A Digg for Facebook Likes: My Experiment - <AUTHOR> http://thelikestream.com

<comment><USER2> Amazing website and gorgeous concept! Bad timing with Facebook being down but I'll check as soon as Facebook's back up.

edit: Looks like Facebook's back up. One note: I'd edit some of the color choices. Some of the website (like some colors in the top menu) becomes hard to read. What are you thinking of doing with this service?

</comment><comment><USER3> Love the concept. I think you'll do great.

One major latency issue (I don't know if you can resolve it or not): every single Facebook like button has to load separately; it takes a long time. If you can solve that, I think you have a winner.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, Luke! Apparently social widgets are suffering platform-wide: <http://developers.facebook.com/live_status>

Perfect timing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is a good idea. I probably won't be part of the userbase, but I can imagine this being very popular. I'm going to bookmark and watch this one.

Best of luck!

</comment><comment><USER5> Love this idea because at this point, I am much more likely to "like" something than to "digg" it. However that may just be me, this idea could go big quickly.

</comment><comment><USER6> This looks like the definitive digg killer. Not that I use any of digg or facebook, however for lolcats and the likes it will certainly dwarf digg instantly.

</comment><comment><USER7> Love the concept. I think it's a great idea. Wish you all the best.

</comment><comment><USER8> cool idea! please somehow add categories. i think categories like digg would be nice. if that's not possible, maybe do it by media type or media source.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey Henry, big thanks for the input. I actually half-implemented categories before deciding they weren't the right solution. I think there is probably something better than implementing straight digg-like categories, but I haven't quite figured it out. Then again, I could totally be wrong and just end up finishing my implementation.

As far as use cases, I assume you don't want to find LOLcats when you're looking for tech news, right?

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> This looks very interesting and I hope you do well, I am surprised I have not seen someone do anything something similar sooner.

I hope it works well.

</comment><comment><USER10> thoughts on a similar existing service? <http://likebutton.me/>

</comment><comment><USER11> Yes, this is a very good idea.</comment>


Ask HN: How hot is it? - <AUTHOR> How hot is it in your part of the world? Where I live (Stockholm) it is very hot. Temperatures have been at 30 degrees or higher since late May and it has hardly rained. It is definitely the hottest summer by a big margin I have experienced/suffered through.<p>What are your coping strategies? Doing productive work in this heat is almost impossible. <comment><USER2> It is very hot here in Cincinnati too in the 80's and 90's F; I think we are undergoing a global heat wave.

I heard an interesting story on the radio about productivity and heat: [https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2018/07/23/6298717...](https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2018/07/23/629871725/why- a-drop-of-4-degrees-made-a-big-difference-for-a-garment-makers-bottom-line)</comment>


Why does not worth to lost time with budget hosting or my terrible experience. - <AUTHOR> This is a personal experience that I had just now.
I've been doing Django websites for quite a while now and always hosting it on Linode or RackSpace. But I'm from Portugal and as you know there is economic turmoil here, the economy is degrading and the result is lack of money for quality services. Like a good old
Portuguese I've search the web for cheaper alternatives, the crisis mandate that we find same services for less money and I found the
holly grail of cheap web-hosting, http://www.lowendbox.com
The prices of the the VPS are amazing, $2, $4, $6 month for machines with 256MB-1CPU, 512MB-2CPU, 1024MB-3CPU, respectively. But the saying is equal everywhere, there are not free lunches. The reality of this cheap hosting for my experience is up-selling the machines,
my specific experience with a very very cheap VPS company called BlueVM, (http://www.lowendbox.com/blog/bluevm-2month-256mb-openvz-vps-in-san-jose-texas-chicago-kansas-buffalo-and-atlanta/) goes like this...
Django webapp + ElasticSearch + Celery
- First problem, account suspended after I imported the database, CPU abuse. This django webapp have the geonames(http://www.geonames.org/) locations table for user registry. And this is a lot 3gb of data(300mb dump compressed), the total of my database. The result of deploy a database like this was to get the account suspended because CPU abuse. After an explanation I told the hosting company that I will do that in a time-frame that there is not much traffic on the server, and the hosting company agreed that it was a good time frame while US is a sleep. So I intended to do that in the next database deployment...
- Second problem, account suspended out of nothing, CPU abuse. The web app has been deployed 2 weeks ago, and my due to my lack of time to do small bug corrections the app stayed online without being open to the public, ... permanent suspend!
To large for hacker news, continue reading here, http://dpaste.com/1066429/ <comment><USER2> The old saying is: "Cheap, fast, reliable; choose two."

Even if you find a cheaper host that can handle your server load, that host will eventually fill their rack or loose their only sysadmin to Facebook and the quality of service will drop severely.

Some dot coms are only dreams and never use major system resources -- cheap ISPs are for those guys. Web applications that generate revenue are hosted at quality ISPs and their business model is adjusted to reflect this cost.</comment>


Ask YC: What kind of Intro Page for your App? - <AUTHOR>

So I've developed a neat little app that manages Agile projects. Version 1.0 is simple as can possibly be to get the job done. Basic ASP.NET stuff, with ugly postbacks and all.
I've got users, and they're pretty much happy. We're reaching the point where the site is functional from the beginning to end of an Agile project. (BTW, not to toot my horn, but 4 weeks to alpha, 7 weeks to full beta, single developer coding after work)
Question is -- now that I'm thinking about moving from a private beta into a more public beta, how to go about it? Step 1 is replacing the main page with an introduction page. Anybody got hints/clues about that?
Step 2 starts getting into PR, and I can wait on that. I was just interested in examples of good home pages for something like this. Should I do a video tour of the app? Screenshots? Free accounts for anybody who happens by? Or maybe one of those serial-number invite deals? Big colorful flashing boxes with all-cap text (I'm thinking probably not)
Ideas? Suggestions? <comment><USER2> First: Congratulations on reaching this milestone!

Second:

No intro page.

Keep the front page as functional as possible, so people can immediately see what the site is about it, what it does and why it is useful.

You should already have a "Join" or "Sign up" link on the front page. Keep it. If necessary, make it more prominent.

Don't overemphasize that you're in Beta. While this is doubtless a milestone for you, new users could care less. They want software that works well. Use the front page to show them what your software does, why it works well and why they should want to sign up. You can do this by highlighting what the software does for existing users, perhaps providing live examples. Show, don't tell.

If you can, give people a way to play with your software without signing up. Perhaps a sandbox, perhaps by not asking for login until they want to save what they've made. You want people to start using your tool as quickly as possible, with as few barriers between them and the tool as possible. Signing up is a huge barrier. People won't sign up unless they want to use a service, and if they can't use a service until after they sign up, how will they know that they want to use the service? Again: Show, don't tell.

Best of luck :)</comment>


Clever phishing attack using the BBC News URL - <AUTHOR> http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/-/http://news.ycombinator.com http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/-/ automatically redirects to any site it's prefixed before. <comment><AUTHOR> <http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/-/> automatically redirects to any site it's prefixed before.</comment>


Unity Technologies Targeting 2020 IPO - <AUTHOR> https://cheddar.com/media/unity-technologies-targeting-2020-ipo-sources <comment><USER2> Is this a good or bad thing for the long-term usage of their platform, do you think? My gut instinct says bad, since once they go public they will be under continued pressure by stockholders to keep making more and more money, and so they feel increased pressure to increase their prices and/or reduce featureset for the free version (or start charging for it again). They might be more focused on consumer facing features than bug fixing than they have been in the past, also.

I don't know, just seen this go bad with lots of other companies, that leaves me skeptical about how this will go and nervous about making games using their platform in the future.

<comment><USER3> The investors (Sequoia being the big one) will want to cash out at some point, and then it's either an IPO or an exit. The most likely buyers in an exit- scenario would be platform owners like Apple, Google or Microsoft, which would be terrible for Unity's viability as a cross-platform tool (or at least look that way - just see the reactions that came after Microsoft bought GitHub). Or they get bought by Epic/Tencent, and the market becomes a monopoly, which is pretty damn bad as well. So under the circumstances I think an IPO is by far the lesser evil, even though I do share your concerns about the shortsightedness of public investors (though I'd argue that's a general problem and not a problem with Unity specifically)

<comment><USER4> Seems like Microsoft would be the obvious choice. They just bought Xamarin, they're finally in a good spot with regards to C#'s growing cross platform viability and they're actually a game publisher.

I don't really know why MS would bother unless not doing so would risk a Unity collapse and a loss of a lot of C# development.

<comment><USER5> Many of Microsoft Window Mixed Reality\Hololens apps are made in Unity also, so it makes sense there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This might be a poor PR move for Unity in relation to game developers. Many will read it as a cash grab with more monetization shenanigans lurking on the horizon and decide to switch to engines like Godot Engine. Unity might've actually hurt itself if it loses too many client developers.

It doesn't help that there have already been some recent stories of developers being given the cold corporate treatment,[0] and the recent issue with Improbable.[1]

[0] [https://sipreadrepeat.com/2018/12/16/unity-email- controversy...](https://sipreadrepeat.com/2018/12/16/unity-email-controversy- what-does-it-mean/) [1] [https://gamedaily.biz/article/507/improbable- disputes-unitys...](https://gamedaily.biz/article/507/improbable-disputes- unitys-terms-of-service-violation-claims-in-latest-chapter-of-public-feud)

<comment><USER7> As a hobbyist game developer I can attest to the quality and ease of use of Godot compared to Unity and Unreal (note: I've only dabbled with making 2D games). It "clicked" much quicker for me and I can quickly prototype ideas (most of which are terrible, but that's not the engine's fault).

<comment><USER8> I've built a fairly large MMO unity project. The worst part of the process was the editor. Godot is a _much_ more plesant experience.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I was just starting to be hopeful after their decision to hire Mike Acton and put him in charge of a more data-driven alternative to their existing architecture.

Now I'm worried that this will start driving them toward short-term gains more than anything.

I'm predicting that if they go public, they'll ape Epic's storefront model within 3-5 years.

<comment><USER10> The data-driven architecture seems amazing. They've shown us some great results. I echo your worries that this IPO will probably lock them into short term goals.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I understand the reservation about an IPO changing their motivations, but it seems like a pretty predictable path for a company that has raised >$600m.

It does not seem to me obviously better (for developers or their customers) for Unity to stay private or be acquired. Acquisition could threaten the cross-platform appeal and perpetual private state would not deliver a return to investors.

And I don't think there is an inherent threat to either the freemium model or a perversion of the roadmap. There seems to be real competition between game engines and the value the free offering provides is one of the easiest entry points to game development. This delivers a huge number of potential developers, which is the foundation that sustains the paying developers above it.

Somebody there told me once that their mission was to 'have half the world's creative content created in Unity', meaning not only video games, but films and presumably traditional CAD markets such as architecture and product design. If this is true, I think the real threat to developers irrespective of IPO is one of focus. Can Unity evolve the product for their core market, or will they become too horizontally committed and lose focus?

This is a place where the market could 'correct' a land grab strategy by driving the company to focus on the core business.

</comment><comment><USER12> Hm, I do not really like that Unity has become such a widely used engine as a completely closed platform. Computer games are part of our cultural heritage by now and tying them to a closed source, utterly opaque and unmaintainable runtime environent will probably not help with keeping them alive as artifacts that can be experienced in the future.

I wish they were in a position to actually open up the core runtime source code so that it can be ported and maintained independently in the future. The tools - the commercially important part of the engine - can stay closed for all I care. I wonder if we would see such a move with shareholders crying for quarterly results.

<comment><USER13> I honestly don't buy that for a minute.

Unity3D is an implementation detail for games that would be closed source anyways.

The games that are the biggest part of mainstream culture today like Fortnite, GTA, CoD, AAA games in general are not open source.

If a creator is interested in open source they won't use Unity, but since open source is very far from the "default" for games there's no difference between a game written in Unity and a game written in some in-house engine.

Not one culture defining game interested in being open source has come out on Unity3d because you don't start an open source project by building on a closed source engine...

And as an aside, Unity3D is not that opaque either, increasingly large parts of it are being opened up and the Unity executable setup is not designed to be particularly opaque to someone trying to access a specific game's assets.

<comment><USER14> I mean, Unreal Engine and CRYEngine are source-available if not open-source. I'm not sure that it's so far-fetched to call for the open-sourcing of game technology like engines.

<comment><USER15> Large parts of Unity (everything C#) are source-available as well.

<comment><USER16> But unlike Unreal, the source code license is reference-only (yeah it sounds ridiculous, but you are not allowed to modify and recompile the source code.) Someone sent a pull request to the code (a bugfix which solved a lot of GC performance issues), only to get rejected because of the license (although it later got patched internally in Unity)

[https://github.com/Unity- Technologies/UnityCsReference/pull/...](https://github.com/Unity- Technologies/UnityCsReference/pull/1)

<comment><USER13> But how does that affect the above comment trying to spin this as an archival thing? If you want to port to a new platform one day when Unity is bottom up the fact they're not accepting patches isn't going to matter

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> An IPO is almost always a bit worrying, but I'm feeling very optimistic about the direction Unity is going in general.

I've just started work on a new game using their new ECS system. It's not ready for anyone who's not either a very seasoned programmer or very patient, but so far I like it much better than the standard MonoBehaviour workflow.

</comment><comment><USER18> Funny I confused it with Unity Biotechnology, which also raised $300M recently and is on the upswing.

Would be interesting if both go IPO around the same time and confuse the heck out of everyone:

\- "Did you hear Unity went IPO?"

\- "Unity? the Technologies or the Biotechnology?"</comment>


The Backwards Brain Bicycle - <AUTHOR> https://youtu.be/MFzDaBzBlL0

<comment><USER2> I had the same experience when I learned to type on a Dvorak keyboard layout. I had to give it up (and relearn) qwerty because I was unable to use basically any other computer. Oh but I loved Dvorak!</comment>


Why I'm Putting All My Savings Into Bitcoin (2011) - <AUTHOR> http://falkvinge.net/2011/05/29/why-im-putting-all-my-savings-into-bitcoin/?

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


Using Simulated Annealing to Solve Logic Puzzles - <AUTHOR> http://blog.pluszero.ca/blog/2016/07/17/using-simulated-annealing-to-solve-logic-puzzles/ <comment><USER2> Another fun way to solve this is using Logic programming, e.g. [http://baptiste-wicht.com/posts/2010/09/solve-einsteins- ridd...](http://baptiste-wicht.com/posts/2010/09/solve-einsteins-riddle-using- prolog.html)

<comment><USER3> Indeed anything with constraints is usually a great use case for Prolog. I particularly like this version in ECLiPSe which is specialized on constraint programming with Prolog: [https://gist.github.com/JuanitoFatas/2227711](https://gist.github.com/JuanitoFatas/2227711)

I haven't benchmarked it but it is pretty intuitive to read which is very important for these types of problems.

<comment><USER4> This is the best prolog solution I've seen for this kind of puzzle. Other solutions all had to define a bunch of primitives for neighborhood constraints.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The article mentions the problem of "local minimums". The author suggests occasionally accepting worse solutions, in order to escape from such. "The hope here is that by following this worse solution, we can eventually get to the global minimum." This is good but one may wish to take it further.

I once messed with something called "metropolis coupling", where you run multiple threads in parallel, with different thresholds for how often they accept worse solutions, i.e. one thread is "cold", one is slightly "hotter", and so on. If a hot thread's current solution is better than the solution of the neighbouring colder thread, the solutions are swapped. In this way the coldest thread (which is the one we're paying attention to) gets pulled out of the local minimum.

As I say, I messed with this once and it did seem to help. It seems to have been developed for inference in evolutionary phylogenetics, and is perhaps a bit obscure?

<comment><USER6> Hi, author here:

Yep, this is the sort of thing we study in our cooperative and adaptive algorithms class. Similar techniques to what you suggest are shown here [https://books.google.ca/books?id=G5ML5EYch94C&pg=PA88&lpg=PA...](https://books.google.ca/books?id=G5ML5EYch94C&pg=PA88&lpg=PA88&dq=cooperative+SA+cosa&source=bl&ots=DjpEgTvDab&sig=LSBRppSNQqhr0qVjqRikt60b36c&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwi0hs39vP3NAhVrw4MKHbd0CEsQ6AEIHDAA#v=onepage&q=cooperative%20SA%20cosa&f=false)

<comment><USER7> Looks neat but I gave up on it converging on my new laptop. I'm going to port it to rebol2. This bit confuses me:

      random.choice(range(0, i) + range(i+1, 4))

how is that different from

      random.choice(range(0, 4))?

Obviously no Pythonista, but playing around in the REPL I see no diff.

<comment><USER7> Duh. Where is the button that reverses the passage of time?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Nice. I've used Simulated Annealing to achieve good results in problems were the solution space was too large for constraint programming, but for this specific sort of problems I've had good experience using constraint programming frameworks like GECODE or choco

</comment><comment><USER9> A lot of people here mention Prolog as another tool to solve this problem. I wonder if there's a natural way to combine constraint solving with simulated annealing.

</comment><comment><USER10> A very well written post on Simulated Annealing, and a fun puzzle to solve (even if it is old!)

</comment><comment><USER11> If you like this sort of thing, I wrote some code a couple of years ago to generate and solve logical deduction problems, such as the "Cheryl's Birthday" brainteaser:

[https://github.com/shaungallagher/cheryls- murder/blob/master...](https://github.com/shaungallagher/cheryls- murder/blob/master/cheryls-murder.ipynb)

The code isn't very clean (it was written hastily as part of a hack days project at work) but the notebook walks you through it, so even if you're not familiar with Python, you'll get a sense of the technique.

</comment><comment><USER12> Bonus points for including code in python to solve arbitrary logic puzzles.

</comment><comment><USER13> I've used simulated annealing to make constraint solvers more efficient. The nice thing about constraint solvers and simulated annealing as demonstrated is that it's fairly straight forward to adapt the algorithm to your specific problem and data in order to get the best performance.

</comment><comment><USER14> So, what does it mean exactly when they say that these kinds of problems are in the same class as Sudoku?

<comment><USER6> Simulated annealing and similar techniques such as Tabu Search are good for problems that have large search spaces due to combinatorial explosion ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combinatorial_explosion](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combinatorial_explosion)) and can be expressed as a state and an associated cost/fitness function.

<comment><USER15> This is true provided your cost function is "continuous" w.r.t. distance. Roughly what this means is that if you make a small change - e.g. one edit in this example - then your cost function shouldn't change a lot.

If you don't have some form of continuity condition you are actually just doing random search.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Constraint Satisfaction Problems can be modeled as Hopfield-type neural networks, such as Boltzmann machines (RBMs of deep learning are a variant) which can be tuned using simulated annealing.

There was plenty of research on this around 1985-1995 (the "second coming" of neural networks), but it died out with the hype because it was never an actually practical way to solve CSPs. Given the recent innovations in deep learning, it should eventually pick up again, to enable deep learners to solve constraint satisfaction subproblems within the same integrated architecture.

</comment><comment><USER17> This sounds exactly like this game: [http://www.kaser.com/sherwin.html](http://www.kaser.com/sherwin.html)

There's relational properties, combinations, and maybes all over

</comment><comment><USER18> Really interesting, I wrote a logic puzzle solver in Prolog a long time ago while I was in uni, I just created a repo for anyone who wants to check it out. Unfortunately the documentation and comments are all in Spanish...

[https://github.com/Anilm3/Logic-Puzzle- Solver](https://github.com/Anilm3/Logic-Puzzle-Solver)

<comment><USER19> Al menos podías haber dejado "head-tail", es más intuitivo.

Gracias de todo modos ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Tweaking 't' here seems to be similar to tweaking the learning rate in gradient descent. But in gradient descent you assume the problem is convex.

Is there any way to tell whether this logic problem (or any other) is convex? Is it possible that the correct solution's 5-away neighbours all have very high costs (like 9+)? What prevents you from doing worse that brute force?

</comment><comment><USER21> What if we change the cost function to something that returns a number which has a direct correlation with the maximum number of attributes that matched? Would solving the problem be any easier or we would still leave the possibility of getting stuck in local optimums just like the one described in the post?

<comment><USER20> What do you mean by the 'maximum number of attributes that matched'? How is it different from the number of conditions that are satisfied?

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I wonder if Quantum Annealing would also be applicable.

<comment><USER23> I think in theory it is possible by unary encoding attributes of the five houses then defining the appropriate weights according to the constraints.

In practice it might not be possible to map the resulting graph on the D-Wave's architecture, I can't find any good documentation on the D-Wave though.</comment></comment>


New tagging standard released by Yahoo, Freebase, AdaptiveBlue, Zemanta... - <AUTHOR> http://www.commontag.org/

<comment><USER2> Why do new standards have to be so heavy? Why can't it just be:

We're talking about The Beatles here

Why can't they use Wikipedia? Everybody knows how to search Wikipedia, but dbpedia search (called "Navigator") isn't even linked from dbpedia.org (I had to use search engine to find out how to search dbpedia)

It even seems like anything that could be tagged should be well-formed XML document (well, XHTML).

<comment><USER3> This is a Bad Idea. You're mixing up _more_ structure with the content. This reduces the usefulness of the tags because you and I may not agree on the tags.

What is needed are overlays that sit on top of the content. This way, you can specify tags for whatever sections you want, and I can do the same while the content remains untouched. The advantage is you can _share_ your overlays with your friends, or you could even setup a centralized service that aggregates the overlays and uses the most common sets of tags.

<comment><USER4> I don't understand what you mean by "the content remains untouched." Referring to the original Beatles markup above, isn't it useful content to say this sentence is about the Beatles -- the topic described by that Wikipedia page. Presumably, you and I would agree on that mapping and reject tying that sentence to the Wikipedia page on the organism Beatles.

The overlaid, personal tags could be through some other mechanism that wouldn't even be part of the page. It could be some browser plugin that maps my tags for the band Beatles.

<comment><USER3> Why should the webpage server/provider have a monopoly on how you consume their content?

They should be using overlaid personal tags as well, it's just when the webpage is served, their tags would be sent over as well. Then _you_ can choose if you want to use their tags or your own personal ones.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Horrible idea, just horrible. I hate how everyone tries to force useful ideas into HTML/XML or HTTP. You know you _can_ create new filetypes, structures and protocols for your ideas if they don't fit nicely into the current ones??

</comment><comment><USER5> I discussed the need for a tagging standard over 2 years ago in a blog post - check out the comments on the article, they have a lot of insight to offer.

[http://neosmart.net/blog/2007/the-need-for-creating-tag- stan...](http://neosmart.net/blog/2007/the-need-for-creating-tag-standards/)

There are a couple of comments by startups dedicated to managing/organizing tags across different sites with some of the various ideas they've used to tackle this issue.

</comment><comment><USER6> I hope it takes off, but I really doubt it will. It's too complex, and the benefits are not so clear. I understand the long term benefits/goal, but it's hard to motivate content producers to adapt something new if they can't see quick returns.

<comment><USER3> The benefits are clear, but the web browsers will have to adapt to them. Also, the implementation is fucking awful as I mentioned in other comments :/

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> That's not actually tagging. Maybe it's a namespace standard.

<comment><USER8> It is tagging, using RDFa. The "new standard" in the headline has a new semantic namespace, but the cool part is a new XML namespace, with a nicer way of writing RDFa tags. Example:

This relates your page semantically to the concepts "Web 2.0" and "Twitter".

Better explanation: [http://faviki.wordpress.com/2009/06/11/common-tag-is- release...](http://faviki.wordpress.com/2009/06/11/common-tag-is-released/)

<comment><USER7> I understand the spec. I understand what RDFa is.

It's still not tagging.

Tagging is a UI and organizational conceit. A minimal way to attach a nickname for a class of things to a new thing to classify it, such that users are actually able to use it, and to feedback the list of used nicknames so as to encourage convergence.

Given that I made up the term in the first place, I'm pretty sure I'm right here.

<comment><USER4> Then there'd be two ways to view the word "tagging." One is the UI and organization style you popularized through del.icio.us. The other is the common English gerund of "to tag", which is the way Common Tag is using it. Maybe it would have been better for them to call it Common Label...

Re: common "tags" through a shared namespace -- seems like it'd be a good thing to do and would increase the relevancy of our stuff to search engines. Would Google actively support Common Tag or does Google support it naturally through RDF indexing?

This approach also reminds me to review the debates on Ontology.

<http://www.peterme.com/archives/000558.html>

I would like to implement some kind of semantic marking for the data on my web site. If not Common Tag, what's the best way to say "this is an Author who has written that" or "this is regarding the Terminator movie (1984) directed by Cameron..."?

<comment><USER7> RDF or RDFa plus any of the myriad schemas that are available. You would use Dublin Core for the first, and you could reference the IMDB URI space for the second.

Commontag does not appear to do these things.

<comment><USER4> Common Tag uses RDFa so I'm confused (bear with me) on your objection to the scheme. The use of Freebase and DBPedia makes sense since all of their data is under relatively open license, unlike IMDB.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> An oldy but a goodie: <http://sylloge.com/personal/2004/09/flickr-and- del.html>

</comment><comment><USER9> I was surprised to not see Delicious in the list, since they're part of Yahoo now.

</comment><comment><USER10> We the people strongly oppose such aberration and condemn those involved in heresy to be burned at the stake!

Unless they accept going back to the drawing table...

<comment><USER10> How about this:

      <tag type="author|reader|auto" rel="label|means|etc" value="label1,label2"/>

which can be included anywhere in the doc and can be parsed/ignored according to some browser setting, leaving the whole document intact?

<comment><USER7> XML is the thing where you have angle brackets, right?</comment></comment></comment>


HBase | An open-source, distributed, column-oriented store modeled after Big Table - <AUTHOR> http://hadoop.apache.org/hbase/#Getting+Started <comment><USER2> here are some notes on getting your own ec2 hadoop single computer cluster upd, these are rough

Getting hadoop and hbase running in single server mode

I am going to track my progress and take some notes on how a newb to the linux world would go about setting up a hadoop node running hbase running on ec2. I have chosen ubuntu as my core OS as it offers all of the perks of linux, and is for me more useable than that of say redhat, suse, or mandrake; I have tried them all, and between the tools and the community, I feel that ubuntu is the best linux OS out there (I am so excited about Canonical's decision to hire UI designers for linux, go-go gadget Ubuntu!).

2:16 I just got one of Eric Hammond Ubuntu images booted on Amazon. I used imaged ami-179e7a7e, which is a base install of Ubuntu LTS 8.04, and I used the firefox3 extension elasticfox to boot the ami.

I am not going to explain how to get an ami booted here, but there are other documents like these that can get you started with your first AMI boot.

2:28 Looking over the wiki.apache.org/hadoop website for setup guides, and there seems to be a few quick start ones and maybe a few that are just for ubuntu.

2:30 I am going to work off of the following tutorial and make changes along the way,…. I hope it works [http://wiki.apache.org/hadoop/Running_Hadoop_On_Ubuntu_Linux...](http://wiki.apache.org/hadoop/Running_Hadoop_On_Ubuntu_Linux_)(Single- Node_Cluster)

the tutorial targets java 1.5 and ubuntu 7.10, and hadoop .14.2 and is dated October 2007. I am going to target Ubuntu 8.10 LTS Java 1.6 Hadoop .18

2:32 Apt-get install sun-java6-jdk

-this will take about 2-5min to download and install the sun JDK

2:55 After looking for a few text editors to replace vi or vim, I decided to just grab nano, jed, and gedit, as I remember one of those being more user friendly than vi

Apt-get install nano jed gedit

-2-5 min to install

3:07 Used "jed" to edit /etc/jvm for java6 by adding this line

/usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun

to the top of the list

3:10 Was able to follow tutorials directions

3:20 Filed a minor bug for the image, it reports as 7.04 when using ssh.

3:23 Going to skip disabling ipv6, cause it requires a reboot and on ec2…. That is a pain in the ass, as I would need to set up and back up my image first.

3:51 Make sure you are back at the root login and do a wget to download the file at one of the hadoop mirrors, you will have to find one that has the 0.18 tar if you are following along.

the hadoop package was only 16MB so it downloaded really fast on my EC2 server, and I downloaded it to /tmp

4:00 After downloading I had to extract the files to a dir, since the tutorial extracted the tarbal to /usr/local/hadoop, I did the same from the /tmp dir, but first I had to make a directory

mkdir /usr/local/hadoop

tar xzvf hadoop-0.18.0.tar.gz -C /usr/local/hadoop

4:10 in that directory I saw a build.xml, so for good measure i decided to install ANT apt-get install ant

4:11 Break

5:50 Break over and time to get more coffee. Meet a few people from geeksugar.

6:50 I found out I was working on the wrong server, and now I am back to where I left off, plus the hadoop user in the hadoop group now owns the hadoop dir as the turtorial suggests 7:02 Editing the conf/hadoop-env.sh file for java6 with JED

# The java implementation to use. Required. # export JAVA_HOME=/usr/lib/j2sdk1.5-sun

Gets changed to

# The java implementation to use. Required. export JAVA_HOME=/usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun

7:15 Ok at this point in the tutorial, there are some major edits that need to be typed and I could not take it to not use cut and paste in a terminal window, so I decided to configure winSCP, so I could telnet in with a gui and a windows text editor.

I am also going to use the /mnt dir as my base for my datastore, as the one in the tutorial is on the root partition and is limited to 10gb on eric's setup and mnt is set to grow.

In the future, it might make sense to set up an EBS (elastic block storage) for more persistent data access.

7:45 You have to run this command as the hadoop user if you are following this tutorial, or else the directory will have been owned by root

hadoop@ubuntu:~$ <HADOOP_INSTALL>/hadoop/bin/hadoop namenode -format

7:51 Make sure that all of the dirs in your hadoop install directory are writable by hadoop. It will try to write to the logs dir during starup.

</comment><comment><USER3> Anyone interested in opensource BigTable clones may also want to check BigData and Hypertable :

* BigData (on SourceForge) <http://sourceforge.net/projects/bigdata/>

* Hypertable <http://www.hypertable.org/>

[http://www.skrenta.com/2008/01/open_source_bigtable_clone_hy...](http://www.skrenta.com/2008/01/open_source_bigtable_clone_hyp.html)

</comment><comment><USER4> How is this different from Hypertable, other than being written in java rather than c++?

<http://www.hypertable.org>

<comment><USER5> How is Django different from Ruby on Rails, other than being written in Python rather than Ruby? (Also known as: how is everything on the Internet different from everything else, other than being different?)

</comment></comment><comment><USER2> We have been extensively looking into hbase on hadoop, its a fascinating technology.

I would love to know how it runs as a basic DB for simple queries.

From what we have seen hbase and hadoop are about 10x slower than their google counterparts. Other tests seem to indicated the request time seems to hover between 50 and 250ms. I am in SF and I would like to hack on hadoop and hbase with anyone in the area to run some tests.

</comment><comment><USER6> I just looked at the PoweredBy section in the wiki and I didn't see any entries. I'd love to find out who is using this in production. The docs are rather thin at this point.

<comment><USER7> Hadoop is a Yahoo project, so it's likely that they are using something like this.

<http://developer.yahoo.com/blogs/hadoop/>

<comment><USER8> Yeah, but using Hadoop doesn't necessarily imply using HBase - HBase is built using Hadoop core.

Btw, the HBase Wiki is here: <http://wiki.apache.org/hadoop/Hbase>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Powerset (a search engine aquired by MS) is behind hbase development.

I have been using hbase in my project -- an interesting experience.

</comment><comment><USER10> Are there any distributed databases that can handle massively large joins?</comment>


MapReduce II (followup to "MapReduce: A major step backwards") - <AUTHOR> http://www.databasecolumn.com/2008/01/mapreduce-continued.html

<comment><USER2> This is the article they should have written in the first place. Much more detail, much better qualified arguments. And the point about each generation of computer scientists reinventing the wheel. Lisp being 50 years old and all that.

</comment><comment><USER3> > efforts such as PigLatin and Sawzall appear to be promising steps in this > direction.

Sawzall is a parallel logfile analyzer. It takes logfiles stored into GFS and MapReduces them for reliable billing (which used to be a nightmarish, fundamental revenue problem and is now a nonissue -- all you Nooglers live in a relative utopia). A unixy tool with a unixy mindset (gee, maybe that's because Rob Pike wrote it). It's a special-purpose tool that is incredibly good at its job, not a general-purpose filigreed hammer that is supposed to nail everything in sight. And the fact that the authors could possibly overlook this speaks volumes about their myopia.

Stonebraker naturally refused to answer the most obvious criticism of all -- _HEY ASSHOLE, WHAT ABOUT BIGTABLE?_

But then, if he addressed that, he'd no longer have an essay. And if Google took his advice they wouldn't have the revenues to have made it as a company. But that's not really something that academics think about, is it?

</comment><comment><USER4> This is worse than the first article.

They seem to be conflating the use of a high-level, SQL-like language with the architecture of the system. Of course you could layer a SQL-like language on top of a MapReduce-based storage and processing array, and for some queries that would be very user-friendly. If that is their whole point it is true but trivial.

I think BigTable does have a limited join capability now.

The real difference between a MapReduce-oriented system and typical SQL storage options is something like this. MR gives you assured scalability at the cost of limiting what kinds of queries you can do, and as the authors correctly point out, some queries get more and more onerous to create. Usually, SQL storage engines place ease of querying above all else, but have to go through painful and expensive procedures to scale well.

</comment><comment><USER5> Upmodded, but I chuckled when I read their first item where they take an obviously relational data problem then observe that you should use a relational database instead of MapReduce for it. From that, they claim RDBM is better.

<comment><USER6> I believe BigTable implements the kind of indexing they like.

Re the point of scalability; while we don't really know how well MapReduce scales, usage at Google provides good hints that it does so well. Further, I don't think relational databases scale linearly either, and it is notoriously difficult to implement large DB clusters.</comment></comment>


Continue or quit? - <AUTHOR> Hi,
I have my own company C now for several years where I work as freelancer. The last 4 years I'm working full time for company A and was winning good money and able to pay myself a salary of 1500€/month and having a car/phone/... on the company.
Last year I started a new company B with the shareholders of company A. I'm for 5% shareholder of this new company B. The problem for the moment is that company A is not running well anymore and company B is not making profit as we just started 1 year ago.
For the moment I'm not paid as good as before the start of the new company and I'm able to pay myself today 500€/month but the balans of my company C is not positive.
For the moment I'm thinking and doubting a lot about my current situation, me and my girlfriend are searching to buy our own property and soon there will be kids. I believe really in the new company we started but have bad feeling today because I'm not winning money as I would be just working as employee.
I put this question here on hackernews because I want to find people who are/were in the same situation as I am for the moment and to get some feedback what will be the best step for the future and career.
Feel free to give some advise or opinion about this scenario. Should I continue to fight for it or search some other freelance job? Is it part of starting new company? <comment><USER2> I'm confused with the statement, "e last 4 years I'm working full time for company A and was winning good money and able to pay myself a salary of 1500€/month and having a car/phone/... on the company."

I understand english isn't your first language, but just want to clarify the phrase "able to pay myself" a salary. I'm assuming that was a slip-up and you weren't a partner in company A..you were just an employee.

I'd bail out the entire situation. I know different parts of europe have different standard of living with regards to the Euro, but I don't know how most folks in the euro can survive on 500Euro/mos...especially with girlfriend and a kid on the way.

My advice is go back to freelancing.

I have a very good salary as a developer in the midwest and do some freelancing on the side.

The way I look at it, I have to be able to afford to lose a couple clients and keep on chugging before I strike out on my own.

</comment><comment><USER3> another option:

set a goal for the company. and if they dont meet it leave.

like: we will gain 1000 users and reach 1000$/MRR in 6 months or im out.

gl.</comment>


Streamlining Kubernetes development with Draft - <AUTHOR> https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/streamlining-kubernetes-development-with-draft/ <comment><USER2> This looks really cool! Hopefully it scratches the same itch docker-compose did a long time ago, but for those running Kubernetes.

I was just talking to a coworker this morning about how Helm is great, but its very analogous to debs or rpms: You would use it all day to install core- libraries (or services for k8s) on your system (or cluster), but probably not your first choice for shipping your business application.

I know, with Helm you can update a value for an image of a "release" (Helm term for an installed chart): but you hand off the upgrade of the application to the Tiller server to manage. If anything in your deployment goes south, Kubernetes will just keep trying to push it out until it works or is manually rolled back. Until Kubernetes gets automated rollbacks ([https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/issues/23211](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/issues/23211)), this can be less than ideal.

Going with the rpm/deb analogy, I prefer to use something that would take the place of Puppet/Ansible (like Spinnaker) for _my_ applications I release, and still use Helm for the cluster level services like monitoring, logging, etc.</comment>


China hacked Norway's Visma to steal client secrets - <AUTHOR> https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-cyber-norway-visma/china-hacked-norways-visma-to-steal-client-secrets-investigators-idUSKCN1PV141 <comment><USER3> In Norwegian scale Visma is pretty big.

Pretty much every non-huge company uses them for accounting and other business-crucial stuff.

Hack Visma properly and you probably have more accounting-data on the whole nation than the IRS does.

<comment><USER4> I didn't know Visma was Norwegian. It is probably among the top 3 companies in Sweden used for bookkeeping/accounting software, especially small to medium sized companies.

<comment><USER5> Visma SPCS is Swedish, founded in the 80s. Visma bought them in the early 2000s.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Not to detract from the gravity of the situation, but the main picture (and caption) are amazing.

"A man holds a laptop computer as cyber code is projected on him in this illustration picture taken on May 13, 2017."

<comment> 52-6F-62 AFAIU Reuters is one of the leaders in terms of news/wire agencies for generating things like that via machine learning and other algos.

It might be an automated choice, where the author or editor merely had to check a few boxes before publishing to get a remotely relevant clipart and caption, essentially. Saves a lot of time and money in an age where it's sort of a weird abstract form that needs to be fulfilled.

-> Hed

-> Byline - <USER2>

-> (Dek)

-> Graphic -> Caption

-> Body Copy

That is, it's not to say the system is elegant, yet....

[https://innovation.thomsonreuters.com/en/labs.html](https://innovation.thomsonreuters.com/en/labs.html)

edit: LOL. Just a few more clicks brought me to this article. I laughed.

[https://blogs.thomsonreuters.com/answerson/art-artificial- in...](https://blogs.thomsonreuters.com/answerson/art-artificial- intelligence/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> This breach happened in September 2018. More info [https://www.recordedfuture.com/apt10-cyberespionage- campaign...](https://www.recordedfuture.com/apt10-cyberespionage-campaign/)

official visma statement: [https://www.visma.com/press-releases/intelligence- report-vis...](https://www.visma.com/press-releases/intelligence-report- visma/?fbclid=IwAR1_pUJvJ9vPVkJjQu8StgKrsMiXMTgoGrA7MdW-FcFKw_5nJleUOHLXfJM)

</comment><comment><USER8> These titles are so damn stupid. I'm so sick of "they did that", and "they did this", when they don't know.

I've always wondered how someone comes to the conclusion that is was China, Russia or USA who did something.

Anonymity isn't exactly hard on the internet, so how do this all play out? Are data left behind saying something along the lines of "Hey, gotcha! Best regards, China. Contact <person> for confirmation."? No.

"Advanced Persistent Threat 10" "Suspected attribution: China"

But, let's face it, it's not known that is was China, it might just as well be anyone else.

Maybe people should stop being so damn stupid and use accurate headlines.

</comment><comment><USER9> Why doesn't the EU impose trade tariffs, sanctions or embargos on China?

China will continue to do this and laugh at the naiveté their victims.

There's no reason for them to stop until there is one.

<comment><USER10> Afraid of losing a large market. It's the same with Australia. OECD countries need to band together to respond to countries abusing global trade.

<comment><USER11> EU is large enough they could do this alone. Or team up with US and really have some firepower.

Things like this is the point of the EU, not creating swaths of regulations about how much or little banannas can be bent.

A place like Australia (alone) could never stand up to China. They would be too willing to make an example of a small country that crosses them. China trade comes with huge amounts of political pride and convenience. Even if Australia joined forces with a larger block we risk being g made an example of like that general saying he would sink an Australian ship to send a message to the US.

<comment><USER12> Australia is part of ANZUS, which means if China attacked Australia, the US would be obligated to intervene

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

<comment><USER11> Obliged by ANZUS, but would they really?

I feel in the past countries would stick to their commitment for the bigger picture. Now, not so sure. I wonder if they would weigh pros and cons and decide to withdraw or not.

<comment><USER12> If it aligned with their national interests, yes and generally US and Australian interests do align

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> What naughty thing did Norway do 250 years ago that people can use to justify this hacking? (See references to Samuel Slater when China/Chinese nationals hacking American firms for trade secrets is discussed).

</comment><comment><USER14> These news pop up almost weekly now.

I wonder what it will take for nations to start imposing a firewall on them – just like the one they impose on the rest of the world.

</comment><comment><USER15> All speculation; no proof in article.

</comment><comment><USER16> read through the article but can't find any hard evidence pointing to China. It makes me think that blaming China is just an easy way out when western companies got hacked due to their own failures to secure their businesses.

</comment><comment><USER17> In China, there is no difference between international espionage and corporate espionage. Their Ministry of State Security has proved this again and again.

Stealing intellectual property from companies advances their military goals.

<comment><USER18> Thankfully, the biggest threat to the individual is a sprinkling of privacy invasion and the odd blackmail. They're miles behind the US on that front.

They won't come and bomb your country to dust to benefit corporate goals like getting access to oil for profit, or massive defence contracts.

<comment><USER19> "Thankfully, the biggest threat to the individual is a sprinkling of privacy invasion and the odd blackmail."

They have prison camps for political dissidents.

<comment><USER18> That's a red herring.

This thread is about the use of Chinese state resources to advance the interests of Chinese companies.

<comment><USER20> You're the one who opened the door. If you can't take it, don't hand it out.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> was more work for hackers to hack every single device xD now they're just hacking one big server farm</comment>


PirateProxyList – Online Status of Various Pirate Proxy Services - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> [https://pirateproxylist.com/](https://pirateproxylist.com/)

</comment><comment><USER2> This didn't quite turn out as expected, did it?</comment>


Personal Reason for Hating Facebook (2015) - <AUTHOR> https://righteousruminations.blogspot.com/2015/06/hating-facebook.html <comment><USER2> I remember reading this when it was originally posted years ago and have had time to think about the implications. I am just over 40, so most of my class reunions were organized through Facebook and was amazed at the turn-out possible because of these new social networks. For my mother, there were simply people she no longer knew how to reach — including one of her best friends from childhood. Years went by until Facebook gained traction and they were reunited.

The point being, it is just as likely that the writer of this post wasn't left out any more than he would have been in the past. What has possibly changed is that a funeral lightly attended by only a few in the past could now reach the many. In the past, he would have missed hearing about the death and would have missed the funeral. In the present, the same thing happened but now feels left out.

It's a benefit to the mother who lost her child, but a detriment to the friend who feels left behind.

<comment><USER3> Agreed. Furthermore, Facebook doesn't require your work history or any of the other things the author claims is it's blood payment cost of entry. Last I checked it needs a valid email address, name, and password.

I've stripped most of my personal information off Facebook and now just use it as a messaging app and a "find me by name" sort of internet yellow pages thing.

<comment><USER4> > Last I checked it needs a valid email address, name, and password.

I've had friends have to submit government ID to prove that they were using their real name.

<comment><USER5> Why is wyager getting down voted? This is not uncommon given that people with certain types of last names (e.g. Yellow Horse) are targeted and then need to prove who they are. I cannot confidently say they don't keep the id given the whole phone call revelations of the last week.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Facebook's primary feature is a newsfeed which uses an algorithm to shape and influence who you ultimately interact with. If you consign your interpersonal relationship to Facebook's algorithms then it has become normal for facebook's algorithm to shape and control the opinions and relationships of people en- masse.

Whether you consider facebook's algorithms benevolent or not, the danger actually lies in the fact that people's opinions and friendships are not forming in a more natural and organic way. If relationships and opinions are shaped by an algorithm from a single source, it's more prone to failure, influence, if not by malevolence than by simple incompetence of not knowing the macro effects of a line of code applied to hundreds of millions of people.

<comment><USER7> Right. Features are for customers. Facebook's primary feature is ubiquitous surveillance of 2 billion users. The newsfeed is a use of that feature, where advertisers and "Facebook partners" can pay to manipulate targeted portions of those 2 billion users.

To Facebook _users_, the newsfeed is just a gimmick they use to get you to reveal more about you and your friends/connections than you would otherwise.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> A few months ago I won about $200 worth of Amazon gift card codes. Since nothing from Amazon delivers to my country I decided to give them to an American friend of mine. I remember it was late for him when I sent him the codes over Facebook so he only used up one right away and then went to sleep.

The next morning, however, the other coupons were all used up. He claims nobody else has access to his FB messages and I never bothered to actually check the validity of the codes on Amazon, so there is enough room for plausible deniability, but this coincided in time with this reddit post [https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/79x7u3/facebook_em...](https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/79x7u3/facebook_employees_just_opened_a_privately_shared/) and now there's that nagging feeling in the back of my mind that some underpaid 3rd world facebook employee read through the messages and decided to use the codes themselves.

I don't know, this is all probably a stretch, but that moment reached a new low for Facebook in my mind (not that my opinion of them was high before).

<comment><USER9> Did you contacted Amazon to clarify gift-codes usage?

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I will say that if you are organizing an event on Facebook, and you actually have a list of people you'd like to see there or who should be there, then if you don't make an effort to contact the non-FB people, you're a bit of a jackass.

We put together a big list of people for a HS reunion, and used real-life social networks to (try to) reach the names that weren't on FB. Mostly successful and with a large nucleus who were on FB, easy to distribute the workload.

</comment><comment><USER11> I empathize a lot with this guy. I wanted to share my recent story:

I unfollowed every single person and page I'm connected to on Facebook a month and a half ago.

Every time I look at a Facebook there's just about no value. My feed is empty. Nevertheless, I'll visit it by habit. It's weird to see how that persists.

I am not posting (never really did anyway), and I have no idea what's going on with the people I didn't really interact with that much anyway.

What put me over the edge was answering the question: "Does anyone that I deeply care for post anything (at all)?"

Answer for 90% was no. And there rest I still have phone/text to communicate.

This has all made me consider what relationships in my life are important. And it's made me consider how susceptible I was to a fine-tuned algorithm hungry for outrage and virality, and how that influenced my relationships and myself.

I feel great opting out. I hope to fully delete the whole thing soon. Weird that I can't just do that.

I recommend the unfollow thing.

<comment><USER12> I remember when I tried to do the same thing three years ago (the year before I deleted my account) – Unfollow every person. AFAIK I had 600+ contacts.

What was funny, after ~300 clicks I got the captcha to fill and 14 clicks later week block with a message: "This is not a proper using of the function". Also, FB was hypocritical. It allowed me to click to follow again, just unfollow was blocked. :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> > I hate that, if I somehow don't want to consign my personal data, beliefs, > preferences, relationships, work history, daily plans, and private messages > to a massive advertising corporation, I have to risk missing out on seminal > life events. Not being on Facebook is sort of like not having a cellphone. > Sure, me and a small number of weirdos can opt out, but we are increasingly > disadvantaged by it.

This captures perfectly my reasons for getting on Facebook in ~2007. One of my best friends had a baby and I was the only one who didn't know because I wasn't on there. I'd also been one of the last of my friends to get a cellphone 3 years before, and was starting to worry that I was just a jerk about keeping in touch.

It's really interesting to compare those two decisions now. The slider phone I got in 2003 was nothing like what we have today, but buying it let me participate in a communication ecosystem that's still evolving fast.

Facebook feels really stagnant by comparison. Its core mechanics, at least the ones I care about, are unchanged. Everyone's usage of it long ago stagnated into the same patterns. I still check it because I have to for life events, but it's not something I look forward to.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Updated to reflect that I wrote this in 2015. Still feel raw about it.

</comment><comment><USER14> I really sympathize with statements like this:

>I hate that, if I somehow don't want to consign my personal data, beliefs, preferences, relationships, work history, daily plans, and private messages to a massive advertising corporation, I have to risk missing out on seminal life events.

I feel very much the same way. Social media is a tool that we can use to make social interaction more convenient, but it should not replace real social interaction. Writing a letter, an email, calling a friend, or even sending a text should not be replaced by Facebook because it is ultimately a corporation that seeks to exploit those very interactions for its own profit _through means you may not agree with_ \-- that is, selling off your personal data to advertisers.

That being said, it's fine to use Facebook occasionally to check up on what's happening with your friends across the globe. But I really think that everyone should consider removing their "close" friends from Facebook and moving that communication to in-person talks, phone calls, or even text messages. If you're logging onto Facebook even once a day, you're playing into their psychological traps: it's probably best reserved for a lazy Sunday afternoon, something like how older folks treat email. You certainly don't need it on your phone.

If you're concerned that you'll lose friends by deleting your Facebook, you can always keep a Messenger account connected to your phone number and not miss out on group communications. If you're a mover and shaker in your social groups, try pulling your groups away from Facebook. Organizing an event? Offer to send out a mass email to people instead of using Facebook. Or text people yourself instead. Decoupling yourself from Facebook only gives you more power when they decide to do misbehave (do you _really_ think this is the last or worse scandal we'll see from Zuck), and if you're really successful, your friend group will eventually start to realize that they don't need Facebook any more either. Everyone isn't going to delete their Facebook overnight, but if folks start to disconnect bit by bit we'll a) all be better off and have more future options when it comes to Facebook's manipulation and b) start to make Facebook less and less valuable, so eventually people won't even want to join in the first place. "What is an ocean... but a multitude of drops?"

<comment><USER15> I would have thought a simple solution to

>I somehow don't want to consign my personal data, beliefs, preferences, relationships, work history, daily plans, and private messages to a massive advertising corporation, I have to risk missing out on seminal life events

Is just to have a facebook account with you name and picture and limit to that? Log in in an incognito window if you really don't want them to know what you are browsing?

<comment><USER14> A fair point, but I would rather they didn't have knowledge of my social graph at all. The minute I make an account, events, friend connections, private messages, and more all start aggregating there. Then you have to log in to check when you get messages and invites, and they know where you connected from and when you connected -- even more data.

And since Facebook is tracking the phone calls and text messages of at least some of my Android-using friends, there goes even more privacy, this time _completely out of my control_ to keep private. Unfortunately Facebook is pretty good at being "sticky".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> On a related note. A couple of years ago I was really annoyed by all the notifications FB emailed me. I went to settings trying to change it so that FB only sends me emails if someone is tagging me or sending me a message. Maybe I'm stupid, I just couldn't figure it out. They made it so confusing and after a few attempts I just stopped receiving any notifications, missing out some important messages from people. I don't think it's just a bad UX (which it is). It's probably by design, intentionally making it hard for people to disconnect.

</comment><comment><USER17> And as a counterpoint, I will say that after I _deleted_ my Facebook, I feel a lot more connected to the people I do see, when I see them, because I cannot assume I know anything about their life, and, I have to, yknow, be _present_ with them? i'm

</comment><comment><USER18> _Not being on Facebook is sort of like not having a cellphone._

As someone who has never had a cell phone, I can say that living this way in a first-world country is challenging. I've been in situations where it's assumed I do have a cell phone, and the result ranges from awkward to maddening for the other party.

I also don't have a Facebook account. Not having a cell phone is much more troublesome.

The pull of network effect doesn't just mean that people join for opportunity. If sufficiently insinuated into daily life, some become compelled to join out of necessity.

But with Facebook and Cell Phones, joining this club takes a major toll one's privacy.

That's the dilemma anyone resisting network effect faces.

<comment><USER19> Not having Facebook and not having a cellphone are two completely different things. If you don't have Facebook, you might miss out on some social stuff. Not having a cellphone is a bad idea, even just from a safety standpoint.

What if there is an incident and you need to call emergency services? Maybe you crash your car? Maybe you come across another crashed car, and can't contact emergency services because you don't have a cellphone?

I understand why you wouldn't want to carry around a cellphone all the time for privacy reasons (government tracking etc.), but why not get a $10 dumbphone and keep it turned off and in your backpack, or in your glovebox in your car? Nobody can track you if it's turned off.

I'm not sure about the USA, but at least in New Zealand, you'd only have to top up a few dollars every 6 months to keep your SIM active, and you don't need to register SIM cards in your name (although I know that other countries, like Australia, require this). Even without a SIM in your phone, you can still ring emergency services. There's no reason not to buy a $5 phone and keep it around just in case.

<comment><USER20> I've never had a cellphone either; I do it because of the danger, life is so tame nowerdays that it's one of few thrills that are still legal.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Its not a matter of trading personal information for access to a social network, which is a reasonable thing to do.

Its a matter of letting a nefarious actor into your life to feed you addictive poison, torpedo your well being, and feed you propaganda. Each new revelation makes this increasingly clear.

</comment><comment><USER22> I can relate to this since I'm an introvert to and don't like social media in general but I do realize that this is how the current generation of society works. If I want to participate in it I have to adapt too.

</comment><comment><USER23> _[Without Facebook], I have to risk missing out on seminal life events_

Is missing a high school reunion or the funeral of a long-list friend really "seminal"? Socially awkward, perhaps, but seminal? No, not really. Seminal is getting married, the death of a parent, birth of a child, finishing college. Not getting drunk with a bunch of people you barely know any more.

<comment><USER24> Totally agreed.

Seminal literally means "of seed." Seminal moments are the moments in life that "seed" your future. 99.99% of the time your life continue on exactly the same if you attend a funeral or you don't and if you attend a class reunion, or you don't.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> > I hate that, if I somehow don't want to consign my personal data, beliefs, > preferences, relationships, work history, daily plans, and private messages > to a massive advertising corporation, I have to risk missing out on seminal > life events.

Why not have a Facebook account but only use it read-only for the most part? Nothing _requires_ that you post your beliefs, work history, daily plans and such.

That's what I do. I do post a couple of times or so a year, just to keep the account looking used, but those posts are always just something innocuous. Usually just a link to something funny I saw on Reddit, but sometimes a photo or video of mine. The latest, for example, was a link to this video of several Chestnut-backed Chickadees that landed on my hand to eat peanuts out of my palm [1].

I do the same thing on Twitter.

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ShPgZhSbxU0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ShPgZhSbxU0) If you watch, I recommend a second viewing going frame by frame as they land and takeoff.

<comment><USER26> > Nothing requires that you post your beliefs, work history, daily plans and > such.

Except a lot of information about these things can be inferred simply from using the network, through metadata and behavioral analysis. Facebook will also use their software running on your machine to steal just about every piece of information they can access at rest there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Closed platforms recreate all previously-solved problems, too, usually requiring you to wait for the gatekeeper to get around to offering a solution.

We _have_ ways to track contacts, organize E-mail threads, view restaurant web sites, etc. and all those tools are uninvented when the data is only visible through Facebook. Even when Facebook graciously permits you to keep using one of your tools (like a web browser), it's still effectively broken until you log in.

I find a silver lining in this by making it as friction-full as possible for me to view Facebook content. For example, having to unblock domains and log in every time (never saving passwords, etc.). It works: it makes me consider whether or not I really want to spend time viewing whatever silly video/rant/whatever I initially thought was interesting. And of course then I am not sucked into an hour of grazing the rest of the feed.

</comment><comment><USER28> Note that carrying a smartphone and using a credit card is entrusting a great deal of information to advertising companies. All major phone and credit companies are selling your data (anonymized, to the degree they feel is optimal). I'm not sure that Facebook is any worse.

To be more clear: They know where you go, who you call and text, and what you buy.

<comment><USER29> Even on iphone with content blockers running and location services disabled for most apps except while using?

Referring to ad companies here, not NSA etc

<comment><USER30> Yep. Unless you disable your WiFi and only use a VPN while you are connecting to the web via your phone.

<comment><USER7> Even that doesn't solve the problem...

[https://www.tomsguide.com/us/FCC-Mobile-Devices-iPhone- Andro...](https://www.tomsguide.com/us/FCC-Mobile-Devices-iPhone- Android,news-12775.html)

"Devices that are not GPS-enabled must be tracked via triangulation with local cellular towers, a time consuming process that can only give an approximate location and can dangerously delay critical assistance. The new regulation will allow almost universal pinpoint location of 911 callers by emergency responders. No date was given for when non-GPS enabled devices must be discontinued, but given FCC estimates that by 2018, 75 percent of all mobile devices will be GPS capable, it is likely that the assumption is the sunsetting of obsolete devices will occur naturally as consumers chuck outdated gadgets for shiny new ones."

I'm really curious to know whether this means my iPhone will give up my GPS location against my preference setting if I call 911, or if it means the carriers are going to be required to improve non-gps derived location data from cell towers to "allow almost universal pinpoint location of 911 callers by emergency responders"...

<comment><USER30> True, but that's something your cell provider (and the providers of other base stations your phone has pinged) has access to, not your typical website.

But you are 100% correct that the cell network knows to within a rough approximation where you are and how fast you travel. This information is also used to predict where and when the next cell-hand-off will happen.

<comment><USER7> Yep - as always in security, it's important to know who your adversary is.

If your adversary is the NSA(/GRU/Mossad/etc) - you're fucked. Throw away all your electronic devices, torch your house, and hope you make it to Belize before they shut the borders to you.

If your adversary is Law Enforcement, they'll get cell tower data (quite likely without a warrant by just asking), and they'll then mislead a court and jury about how accurate that data is: [https://www.newyorker.com/news/news- desk/what-your-cell-phon...](https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/what- your-cell-phone-cant-tell-the-police)

This link: [http://urgentcomm.com/psap/different- strokes](http://urgentcomm.com/psap/different-strokes) says that since '05 wireless carriers in The US have been required to do better than just "which cell tower you're connected to", but for some percentage of connections they're required to provide 50 or 150m location accuracy - which they can apparently do using three cell towers and triangulation. Since they're happy to hand over cell tower data to law enforcement when asked (or possibly when asked with a warrant) - I wouldn't bet against then handing this E911 Phase 2 level of location accuracy over.

Somewhat more worryingly... The cell providers seem to be happily monetising that data too: [https://techcrunch.com/2017/10/15/mobile-phone-companies- app...](https://techcrunch.com/2017/10/15/mobile-phone-companies-appear-to-be- providing-your-number-and-location-to-anyone-who-pays/) [https://www.theverge.com/2013/4/9/4187654/how-carriers- sell-...](https://www.theverge.com/2013/4/9/4187654/how-carriers-sell-your- location-and-get-away-with-it)

Now out of the four big technology companies - two of them own a mobile OS and so can do whatever-the-fuck they want with your phone if you're "in their camp" and of the remaining two, one of them actually sells you stuff to make a living, the other makes their money by surveilling you.

With Facebook's warchest - what do you reckon the chances are of them _not_ buying cellphone location data on the open market to add to their advertising- marketing machine?

I'm not saying I know they are - but I do know that the data about location down to perhaps 50m accuracy or less is legally required to be available to the cell operators - and they've been caught in the past selling that data - and Facebook have _very_ deep pockets to pay for data to match against theirs. (And there is almost _zero_ chance that whatever the cell companies might to to "anonymise" that cell location data, Facebook wouldn't be able to de- anonymise it by correlating to to other data they collect.)

But yeah, having your phone use a VPN no doubt helps...

<comment><USER30> > With Facebook's warchest - what do you reckon the chances are of them _not_ > buying cellphone location data on the open market to add to their > advertising-marketing machine?

I don't think they would have to pay for it. They're just going to give the phone company a nice fat discount on their advertising campaign. That way they don't have to own up to selling your data either, win/win. /s

Mobile phone location data is so valuable that there are whole companies dedicated to 'enriching' mobile phone OpenRTB requests with location data.

[https://www.iab.com/guidelines/real-time-bidding-rtb- project...](https://www.iab.com/guidelines/real-time-bidding-rtb-project/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Honestly, this is true even if you're on facebook, if the algorithms don't feel like putting the event in your feed.

<comment><USER32> When someone invites you to an event, you receive a notification. You will be directly informed, you don't have to see it in your feed.

<comment><USER33> You can even setup an ical feed for events, they'll get added when people invite you. Don't even have to login.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> The major complaint here is that not being on Facebook leaves him out of things that are now on Facebook. And I get that, for a good while I was off facebook entirely and felt quite left out. But still... it doesn't really make sense to me for that to be your primary complaint. You could make the same complaint about email, or the internet in general.

That said, I think it is a terrible shame more efforts haven't gone into making an alternative -- and at this point, it would need to be a compatible alternative -- that is not controlled by a single for-profit organization.

</comment><comment><USER35> Communicating in a way that is mutually agreeable is a more powerful enabler of friendship than the existence of an entry in Facebook's database.

I put it to you that Facebook is about group communication, whereas friendship is about one-on-one communication. As such Facebook has nothing to do with friendship, and it is a delusion to think otherwise. Those Facebook "friends" are actually acquaintances, and your friends are those smaller number of people whom you talk to outside Facebook.

</comment><comment><USER36> How fast can I kill all my karma by pointing out that the 3 of the top 4 articles on HN are some realization that Facebook does not give an ef about anybody's privacy?

<comment><USER36> Response/discussing is preferred to down votes!

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> I fantasize about Facebook just one day utterly disappearing. No warning, just quietly taken offline without explanation, all data deleted without a whisper.

The world would absolutely freak out like never before and I would sit back and chortle with delight as I watched my fellow people throw tantrums like little babies for months on end. Think of the lawsuits and blubbering that would ensue!

I think it would be an excellent lesson to society that they shouldn't ever, ever, ever entrust their personal data to a profit-driven corporation again.

Out of the ashes would arise a better, decentralized system and control would be given back to the individuals and we would stop hating each other and being glued to our fucking phones all the time and, well ok this fantasy has gone off the rails, but you get the idea!

<comment><USER38> How would that be a lesson to society about entrusting personal data to corporations?

<comment><USER37> I mean, insofar as society can learn anything, I think if your entire last 10+ years of photos and love letters and baby pictures and the other trillion gigs of intimate shit people have eagerly given to FB suddenly disappeared, you might be a little less willing to so unconditionally trust the next FB that comes along. IDK man! By that point, there's a new generation chompin' at the bit to give away their gigs of content and the cycle repeats. Guess we're stuck w/ FB forever. And war. War will never go away either.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Social networks and Facebook in general are a certain aspect of "progress" in society. Yes, it's not perfect, but it's ubiquitous enough that it's considered a primary contact channel that reaches many people at once. Not liking it/hating it/etc. is fine. It's one's own prerogative. But don't complain other people find it useful and you will be left behind because you don't. An exaggerated analogy is like saying "I don't like computers/cars/aeroplanes/internet. I hate that. It's not right I am left behind for not wanting to use it".

<comment><USER40> It's not that the author didn't get to chat about people's lunch on Facebook every morning. It's that the author wasn't invited to things he should have been invited to because to many people, "I invited everyone from my FB list" sounds like they invited everyone they reasonably could. Which is not true. The author explicitly says that he is easy to find. And his school friends should take the extra several minutes to searchengine each person they didn't have on facebook if the event is relatively big and organized. It should be the default response. And the author is rightly frustrated that it isn't, because people are lazy and can unintentionally be careless.

That isn't comparable to not being invited to a spontaneous dinner in 2 hours at 9PM by someone clicking invite all of their contacts list tagged as _classmates_ because you're living in the mountaints a one-hour flight and a two hour hike away without any communication tools around you and you don't even believe in flights.

I don't mean these examples to sound flippant, they're here because I'm trying to underline how there's reasonable compromises between convenience and being a good friend / event organizer, and not being on facebook doesn't make you hard to contact. It definitely didn't in the case of the author.

<comment><USER39> All fair points and an indication to the quality of 'friends' sometimes who might or might not make the effort. One point I'll make is that being on LinkedIn, to me, as what being on Facebook is for him. I don't like LinkedIn, but I'm on it, reluctantly. I am only there for potential business and 'presence'. My "contacts" are mostly former colleagues, and recruiters. Every button click on LinkedIn requires a second thought as it might be a contact harvesting trap or worst. I really don't like it, yet I'm there because I realise that sometimes this is a viable channel for this or that purpose.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Well said.

A talk by Moxie Marlinspike called "Changing threats to privacy" also addressed some of these network effect aspects in a thoughtful way. [https://archive.org/details/youtube- dBtmzY5gcO8](https://archive.org/details/youtube-dBtmzY5gcO8)

</comment><comment><USER41> I do sympathize with this but I have friends not on FB and as a friend of them , if I see something on FB (like an event invite) one of us know to relay via text to them. Maybe my situation is unique ?

</comment><comment><USER42> You don't hate facebook. You hate people who think facebook = life.

<comment><USER43> Of course, there is also snapchat, tumblr and instagram.</OnlyHalfSarcasm>

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> If you're concerned about "consign[ing] my personal data, beliefs, preferences, relationships, work history, daily plans, and private messages to a massive advertising corporation" but don't want to miss out on seminal life events, why not just maintain a Facebook account without ever posting to it?

As long as you remain friends with people you need to keep in touch with, but never post anything or fill out your personal details, you will not be giving up any privacy or missing out.

<comment><USER44> They'll still know where you live, where you work, what devices you use, what places you travel to, what hotels you stay in, what times you're usually awake, who your friends are, which friends you're more interested in, what invitations you respond to, what invitations you ignore, which of your friends are interested in you, what your hobbies and interests are, what texts you send on messenger, what other websites you visit on the internet, ...

Should I go on?

<comment><USER45> Don't use the app and they won't know most of that.

<comment><USER46> Also don't let your friends and family use it, block their Pixel, don't let them buy brokered info on you, don't let anyone else with Facebook on your WiFi... and do this all perfectly 100% of the time.

<comment><USER45> They can't track you if you're not using their app on your phone. Use a sandboxed version (there are many) and it's not running and tracking you other than when you're actually using it. You can also sandbox it on your computer if you like, but there are many privacy blockers that will keep them from tracking you all over the web if you want to just use it in your regular browser.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> > _I feel that my only real choices are to either A. Get with the program and > embrace the dominant protocols of society..._

Um, yes? That's literally what bring a part of a society is about. I'm not thrilled that Facebook has woven itself so deeply into our society, but if you're not on it, it's likely you'll be missing out on some things. Many of those things you may not care about, but unfortunately for some, like the death of a dear friend, you will care.

</comment><comment><USER48> I haven't used Facebook for years (deleted my account as much as is possible). I'm lucky though because I have a wife on Facebook who lets me knom when family events occur.

</comment><comment><USER49> Sorry, but for the most part this sounds stupid. You're hating a widespread method of communication because it doesn't work for you _when you're not using it_. That's like complaining that no one text messages you if you never opted in to owning a phone.

<comment><USER24> Yeah, and it's really baffling that someone who is a self described "introvert," who goes years without speaking to people they consider close friends, is upset they didn't get an invite to a _high school reunion_!?!? Why would someone like that want to attend a high school reunion in the first place?

They didn't get an invite because they don't stay in communication with people, not because they don't have a Facebook!!!

I'm not really sure why they'd expect to hear directly from the mom. When a person dies, the information is spread like a web, the next-of-kin very rarely informs everyone directly. Usually they inform their close circle and the close circle of the deceased. Then those people spread the word. 100% of the time I've been informed of a death it was by someone in my close circle, not the next-of-kin. Since the author doesn't keep communication with their "friends," they got overlooked. That's very sad and shitty, but it doesn't have to do with Facebook.

<comment><USER50> Maybe because without an event to go to, it's difficult to force themselves out into the world?

Maybe because they wanted to see their friend at said event?

Or maybe, just maybe, they didn't have the current contact info for their friends and would like so still see them but otherwise can't setup a meeting with them?

The article doesn't make all of the facts plain, so it's pointless to speculate the full details.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> So that person calls himself/herself an "introvert" (I hate when ppl justify their lifestyle with that word btw) then complains than he never got to class reunion. Then throws some stronger motives about his friend suicide yet griefs more about inability to "say goodbye" or "i feel responsible and hurt".

And overall says about facebook hate but, like, it is just a platform, a technology; it all starts and ends up with people, so he'd better say "I hate people but want their attention but don't want to tell 'em that by owning a facebook profile".</comment>


Aeromobil: Roadable aircraft - <AUTHOR> http://www.aeromobil.com <comment><USER2> I just don't get the appeal of roadable aircraft like this.

Every single one I've seen is neither a particularly good airplane nor a particularly good car, and they're _expensive_. For the price of one, you can generally buy a better car, a better airplane, _and_ a second better car to keep at your most frequent destination airport, _and_ have enough money left over to rent cars at other destinations for years.

I can't find a price on this one, but I suspect it will be no different.

If you want a light plane, buy a light plane. There are plenty of them out there, with a large variety. If you want a car, buy a car. Lots of reasonably priced choices there. I just don't see why anyone would ever want a single vehicle for both roles.

<comment><USER3> That's a little bit like saying 10 years ago that no one needs a smartphone, it's a crappy phone and a crappy computer, it's too big and heavy and expensive and you can't get data anywhere and it sucks to type on. Just buy a phone for moving around and a computer for getting work done.

Things change. Anything could be the Apple Newton of the next big thing :). (Although to be honest, I see transportation moving much more to a computer controlled system rather than this, but just for the sake of argument).

<comment><USER4> Unlike smartphones, the technology to build flying cars has existed for decades, and it's fundamental laws of physics rather than Moore's law that the designers have to combat to try to give them better performance characteristics than a WWI aircraft.

If you've already lost the time saved by not switching from car to aircraft a minute or two into the flight it's not that practical except in situations where there's absolutely no chance of getting a taxi or hire vehicle at the end. Suffice to say it isn't going to be a cheap solution to that relatively rare problem.

<comment><USER5> I agree with the general premise that flying cars are not a good idea in the near future, but I strongly disagree with your point.

1st) "fundamental laws of physics rather than moore's law" is a great analogy since people over time have continually cited physics as what will stop Moore's law. Some argue that it has in recent years done just that.

2nd) Like smartphones, the technology to build flying cars has evolved and will continue to evolve. I'm not an expert on aircraft or cars, but I can think of some areas that will make this easier right away. A) by moving all controls to fly/drive by wire, we can reduce weight, B) Materials technology has improved dramtically. C) Battery technology has improved. Maybe not for flying, but for systems. D) Weight can be further reduced by having all controls in one small computer which will eventually be the size of a smart phone instead of the size of a desktop, E) Fuel economy is improving in both cars and airplanes.

But... Here is what I think can really make it happen, and what will make it happen. When cars and planes can both fly themselves with full automatition from point to point without pilot intervention, we will see flying cars. The reason stems from the fundamental problem that 99% of people don't know how to fly, and of those that do, only a small percentage can fly, afford and want to own a car/plane.

I don't know anyone who wouldn't be interested in hoping in a fully automated vehicle which would fly them from point to point at 500 mph. You could work 250 miles away from where you live.

It will happen, just not for a long time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The appeal of the flying car is imaginary: what people immediately fantasize about is rolling out of their driveway, finding a clear stretch of road, and taking off.

Make that one hour commute a lovely fifteen minute flight!

But that can't actually happen. The month of driving practice needed to get a license becomes a year or more of pilot school. The damage inflicted by motor vehicle accidents is already horrendous enough without adding a thousand meters of altitude into the equation.

<comment><USER7> We just have to upgrade Google's driverless car. And the drawbacks you mention are the same drawbacks when we stopped using horses. Why do you need a dangerous car when you can use a more safe horse without a drivers license?

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Everyone builds a flying car, but I've always thought that motorcycles had more in common with light aircraft. Narrow body, low weight, high rpm engines etc...

If I were designing a road/air vehicle. It would be a motorcycle with detachable wings/prop.

<comment><USER9> [http://www.wimp.com/flyingbike/](http://www.wimp.com/flyingbike/)

[http://www.designboom.com/technology/flying-hovercraft- bike-...](http://www.designboom.com/technology/flying-hovercraft-bike-by- aerofex/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> It's a good attempt, but I believe the definition of a flying car is a car that doesn't need to drive to the airport?

<comment><USER10> Given current roadway infrastructure I think that would preclude any sort of "plane" other than Harrier style VTOL craft, and from what I understand those are expensive and difficult even for the military. Your other option would be a helicopter.

For my personal definition this complete works. But I have no clue which of us is more representative of the public…

<comment><USER11> While technically this is a flying car, I think the Jetsons' version is the one people are really wanting.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I love these things, I think concepting road to air is a great field that I encourage people to explore.

However, I think people should refrain from making a business out of this. Use research funds to push boundaries! I can't help but look at this page and video and think that they are trying to make money off of it.

Speaking as a pilot, a lot of aircraft are built with crashing in mind. Just look at the 777 crash at SFO recently. Judging this craft simply by the video, I have serious doubts that this craft would keep you very safe in an air emergency. I'd love to see what its glide ratio is.

Another issue with current road->air systems is the need of 2 powerplants: one for the road and one for the air. For road travel, the extra weight is not that big of an issue. However, the weight of the road engine (batteries if it were electric) puts serious limitations on its airworthiness and stability.

</comment><comment><USER13> These things keep coming up. Here's the part i don't get: Who are these people who think it is a good idea to invest in such ventures? Really.

Let's put pen to paper and figure this out.

The cost of an aero car is likely to be in the $300K range. This does not include maintenance, insurance (insurance!) and other operating costs.

Well, to put it in very simple terms, with $300k you can buy a nicely equipped Tesla AND an equivalent Cessna and still have up to $200k left in the bank --depending on the airplane cost which starts $10K.

Going this route means that you'll have ZERO FUEL COSTS while on the road and a dedicated aircraft that is well-tested, proven and with a history of millions of flight miles.

But, wait! You can rent an aircraft for somewhere in the $75 to $250 per hour range. No jets. I am looking at Cessna 152 to 182 class aircraft. The aerocars are roughly equivalent to the low end of the Cessna range.

If you buy a Tesla and rent aircraft you have zero on-ground fuel costs as well as over $200K in the bank. Depending on the model you rent you have enough money for over 2,500 hours of rentals. You also have zero aircraft maintenance and operating costs. If you play it right 100% of the rental costs are tax deductible.

It is important to note that this also gives you aircraft at every airport in the world where such aircraft are rented. This beats owning a plane by a massive margin.

But, wait! How much do you really fly per year. Really?

Nah, these things are bad ideas. Interesting from an engineering perpective.

Maybe Tesla should market a flying car deal: buy a Tesla and the fuel you'll save will buy you several domestic flights per month. Maybe they can make a deal with flight schools to get people certified at a discount and then they can rent planes at a discount as well.

Again, I have to wonder who invests in these things. I remember reading about one that got some $40 million from investors. Learn to use a friggin calculator.

</comment><comment><USER14> Something doesn't add up. From the specs in automobile mode, fuel consumption is 7.5 l per 100 km, and the range is 500 km.

From that, we can deduce that it has a 37.5 l fuel capacity.

Now let's look at the specs for plane mode. It says that it has a range of 700 km, and consumes 15 l per hour. At 15 l per hour, it would take 2.5 hours to go through 37.5 l, but to go 700 km in 2.5 hours takes an average speed of 280 km/hour. The specs say that the top speed is 200 km/hour, so what is going on? (They do say "and more" for the top speed, but I would not expect the listed speed to that far under the real top speed).

</comment><comment><USER15> I doubt from a safety standpoint they will be allowing this in our airspace- - people wreck their cars all over the place, the last thing we need is cars falling out of the sky, or more ways to die. -- Doubt the FAA will ever greenlight this..at least here in America doesn't seem feasible. Possibly in 30 years - -when there's an automated version -- ie set coordinates and it handles all routing/air-traffic control mechanisms -- think google auto- driving car for personal aircrafts... that would be huge.. but still a distant dream.

<comment><USER16> I think getting it street legal will be a much bigger battle.

There's no reason that this couldn't be certified as a LSA ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light- sport_aircraft](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light-sport_aircraft)).

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I know nothing about airplane physics but looks like this one sways a lot with the wind. I can't imagine it taking a big wind hit and keep flying. Looks dangerous.

</comment><comment><USER18> Oh geez, another one. These things never work out because the regulations for airplanes and cars combined could easily kill a man if dropped from a three- story window.

</comment><comment><USER19> Just another toy for the wealthy. I'm still looking for something like the Moller Skycar with auto-pilot. Getting a pilot's license is too hard/expensive/takes too long for it go mainstream. It would also be nice if it used something stronger than a propeller (not sure if jet engines work on small aircraft). If it's going to replace plane trips, it needs to go a lot faster than 60mph.

<comment><USER20> 60MPH was the minimum airspeed. The max was 124. Takeoff was 90.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Great concept, but I call "vaporware" for several years to come. We're all still waiting for Icon Aircraft, the light-sport aircraft you can tow behind your car. [http://www.iconaircraft.com](http://www.iconaircraft.com). Deliveries are waitlisted until 2017 -- and Icon doesn't try to be a car as well. ;)

</comment><comment><USER22> The idea of flying car, while very nice and present in many scifi creations should not happen, at least not with humans controlling it manually.

We have already countless idiots on the roads, I don't want them in the air as well; I'd be afraid to get out of my house.

</comment><comment><USER23> Interestingly, this also came out today: [http://www.davisenterprise.com/local-news/moller-signs- agree...](http://www.davisenterprise.com/local-news/moller-signs-agreement-to- advance-skycar-development/)

</comment><comment><USER24> It looks like it barely lifts off and even then doesn't look particularly stable.

</comment><comment><USER25> I'm pretty sure Terrafugia is much further ahead: [http://www.terrafugia.com/aircraft/transitionR](http://www.terrafugia.com/aircraft/transitionR)

But competition is always good!

<comment><AUTHOR> Hm, I don't think so. These guys are working on it almost 20 years. They just spoke at Bombardier conference in Canada [http://www.sae.org/events/atc/](http://www.sae.org/events/atc/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> If you can afford to own and fly a light plane, you can afford a rental car or an "airport car" you keep at your usual destinations. The scope of the problem this solves is vanishingly narrow.

</comment><comment><USER27> I like that the material it's made out of is called "steal".

</comment><comment><USER28> "Roadable"? Really? I was unaware road was a verb.</comment>