The Internet of Onions - <AUTHOR> https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/695910/61948e743f7054ec/ <comment><USER2> I'm actually working on something based on this idea - I've created a SIM card for the Internet of Things - basically a smartcard (microSD form factor) that offers a persistent crypto-secure identity for Internet-connected objects.

It works by holding the TOR hidden service private key inside a tamper- resistant smartcard and generating/signing hidden service descriptors with it (plus an entire mechanism to prevent you from signing future descriptors - meaning that the identity is closely tied to the physical SIM card, just like in the GSM world - whoever has the SIM has the identity, once you've removed the SIM the identity goes with it).

Discussion at [https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor- dev/2016-June/011...](https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor- dev/2016-June/011134.html) \- I've made progress since that post, it's now fully operational and tested, just need to figure out a way to turn it into a product and get some funding for it.

<comment><USER3> I'm working on something that may be a complement to this. My email is in my profile if you want to chat.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I work for a large IoT PaaS provider. Would this be valuable for customers on our platform if we supported something like this? I'm trying to think through all the problems with this and while I think the redesign of our platform will actually make this harder, there's no reason it wouldn't be _possible_.

I also don't really understand how Tor works. Does this break anything like persistent connections or letting screw up anything with using UDP over longer time spans? (My other pet project is CoAP.)

I don't actually work on the products team, but I bet I could fight for something like this. (Plus figuring this out would actually be fun rather than the tedium that my real job has become.)

<comment><USER4> Supporting Tor is a niche thing, but... it would be very very helpful if everything in the IoT could be persuaded to go through a customer-controlled local gateway, which could proxy, rate-limit, redirect, and firewall connections according to the owner's policy.

Every device that reaches back to the mothership with a proprietary protocol is another device which gets discarded when the mothership loses interest in supporting it, and probably has major holes in it as well.

<comment><USER5> I'm not sure what you mean by "persuaded", since unless the IoT device has its own cellular connection, it can't prevent being passed through a consumer- controlled device. Do you have such a device right now that is being bypassed? Because if the answer is no, that's your real problem.

<comment><USER6> The problem with IoT is that the 'I' expands to "Internet" instead of "Intranet". A device should not be rendered useless because it can't connect to manufacturer's servers. The cloud is a good value-add option, but should _not_ be considered a primary and required element.

The other thing is that most of those devices are gimmicks, toys - a good device intended to be useful should embrace interoperability - devices working alone have only a fraction the of potential of devices working together[0].

As for bypassing your device, at some point a "clever" entrepreneur will discover SSL and certificate pinning, and then you'll be SOL.

[0] - that's why e.g. I recently shelled out and got myself Hues. It's not the cheapest option, but it's reliable, works perfectly well over LAN, has a decent API exposing pretty much all possible functionality and then some over said LAN, no cloud registration or other bullshit. Also I kind of trust Phillips not to burn my house down with crappy manufacturing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Off topic ish, am I supposed to be able to read this without a subscription?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, LWN has a feature that lets subscribers share a subscriber-only article with non-subscribers. I think there should be a message on the page along the lines of "A subscriber has made this available to you, would you like to subscribe?"

<comment><USER8> There _is_ a message to that effect when non-subscribers read a sublinked article like this. Sometimes with a trial offer. The occasional (occasional!) posting of subscriber links is, I think, one of the best marketing tools we have.

<comment><USER9> Jon, I've been looking into a lot of elements of information goods, and there are a few bits I'm coming to realise, slowly (it's only been 30 years I've been studying this).

1\. Information is a public good. Nonrivalrous, only very difficultly excludable. Strong positive externalities. Hal Varian's got a good piece on this. Doesn't mean you _cannot_ sell it, but it means that doing _exclusively_ has serious negative effects.

2\. Free-sample giveaways are almost always an _excellent_ idea. John Dvorak's recent "Whatever Happened to Wordstar" had an excellent illustration of this:

 _Worse, in 1985, the company produced Wordstar2000, a copy protected program that was nothing like the older lovable Wordstar and which contained annoying copy-protection features that scared most users away. While many pundits including Esther Dyson predicted great things for Wordstar2000, users rejected it. The product was big and slow and expensive. And despite complaints by the company and others, people wanted software they could copy and use on more than one machine. During this era piracy sold software and created market share. People would use a bootleg copy of Wordstar and eventually buy a copy. Wordstar may have been the most pirated software in the world, which in many ways accounted for its success. (Software companies don't like to admit to this as a possibility.) Books for Wordstar sold like hot cakes and the authors knew they were selling documentation for pirated copies of Wordstar. The company itself should have just sold the documentation alone to increase sales._

[http://www.dvorak.org/blog/whatever-happened-to- wordstar-2/](http://www.dvorak.org/blog/whatever-happened-to-wordstar-2/)

3\. Corporate and foundation grants and sponsorships or support may be an option. I've been following the Rockefeller Foundation's "100 and Change" program with some interest -- the application process is structured to _also_ seek projects benefiting from other forms of support.

[http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/03/us/macarthur-foundation- wi...](http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/03/us/macarthur-foundation-will- award-100-million-for-solution-to-a-global-problem.html)

Food for thought.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


What was the the most academically influential video you saw as a young child? - <AUTHOR>

I spent the evening tonight going over great math videos with my wife and daughter. We looked at the most recent videos from Vi Hart, and I was happy to introduce to the both of them the "Powers of Ten" video by Charles & Ray Eames - somehow, I was lucky enough to have been introduced to this video while I was in nursery school. I just recently realized how influential this video has been during my whole life. <comment><USER2> Donald in Mathmagic Land was one of my favorites for sure. Surprised to see it was made in 1959 though. I didn't think it was that old (For reference I was born in 1980).

I found it on youtube here: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YRD4gb0p5RM>

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Here is the "Powers of Ten" video: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fKBhvDjuy0>

</comment><comment><USER3> Honestly, watching Star Wars and other Sci-fi movies with my dad helped kindle an interest in science in me more than anything else.

</comment><comment><USER4> Carl Sagan's Cosmos, hands down. The soundtrack still gives me a little shiver when I hear it.

</comment><comment><USER5> I never saw any "videos" as a young child. Such things didn't exist during the Jurassic.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ha, ok 8MM film works as well :) I think thats how I saw "Powers of Ten" originally anyways.

<comment><USER5> "Hemo, the Magnificent" probably kindled my interest in the biosciences.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> ratopolis

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3FxXKtnJEEs>

Ok. I wasn't a young child, I was a teen but it marked me.

<comment><USER6> they basically put a bunch of rats in cages to try to provoke certain behaviors in an overpopulated environment.They show homosexuality,murder and addiction amongst rats.</comment></comment>


6 Big European Cities Have Plans to Establish Car-Free Zones in Central Areas - <AUTHOR> http://www.citylab.com/cityfixer/2015/10/6-european-cities-with-plans-to-go-car-free/411439/ <comment><USER2> Car-free zones are pretty common in German cities. My hometown has a really nice and fairly big one with lots of shops, cafes, restaurants, and other businesses. It's a bit like an outdoor mall in the US, except that it's a real city where you can live (shops tend to be on the ground floor, apartments on the upper floors).

</comment><comment><USER3> If I were to nominate a US city for this experiment, I'd pick Seattle downtown.</comment>


I got linked here from Google Web History information page - <AUTHOR> http://www.google.com/privacyfaq.html

<comment><AUTHOR> Just thought that was hilarious.</comment>


Compulab Airtop – Natural Airflow Desktop - <AUTHOR> https://airtop-pc.com/ <comment> m-i-l I've been putting together fanless PCs for my own use for a few years now, also disliking the aircraft-taking-off sound of many desktop PCs when they are switched on. I started with the Zalman Reserator[0] water cooling tower, then moved to the Zalman TNN 500-AF[1] where the case was a giant heatsink (it was an amazing piece of kit), although more recently have been using ready-made fanless PCs (which are more widespread now most of the components run much cooler). The site at [http://www.silentpcreview.com/](http://www.silentpcreview.com/) used to have useful information for people building quiet PCs, and [https://www.quietpc.com/](https://www.quietpc.com/) still has some good components (and ready-made machines) too.

[0] [https://www.quietpc.com/reserator1-v2](https://www.quietpc.com/reserator1-v2)

[1] [https://www.quietpc.com/tnn500af](https://www.quietpc.com/tnn500af)

<comment><USER3> I use an integrated graphics chip and a noctua cpu cooler, it's practically completely silent. I sleep right next to my PC often.

<comment><USER4> Different people have different noise threshold, and different ability to filter out noise. I couldn't sleep next to a running computer even using large low-speed fans until I built one using a Reserator. I have friends who can sleep next to what are essentially heli turbines. The big annoyance of the Reserator is it's a pain in the ass to carry around.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Funny/scary anecdote: I have a PC whose CPU fan has stopped working about 18 months ago. The thing has been running as my home server, reliably, and it is very stable.

Of course, the fan sits on top of a huge heat-spreader, which still (passively) works, and the case is open, and the machine has not all that much to do serving me. On hot summer days, the system log tells me frequently that the CPU has throttled itself to prevent overheating, but that's about it. And that's Core2 Quad, so it has not been exactly engineered for this scenario. And still, to my utter surprise, this thing runs along merrily, with an uptime of currently 148 days.

If I can create a "fanless"[1] computer by accident that works and is - <USER2> face of the rather modest load I put on it - rock-solid stable, building one intentionally should not be that hard.

I own two notebooks, for Pete's sake, that are fanless, and they work well.

So, yes, the idea that a computer must make some kind of noise to show you it is working is gradually becoming a thing of the past. If sufficient cooling can be achieved without moving parts, that is preferable.

OTOH, the sounds devices emit used to be indicators of what was going on inside them. With SSDs, you can no longer hear your hard drive work. When I sit at one of our CAD workstations and watch a designer model something in Autodesk Inventor, more and more fans are spinning faster and faster as the temperature rises - the noise level correlates to the workload of the system. If the computer becomes absolutely silent, we need substitutes for those metrics. Blinkenlights, maybe.

[1] Strictly speaking, the power supply still has a fan, and that one is not all that far away from the CPU, which might improve the situation somewhat.

<comment><USER6> I believe a lot of fans in modern systems are for worse case rather than average case situations.

As far as I know, there's nothing in the Dell et al. warranty that prohibits you from running a high-load system in a confined nook in a dust-clogged room with a high ambient temperature. So cooling needs to be designed to be sufficient even in pathologically stupid situations.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> The configurations that allow multiple 60Hz 4K monitors appear to depend on either having a NVIDIA GeForce GTX 950 or NVIDIA Quadro M4000 graphics cards.

But the NVidia GeForce GTX says it needs a 350W power supply [0]. The NVidia Quadro says it needs 120W and says it has a "Ultra-quiet active fansink" [1] ... i.e. quiet, but it still needs a fan.

Can anyone therefore confirm if the Airtops are _completely_ passively cooled? Is it just the CPU that is passively cooled, or the graphics card too?

[0] [http://www.evga.com/products/Specs/GPU.aspx?pn=567ece10-ff52...](http://www.evga.com/products/Specs/GPU.aspx?pn=567ece10-ff52-4ebb-b856-6f38e9cde6f2)

[1] [https://www.pny.com/nvidia- quadro-m4000?sku=VCQM4000-PB&type...](https://www.pny.com/nvidia- quadro-m4000?sku=VCQM4000-PB&type=m)

<comment><USER8> It is entirely passively cooled. The GTX 950 has a thermal profile (TDP of 90W [0]. The 350W recommendation is for your entire system, it's not asking you to add 350W to the size of your current power supply. The Airtop can passively cool about 200W, so they put in a GPU at 90W TDP, and a CPU at 85W TDP

[0] [http://www.anandtech.com/show/9547/nvidia-launches- geforce-g...](http://www.anandtech.com/show/9547/nvidia-launches-geforce- gtx-950-gm206-the-lesser-for-159)

<comment><USER7> Awesome. I bought a NoFan from quietpc.com last year but I struggled to get a completely fanless setup capable of driving 4K at 60Hz (there was exactly one fanless card they offered which had displayPort 1.2).... Now though it looks like Airtop will be my next upgrade!

<comment><USER9> An ordinary GPU can be made fanless with an aftermarket cooler. The Arctic Accelero S3 will handle 135w TDP cards without a fan. That's sufficient to cool a GTX 1060. You will need a large case with plenty of ventilation.

[https://www.arctic.ac/uk_en/accelero-s3.html](https://www.arctic.ac/uk_en/accelero-s3.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Funny, I was looking at these guys' latest offerings just earlier today, before the HP announcement.

This is built by the same guys that built the FitPC ([http://www.fit- pc.com/](http://www.fit-pc.com/)). I've had one of their little 5-watt fanless systems running 24/7 in my home for a couple of years now. I love it. Never had a problem with it. It's easily one of my favorite pieces of computing equipment.

I was looking at their stuff earlier because I'm considering getting some more from them.

</comment><comment><USER11> I find the hum of lots of computer fans comforting. I did a lot of my work at uni very late at night in the computer labs when it was empty, just the constant noise of a hundred or so desktop machines. It's my ideal working environment.

<comment><USER12> We've got you covered, mate. Here we have retro computer fan and server room sounds in the age of these pesky-quiet, small form factor fanless PCs:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NeESf9aCZHQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NeESf9aCZHQ)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gy_RHdE7zsc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gy_RHdE7zsc)

:-)

<comment><USER13> If you like those you might also like the star ship Enterprise idling, for 24hrs... for a more futuristic spin (haha!) on things.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZPoqNeR3_UA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZPoqNeR3_UA)

<comment><USER14> That's awesome. [http://mynoise.net](http://mynoise.net) has similar ambient sounds, they have a section on "Transports" that contains (just a few); Spaceship, Railroads, Sailboat, Aircraft cabin, Flying Fortress.. etc

It's awesome when I'm writing short stories, they've also got stuff like; RPG Dark Forest, Dungeon, Battlefield that helps me get in the mood if I'm writing a fantasy story.

IIRC it's a sound engineers hobby side project. I've got nothing to do with the project, just been a happy user for years.

<comment><USER12> Brilliant site, thanks for the recommendation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> My fear with these designs is that because the chassis is the heatsink, there is the issue of the continuous deformation (expansion and contraction) of the chassis body/heatsink, and you get mechanical stresses on the mobo that eventually cause internal vias to break. So yes, it may work fine for 12 months, but the overall lifespan of the product might be significantly shortened.

<comment><USER16> Not going to happen. They're too small to expand much.

Aluminium is 22 microstrain per degree apparently. Say it raises to 60C and is 30cm long, that gives you're looking at 0.26 mm. Easily accommodated by flex in the mountings.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Last PC I built I looked very hard at fanless, but eventually decided to choose my fans well and run them as slowly as I could get away with to keep the computer cool.

It works well - the swoosh of the 120mm on the back is _just_ audible when the computer is working hard (with the computer 4ft away from me). Otherwise I don't hear it.

Oh - and when I game occasionally I hear the graphics card fan, but that was expected. The fan only runs when needed (ASUS Strix) so is silent in normal use.

<comment><USER18> Yup, large (100+mm) and slow (<1000) RPM fans are the way to go. Put it under the desk (desktop to deskunder?), use SSDs and a noise insulated case, and that's a fairly quiet machine. And that's before going overboard with liquid cooling.

Gaming has lots of sound to mask any kind of noise from the case, unless there's something quiet and _emotional_. I have 1000w 7.1 speakers, and never notice case noise.

I have a four year old GTX 680 with the blower reference cooler (fairly quiet). I've blown air into the outside vents to get the dust out, but a few weeks ago, I took off the shroud for the first time, and was amazed that there were no dust bunnies anywhere, even though I hadn't blown the dust out for at least a year.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I recently got my parents a fanless desktop computer. There a lot of options, but I went with a cheap Shuttle XPC slim barebone [1]: It is tiny, has a really nice industrial design and two front facing COM ports (!).

[1] [http://www.shuttle.eu/fileadmin/resources/download/docs/spec...](http://www.shuttle.eu/fileadmin/resources/download/docs/spec/barebones/DS68U_e.pdf)

<comment><USER13> _two front facing COM ports_

They'll come in handy!

But seriously, what's the motivation behind putting those on the machine, or wanting them?

<comment><USER20> I imagine that's for use with POS terminals (ie cash registers). A lot of those still have serial-port barcode scanners or serial-port printers.

<comment><USER21> I'm pretty sure the ports are also commonly used for cash drawers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I am using this [https://www.amazon.com/Qotom-Q190G4-Celeron-Processor- Barebo...](https://www.amazon.com/Qotom-Q190G4-Celeron-Processor- Barebone/dp/B019Z8T9J0) machine as a Linux router and also as a media player. It's astonishingly cheap for what it is and is not an Atom which CPUs I really dislike because of their incredibly slow single thread performance. This is not fast either but it's about on par with a i3-4020Y so don't be put off by the "Celeron" marking. It's very similar to the Shuttle @dpfu mentions in this thread except a little different in ports and appearance and 20% cheaper. The Shuttle one has two DIMM slots while this only has one.

<comment><USER23> Qotom boxes are great! I run one as a router with pfSense, and it gives me no trouble. If I ever start using my TV again, I plan to get another for media center use.

One note of interest: depending on the shipper, you may need to pick it up in person, as photo ID may be required if it comes through customs. This was no issue for me since the DHL depot at BWI is less than a mile from the light rail stop - I even got to see a couple of 777 and 747 freighters up close! - but may be inconvenient depending on shipper and depot location. Still very much worth it IMO - the price/performance of Qotom hardware is extremely impressive, and nothing I could more easily source compares.

<comment><USER22> Yeah when I looked at the price I was extremely skeptical of getting four Intel Ethernet controllers but there they are... LOL I remember when a four port Ethernet card costed more than this whole machine :D

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Checked this out last night when it was linked to in the HP post. I like the direction these fanless PCs are going in, but as others have said, it's more or less a solved problem.

Fanless laptops are where I'm now looking. The UX360CA Zenbook is fanless, low-power, and very reasonably priced (at least in the USA - still waiting on price to 'settle' over here). Silence would be very welcome for night reading and viewing.

<comment><USER25> > Fanless laptops are where I'm now looking. The UX360CA Zenbook is fanless, > low-power, and very reasonably priced

The fanless Zenbooks are fantastic. But they're also really low power with the Core-M CPUs with a TDP of 4.5 Watts [0]. That's in a power budget that could fit in a tablet.

The Airtop-D has a Core i7 CPU, which has a TDP of 65 Watts (can downtuned to 37W) [1]. You can roughly expect it to have 10x+ more computational power.

It's just a whole different category of devices.

[0] [http://ark.intel.com/products/88199/Intel- Core-m7-6Y75-Proce...](http://ark.intel.com/products/88199/Intel- Core-m7-6Y75-Processor-4M-Cache-up-to-3_10-GHz) [1] [http://ark.intel.com/products/88040/Intel- Core-i7-5775C-Proc...](http://ark.intel.com/products/88040/Intel- Core-i7-5775C-Processor-6M-Cache-up-to-3_70-GHz)

<comment><USER22> You will be sorely disappointed if you expect those CPUs to have a 10x difference. First, you have a 2.75x clockspeed difference and then a double core count so 5.5 times is what you could expect if they were the same architecture but the 6Y75 is Skylake (don't be mislead by the "Core M" moniker, these the same architecture as their larger wattage brethen just with a lower TDP, they used to mark them with an Y postfix like i3-4220Y and the Y is still in the moniker) and the 5775C is Broadwell but it has eDRAM so the difference is negligible here [http://www.anandtech.com/show/9483/intel- skylake-review-6700...](http://www.anandtech.com/show/9483/intel-skylake- review-6700k-6600k-ddr4-ddr3-ipc-6th-generation/9). So in real world, you can expect to see a 3-5x speedup.

<comment><USER25> Yes, 3-5x (peak performance) sounds quite reasonable. But 10x is not out of the question under high load for extended amounts of time (like compiling big software) when you take the form factor thermals into account. A laptop like that will start throttling quite aggressively quite quickly.

The Zenbook I have isn't a powerful computer by any measure. It's a fine laptop for light use but the CPU and thermal characteristics aren't suitable for intensive computation. I'd expect any fanless desktop computer to wipe the floor with it when it comes to perf.

<comment><USER22> This is why I rent a server at Hetzner. Considering you can get an i7 3770 for 33.61 EUR a month, it's pretty economical. It also serves as a backup (2x3TB) and occassional webhost.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I have been using a laptop and a docking station for a while now. I think this is the optimal configuration.

\- no / very little noise

\- no need to synchronize between work / home (Given that I also have a docking station at home, I essentially use my laptop as a portable hard drive with a screen)

\- I can take my current work to meeting rooms anytime.

\- ...

<comment><USER27> > no / very little noise

Doesn't that heavily depend on usage? At least I've never had a laptop which wouldn't turn into a noise generator once you start compiling, computing or heavy imaging/editing.

But yes a single machine + docking station at home and one on the job isn't a bad solution

<comment><USER28> > Doesn't that heavily depend on usage? At least I've never had a laptop which > wouldn't turn into a noise generator once you start compiling, computing or > heavy imaging/editing.

Exactly. For the past decade I've built desktop computers that are silent no matter the load (I don't do any GPU heavy work). I really cannot say that for my work laptops.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> This is awesome but expensive. The base configuration is $800 ($795) for case+motherboard+power_supply. I'm used to $50 case, $200 mobo, $100 ps. $800 is a lot more than $350. Maybe you'll get $450 of enjoyment out of a sweet silent workstation. [http://airtop-pc.com/product/airtop- customized/](http://airtop-pc.com/product/airtop-customized/)

<comment><USER8> Well, you should at least compare apples to apples. A fanless power supply will cost your more like $200, a quality small case will cost you $200, a fanless cpu cooler like the NoFan will cost you $100, so you're at about the $700 range, which is not too far off. A $100 permium to get all of this integrated, and able to cool 200W (as opposed to about 100W of cooling in the generic solutions) is a lot less extravagent.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> I've got a MintBox 2, which is a fanless PC produced by CompuLab (same manufacturer as the Airtop).

From what I can gather, CompuLab's primary market is industrial/embedded PCs. As such, they have extremely long SKU lifetimes.

The MintBox 2 for example comes with a 5 year warranty, and the "Long Term Availability" of the Intense PC SKU (released in 2012) is 2019. So they will still be selling 3rd Gen Intel parts in 2019.

The MintBox 2 cost $599 US when released, and if you check the price today it's still the same $599 as on release day. So don't expect the models to get any cheaper over time.

The only issue I've had thus far with the unit is that it's very picky on memory. You _have_ to install modules from their QVL or you'll end up with memory errors and crashing.

Otherwise, if you want a compact fanless PC, you don't want to build it yourself, you want a long warranty, and you're willing to spend Apple-level money, then CompuLab has the product for you!

</comment><comment><USER31> Here`s hoping for a future where desktops are so efficient that they don`t need any active cooling.

<comment><USER32> Arguably they've been around for a while now (I have two fanless shuttle mini PCs running on my desk, and one laptop made fanless by stabbing a screwdriver through the vent holes into the fan). It's just that whenever you want the last three inches of extra performance, you pay a heavy price with respect to thermal power.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> I was hoping for something like this with the skylake iris 550. Top of the line perf/watt (for a cpu+gpu). GPU fast enough for light gaming/webGL, or older games.

There's an intel NUC that's close (M2 slot + iris 540), but it's a little pricey at $340 and uses 15 watt version (that throttles very quickly), instead of the 28 watt version that can actually sustain a decent level of performance.

Fast, quiet, decent CPU+GPU shouldn't really be that hard.

Seems like GPUs are getting their with the gtx 1050/60/70 having tiny half length cards available, but I've seen very few cases designed for them.

<comment><USER34> I've owned a couple NUCs. One that was fanless (Gigabyte BACE-3000), but a bit slow. I upgraded to an Gigabyte Intel i5 NUC, it has a fan but I can't hear it at all. Brilliant machine.

I think the "quiet pc issue" is a solved problem provided you aren't building a massive gaming machine.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Looks like a much beefier alternative to a NUC, which I was already impressed with.

</comment><comment><USER36> interesting. the whole case is a heat sink directly applied to the cpu.

although, 100W cooling does nothing for the r9 390 which is something like 275W TDP. i have a veritable wind tunnel below my table, blowing really hot air up my shorts.

</comment><comment><USER37> I have the following approach to fanless computing:

1) I buy any desktop I like for its form factor

2) I either use the onboard graphic or a fanless graphics card

3) I set the threshold for all fans that are accessible via fancontrol to a level that keeps them permanently off

4) I pull or cut the cables of any fans that remain spinning

People always tell me I am "insane" to do so. But I have been doing this for years now and never had a problem.

<comment><USER38> Modern CPUs will just downclock themselves. I mean it's not insane; you won't damage the components, but you will be running A LOT slower than you could be.

Do you run tools to see how far down your CPUs frequency scaling is taking it?

<comment><USER37> I would be surprised if any downscaling takes place. I run some heavy computation software from time to time and compare the performance to other computers. Many of them in datacenters. I would probably notice if a machine suddenly downscales.

That said, I would be happy to measure it and post the results. Running the computations now. According to "top" it saturates 2 of my 8 CPUs. So far, "lscpu" reports the CPU at 1600 MHz. "sensors" reports the CPU Temperature is slowly rising. Was 48°C at IDLE. Is 50°C now.

15 minutes later. CPU temp was raising so slow that I stopped it now. Don't think it will get to anything critical ever. It was at 52°C. CPU speed was still at 1600MHz.

<comment><USER39> Isn't 1.6 GHz quite a low frequency? What CPU do you have?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> IMO 120mm+ fans running at low speeds combined with large heatsinks and SSDs pretty much solved noise problems for desktop PCs.

<comment><USER41> Except for discreet graphic cards, of course.

<comment><USER42> Some GPUs have fans that spin down entirely under light load (Asus calls it 0db mode), and only spin up the fans when under moderate to heavy loads.

<comment><USER40> Yes. Also, at least With NVDIA cards, you can specify a temperature target to the driver. I think the defaults usually run the chips at ~70C.

I guess the fans are actually mostly 100mm in 2x fan configurations, manufacturers seem to have many custom solutions for blade configuration etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> It reminds me of Amstrad PC1512 in 1986 [1]:

> "Whereas IBM's PC (and almost all PC compatibles) had a power supply in a > corner of the main case, the PC1512's power supply was integrated with that > of its monitor. The monitor had sufficient venting to cool itself by > convection, instead of needing a fan. The PC1512 was therefore quieter than > other PCs. Rumours circulated that an Amstrad PC would overheat, and while > existing owners would note that this did not happen, new buyers were > discouraged. As a result, later models had a cooling fan integrated into the > main case."

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PC1512](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PC1512)

</comment><comment><USER44> This is not all that new of an idea. I had one of these around 2005/2006: [https://www.quietpc.com/hfx-mini-metal](https://www.quietpc.com/hfx-mini- metal) \- completely fanless and (virtually) silent - back in those days there were no SSDs, so one had to content onesself with slow spindle speed HDDs mounted on soft rubber to minimise vibrations.

Despite the fact that the mfr appears to think it's a "revolutionary" idea, I'm not really seeing any material difference between that and the case above, from over 10 years ago. Perhaps I'm wrong though?

<comment><USER45> I had a couple of machines from Hush Technologies (long since out of business), also ~10 years ago. They were passively cooled through a finned chassis, connected to the CPU and other hotspots by heat conducting pipes.

Like yours, sounds like the same sort of thing as these Airtop machines.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> If this thing can dissipate 200W of heat, that I must say it's truly impressive. I cannot say I want to buy one (I'm not that sensitive about noise), but from technical point of view it seems like a little marvel.

</comment><comment><USER47> Reminds me of this company: [http://www.calyos-tm.com/calyos-fanless-pc- workstation/](http://www.calyos-tm.com/calyos-fanless-pc-workstation/)

</comment><comment><USER48> Seems to me that if someone could figure out how to create a stable Hackintosh install package that exactly fit one of their builds it would be a thing of major usefulness.

</comment><comment><USER32> Does anybody understand the copper heatpipes? It mentions virtual vacuum, but my understanding is that heatpipes are typically filled with a liquid that boils and turns to gas as it heats, thus moving up along the pipe and carrying heat further away to allow for a larger contact surface with the heatsink. Are airtop's heatpipes somehow different? What "virtual vacuum" and how does it work?

</comment><comment><USER49> On a slightly related note: does anyone have recommendations for embedded PC distributor/manufacturer in EU with online order system? I don't want to waste time talking to sales reps.

From time to time I need a PC to stuff inside places a regular desktop wouldn't survive too long (think factory floor).

I've ordered from IPC2U but they introduced a minimum order of 10 for their Intel NUC based systems.

</comment><comment><USER50> Compare to something like this that you can get for $30:

[https://www.pine64.org/?product=pine-a64-board-2gb](https://www.pine64.org/?product=pine-a64-board-2gb)

Yes, the airtop will give you 4x-6x the features, yet in these days of cheap electronics, is $1800 really worth it?

<comment><USER51> A fairly powerful, fanless computer with a 6 year warranty that can run multiple 4K displays for less than a well built MBPro is probably worth it to quite a few people. Besides people who just "want" a fanless PC, there are lab applications that require noiseless computers. Noiseless lab computers are VERY expensive. I'm sure there are many other professional use cases where $1800 isn't that much money. Maybe video/audio production?

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> Too much compromises and too expensive. For this money you can buy a normal i7- __ __k processor with Noctua cooler, Asus Strix video card with DirectCU and PSU by 'be quiet!'. Put all this stuff in a good case and you will get a PC with a great performance and almost no noise.

</comment><comment><USER53> What is the use-case for this? It seems pricey for entry level, but has a lot of nifty options for power-users.. but, then why would I risk having no airflow or extra power (200watt PS) for when I get cookin' with storage or fast video?

<comment><USER54> It's silent. Maybe to you it makes no difference, but for me it's really important.

<comment><USER53> I'm a 'fan' of silence, but a Silencio ATX case is <100 and I never notice my computer, ever. I also spent a lot of time finding just the right keyboard and mouse, a sweet-spot of solid action without too much click... us techies sure are picky now that I think about it, and for a good reason, tools of the trade.

<comment><USER4> > I'm a 'fan' of silence, but a Silencio ATX case is <100 and I never notice > my computer, ever.

Sounds like you have a pretty high "silence" threshold. I have a Define R4 with undervolted front fans, and while it's good enough when awake I couldn't sleep next to it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> I've never had any issue with PC fan noise - I have a fish tank in the room where my desktop lives and the PC can't be heard over the sounds of the aquarium's filter and air pump, which sound quite pleasant to me.

<comment><USER56> My latest build is surprisingly quiet as well. Part of it is using only SSDs. The only fan I hear is the GPU and seldom honestly even while gaming.

</comment></comment><comment><USER57> Streacom has fanless cases that look way better. They're not as small though.

<comment><USER58> They're much harder to open though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER59> I'm kind of disappointed that it relies on an external power brick. If I'm spending a premium on a desktop, I don't want another bit of crap cluttering up the desk or floor.

<comment><USER33> Indeed, lame. Just a cheap and silent way to get 10% or so of the heat generation outside the case.

</comment></comment><comment><USER60> I am not the target market for this. I'm pretty sure I might be in the minority, but I enjoy the sound of desktop PC fans, especially the larger, noisier ones.

</comment><comment><USER61> Looks like we took the site down. I have an Intel Skull Canyon NUC and love it, will be using these from here on out. Be nice to see more companies offer fanless cases.

</comment><comment><USER62> 0dB is pretty loud, no? IIRC it's the loudest sound expressible on an audio CD. (Decibels are a log scale - true silence would be minus infinity).

<comment><USER63> No. 10dB is the volume of calm breathing, 0dB is the threshold for auditory perception of a sound at 1kHz.

With regards to a CD, the decibel measures the gain rather than the volume. 0dB in this context simply means "full volume", while -10dB means 10% of full volume, and -20dB means 1% of full volume.

</comment></comment><comment><USER64> I worry about dust. With a non-fanless PC, you will notice it needs cleaning because the fan becomes noisy. With a fanless PC you won't get that.

<comment><USER65> These (AirTop, Fit-PC, etc.) are completely sealed machines so no dust enters. It does build up on the case - depending on your environment - but doesn't effect the thermal characteristics at all.

<comment><USER32> It looks like the airtop has open air pipes that work like chimneys, letting the heated air inside flow up and out of it. These ought to be easy to clean with compressed air though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER66> 12" MacBook has no fans, and I hardly ever hear them with 11" MacBook Air (unless I were to switch back to Chrome)

</comment><comment><USER67> FYI, This page crashes on my iPad Pro in Safari 100% of the time.

</comment><comment><USER68> 200 W for gaming card? Just ridiculous. Even gtx 1050 need 300 W PSU. And modern quiet fans in quiet cases are really quiet - below 20db, so it's difficult to hear it at all. My son have such with Gtx 1080 - it's the gaming card.

<comment><USER33> GTX 1050 is just 75 watts, nvidia is just being conservative because many people have crappy power supplies or tons of power consuming extras.

Assuming an intel cpu (mostly 65 watts or less), a SSD (few watts), some dims, and the normal overhead for usb/power conversion, etc. you can get away with quite a bit less than 300.

<comment><USER68> card: 75w, cpu when gaming: 80w, memory: 6w, 2 ssd drives: 6w. Total 167 W. 200 W pcu with 80% efficiency: 160 W. PCU with 95% efficiency: 190 W. Step left - step right (any gaming hard moment) and bye bye. Looks like nvidia recommendation is not so dumb. And it's for a low-level gaming card.

<comment><USER4> > 200 W pcu with 80% efficiency: 160 W. PCU with 95% efficiency: 190 W

That's not how efficiency is computed (in general, but especially in PSU).

The power rating (200W in your example) is what the PSU can provide to the system as DC power, the efficiency is the difference between AC input (wall- draw) and DC output.

An 80%-efficient 200W PSU will provide 200W internally but draw 250W from the wall-plug (and waste the extra 50W as heat).

If your 200W PSU maxes out at 160W it's not because it has 80% efficiency it's because it's a worthless piece of shit. You should throw it away as there's significant risk it will blow up (figuratively or literally) and/or catch on fire. Here's an article (in french but you can look at the pictures) checking out garbage PSU exhibiting that sort of behaviour: [http://www.x86-secret.com/dossier-36-3000-Alimentation_Nonam...](http://www.x86-secret.com/dossier-36-3000-Alimentation_Noname.html) spoiler: shitty components, detonations and burnt smells.

<comment><USER68> no worries, I use pretty decent CPUs, calm down in your negative adjectives.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER69> Read the thread. The main question is still open. Does anyone actually own such a computer?

</comment><comment><USER70> nice, I want one!

preferably as a Hackintosh... is it possible?

<comment><USER8> Not directly... But with a discrete GPU and the KVM hypervisor on Linux, you could get the same effect

<comment><USER70> what does that mean?

this airtop has a discrete gpu

what does "KVM hypervisor on Linux" have to do with running macOS on it?

<comment><USER8> In order to run it as a hackintosh natively, you would need compatible hardware and drivers, which this doesn't have. A niche alternative (starting to be more documented) is to install Linux and run an OSX virtual machine. Traditionally, that gave you terrible performance, and specifically terrible graphics.

A hypervisor is a very lightweight wrapper around a virtual machine that either requires a modified virtual machine (not the case here) or hardware support in the CPU so you get to run a VM with a performance hit on the order of 3%.

The newest intel CPUs have added hardware virtualization support, so if you have a discrete GPU (like for this box), you can give the integrated graphics to the host Linux system, and dedicate the discrete GPU to the virtual machine (again, performance within a few percent of native).

All of this is to say that you can run a virtual OSX system on top of linux, and get almost native performance like running a hackintosh, but without having to have a perfect match of already supported hardware components.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER71> at this price, i would rather buy intel NUC.

<comment><USER72> Have you ever used one? They can be extremely loud under load. It's like comparing apples to oranges.

<comment><USER73> There are fanless NUC cases available. I have one from Akasa, it's a beautiful piece of kit. Solid black metal with heatsink ridges on the top, it looks and feels like a hi-fi amplifier.

[https://www.scan.co.uk/products/akasa-newton-h-aluminium- fan...](https://www.scan.co.uk/products/akasa-newton-h-aluminium-fanless-case- for-intel-nuc-d34010wyb-and-d54250wyb-with-2-usb30-audio-and-i)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER74> The site is currently reporting an "Error establishing a database connection." If at all possible, please try to make simple content sites like this static using a tool like Netlify or [http://stout.is](http://stout.is). Static sites are faster, more reliable and cheaper to operate.

<comment><USER75> Knowing nothing about web hosting - could a static site hosted on a basic hosting plan survive a hacker news front page? Or what would be required?

<comment><USER76> It'd depend on the shared hosting provider and your site.

Having hundreds of MB of content that people are going to want to load, even if it's all served statically, will probably still have you in a bad way with the cheapest of hosting providers.

But it'll have a much better chance of surviving than someone running wordpress or something that's got zero caching and needs to do a ton of calls to a shared MySQL host.

<comment><USER75> Right sure, I was just picturing a static HTML page measured in KB.

<comment><USER77> Then yes, it would probably be fine, within reason.

When running a static site at very high traffic loads it becomes about how many connections the webserver can handle and how much bandwidth you have to serve the site itself, rather than pure power of the server to process all the requests a dynamic site would generate.

You can start to chew through bandwidth allocations pretty quickly when you get a couple thousand concurrent visitors, so a shared hosting plan might run out pretty quickly if the cap is small, even with a fairly small site. And something like Apache would need tweaking a fair bit to handle that number of connections without eating all the RAM. Nginx is better in that regard and could pretty easily handle thousands of concurrents.

So a small DigitalOcean VPS can easily handle millions of 'hits' per day if set up with a little care, and more than that if setup well, but you just have to watch you don't saturate the connection.

I mirrored a few sites that had faced the reddit hug of death (just to see what the load was like) and I found you can easily hit 200mbps* sustained connection requirement with all the visitors it brings just from the comment thread, which people don't enter as much as the list posting.

*(depending on the size of the page obviously, the bigger the page the more mbps it'll need to serve, average was around 20-50mbps).

<comment><USER76> A VPS is quite a bit different than regular shared hosting though.

Like the absurdly low single-digit-per-month hosting plans with 'Unlimited' everything. They're run to push the most customers onto the fewest boxes possible, and offer incredibly large feature sets.

So, while you might be tuning your static content to be as small as possible, you're probably on a box that's serving a heck of a lot poorly optimised sites. Disk IO is probably going to be an issue if you can't keep your content in memory (remembering that memory pressure is probably pretty high)

<comment><USER77> Ah, you're right, disk IO is one I hadn't considered too. I"m so used to availability of cheap VPS and SSD I'm not sure the last time I used actual shared hosting myself.

Those sorts of shared hosting plans have a funny way of disabling your site if you get a big surge of traffic, despite the 'unlimited' claims.

I was told once, "Yes, your plan is unlimited, but not infinite.' when I had a post on a long forgotten site go mildly popular.

I suppose on those types of machines the sheer number of connections would get you in hot water too, especially if they're running vanilla apache and it starts burning through memory there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER78> Site is down for me</comment>


What Happens When the Richest U.S. Cities Turn to the World? - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/22/upshot/the-great-disconnect-megacities-go-global-but-lose-local-links.html <comment><AUTHOR> An interesting article on how the economies of large cities used to depend more on smaller cities in the same country, while now they depend more on other large cities elsewhere in the world. This has increased the concentration of wealth in the large cities.</comment>


Misconceptions About Forward Secrecy - <AUTHOR> https://blog.thijsalkema.de/blog/2014/01/17/misconceptions-about-forward-secrecy/

<comment><USER2> It seems that in post-2013 articles on encryption the phrase "a malicious 3rd party" has been completely replaced by the 3-letter acronym: NSA.

<comment><USER3> To be fair, they're one of a small set (possibly of size 1) of organisations that would be able to carry out most of the attacks discussed. Things that were considered highly unlikely pre-2013 are now a real possibility, if not probability.

<comment><USER4> why? is there any revelation that they have the compute power to do that? Or it's just because now it's know that they'd really like to do it?

<comment><USER5> The NSA is somewhat open about the massive amounts of computing power they have available: [http://nsa.gov1.info/utah-data- center/](http://nsa.gov1.info/utah-data-center/)

Lots of goodies on this public site like "This [compute cluster] will give us the capability to break the AES encryption key within an actionable time period and allow us to read and process stored encrypted domestic data as well as foreign diplomatic and military communications."

Obviously leaked documents and other media reports contain much scarier revelations into what the NSA is capable of, but I thought I'd post what they acknowledge since it's safe to assume they're capable of much more.

<comment><USER6> In case someone doesn't pick up on it, gov1.info is a parody site.

<comment><USER5> Wow I'm gullible.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This article is dead wrong on multiple points. First off, the impact of multiple keys is different for the parallel Rho method: the time to the first key to be cracked is the same. Secondly ECDH is commonly used to avoid the problem mentioned in the second point. The worst part is people will make decisions based on this wrong information.

<comment><AUTHOR> My claim is: FS does not imply, by definition, that every attack scales linearly in the amount of keys. Having a counter-example of an attack that _does_ scale linearly does not disprove that point.

I indeed only cover DH at #2, as index-calculus does not apply to ECDH.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Looks like the page is dead?

Edit: oh it's back. In any case here's a better archive if it goes down again [https://archive.is/2rQfr](https://archive.is/2rQfr)</comment>


Python 2 is ending, we need to move to Python 3 - <AUTHOR> https://open.edx.org/blog/python-2-ending-we-need-move-python-3 <comment><USER2> I do not understand the ramifications, but how come nobody ever answers "Tauthon" to this discussions?

[https://github.com/naftaliharris/tauthon](https://github.com/naftaliharris/tauthon)

Background: [https://www.naftaliharris.com/blog/why-making- python-2.8/](https://www.naftaliharris.com/blog/why-making-python-2.8/)

<comment><USER3> It's probably fairly unknown. I hadn't heard of it until today, although some poking around shows it got some exposure in 2016.

Also, for what question is it exactly the answer? My first impression is:

"I just want to continue to run my Python2 code": it works for that, but I'd probably go for Python 2 as included in e.g. RedHat or Ubuntu LTS versions for now, which will provide security support for a few years more, over a fairly small project with unclear future. Or Google App Engine (which is the main reasons one of the projects I help maintain still supports Python 2)

"I don't want to upgrade to Python3, but still use new features": Tauthon is probably the only solution, but you're now writing software that only works in it. Are you willing to use a fairly niche interpreter for your project, and hope it gets maintained and supported as you need?

"I want to use it to step-by-step migrate to Python3": I'd have to investigate that more, but I'm not sure it provides much more in the way of compatibility than 2.7 does with __future__ flags. In some places there might be an argument that you could get more benefit from new features during that process using Tauthon, but I think you'd still have that final push to switch over at some point.

And for software you ship to customers, depending on the customer set switching to a "weird" (for whatever their IT thinks that is) interpreter isn't really an option.</comment></comment>


LinkedIn's updated IPO documents - <AUTHOR> http://sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1271024/000119312511064249/ds1a.htm

<comment><USER2> Can someone summarize this?</comment>


Interview with Brad Cox, the Man Behind Objective-C - <AUTHOR> http://www.mactech.com/articles/mactech/Vol.25/25.07/2507RoadtoCode-BradCoxInterview/index.html <comment><USER2> It almost certainly doesn't get recognised enough the influence this guy has had on the world by creating a technology that has influenced the lives of hundreds of millions.

The tools developers use have a big impact on the resulting software and so it's crazy to think where we'd be if Obj-C hadn't been created and hadn't enabled the iPhone etc.

<comment><USER3> The iPhone would probably just be using C++ if not for Obj-C. And if not C++, then maybe C or Pascal. And maybe in some alternate universe everyone is still using Fortran, or maybe Ada, etc...

There are plenty of efficient systems languages out there...

<comment><USER4> There are, but Objective-C was unique at the time in terms of being object- oriented _and_ late binding _and_ compiled to machine code _and_ interfacing efficiently with C code.

IMO these features made it more productive than C++ or Pascal for developing GUI-based applications.

<comment><USER5> Unless we're talking about ancient versions of C++, those productivity advantages of Objective-C are mostly a myth which I have yet to see any argumentation for.

The whole point is moot though, because Swift is the future. It's quite amusing seeing the Objective-C community trying to reconcile their irrational love of the language with the reality that Apple communicated - it's a disadvantage for the platform, keeping developers away with its unusual syntax, lack of safety and overcomplicated paradigms.

<comment><USER6> Interface Builder was impossible in the C++s of the day. It is merely extremely difficult today. Remember that what IB did was build the UI _using the actual elements_ , so you could play with it even without the logic hooked up, serialized that entire object tree, and then deserialized it at runtime.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The man behind Objective-C these days (and for the past decade plus) is this guy: [http://www.sealiesoftware.com/blog/](http://www.sealiesoftware.com/blog/).

</comment><comment><USER8> Heh...:

"DD: Could you have used Smalltalk directly or were in an environment where C was the language you had to interoperate with?

BC (18:12): Xerox was busy shooting themselves in the foot at the time. They wouldn't sell it to me, or to anybody. The were into this "We're a research lab and that's a research toy and go away.""

<comment><USER9> There are a few videos and reports from Xerox people on how their management managed to fail to make Smalltalk and Lisp Machines mainstream.

Sadly AT&T was more effective bringing their research into mainstream.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> More on another of Cox's signature ideas – about which he wrote a book[1] – 'Superdistribution':

[http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/2.09/superdis_pr.html](http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/2.09/superdis_pr.html)

The gist is to stop charging for software (including subcomponents like shared libraries and reusable objects) per copy, or by copy-based-licensing.

Instead, charge (tiny amounts) per use. Theoretically, this could cure underinvestment in the creation of certain shared components, or in software quality/reliability. It's somewhat related to the idea from Ted Nelson that hypertext transclusion could also route automatic incremental reuse payments.

Of course, enforcing the metering can be hard. (You need either DRM or cheerful voluntary compliance.) And all the usual issues with micropayments apply. But it's an interesting idea and the currently-vibrant in-app/in-game models resemble it in some respects.

[1] [http://www.amazon.com/Superdistribution-Objects-Property- Ele...](http://www.amazon.com/Superdistribution-Objects-Property-Electronic- Frontier/dp/0201502089)

</comment><comment><USER11> I remember Brad giving the keynote at RubyConf 2004. At that time he was pretty excited about micropayments, so after a short blurb on ObjC he mostly talked about that.

I don't think micropayments ever really worked out, but he was obviously putting a lot of energy into figuring out how it could be done and it was interesting to hear him hold forth.

<comment><USER12> >I don't think micropayments ever really worked out

becaue no one ever implements MICROpayments, we always end up with macropayments. Have you seen a program or a game that asks you for 0.5 cents for a hat? or 0.001cents for a bullet?

The closest I could find is world of tanks, where you can buy bullets for 0.006 Euro for the smallest tanks, and 0.06 Euro for the most expensive ones. Hats (camo patterns, inscriptions) still cost ~ 1 euro each tho.

Most games simply milk you $5 and up per "micro"payment.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> When was this article written? I can see it refers to Snow Leopard as the latest (or possibly upcoming) version of OSX, so 2009?

<comment><USER14> It was published in the July 2009 print issue of MacTech. I interviewed him in April.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Any Linus rant about how Objective-C sucks? :-)

<comment><USER16> Brad Cox had a huge impact on the world because he helped author a computer language used by millions. Most of us here haven't come close. We should have a test before we can post to the internet. Here's the first thing you need to understand.

[http://www.theodore-roosevelt.com/trsorbonnespeech.html](http://www.theodore- roosevelt.com/trsorbonnespeech.html)

<comment><USER17> This analogy doesn't work on a lot of cases. Lets say you're served a plate full of something you find disgusting. How could you critic it? You're not the cook.

Now, you could say this case is not similar since it is "used by millions", but a lot of systems that are _universally_ agreed to be bad are used by millions. Hence why a lot of people in HN are trying to "disrupt" said space (or market).

TL;DR Using what you're given to work with and being content with what you're using are two different things and should not measure the quality of said thing.

PS.- This is not to say I believe Brad Cox is bad or Objective C is bad, I haven't used it ever. Is just the "if you can't do it don't criticize it" mentality I'm not for.

<comment><USER18> I don't interpret the quote as meaning "if you can't do it don't criticize it". It's just saying that it's much more noble to attempt to do hard things and fail, than it is to do nothing but take cheap shots at those who are trying.

In this context I think it was more a reflection on the cheapness of the shot and what it says about the people making the cheap shots. There's a big difference between honest criticism and "your thing sucks, haha!"</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Modules cause more JavaScript fatigue - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/front-end-hacking/the-other-kind-of-javascript-fatigue-afa8a99ff594 <comment><USER2> [https://hn.algolia.com/?query=the%20other%20kind%20of%20java...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=the%20other%20kind%20of%20javascript%20fatigue&sort=byDate&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=story).

Please stop. This spam is giving me more fatigue than JavaScript ever did.</comment>


Redux is Overhyped - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@shakiba/redux-is-overhyped-3ad6e42b7730#.3z55wexom <comment><USER2> > Is it easy to replace Redux with another state-container or data-storage > without updating entire app?

Yes. This is why I use Redux. All the other stuff like reproducibility, state persistence, and devtools are just icing on the cake.

Redux heavily encourages architectures where the vast majority of your app has no knowledge of how data is stored, fetched, or updated. I purposely architect everything so that Redux would be easy to remove -- not that I actually plan on doing it, but it's a good litmus test that my architecture is properly data-agnostic. The end outcome is that the majority of the code is "pure" \-- that is reusable, composable, and predictable. It's also immediately obvious which code actually touches state (namely actions, reducers, and containers).

</comment><comment><USER3> This reminds me of a recent article by the author of Redux, who wrote ["You might not need Redux"]([https://medium.com/@dan_abramov/you-might-not-need- redux-be4...](https://medium.com/@dan_abramov/you-might-not-need-redux- be46360cf367)). It was refreshing how he emphasized that Redux is just an implementation of a design pattern (or a composition of a few), that it's not necessarily "the solution". If another state management library works better for some applications, then use that instead.

"Overhyped" implies that its popularity is not worth its value. It's clear that it has proven its value to a majority of developers working with React. Especially as applications grow larger, I've found that using Redux provides an intuitive pattern for sane state management.

It does have its pain points (verbosity, async actions) but there's a plethora of libraries one could choose from, depending on need and preference. Since the core functions are so simple, they can be adapted as needed - for example, in a recent project I wrote a wrapper (~20 lines) to extend actions and reducers with namespaces.

An additional advantage of Redux, I think, is that it's becoming widely adopted, so when I look at an open-source codebase built on React + Redux, it's so easy to understand the application architecture.

<comment><AUTHOR> > when I look at an open-source codebase built on React + Redux, it's so easy > to understand the application architecture.

That's my point, I believe a library should not imply architecture.</comment></comment>


A $1 Million Research Bargain for Netflix, and Maybe a Model for Others - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/22/technology/internet/22netflix.html?_r=1&ref=technology <comment><USER2> I want to be part of the next contest of this kind. Does anyone know of one that is currently running?</comment>


Why does `True == False is False` evaluate to False in Python? (2013) - <AUTHOR> http://stackoverflow.com/questions/17202207/why-does-true-false-is-false-evaluate-to-false <comment><USER2> Syntax sugar sure is great until you forget any of it, at which point you become blind to a whole category of bugs.</comment>


Ask HN: How hard will it be to find a job (dev) in 5 years from now? - <AUTHOR> Looking at how tough it is for a software developer to land a job in today's market, I am wondering how hard it will be in 5 years from now?<p>Everyone is learning how to code and most of the students out there are into computer science. What are your thoughts? <comment><USER2> I don't know how hard it will be to land a tech job in general, but for any individuals I know it will be more difficult. It gets much harder in your thirties, and a damn near impossible to get a development job by the time you are fifty. You had better have made you millions and retired by then. I recently landed a job at a startup and couldn't be happier, but it was a helluva struggle to overcome pervasive cultural biases that favor less experienced coders right out of college.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's exactly what I'm talking about. As a developer you're at your most marketable state from the age of 20 to 30. Anything pass 30 (not ALWAYS) is usually not good.

A natural path would be to go into management, etc. But when you look at the ratio management versus dev roles, it's pretty bad. Not everyone becomes a manager.

<comment><USER3> I have been laid off enough to know that no job is safe, no matter what job you are in. The best thing you can do is work on things while you have a job that will set you up and secure your future. Get into that mindset and as long as you are working towards it, you have a better chance at future security.</comment></comment></comment>


Cats Cannot Taste Sweets (2007) - <AUTHOR> https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/strange-but-true-cats-cannot-taste-sweets/ <comment><USER2> > "This may be why cats are getting diabetes," Brand offers. "Cat food today > has around 20 percent carbohydrates. The cats are not used to that, they > can't handle it."

It's worse than that, usually 35-50% carbohydrates. The good (expensive) dry stuff is usually 10-20%. Wet food is often lower, depending on the type, as low as 7% as-fed with pates.

The weight-control labelled food is terrible both for weight and diabetes risk. It trades protein for carbohydrates under the assumption that cats don't absorb the carbohydrates as easily because the cat's liver has to process them. But this means the liver processes them to body fat, and the lack of protein leaves the cat less satiated, so it eats more food.

<comment><USER3> Our vet did point out that cats eat carbohydrates; they tend to love the innards of their prey, and those often contain the undigested things mice etc eat. No idea what percentage of their diet that makes up though. (It wasn't a conversation about carb percentages in cat food)

<comment><USER2> That's also an interesting point. People have an aversion to those innards, or "by-products," being included in food, but our disgust isn't rational, and cats don't share it. Just because a cat food includes meat by-products doesn't make it any worse than just muscle meat, and it can be cheaper because of that. Cats like the flavor and it's good for them.

<comment><USER4> > innards, or "by-products,"

the tasty innards you're talking about and the "by-products" that are in the industrial cat food are 2 very different things. The "by-products" is hide, horns, hooves, etc. with very heavy dose of strong preservatives, desinfectants and other chemicals.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I found this out when asking myself the question "are animals fooled by artificial sweeteners". The rabbit hole that that led into is not only do we not know the answer to that question, many animals don't even taste "sweetness" (or if they taste it they don't like it or don't prefer it). Not even all primates, if I recall correctly.

And we've seen drift -- apparently we used to be able to bait cockroaches with sweet bait (through the middle of the century), but they have adapted to it and it no longer works as bait.

Taste and smell are very strange and defy attempts at reductionism; our brains are basically very evolved olfactory organs. Dealing with smells was so hard that brains evolved to deal with the problem, and then it was just evolution asking the question "what else can we do with this giant block of computational power -- what about ... memory? vision? hearing?"

<comment><USER6> Whoa. Smell was more important than sight for brain evolution? Is there somewhere I can read more about this?

<comment><USER7> There are lots of blind animals that can smell. I don't know of any sighted animals that can't smell.

<comment><USER8> some humans have a mutation that means they don't smell

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Some of the stuff I've seen our cat eating, it's both obvious and a blessing that he doesn't have much of a sense of taste.

Goes nuts for the plastic wrappers you get around Pepsi cans and won't stop licking them. Little weirdo.

<comment><USER10> I have a cat who loves to lick crinkly plastic wrappers and bags. I use shopping bags for my bedroom trash can and I'll wake up to him just sitting there licking the folded over edge for upwards of 10 minutes.

Two theories I've heard are that beef tallow is sometimes used in the manufacture of such bags so they might be smelling that. Or it could be as simple as they enjoy the sensation and/or sound of licking the bag. Though, they certainly are weirdos.

<comment><USER11> Huh, one of our cats does the same. We don't want her to choke on plastic, so we no longer leave any plastic bags out in the open. She also tries to lick olive oil and butter, so the beef tallow theory would follow the same pattern of looking for fat.

<comment><USER12> Try her on taffeta.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Knowing this, when my cats desire something sweet that I was eating, I have always assumed they wanted something else they tasted in the food -- if ice cream, then the cream, etc.

<comment><USER14> Mine loves cantaloupe. I'm curious which part of that she likes other than the sweetness.

<comment><USER15> This is probably the first time I've seen someone else say this online.

The cat I grew up with (lived 21 years) loved cantaloupe as well. It would smell it from far away and come trotting into the kitchen. Seemed to be able to eat as much of the fruit as we were willing to chop for it.

<comment><USER16> Me three.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Fun fact: the sodium lauryl sulfate in toothpaste dulls the sweetness receptors on your tongue. The taste of orange juice after brushing your teeth is what it would ALWAYS taste like to cats.

<comment><USER18> I've always been suspicious of that. Why is it specifically OJ that tastes awful, and not other juices, or chocolate, or bread?

<comment><USER19> You don't even need toothpaste. Taste is also a state of mind thing.

Bet a friend/family member that they can't taste the difference between whole/2%/1%/skim milk, or some combination thereof. Blindfold them and have them begin tasting the milks. Now, replace the last milk with orange juice. The brain prepares the body for milk, and the unexpected acidity usually causes a gag reflex, and sometimes vomiting. Keep a bucket handy:

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

<comment><USER20> I stopped drinking OJ as a teen after a decent run (4mi) and coming back super thirsty and drinking OJ just caused my mouth to keep salivating continuously (painfully) for minutes.

I vowed that day to stop drinking OJ and stick to water.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> This leaves me with more questions as I have a cat that absolutely will not leave you alone if you're holding ANY fruit. She will cry and whine and do all she can to get to that fruit. Apple, plum, orange, grapefruit, pineapple, melons, it doesn't matter. She goes especially nuts for dragonfruit.

<comment><USER22> Citrus in particular is famous for cats disliking. Interesting that your cat enjoys those.

<comment><USER23> I had a cat that freaked out when he smelled oranges. I always thought he associated it with an orange scented shampoo we used once on him.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Evolutionarily, this makes sense. All felids are obligate carnivores that rely on meat for nutrients—for example, they need taurine for vision, which they can't synthesize and is only found in meat. So there's an evolutionary advantage for cats to _not_ want to eat anything else.

<comment><USER25> > All felids are obligate carnivores

I think you meant "felines".

[UPDATE] Nope, the OP meant felids (though my old eyes parsed it as "fields" (never heard of a "felid" before) which is why I thought it was spell checking or voice recognition gone wrong).

<comment><USER26> "felid" comes from "Felidae", the family for cats. It's synonymous, but a bit more formal.

<comment><USER27> Etymologically, "felids" are "things descended from cats", while "felines" are "things that are like cats".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Makes me wonder if this is just a result of genetic drift and/or bottlenecking. They clearly have no need for it, and are very specialized killers, but it being so widely present in mammals tells us that it's not really a costly gene to have.

I found the part about being able to register ATP interesting, as controlling for ATP is one of the most common techniques used to control the quality of hygiene in food production buildings and equipment. I don't know how this applies to nature where you would expect this to be found everywhere, but maybe it's valuable in deserts, snowy areas and similar? Or maybe higher than usual levels can be used to identify areas where rodents and other sources of food could be found?

</comment><comment><USER29> For some reason, I had always assumed there were a number of mammals that didn't care much for sweets, even though in retrospect I know that ferrets, also carnivores, will obsess over sweet drinks.

<comment><USER30> Perhaps because mustelids have an extraordinarily high metabolism for their size? [https://nyti.ms/1Ur6S6C](https://nyti.ms/1Ur6S6C)

<comment><USER29> As carnivores, I wouldn't expect them to have a use for tasting sweet things. The article doesn't address that point, but I think anyone who owns a ferret could tell you that they have a crazy metabolism!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> If you're really interested in cat nutrition, comment history of alleged veterinary student [https://www.reddit.com/user/Pguin15/](https://www.reddit.com/user/Pguin15/) is gold. He posted a link for example that shows cats and dogs readily digest carbs, and that this is well known: [https://en.wikivet.net/Digestibility_of_Carbohydrates](https://en.wikivet.net/Digestibility_of_Carbohydrates)

> Ground, cooked and extruded starches are almost 100% digestible in both dogs > and cats, while digestibility of raw (uncooked) starches varies from 0-65% > depending on the type of starch.

</comment><comment><USER32> Related paper (from 2007): [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2063449/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2063449/)

<comment><USER33> Cool to see this on HN. I briefly worked there on a closely related project during high school after this paper was published. It was my first real experience doing wet lab work-- learned a bunch, met cool people, was fun. (Also did a lot of pipetting and PCR.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> For some reason, our cat used to be absolutely crazy for anko. The first time he ever encountered it, he stole a dorayaki out of someone's hands and hid with it in the closet growling (it was wrapped in plastic so he couldn't actually eat it). After that, I used to give him a tiny taste any time I had some but I noticed he would always throw up soon after. Now that he's a bit older he seems to have no interest in it at all.

Could it be that they can taste sweets at a young age but gradually lose that ability?

</comment><comment><USER35> I used to think my kitten was after the sweetness when i noticed that she only likes/prefers milk based sweets. But then she does have same affinity for chocolates and strawberries too.

<comment><USER36> Reminder: Chocolate can be lethal for cats...

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> About cats only eating meat: I have 3 cats, and all of them love any blades of grass, eating a full 'salad' every day.

<comment><USER38> Do you grow cat grass for them? Ours loves it. [https://www.hillspet.com/cat- care/nutrition-feeding/cat-gras...](https://www.hillspet.com/cat- care/nutrition-feeding/cat-grass-safety-and-information)

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> _There is a reason cats prefer meaty wet food to dry kibble, and disdain sugar entirely_

This person has never met a cat. One of ours is obsessed with sweet foods like yoghurt, honey, pastries. Which we don't generally let her have because of her teeth.

<comment><USER40> You're discounting several possibilities.

Yogurt has protein, and many varieties have a lot of fat. Pastries tend to be fatty (butter/lard). Honey's less obvious, but my cat would lick clean wooden spoons just for the texture; perhaps yours likes something about the stickiness?

<comment><USER41> My cat loves sweet things, regardless of the presence of fat. I need to make videos of this to post.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> Strange. My buddies cat loves sweets. Especially pecan pie. I'm not sure if she's just trying to bond with him by eating the same food at the same time or she has a sweet tooth.

</comment><comment><USER43> A friend of mine was born without the ability to taste sweet things. That doesn't stop their body from reacting to it, though. Most of their favorite foods are incredibly sugary.

</comment><comment><USER44> { plastic bags, various wires, a few DC adapter/chargers, the $10 soldering iron's AC cord, a used paper napkin that smelled like the sub sandwich it came with, crumpled up sheets of paper that are thrown and chased and batted around for some time, peanut butter, American cheese, tortilla chips (with or without Valentina and refried pinto beans and melted cheese), the spaghetti sauce or chili residue on the bowl, fluffy white rice, beef jerky (any flavor incl. peppered), roasted salted peanuts, dried fruits from trail mix, fresh voles }

</comment><comment><USER45> What would happen if the cats eat miracle berries?

</comment><comment><USER46> Yes, but this is only 8 out of 10 cats.

</comment><comment><USER47> Large cats in zoos get treats like frozen blood ("bloodsicles").

</comment><comment><USER48> Tell that to my cat, who fucking LOVES ice cream.

<comment><USER49> It's the milk fat they love! My kitty also goes crazy for coconut oil, which helps with hair balls.

<comment><USER50> Yep. I recently tried this out with my cat: skim milk vs 2% vs whole milk vs heavy cream. No prizes for guessing what his preference ordering was. (He wouldn't even drink the skim! Just licked it, looked at me, and walked away.)

<comment><USER51> Yeah, and will give you _that_ look too as he walks away...

My little chonk monster is actually pretty good with food, and isn't interested in human food much at all, possibly because he had to fend for himself for a few months before he imposed himself on me. He's certainly partial to the odd pigeon which are too slow/stupid to get away.

He currently has mostly dry kibble and water, but with the odd wet pouch for some variety.

I've tried him on a little milk before and he wasn't bothered, but I have semi-skimmed lacto-free, so I don't know if it offends his taste-buds or not.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Introducing SthgNw - <AUTHOR> http://www.sthgnw.com/about

<comment><AUTHOR> The reasoning behind why I built this platform: <http://bckmn.com/releasing- sthgnw/>

And it's official home page: <http://sthgnw.com></comment>


Show HN: Hire contributors to the open source projects you use - <AUTHOR> https://hirecontributors.com/search.html <comment><USER2> I don't understand the website. There's two search boxes, what am I supposed to search for and what would a good result look like? When I search 'hello' there is a nice animation, nothing else. I checked the HTML source code for clues. Can you add a couple of sentences of introduction?

<comment><AUTHOR> The search boxes let you search github for open source projects. For example if you want to hire developers for a rails project that uses react for the front end, you could search for rails and react, and the result would be developers that have contributed to both.

BTW, credit for the animation goes to Boujjou Achraf.

<comment><USER2> Ah, I see. Add that to the website :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the advice :) I added this text:

Welcome! Use the search boxes to search github for open source projects you use, and get a list of programmers who contributed to all of them. Click "Add GitHub Search Field" for another github search box, or "Add URL Field" for a box that lets you paste a git URL.</comment></comment></comment></comment>