $99 for the account) are still 'a bit' beyond our reach.
It's no Kerbal Space Program, but it's ours and we like how it turned out. :)
It's up on Google Play for free, tell us what you think! https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.suavis.thyrocket <comment><USER2> First congratulations on not only making a game, but making it with your mate. I trust it was a fun learning experience? Are you two planning on making another?

As for thoughts I would only recommend you make your ship 1/2 it's size. That will fix the difficulty problem. In my years of making games (vidya, board, and card) and puzzles Over and over again I stumbled into the fact that it is easy to make games/puzzles difficult. However it is difficult to make games/puzzles entertaining, that requires much testing and feedback with naive users. So, yes, I recommend listening to your users and making it a bit more fun and less frustrating.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! It sure was an entertaining experience for both of us, especially with an SDK that is so easy to work with. As for the difficulty, we've already reduced the size of the rocket quite a bit, but we will continue listening to suggestions for future updates! :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Downloaded it and played it. It's almost Flappy Bird level of difficulty! Super fun though.

How long did it take to make?

</comment><comment><USER4> Congratulations to both of you on finishing the game and releasing it to Google Play!

My high score after 50 attempts or so is 18... no way I'll unlock all those rockets :)

If I may ask, have you earned back the $25 fee from the app ads?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you! That's not a bad score if you ask me :) Not nearly there, sadly, but a random guy contacted us and sent us $25 in Bitcoin so we are pretty much at awe at this point!

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Hi, congrats, looks awesome (loved the look!! (and feel and sounds)), I would love it to be easier.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you very much! It looks like we'll have to put an easy-hard slider in a future update!

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Man, too hard to play. How do I "drive" the rocket?

<comment><AUTHOR> Once the rocket launches, it will swerve to a random direction. Tapping the screen once will change its direction of horizontal movement. It will automatically go up as long as it doesn't hit anything.

<comment><USER6> In my opinion it is too hard. Maybe slower it down a little. On my Android phone there's no chance to play this....

<comment><AUTHOR> We'll probably resort to implementing an easy-hard slider in a future update!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Looks cute! Congrats on the 500-1000 downloads!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! :)

<comment><USER8> Keep up the good work, nice that you are already in the 1000-5000 download range.</comment></comment></comment>


Google to auto-delete users' records by default - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-53165566 <comment><USER2> Thank goodness. Google is the biggest potential 'database of ruin' that could embarrass many people if even a sliver of the dossiers they have on people were leaked. Holding onto this database (without periodically wiping it) is like keeping tonnes of radioactive waste under the floorboards.</comment>


Avocado injuries a thing of the past? - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/news/business-42268516 <comment><USER2> We always had a few of these on the same tree where the normal size was about half as big as a bowling pin and had seeds almost as large as a whole Mexican avocado.

Never knew about "avocado hand" but were careful to avoid "avocado head" when harvesting the not-so-low-hanging specimens.

When you drop a full-size one from 2 or 3 stories high, you really need to look out below or it could hit hard enough to cause unconsciousness or worse.

Interestingly, this is one of the species that has separate male and female versions.

With only a single landscape plant (no orchard) there must have been a male somewhere nearby, that owner might not have even known their tree was an avocado to begin with.

If a hurricane or high winds came up while flowering in the early summer, there go the flowers and you got little to no fruit that year.</comment>


Art Opens the Door to Connecting, Understanding, and Inspiring - <AUTHOR> http://www.victusspiritus.com/2009/11/25/art-opens-the-door-to-connecting-understanding-and-inspiring/ <comment><AUTHOR> And closes the door to interested entrepreneurs.

Art isn't just a guilty pleasure, it's intimately connected to our creativity and inspiration. Look at the style within modern sites, services and products. People need art, they want it in their breakfast cereal and basic daily business.</comment>


JavaScript Operator Overloading – the elegant way as library - <AUTHOR> https://www.npmjs.com/package/@js-basics/vector <comment><USER2> From the github page: > Javascript has this one peculiarity called valueOf() this function is designed for primitive handling (numbers and strings) when handling arithmetic operations. Every class can overwrite this function to give it special behavior. This Vector class calls the assigned statement three times for x, y and z. Comparable to trigger arithmetic operation manually for every axis.

Internally the valueOf() implementation returns x in first call, y in second call and z in last call, these results are put into an new Vector object and can be reused further.

That's actually quite clever. Thought it was going to be some sort of eval or build time magic. Not bad.</comment>