To elaborate on why open-source hardware is hard - <AUTHOR> http://www.mauve.plus.com/opensourcehw.txt <comment><USER3> This if obviously true, but I don't think this means we shouldn't demand openness in hardware, though.

Openness for me is first and foremost ideological, not practical, and certainly not just about the results. It's really about power, and the relationship between those who make the technology and those who are dependent on the technology.

Being dependent on proprietary technology whose continued existence is completely tied to the financial well-being of a single corporate entity is not a very good situation to be in for anybody, since it means that you are by proxy dependent on that entity and its success. Openness does not reduce dependency on technology, but it does reduce dependency on specific technology providers, and ultimately I think that's in my best interest.

<comment><USER4> _Openness for me is first and foremost ideological, not practical_

For the case where actually _repairing_ or _maintaining_ hardware is your job, open design and schematics is _essential_ \--especially if the original manufacturer is out of business. You'll see this in hospitals, military ships, machine shops, etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> This article describes why hardware is hard but if you were a small company designing a closed-source circuit you'll have the same problems.

Being open has the theoretical advantage of having multiple people review your circuit and help you spot mistakes.

<comment><USER6> The individual perspective is irrelevant. If the rest of the world was closed source, releasing your program open source wouldn't make much difference.

The difference is collectivization. When practiced widely, open source hardware means that you can find other designs that have tackled problems you've encountered. You can borrow one guys power block, find an audio block that meets your constraints, tack on a core complex from another project, and use a motor control from a fourth. You probably won't have anything to contribute to any of these projects: you may face some challenges they face, but collaborating with them is way harder than with software. That's ok. There's still a growing of a collective body of knowledge that others can recycle, and grow atop of. Open source hardware still does what is important about open source software: it empowers individuals to explore realms they would never have gotten to meddle with before.

As a small company, you can find a lot better a base than what you might develop in house if others are practicing open source hardware. And that means better kit for everyone.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> This came up on electronics.stackexchange: [http://electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/61873/why- is-...](http://electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/61873/why-is-open- hardware-so-rare/61891#61891)

My answer from there: "The "freedom to redistribute copies" and "freedom to modify" aspects of Free software really don't translate well to hardware. There is work and cost associated with copying a board, and much more associated with copying an ASIC (modified or otherwise). It's simply not going to be within the reach of the average user in the forseeable future.

Another factor is rapid obsolescence. Some of the open UNIX software is thirty years old; GCC is about 25 years old. Open hardware will generally have a shorter time before it starts looking horribly obsolete. This is especially true of all the things that people really want to be open: processors, graphics hardware, wireless interfaces.

(You could have an open replacement for e.g. the 555 or LM741, which would be more timeless, but what would be the point? How would it differ materially from the current ones?)

There is certainly scope for "community" hardware development, but that depends on having a stable, sensible community that can agree what it wants and is willing to pay for. Again, requires a lot of work."

<comment><USER8> > You could have an open replacement for e.g. the 555

There is already a kit [1] for a 555-like circuit (I think Dave [2] says there's some reason it can't be used in place of an actual 555) made of discrete components.

But there's no indication that it's Open Hardware, though. :-(

[1] [http://shop.evilmadscientist.com/productsmenu/tinykitlist/65...](http://shop.evilmadscientist.com/productsmenu/tinykitlist/652) [2] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U6qZPx4uD0g](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U6qZPx4uD0g)

<comment><USER9> There's a really detailed description of that kit (including full schematic) here: [http://shop.emscdn.com/KitInstrux/555/555_principles_revB3.p...](http://shop.emscdn.com/KitInstrux/555/555_principles_revB3.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> A couple months back I was on a panel on Agile methods with a fellow from Intel. [1] Normally I scoff at large-company Agile efforts, but I came away impressed. As I understood his presentation, they had virtualized their entire System-on-Chip development pipeline [2], allowing them to use software methods for hardware products.

Clearly we're not there for open hardware, but I think that's the kind of tooling necessary. If the cost of a build drops from $1k of manufacturing to $0.01 of electricity, and if the hardware experts express their knowledge as automated tests, then suddenly randoms like me can, as with open source, jump in, try a patch, and be given a chance to learn how to do it right.

[1] [http://computer.ieeesiliconvalley.org/agile-update-and-is- it...](http://computer.ieeesiliconvalley.org/agile-update-and-is-it-for-you- panel/)

[2] [http://computer.ieeesiliconvalley.org/wp- content/uploads/sit...](http://computer.ieeesiliconvalley.org/wp- content/uploads/sites/2/2014/07/harsh_kumar_position.pdf)

<comment><USER11> For well-established projects with high throughput and lots of resources this is likely practical, but those aren't the kind of things that "open source hardware" (a term I personally hate) typically targets.

For niche products being worked on by a small team with shoestring resources, the problems the article points out just scratch the surface. It gets even more fun when you add mechanical systems and sensors to the mix. I work in embedded systems and spend at least as much of my time debugging hardware as software.

The number of ways hardware can go wrong is astonishingly large. As well as all the ones mentioned in the article, there are temperature effects, power supply effects and most of all: noise. Put your system into an industrial environment with lots of big electric motors generating noise on the mains and see what it does to your design, even after it's passed EMC testing.

Noise and grounding (particularly leakage between analog and digital grounds) cause a ridiculous range of hard-to-debug problems. Software by comparison is easy.

My career has been about 80% software/firmware with 20% hardware, and I'm a hardware hobbyist (including time as a mentor for an FIRST Robotics Challenge team, an experience I highly recommend) so I've seen both sides of the coin and found that the typical "open source hardware" electronics problem is the kind of flaky, intermittent weirdness that is really rare in well-designed software these days (it's been years since I've seen a real Heisenbug in software, whereas they used to be a lot more common). Some of that speaks to how well-designed a lot of modern software is, especially open source stuff. Some of it speaks to how difficult it is to predict/ensure the quality of electronics in the real world.

<comment><USER10> Sure, but the history of computing has a lot of people solving hard/expensive problems and then having the techniques trickle down to small/cheap ones. That's my hope here.

Of course, I doubt it will ever work for the hand-built stuff. I'd guess it will only make sense for stuff whose fabrication is automated or controlled enough that it can be reasonably simulated.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> > For something of a smartphone class, a one-off PCB may cost several hundred > dollars. Then the parts will cost another several hundred dollars in small > quantities, as well as being difficult to obtain.

> Now, you have to solder the parts onto the board, which is a decidedly > nontrivial thing - and if you decide you want someone else to do this, it's > probably another several hundred dollars.

I'd love to live in a developed country where these statements are true. For a "smartphone class" board with 6-10 layers, 0201 size passives (1.0 x 0.5 mm), and 0.4-0.5 mm pitch BGAs (almost all mid to high end ARM microprocessors) you're talking about thousands of dollars of setup costs for each step of the process _before you even make a single board._ Reducing these costs to the hundreds of dollars requires a whole different world of expertise dealing with Chinese suppliers and manufacturers.

To give some perspective on how expensive it is for an EE working in California on non-trivial projects (more like RPi and less like Arduino): 10 boards with an ARM microprocessor, some DDR2/3 RAM, a multimedia processor, and a gigabit PHY on an 8 layer board can easily cost on the order of $5,000-7,000 with a month+ turn around time in the Bay Area. If I want the same design made in a week by reputable suppliers (such that I'm 90% sure that the issues I debug aren't from fabrication or assembly errors for a first run of a design), it can cost me closer to $15,000. The difference between making 10 boards and a one off? Usually less than $500, or 10% of the cost of the best case. That's usually not including the cost of parts which, unless you're contracting or working for a big company, you'd be lucky to get without a friend who can wander around the Shenzhen electronics part markets and overnight stuff to you.

The problems just go on and on. Many of the useful parts like cameras, multimedia processors, microprocessors, and high end ethernet MACs/PHY often require signed NDAs before you can even get the documentation. Oh and if you want to work with anything considered high speed digital electronics (i.e. bus speeds of 133/266mhz for DDR1/2 RAM, 1GHZ for MIPI2 cameras), you're now in the realm of RF (analog) electronics and intermittent bugs that can drive even the most talented and well equipped debugger insane.

Reality is messy and this is just one of those cases where the decks are stacked heavily against open hardware that is more complex than an Arduino. It's telling that many of the open source projects like PandaBoard, BeagleBoard, or OpenRD were originally made as reference designs by companies like Texas Instruments and Marvell or as otherwise well funded initiatives like the RaspberryPi.

<comment><USER13> I've run into the same wall with my own projects. The differential in cost between a one-off ARM board of medium complexity compared to even a higher- complexity dev tool made in decent quantity (gumstix, rpi, beagleboard) is just amazing.

What I've noticed is that there is a step in cost once you hit a certain level of complexity. Markup on parts is pretty predictable across the board, but the fabrication costs jump once you exceed the capabilities of the hobbyist- friendly services. OSH Park will do 5 mil trace, 4 mil space, 10 mil annular ring, which is about the best there is when it comes to inexpensive one-offs. That's enough to break out _some_ of a 0.8mm BGA. To improve your capabilities with components that size or smaller, you need to look elsewhere, and suddenly you're looking at "real" services and now the prices are in the several (or tens-of) thousands of dollars range. That's the point where a hobbyist can no longer approach this stuff. Now you're investing in prototyping and you've got to have a business plan.

At least you can get a System-on-Module. That seems to be the only way forward unless you have lots of money to sink up front.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> To what extent is it possible to design hardware using a software simulation of its behavior? Do you actually need to manufacture the hardware in order to develop it?

<comment><USER15> Most hardware is designed through simulations. It mostly works. That is until it reaches a certain temperature you didn't simulate and exhibits a bug only at that temperature.

<comment><USER16> If you are designing your own ASIC from scratch this is exactly the kind of problem you face all the time. It is VERY hard to simulate every single corner case.

If you are designing a board with other people's chips on, where are you going to get the simulation models from?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> HDL (hardware description language) is an interesting case. With lowRISC ([http://www.lowrisc.org](http://www.lowrisc.org)) we are working to produce an open source SoC using RISC-V. The parts of the chip described in high level HDL (e.g. the main 'Rocket' core) do not have the same issues described in this document. Assuming you have access to appropriate tools and a design kit for the technology node you want to target (which can be expensive and/or difficult) then for the most part, if it synthesises and passes the design rule checks you can be fairly sure it will work. Where this completely falls down is for the more analog aspects of the chip, such as the memory PHY (physical interface). This is typically specific to the fab process being used and really can not be verified and reasoned about in such a straight-forward way. People obviously do SPICE simulations and the like, but that only gets you so far.

<comment><USER18> If i not mistaken, you implement the project in the Chisel hardware language. How large a productivity benefit has it given you versus standard HDL's ?

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> This is a good description of the state of hardware engineering but I think the implication is that this will never change is incorrect. Also the main point has little to do with open-source. By these arguments, even engineering practices for proprietary hardware are prohibitive to rapid development.

Before we had compilers, debuggers, code analysis tools, garbage collection, etc. building software was hard too! Some would argue that building software is _still_ hard.

Hardware engineering clearly needs more accessible and easier to use tools, open source can actually help this. The best and most-used software development tools are open-source. An open landscape will encourage development innovation as more and more people become hardware developers.

With that in mind, I would actually title this article something like "Why hardware engineering needs to be open-source to advance."

</comment><comment><USER16> > it is pure coincidence that all models up till now have booted

This sums up my hatred of electronics.

</comment><comment><USER20> Computers-on-module do go a long way in keeping costs down. There are also services like Gumstix' Geppetto, which let you build a custom expansion board using their COMs and other functional modules. The price point is a couple thousand dollars, but after spending a couple hours on a design, you end up with a high-quality, guaranteed working board in a few weeks without any of the hassle of parts procurement.

</comment><comment><USER21> Not just open-source hardware, actually hardware itself is hard, maybe that's why it's called 'hard'ware.

Digest thousands pages of datasheet, find the best price of the ICs, making sure no potential supply issue or long waiting time for the order, PCB, SMT, cost, more importantly quality assurance at manufacturing, logistics....

I would say it's 100x harder than software, been there done that.

</comment><comment><USER22> Plus, with software, if you find you're missing something, you download it. With hardware, you pay through the nose for FedEx and pray that the vendor offers Saturday delivery. Then you sit on your ass until tomorrow afternoon.

With software, you install updates. With hardware, you milk your device as long as you can, then throw it away. Board-level rework is rarely worth the effort.

Yes, hardware is hard.

<comment><USER23> I guess that why it's called that? :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> With respect, I don't know if he's suggesting the right approach. Why not build up a "library" of smaller circuits (e.g. voltage divider, butterworth filter, debounce circuit etc), that allow people to make bigger circuits by combining them. Do it on a breadboard to test, then modify.

<comment><USER25> That sort of library is basically what the industry's vast catalog of integrated circuits amounts to, except that it is not open source and generally at a higher level of abstraction than the subcircuits you describe.

<comment><USER24> Really? I thought ICs were more along the lines of microcontrollers which have things like USB controllers, PWM controllers, GPIO etc. For these, it's mostly programming.

The library I described was supposed to be about all the external bits: signal conditioning, power conditioning, sensors etc.

<comment><USER7> Well, those aren't the hard bits, you can generally pull them out of a textbook or reference design and expect them to work.

You're overlooking the entire field of analogue ICs. Again, there's a fairly good cookbook of reference circuits out there. In some cases manufacturers will help you a lot: TI have a tool for designing switchmode power supplies around their chips.

So you can compose circuits into schematics. You don't usually compose _layouts_ as it's more compact to hand-redo them for your particular board shape. There is some open source hardware at this level; often to be found on tindie or via hackaday.

Then the other obstacles to shipping a product: regulatory approval. EMC testing. If it plugs into the mains, a whole bunch of safety testing. In the EU, CE marking and WEEE registration. If it has a radio, radio approval.

Economy of scale matters as well. That's why things like OpenWRT are so popular: repurpose hardware that's already mass-manufactured for a slightly different purpose.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> We tend to forget that software was hard just a few decades ago. We'll make hardware easier, but it will take time.

</comment><comment><USER27> This is what I think about Open source hardware. I could be wrong. I would love to be corrected.

1\. The definition of hardware is different for each person depending on their background

\- IC engineer's world of hardware is all about transistors and IC design. \- Mechanical guys world of hardware is all about geometries, material, structure analysis and it itself has a lot of variations. \- Product designers world of hardware is just sub-assemblies that already exist.

My point is everyone works with different levels of abstraction. IC designer has no idea of how product designers work but every one calls themselves a hardware engineer if they work with atoms (which is fair, but we just need to know that this difference exists).

2\. Because of this difference in definition of hardware, what do we exactly mean by open source hardware?

As a product designer, am I interested in an open source version of 555 timer or NEMA Motor? No - I am just interested in knowing its specs and building something on top of it. As an IC designer, you might be interested in knowing the details of the 555 timer and creating an open source version of it. Your fellow IC designer might find some use out of it, but not the product designer.

We must understand that an individuals interest lies in different levels of abstraction. This is true in the software world. Linux is open source but I might be contributing to a app on linux because thats where my interest lie. You might be interested in the kernel level.

My point here is that all of the above might be considered open source hardware but we should understand that modularity and levels of abstraction exists that makes things possible. As a product designer, 555 timer is a module, a means to an end.

3\. Hardware land is still very individualistic. Most hardware engineers even if they make it open source they still work alone on the project, majority of the time. There might be some levels of collaboration, but most of the time it is by one person. This is primarily because of limitations in access to hardware - consumables and equipment as mentioned in the main text. Hundreds of people collaborating on building one large hardware project has not happened. Eg - Open source Laptop - Novena is by one person - bunny.

4\. Majority of the open source hardware modules are small modules - like the sensor modules on sparkfun, adafruit or seeedstudio. Hardware as modules existed - eg dev board etc. Open source hardware as module was new. This helped prototypers and system designers work really fast. Also since the boards were open source, it sort of standardized the modules around the world. Tutorials and support are easier to find on popular open source boards than on closed source boards. My point here is that inspite of all this advantage, open source hardware is still small modules. The primary reason being point 3. There are limits to what one person can build.

5\. Just making the source open does not cut it for open source hardware. Like mentioned in the original text, there are so many insights that go into building a board. That is not reflected in the source file. So for each module in addition to the source file, you also need to map insights, such as, what is the reason behind a design choice - Why is there a chamfer? Why was a particular component chosen? What is the price of a component at scale etc.

6\. What does it take to make large scale open source hardware happen?

My definition of large scale open source is large number of people collaborating on a single project. Can we have a project that was build by 10 different hardware engineers based out of different locations? This is what I think takes to build large scale open source hardware a. Modularity - <USER2> for people to work at different layers of abstraction of their choice. Contribute to a module b. Ability to map insights - Just open source files does not help. The associated insights are crucial for someone else to build on your work c. Access to relevant tools - through maker spaces/techshops. Here since you are only contributing to a module of the project, you might only need access to a subset of the tools. d. Version control for hardware is like software releases - For now we can live without line by line versioning, but it is important to have access to earlier prototypes that went to the factory.

We are testing this hypothesis by attempting to build a large scale(defined by number of collaborators not by size of the project) open source hardware project - an open source electric unicycle - www.fireflyunicycle.com . This will be one open source hardware project where others can contribute. This is primarily an attempt to build a kickass community of hardware developers in India.

Shameless plug here - I am the founder of a startup - Makeystreet(www.makeystreet.com). Makeystreet is 'Github for hardware(system design)'. We are trying to make large scale open source hardware happen.

<comment><USER28> To comment on your post (the following numbers correspond to your listing):

1) Yes, "Hardware Engineering" is a very broad term. You'll have multiple levels of Hardware Engineers all working on different aspects of a design. However, this isn't much different from Frontend + Backend (and their associated languages).

3) Multiple parties working on one device, remotely, is possible (see: [http://www.protoexchange.com](http://www.protoexchange.com) \- shameless plug). We've worked with multiple engineers on a single hardware device. The hard-part is that the debugging typically requires each party to have the same piece of hardware physically available.

It would be interesting to chat more about OSHW if available :)

<comment><USER27> Yeah, would love to chat with you more on OSHW. Mail? firstname.lastname@example.com

</comment></comment></comment><comment> guard-of-terra Most software products exibit all kinds of similar behaviors to his "A-G" list. The "pure coincidence" thing is how most libraries work in your code.

However, software is usually evolved rapidly to avoid triggering design problems.

The solution should perhaps be moving more things off hardware and into software.

<comment><USER29> What things would you move off hardware and into software?

Typically the reason why we produce something in hardware is because it's infeasible to do in software. This is because of the costs mentioned.

<comment> guard-of-terra I imagine we can have SOC of CPU+RAM in one package and save on their wiring, for example.

<comment><USER30> Typically you'll use PoP with modern SoCs, where you put the memory on top of the CPU so connections don't go through the PCB</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Myth of 10,000 hours - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@senthil/the-myth-of-10-000-hours-hard-work-success-e309128c3d63 <comment><USER2> I haven't read the book, but what I heard about it second hand is that 10k hours is about mastery, not success. You can be a master without being successful and visa versa. But mastery sure improves your odds of success.

Of course 10k hours doesn't guarantee mastery either. I've put in that much on the golf course and still suck at it.

<comment><USER3> I've heard it's also important to distinguish _practice_ as separate form of _doing_. Without knowing anything about your golf habits, so not intending to criticize, but to use as an example: 10k hours of _playing_ golf is quite different from 10k hours of _practicing_ golf and the latter would, from what I understand of the distinction, have a more appreciable outcome. As you said though, mastery and success are not necessarily correlated.

An example from my life being: I spent much of my youth "practicing" guitar (guided lessons, learning theory, improving my abilities in different techniques) while my peers simply "played" and the difference in our skill levels (from a purely technical perspective) was noticeable. However, I still never had a successful music career :) whereas I can think of at least one of my peers who "merely played" that's since made a living off their abilities.

<comment><USER2> I've probably also spent almost that many hours on the driving range. Some people just don't have the talent for some things, and as far as golf, I seem to be one of them. But I always hit at least one good shot that has me coming back for more. Like an addiction.

I have a friend who hardly ever plays, but still beats the snot out of me on the course. So in my humble opinion, trying to eliminate natural ability from the equation is misguided.

<comment><USER4> Another requirement is focused practice, which means having a coach who can evaluate what you're doing and tell you where to improve.

Going to the driving range and hitting a bucket of balls isn't as helpful if you don't know what you're doing wrong and how to fix it. You'll just keep doing the same wrong thing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> For those who don't know already, the "10,000 hours" to attain expert-level mastery in any field or endeavor is false. The study that Malcolm Gladwell cites by Anders Ericsson _only_ applied to violin performance, which is a narrow field that has measurable and quantifiable performance levels and hundreds of years of teaching history.

I repeat this comment almost every time because 10k is both discouraging for the beginner and sometimes falsely encouraging for the "expert" who may have put in a lot of hours but in reality has been repeating mistakes and not really improving.

<comment><USER6> I don't see how it's discouraging. I find it far more discouraging and depressing when people say the 10000 hours is a myth and deliberate practice is a waste of time. What exactly am I supposed to do then if practice doesn't make me better?

<comment><USER5> Deliberate practice is most definitely not a waste of time! I hope you continue to get better in your endeavors.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Grit by Angela Duckworth ([https://www.amazon.com/Grit-Passion-Perseverance- Angela-Duck...](https://www.amazon.com/Grit-Passion-Perseverance-Angela- Duckworth/dp/1501111116)) goes into deliberate practice quite a bit.

She talks about how deliberate practice is almost never enjoyable because you're trying to improve specific things, but it is how you attain mastery. The other side is "flow", when that mastery is display, and she mentions how it can look so effortless for top athletes, when it's almost definitely the result of hours and hours of deliberate practice.

<comment><USER8> On the same trail of thought [https://www.amazon.ca/Talent-Code-Greatness- Born-Grown/dp/05...](https://www.amazon.ca/Talent-Code-Greatness-Born- Grown/dp/055380684X) is a great read.

Shows many examples of how deliberate practice on the edge of your current ability is what equals mastery ( whilst also exploring the science behind it )

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> The book doesn't simply say that practicing something for 10,000 hours will make you a master. The point is that people who are masters at something (or known as brilliant or experts in their field) didn't just magically get to that point by having a particular talent. They got there by having a particular talent, being born into particular circumstances, AND THEN putting in a ton of work (hence the 10,000 hour reference).

Bill Gates wasn't born a great programmer and businessman. He was born smart and into a situation where he had access to a computer and then he worked his butt off to learn. Similarly, great athletes are both talented and work like crazy to hone their craft.

The point I took from the book is that hard work and many, many hours of study and/or practice is essential in order to get to the top of a field. Doing the hard work will not automatically get you to the top since at some point lack of talent or lack of resources may get in the way. But, you need to do the hard work in order to give yourself a chance to make it to the top.

<comment><USER10> I agree. The whole point of the book was that there were outliers which gave people certain edges which made their success more likely than one would think.

The examples I recall were hockey players who were born at certain times so during their formative years they were essentially a year older than the other players which gave them a leg up during their formative years making them better candidates to succeed later on. Looking around that appears to be equally controversial.

While I often don't agree with Gladwell's conclusions I do think he, as well as Michal Lewis, bring enough new information and insights that they are worth reading.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I think the author of the article is missing the point of the book. And assuming everyone else is missing the point of 10,000 hours of intentional practice.

<comment><USER12> Agreed. So 10'000 hours of practice isn't just doing it, it's actually becoming obsessed with doing it BETTER. I can make sandwiches all day long, but only if I focus on how precise I am in the dose of mayonnaise, how seamless my spreading it over the bread, and how exact is the time the sandwich spends on which part of the refrigerator, then I'll improve.

Sorry I'm tremendously eager to eat a sandwich right now. A good follow up book after reading Outliers is James P Catse's "Finite and Infinite Games": [https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1476731713/ref=as_li_tl?ie...](https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1476731713/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=1476731713&linkCode=as2&tag=alvaroduran-20&linkId=8083958421b739785738a9ea98e334a1)

<comment><USER13> I know a lot of people who have 6 months of practice, repeated dozens of times. Most drivers for example have about that much, and it shows in how they drive.

<comment><USER12> Can't describe it better (unless it involves food). Good job!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I'm not sure why "10,000 hours to mastery" pisses off so many people. Sane people don't believe it's a hard number. They know it's a point of view that should help them focus on their goal, instead of some magic fact.

It tells newbies that they'll need to spend time and work hard to master the skill. It tells experienced people that they probably aren't the best they can be yet. And it tells masters to stop expecting newbies to be great and to let them have time to learn.

</comment><comment><USER15> The 10k rule got me started programming when I was 17.

I don't have a billion dollar app, but I use programming at work to increase my value tremendously.

I want to challenge this with having a low value skill, like playing sports, doing 10k hours, and seeing if the person could make 50k a year.

</comment><comment><USER16> The observation is that mastery requires thousands of hours of deliberate practice.

I find it remarkable that people seem to think that this implies a claim in the opposite direction: that thousands of hours of (any) practice results in mastery.

<comment><USER17> I think it's because we all[1] like to think there's an easy shortcut to achieve a goal.

[1]Lots of people.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> 10k hours on anything will likely make you as good as you can be at something.

Whether or not that is enough to become success depends on one's own ego and attachment to realizing if they're focusing on the better thing or not.

<comment><USER14> I'm sure many will argue, but I agree.

After 10,000 hours of doing something, I can't see _anyone_ not having tried to improve themselves. I think it's basically impossible to do the same thing for that long without basic human nature taking effect and forcing that person to improve until they can't any more. At least, not organically. I'm sure you could put a gun to their head and force them to improve more, but that's not natural.

<comment><USER13> I think you are missing a few things. There are a lot of things to learn, someone who spends 10,000 hours on flat pick guitar will not be any good at finger picking guitar without a few thousand more hours practice in a different skill. There are a number of other ways to study guitar, before you branch to base, violin, Piano, drums - that is all playing interments. There is are completely different line of music you can go down: composition, conducting. In short, there is always something more to learn even if you are a master of something.

<comment><USER14> If you can flat pick a guitar for 10,000 hours without desiring to learn more and better yourself, then I claim that you are already the best you can be. You simply haven't the curiosity or drive to become better at it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> > Unfortunately "Work hard to succeed" is the message the world took away from > it.

Is this unfortunate? Yeah, there are lots of random factors that might affect your outcome. The only one you can reliably influence is how hard you work. While you're lamenting about how you weren't born in the right time or the right place or so and so had the lucky opportunity to get a break and the right time, your competitors are working.

</comment><comment><USER19> It doesn't matter what the book says about mastery, success, or practice, because Malcolm Gladwell isn't interested in the truth. "I don't write about what is true, I write about what is interesting." Systematic distortion is his stock in trade.

Even if he actually said something nominally true, it would still be wrong. Studying successful people and finding it took them 10,000 hours to get there (which he didn't) would not imply that anyone else could get there in the same 10,000 hours. I could practice basketball for 100,000 hours and never be able to sink a half-court shot, blind.

What does seem true is that people who enjoy practicing a thing are the ones who master it, probably because seeing progress makes practice enjoyable. When you stop seeing improvement, you stop, and move on to something else. People who master a thing are self-selected as those who could, for whatever reason. No one else is counted.

</comment><comment><USER20> I think there's an unaddressed point in the book that should include "for the average person with average physical/emotional/intellectual capacity 10k hours - give or take - of _deliberate_ practice should make you a master". This intuitively makes sense to me, and what I took away from the book. I guess others took away other things and if you want to fault the author for that I'm not going to stop you. It's also fashionable to over-analyze everything these days so some won't be satisfied unless there are exact data points involved it should warrant throwing out the whole book and to which I would say to them sometimes it's about the notion rather than it's exactness. In any way the book is interesting and still worth a read.

</comment><comment><USER21> I look at the hours and hardwork I put in as increasing my chances for success.

I wholeheartedly agree that success is mostly based on luck. I believe that the most successful business people were incredibly lucky in their journeys - but most also worked incredibly hard. If you work harder, you increase your chances at finding that luck.

If I gave up working hard a year ago, I would have never been found or funded. If I stopped working hard today, I won't find the next source of luck I need.

Life is about luck. I don't think it's right to shame others for wanting to work hard to create their own luck.

</comment><comment><USER22> Well, obviously different tasks have differing levels of complexity and difficulty. I'm sure no one seriously thought that exactly 10,000 hours were needed for mastery of all tasks.

</comment><comment><USER23> "Working hard does not guarantee you will be successful, but I guarantee all successful people worked hard." - Coach Kamogawa of Morikawa's life novel, Ippo.

<comment><USER24> In a similar vein,

'Hard work beats talent when talent fails to work hard'

<comment><USER25> Do you think Trump worked hard? Yet he is at the top of the tree right now.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Whether mastery or success is the end, the rule emphasises quantity of time over quality of time.

AFAIK 'quality of time' discussions are restricted to mentions of 'deliberate' practice. That's critical, since if someone can (sorry..) 'work smarter, not harder' then it devalues the 10k rule. Not even to mention luck

</comment><comment><USER27> What I think is interesting is how much emotion the 10k hour rule rouses in general. The Freakonomics podcast mentioned the 10k rule as well. They posit that given equally talented individuals, the person who puts in the requisite hours of hard work through deliberate practice would obtain the higher level of mastery.

<comment><USER19> Trivially. It doesn't take a book to say that.

Gladwell wants us to think that successful people earned it, that Bill Gates deserves his $100B. Everything else bends to that goal. But Gates has $100B not because he worked hard, but because he abused monopoly power, and impoverished the world. The enduring legacy of Microsoft's dominance is that people think computers working badly is both OK and unavoidable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> The way I always understood it is that 10000 hours of focused and deliberate practice and work gets you there.

I never interpreted it as: just do something for 10000 hours and you'll be a master at it.

</comment><comment><USER29> I read the book and I want my money back</comment>


Google Maps API V3 - <AUTHOR> http://code.google.com/apis/maps/documentation/v3/ <comment><USER2> This release is nothing short of a revolution for the Google Maps API. What once took 15 JS function calls now only takes one or two with a json string describing your point/polygon/etc. Thanks Google!

<comment><USER3> And no more API keys!</comment></comment>


Thales Threat Report – disk encryption, happy Europe, and blockchain worries - <AUTHOR> https://keychest.net/stories/c-level-cyber-security-report-with-surprises <comment><USER2> The biggest surprise to me about Thales is that it's pronounced 'ta liss'</comment>


Amazon Could Transform the Tiny House Movement - <AUTHOR> https://www.citylab.com/perspective/2019/08/tiny-house-order-amazon-kit-diy-how-much-cost-zoning/596350 <comment><USER2> "This is dumb"</comment>


Netflix is down - <AUTHOR> http://www.netflix.com

<comment><AUTHOR> any login attempts are met with an error message.</comment>


WASD Keyboards:Custom mechanical keyboard with VIM keys - <AUTHOR> http://usevim.com/2015/06/12/wasd-keyboards/

<comment><AUTHOR> Here is another one: [http://www.wasdkeyboards.com/index.php/products/mechanical-k...](http://www.wasdkeyboards.com/index.php/products/mechanical- keyboard/wasd-v2-104-key-custom-mechanical-keyboard.html)

Scroll down to "2\. Select Alphanumeric Layout Style"</comment>


NASA: Standard Disclaimer - <AUTHOR> http://goes.gsfc.nasa.gov/text/disclaimer.html <comment><AUTHOR> Seems like it's a place where they dump any standard diclaimer boiler plate they come across, Includes Includes "Not the Beatles", "Falling rock" and "No Alcohol, dogs or horses" This is just begging to go viral.</comment>


If You Have to Explain It, You've Lost - <AUTHOR> https://latenightcoding.co/if-you-have-to-explain-it/ <comment><USER2> Good stuff. I'm currently working with chatbot development. And I have to keep this kind of stuff in mind all the time.</comment>


An overview why file locking is broken in Linux - <AUTHOR> http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/locking.html

<comment><USER2> This topic doesn't make any sense. Linux has many file systems. So which file system specifically has "broken" file locking?

So having read it. Seems this guy takes issue with the POSIX standard and it's flock requirements. Which of course makes this topic make even that much less sense.

</comment><comment><USER3> Not really broken. BSD-style locks work fine, although I suppose I have never had the occasion to only want to lock certain bytes in a file.

<comment><USER4> On nfs?</comment></comment>


Yahoo discloses hack of 1B accounts - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2016/12/14/yahoo-discloses-hack-of-1-billion-accounts/ <comment><USER2> Canonical source: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13180033](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13180033)

<comment><USER3> Save a click on a 1-comment discussion:

[https://yahoo.tumblr.com/post/154479236569/important- securit...](https://yahoo.tumblr.com/post/154479236569/important-security- information-for-yahoo-users)</comment></comment>


Comcast won't throttle BitTorrent anymore, will throttle heavy downloaders - <AUTHOR> http://www.alleyinsider.com/2008/3/bittorrent_comcast_cmcsa_shake_hands_downloaders_still_screwed

<comment><USER2> It always has confused me as to why ISPs and Universities have been so persistent about throttling protocols instead of just regulating bandwidth.

Quality is generally completely unaffected for other services as long as you don't saturate your upload bandwidth on DSL.

</comment><comment><USER3> I always thought a nice system would let me pay by per-second bandwidth rather than by some contrived package combination of monthly cap and top speed.

e.g. $30/100KB/s, $40/250KB/s, etc.</comment>


Tesla recalls 53,000 cars over brake issue - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/news/business-39663382 <comment><USER2> I...okay, that headline is just bad.

Core issue: "A small gear may be defective in some cars; you should come into the service center and get it checked. If it breaks, you may be unable to disengage the parking brake."

Headline: "Massive recall over brake issue!"

It's not _technically_ wrong. But it misleads more than it informs.

<comment><USER3> I don't think you could write the headline any less sensational and more informative. Tesla has to repair 53.000 cars, this is in itself newsworthy as it becomes clear that they are struggling with the same issues as any other car manufacturer and it should be a challenge to their operational logistics.

<comment><USER4> "Tesla Recommends Parking Break Update"

<comment><USER5> I would hope that the BBC had better spelling than that!

<comment><USER4> Haha yes... I'll leave editing for others amusement.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> A very sensational title. One of their suppliers F'ed up, and now Tesla needs to check and replace a small part in some of their cars. All that's required is a visit to a service centre. Doesn't seem like a big deal.

<comment><USER7> This can be said about any problem in any car, "one of their suppliers f'ed up" because most things in a car are manufactured by suppliers today. Car manufacturers only assemble sub systems from 3rd parties.

How comes if Ford f'ed up, it's Ford. If Toyota f'ed up, it's Toyota. If Tesla f'ed up (doors, brakes) it's a supplier?

<comment><USER8> If the issue were the brakes not engaging, sure, I'd blame Tesla. When the issue is "the parking brake may not disengage and then you'll have to call AAA and your ice cream will melt," I'm okay with blaming the supplier.

<comment> ismail-khan Tesla is still responsible for picking the right supplier & some degree of quality control even on components they didn't manufacture themselves. Perfectly OK to hold them responsible as well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Details surrounding the issue in question:

 _In a statement the firm said the electric parking brakes installed on Model S and Model X "may contain a small gear that could have been manufactured improperly by our third-party supplier".

If the gear were to break, the parking brake would continue to keep the car from moving, but the parking brake would be stuck in place, it added._

<comment><USER10> So this is a matter of brakes being unable to be _disengaged_ from standing rather than engaged at speed?

<comment><USER11> But now all the people using their parking brake while moving will be performing a possibly unsafe action!

<comment><USER12> The thing I haven't figured out yet is whether this is the brake engaged when you shift an automatic transmission into park, or if it is the emergency brake. If the latter, I'm not sure what the big deal is, since you should almost never use the e-brake.

<comment><USER13> It's the parking brake, not the transmission in park.

Though commonly called an e-brake, the parking brake is actually intended to be used when parking, especially when parking on a hill.

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

<comment><USER12> Ah, I see. I was always taught not to use the parking brake. If not used regularly, it has a tendency to seize up, particularly in cold conditions. On all but the steepest slopes, park in an automatic is sufficient. With a manual transmission, I'd either put it in gear in 1st or reverse, depending on the orientation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> > The electric car maker said about 2% of the 53,000 vehicles built from > February to October 2016 were affected, but all of those cars are being > recalled

That's 1,060 cars altogether are affected.

<comment><USER15> That's misleading. All 53,000 vehicles need to be inspected, but Tesla expects ~1000 vehicles to have problem.

Source: I received recall notice.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> That's more than they produce in a year, right?</comment>


Is iOS a natural choice for a startup to release their first app? - <AUTHOR> http://e27.sg/2012/03/06/im-sorry-android-you-and-i-just-dont-work/

<comment><USER2> Depends on the nature of the startup and your development lifecycle. If you do rapid development, I would go with Android first, iterate _very_ fast based on the feedback from your first batches of users, make decisions based on any usability/feature complaints, and then release an iOS app which has maximized chances to do the best it can on the AppStore.

If your app is highly social, a facebook app would probably be even more appropriate, since the first users don't need to update your app to get the new changes.

</comment><comment><USER3> There's also the fact that most developers are already in the Apple ecosystem - more likely to have an iphone, ipad and most common, a mac laptop.

</comment><comment><USER4> The title on HN makes it seem like this is going to be far more substantial than it actually is.</comment>


Developer Innovation Time - <AUTHOR>

I'm trying to figure out how to incorporate time for developers to work on new technology, learn new things, remember old things, and otherwise have some time set aside for self improvement and reflection.
It turns out that there needs to be a pause in sprinting.  I have developers who are stuck in a framework that our company uses and often don't get a chance to work on different things. I think it's best for the long term to retain motivated and good people by giving them time to tinker and learn so that they don't get too bored and leave too soon.
My plan is to allocate 3 or 4 hours every Friday dedicated to to learning and self improvement. If a developer chooses to use this time for self improvement, then they should be ready to present a quick presentation on what was learned.
What do you all think of this approach?  Do you have any other suggestions as to how to incorporate this type of time in your working environments? <comment><USER2> 1\. Rotate developers every milestone.

       Group A: Codes and takes care of product tasks
       Group B: Investigates, Research and writes Test code.

Important!:

Make sure you set a vision for the team and always remind them of it through inspirational material so their "extra" work/research naturally tends towards it (aka: don't make google's mistake, bunch of innovations going nowhere; hence all the close products).</comment>


Fund raising for Egyptian young social entrepreneur - <AUTHOR> http://igg.me/p/120709?a=742602

<comment><AUTHOR> I believe that this girl deserves help.</comment>


Why GPA Is Useless - <AUTHOR> http://loganrandolph.com/blog/2013/10/16/why-gpa-is-useless

<comment><USER2> I think your friend was referring to business majors. a 3.5 at most finance programs is achievable with hard work and almost no innate intellectual gifts. Conversely a relatively smart person can get a 3.5 without attending lectures or doing much work.

If you are an engineer it's very difficult to explain in parallel terms. The running joke at my school was that failed engineers drop out and become straight-A accountants.

Sorry if I offended any business majors (I am one), but the truth is the truth:)

<comment><USER3> Yep. I had it even worse, I went to a magnet high school for engineering and science. All students were in an advanced college prep or regular college prep program.

We had people who couldn't cut it, get routed back to their zone school and become valedictorian. And some did that with only taking one or two classes a semester(my HS has so many advanced courses that besides English, you have enough credits to graduate in sophomore or mid-junior year.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> And even if you got straight A's in school does not mean that you are going to be very good at your job. It just means that you are good at studying things.</comment>


Watch this now. Steve Blank on Mixergy - <AUTHOR> http://mixergy.com/fail-interview-steve-blank/

<comment><USER2> It goes without saying that you think people should look at the articles you submit. "Watch this now" is just noise — please leave it out.

</comment><comment><USER3> This link is broken.

<comment><USER3> Fixed now.

<comment><USER4> Broken again? Or maybe the interview was taken down.</comment></comment></comment>


India launches Chandrayaan-2 moon lander - <AUTHOR> https://www.space.com/india-chandrayaan-2-moon-mission-launch-success.html <comment><USER2> Where are the toilets?</comment>


EU bans claim that water can prevent dehydration - <AUTHOR> http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/eu/8897662/EU-bans-claim-that-water-can-prevent-dehydration.html <comment><USER2> Good grief, this sounds like something that should have been in The Onion.

</comment><comment><USER3> dated: 18 Nov 2011</comment>


Cheran: The town that threw out police, politicians and gangsters (2016) - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-37612083 <comment><USER3> Their method of local organization is very similar to the Zapatistas, or more recently, Rojava - both also shift the focus of governance onto the local level, where it can be done by the community itself as much as possible.

The details of the system in Rojava are better documented - they have a written constitution, for starters, but there's also more media scrutiny because of the war, producing some very detailed write-ups. Both can be fascinating to read:

[https://corporatewatch.org/wp- content/uploads/2017/09/Strugg...](https://corporatewatch.org/wp- content/uploads/2017/09/Struggles-for-autonomy-in-Kurdistan.pdf)

[https://www.scribd.com/document/441234886/Social-Contract- of...](https://www.scribd.com/document/441234886/Social-Contract-of-the- Democratic-Federation-of-Northern-Syria)

<comment><USER4> These systems (most explicitly Rojava) are similar to Murray Bookchin's [0] ideas on libertarian municipalism. Basically, control over economy and environment is mostly devolved to the local level, with citizen's assembly and that sort of thing. It does seem to work well in practice, which is really encouraging.

It's obvious now that we need a fundamental reorganization of our political economy for both material well-being and the climate. Something along these lines would probably be the best. The future will hopefully be much, much, more local in physical production and distribution. In such a scenario it would only make sense to keep power democratic and on the local level.

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

<comment><USER5> I see a lot of parallels between political organizations, organisms, computer systems, etc. A larger system with vertical integration is more efficient at producing the result. In our life it manifests itself in affordable mobile phones, being able to launch a satellite, small amount of time necessary to understand contractual expectations, etc.

But the larger the system - higher are the stakes if something goes wrong - eg. economy in 2000 -> 2008 -> 2020\. In nature usually there are external factors that seem to do well at keeping systems from growing too much. I wonder what could be an equivalent in the political environment (without Darwinism and constant death of many to find the fittest ones).

<comment><AUTHOR> I'd say organisms are not so much vertical organized but homeostatic, the likes of cybernetic control of old cyberneticians. Like the brain doesn't say each cell what to do, cells share the environment, each signals their state, needs and reach to their local environment. In that sense you would share information (on production, on the state of the environment, on needs) and each local community would react in accord to move that shared environment towards homeostasis. But even organisms aren't perfect, think of your body, when you consume great amounts of carbs your body secrets insulin in a negative feedback and actually overshoots sending glucose levels bellow optimal which eventually fixes itself after several cicles of self correction.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > Political parties were banned - and still are - because they were deemed to > have caused divisions between people.

What an excellent idea.

<comment><USER7> It sounds like a good idea, but unfortunately it's mathematically unstable and doesn't form any sort of equilibrium (Nash or otherwise). Any participant can gain an advantage by grouping up with one other participant. Once everyone has grouped up into pairs, they will then group up again and again, ultimately creating a two party system.

<comment><USER8> Why even allow grouping (politically) into pairs? The town could just ban non- politicians from expressing _political speech_ entirely (as a social norm, not a law.)

Politicians could still speak politically in the form of campaigning; but they'd not be allowed to make reference to _other politicians '_ positions on things; only to speak about their own beliefs on how things should be/how things should work.

For anyone who isn't an actively-campaigning politician, the only political speech you'd be allowed would be (private-ballot) voting. Anything else would get you shunned by the community.

(Yes, I realize how ridiculous this sounds.)

<comment><USER9> >The town could just ban non-politicians from expressing political speech entirely (as a social norm, not a law.)

And who enforces that ban? Who picks the person that enforces it? How are they held accountable? Who are they held accountable to?

You see everything is politics, whether we like it or not.

<comment><USER8> It's a social norm—everyone enforces it, and everyone also punishes those who don't enforce it. Compare/contrast: being punished for using a cellphone in an Amish community.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The commentary here seems to miss a certain basic point about the situation with Cheran (and many other regions of Mexico, where I live, that are controlled by autodefensas groups and other types of local vigilante security groupings).

What the people of Cheran did is worthy of applause, because it brought some measure of peace in the middle of a desperate situation of insecurity, extreme violence and governments that at both the federal and state level are almost catastrophically corrupt on guaranteeing security.

However, for this very reason it's a sad thing to see. The single most basic debt to society that a government owes in return for paying taxes and agreeing to its rule is a monopoly on violence that's fair and sufficient enough to prevent rampant criminality, yet Mexico suffers from the latter so severely that large swathes of the country are firmly outside the government's supposed rule of law, and make small towns and regions have no choice but to take measures like these.

Who knows how sustainable this is, or its long term ramifications. What it definitely does do is further weaken that same government's capacity for reestablishing its main responsibility.

The government of Mexico of course knows this, and so do the state governments that supposedly have authority over places like Cheran. For this reason (and for reasons of extreme corruption) they not only resent vigilante efforts like these or any attempts by private citizen groups to defend themselves with weapons or by other means, but also often actively, violently try to impede them "legally" despite not being able to replace these localized security measures with a useful reformation of their own.

This is done under the pretext that non-state armed security groupings are dangerous to public safety, but curiously, the same efforts at curbing heavily armed groups outside the law seem to evaporate when it comes to curbing the power and rampant impunity of cartels that also control whole regions much more viciously.

One of the reasons why? Unlike the people of Cheran or many private citizen defense groups, these cartels are typically colluding with the same politicians that claim armed vigilante activity as dangerous. The cartels also have their own similar reasons for disliking armed civilians who tend to retake peace from corrupt gangsters and politicians.

</comment><comment><USER11> Radical, indigenous, feminist, anti-colonial, self-organising. I think that's the real lesson, that almost all the problems were brought in from outside by exploiters and that the armed decolonization of the town was the real liberation.

It's not an ideal situation: you can't have a zero party state, that always turns into a one party state. The actual situation of control will turn out to be a set of family relationships embedded in the matriarchy running the town, but analysing this will be impossible for journalists. It's also why it's very difficult to replicate.

<comment><USER12> >Radical, indigenous, feminist, anti-colonial, self-organising.

According to the BBC's laughable propaganda. Not according to any of the people actually involved. Even then there's nothing colonial about Mexican cartels stealing from Mexicans.

>The actual situation of control will turn out to be a set of family relationships embedded in the matriarchy running the town

What a bizarre notion. Why and how would that suddenly occur?

<comment><USER11> Oh, the wording is all mine, inferred from this fairly thin set of news reports. But:

\- radical: doesn't get much more radical than an armed uprising

\- indigenous: they're Purepecha. This is very important. While they're Mexican _nationals_ , and would be called Mexican by Americans, they're not of Spanish descent. They're descendents of a tribe unconquered by the Aztecs. Racial discrimination against people of indigenous descent is common all over Latin America.

\- feminist: all the news coverage points out that the initial uprising was initiated by women.

\- anti-colonial: outsiders of a different ethnic background coming onto traditional tribal land to steal natural resources? With the collusion of the police? Sounds pretty colonial to me.

\- self-organising: found a bit more on this; [https://elenemigocomun.net/2018/08/cheran-names- government/](https://elenemigocomun.net/2018/08/cheran-names-government/) ; [https://www.nbcnews.com/news/latino/after-long-fight-self- go...](https://www.nbcnews.com/news/latino/after-long-fight-self-government- indigenous-town-cher-n-mexico-n906171)

It's crucial to being exempted from normal politics such as elections. "arguing before the courts that there were provisions in Mexican law that permit indigenous communities a form of self-government based on their customs"; sounds analogous to the semi-autonomy of Indian reservations in the US.

>> "set of family relationships embedded in the matriarchy running the town"

So it looks like I overstated this a lot, but if you refer to the NBCnews article above it's a "council of elders". And they don't have parties? Family is a party you're born into. It's more or less the default arrangement of pre- bureaucratic politics. It's hard to avoid even in modern states. Add up all someone's in-laws and second cousins and it's easy to get to hundreds of people, which goes a long way in a community of 20,000.

BBC: "Most people who live in Cheran are from the town. Social mores dictate that locals marry locals - there are very few outsiders here. Families are large, and they are close. Everyone knows everyone else. And that is the foundation of the town's unity."

NBC: "Patricia Hernández, a taco vendor and mother of four, accepted the challenge to be part of their government when her neighbors chose her to represent their fogata. She is now one of four women who will govern Cherán for the next three years as part of the twelve-person council known as K'eri Jánaskakua.

"Before the government didn't take us [women] into account, until we were the ones who started this new government seven years ago," said Hernández to NBC News. "We said 'Ya Basta!', (Enough!) to put an end to this violence."

(more feminism! with machetes!)

It doesn't "suddenly occur", it was always there, it just took a lot of adversity to mobilize it to the level of armed self-government.

<comment><USER13> >doesn't get much more radical than an armed uprising

I would like to nitpick that the idea that there exists a threshold of terribleness for local power structures beyond which it's perfectly reasonable to use or threaten violence against the people propping them up is one held by a heck of a lot of people on the North American continent. Of course people disagree about where to draw the line but the concept itself is pretty mainstream.

Edit: I guess I'm really nitpicking that "radical" implies something novel, new or fringe which does not fit the circumstances here.

<comment><USER11> Surely the local power structure is mainstream by definition? "Radical" doesn't imply "novel", but it does imply a much greater belief that the ends justify the means, and an opposition to the status quo. Radical is a modality of politics. Description of something as radical is not necessarily an endorsement or censure.

The American revolutionaries were radicals. The protesters with guns demanding that Kentucky reopen its shops are radicals. The Unabomber was a radical. Nelson Mandela was a radical.

(There's a much longer point to be made about how armed revolution is an event and the subsequent politics is a process, and that lots of places fall over when it comes to the long haul of building a working politics after the revolution. I'm glad this community seems to have avoided that.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Anyone have an update of what has happened since 2016?

<comment><USER3> [https://www.latimes.com/food/story/2019-10-07/mushrooms- cher...](https://www.latimes.com/food/story/2019-10-07/mushrooms-cheran- mexico-indigenous-revolution)

<comment><USER14> Damn, this is the kind of inspiring story I need right now, thanks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> From my experience growing up in Russia, I can say that no organised crime can exist without somebody providing them legal cover.

Think this way: even a single caught gang member can spill the beans on the whole group. Eventually, as the gang grows, it happens.

<comment><USER16> I always thought organized crime works in such a way that, at any given layer, a person could only provide evidence of criminal activity of their peers at the same layer, and maybe a bit of dirt on their bosses a layer above - <USER2> they couldn't bring enough legally admissible evidence to impact the higher layers. So if a random bottom-tier gangster starts to testify, everyone above them on the ladder just denies knowing them (and each other). The legal system can't proceed, and meanwhile someone from the gangster's family suffers a fatal "accident".

<comment><USER15> > _legally admissible_ evidence to impact the higher layers.

This does not prevent the police from getting on their tail, putting them under intense surveillance, and effectively neutralising them.

<comment><USER16> If a single testimony could cause everyone mentioned in it to be subject to intense government scrutiny, then society would stop working because griefers would abuse it.

<comment><USER11> Ah, you've heard of swatting and the Church commission.

(The secret is that police have a huge "bayesian" filter for who they consider likely to be a criminal, so little or nothing can trigger intense scrutiny for some people whereas blatant criminality by "respectable" people is ignored)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> This reminds me of "Cartel Land" movie¹, which depicted similar events (in the same Mexican state of Michoacán, BTW) a few years before, mostly around José Manuel Mireles Valverde².

¹ [https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4126304/](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4126304/)

² [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jos%C3%A9_Manuel_Mireles_Valve...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jos%C3%A9_Manuel_Mireles_Valverde)

</comment><comment><USER18> ... with guns. Just sayin'

<comment><USER19> Last I checked the United States isn't an anarchy with roving bands of unopposed, murderous gangs.

<comment><USER18> Well, it depends who you ask. My original post is slightly provocative, I admit, but I think there is a real debate regarding this issue.

To me, it seems to validate the need for citizens to be well armed, preferably before it's too late.

<comment><USER20> They weren't armed. They only had machetes, "In those early days, we didn't know anything about using guns." I grew up with tons of guns, you don't have guns and at the same time know nothing about them. Had they guns they would have used em instead of shooting fireworks at the gangsters.

<comment><USER18> Sure, and that kind of confirms my point, doesn't it?

<comment><USER20> What? Are you trolling?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> Nevada-Smith May as well throw out the lawyers too.

<comment><USER21> according to the latimes article they essentially did, punishing and making up law as they go.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Expect to see this model spread in the years to come. It has a lot of potential, though I'm not sure it's easily adaptable to non-agrarian economies.</comment>


Ask HN: How do you create/gather a community like HN? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> An acquintance of mine got his FB group going thanks to real life meetups. The online community was jump-started by the participants and grew organically from there to the point where 95% of members don't even know there used to be a meetup.

</comment><comment><USER3> HN draws a lot of its user base from the fame of the Y Combinator VC firm, and a little bit from the occasional good thread being cross-posted elsewhere. So, a good recipe for creating a similar community is to attach yourself to an existing brand the way HN did. (As with HN, the results are going to be mixed.)</comment>


Apple's Hollywood venture marred by 'intrusive' execs, including Tim Cook - <AUTHOR> https://nypost.com/2019/03/03/appless-hollywood-venture-marred-by-intrusive-execs/ <comment><AUTHOR> A thin blogpost excerpting this story was understandably killed ([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19313822](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19313822)). But, the inside grumbling about Silicon-Valley-vs-Hollywood culture clashes, and reports about Apple's content preferences (such as avoiding "religion or the negative consequences of technology"), seem independently interesting & relevant.</comment>


The oldest computer in use by the U.S. government - <AUTHOR> https://www.muckrock.com/news/archives/2016/sep/23/governments-oldest-computer-isnt-technically-compu/ <comment><USER2> There is a lot to be said for systems that do their jobs despite their age, and which have been validated and refined over the course of decades.

In many ways, I'd rather maintain an old, well tested system than a modern system with widely available exploits, conflicting commercial interests, and rapid obsolescence.

<comment><USER3> An abacus has an exceptionally small attack surface when you think about it.

<comment><USER4> Too true - both the negative (who wants to program an abacus), and the positive (there is no magic in this program/device).

I feel like developers tend to favor the magic, due to the burden it relieves, without having to consider the negatives due to the way the business of software works.

<comment><USER5> Not all developers, but I'd say that certainly the majority seem easily entranced by the "latest and greatest" especially in some areas of software; web development is the most prominent example to come to mind.

<comment><USER6> Web development has the most innovation because it is the least entrenched. It is not hard to write a bare-bones web application that produces output that can be read on browsers everywhere.

Compare that to the difficulty of writing a cross-platform GUI framework. It's not even easy to write bindings for existing GUIs because it's hard to wrap C++ in a way that doesn't have you manually managing memory or discarding other language features and philosophies.

This is why we're seeing the Electron approach to GUI apps grow. It's easier to write bindings for chromium and feed it HTML.

<comment><USER7> No, we are seeing Electron because Web hipsters never coded in anything else other than JavaScript.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The IRS itself goes into detail: [https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs- pia/imf_pia.pdf](https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pia/imf_pia.pdf)

"IMF is located at the Enterprise Computing Center – Martinsburg (ECC-MTB) and resides on the MITS-21 GSS. IMF is written in Assembler Language Code (ALC). There are no direct users of IMF. IMF receives data from an array of systems and then sends data to several systems as well."

MITS-21 GSS == "Modernized Information Technology Services (MITS)- 21, IBM Master File General Support System (GSS)"

[https://www.treasury.gov/tigta/auditreports/2011reports/2011...](https://www.treasury.gov/tigta/auditreports/2011reports/201120074fr.pdf)

There are two mainframe systems, Unisys and IBM:

"The Unisys mainframe at the Martinsburg Computing Center processes all of the centralized Individual Taxpayer Information File workload for the 10 IRS campuses. The Unisys mainframe at the Memphis Computing Center processes all of the centralized Business Taxpayer Information File workload for the 10 campuses.

The Unisys mainframe at the Martinsburg Computing Center is configured to run with 950 MIPS for normal weekday processing. For weekend processing, the Unisys mainframe at the Martinsburg Computing Center borrows MIPS from the development and test environments to increase capacity to 1,200 MIPS for managing the increased workload. The borrowed MIPS are returned to their respective systems on Monday mornings to support weekday processing. The Unisys mainframe at the Memphis Computing Center is configured to run with 675 MIPS for normal weekday processing."

"In October 2010, the IRS upgraded its Martinsburg Computing Center mainframe computers from the IBM z/9-series mainframes to the IBM z/196-series mainframes."

The report even provides nice utilization graphs.. Your government at work.

edit: The type of Unisys systems "The IRS Unisys mainframe environment contains two Dorado 280 mainframe computers, with one located at the Martinsburg Computing Center and one at the Memphis Computing Center. Because vendor hardware support will be discontinued as of December 31, 2011, the IRS has decided to upgrade the Dorado 280s to Dorado 780s during Fiscal Year 2011."

<comment><USER9> For anyone else who was curious, an Intel i5 2500k runs at about 83,000 MIPS compared to the 1,200 of the entire IRS Mainframe.

<comment><USER10> Main-frame specialty is crazy IO, I'm told, not raw muscle

<comment><USER11> Yes, the number of instructions per 'business operation' in a mainframe is typically much, much smaller than on something like an x86. This dates back to IBM's early habit of implementing all instructions in lengthy microcode, resulting in instructions that were relatively slow to execute but did complex things, typically taking an entire high level operation (e.g. sum all these numbers) and making it one instruction. A big part of making this happen is the IO model on mainframes which is much more integrated than x86 professionals are used to. In general files on mainframes are not binary blobs but schema-compliant tables similar to an RDBMS, a fact that is leveraged at a very low level when programming for mainframes.

This leads to a very different kind of thinking from using microcomputers. I highly recommend that anyone in computing learn to use a mainframe or at least minicomputer operating system, which is affordable thanks to services like PUB400 from RZKH which provides free access to an IBM i minicomputer. Yes, these systems are uncommon today outside of certain specific market verticals (e.g. finance), but the exercise will show you a very different way of organizing a computer system that might help you think outside of the *nix- style box.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> > We did indeed find the oldest computer in government, but it's not really a > computer at all; it's computer software.

What a complete disappointment! I was hoping to read about some crazy legacy hardware they were still using. Software?! Yeah... no, that does not count as the oldest computer in government.

In general, does a software's age alone really give any cause for concern? In my book, software that survives 56 years is proved solid. Software that is new is guaranteed to have bugs.

> I'm starting to have a lot of questions about this tax software and the > management around it.

This does seem like muck-raking by a non-expert with little to no real context... Is that what Muckrock does? This software was audited, presumably by experts, and people looking directly at it acknowledge it's hard to maintain and still conclude there's no immediate need to replace it. What evidence is there that this conclusion is in dire need of re-examination?

</comment><comment><USER13> The article mentions that the oldest _actual_ computer in use by the government regards nuclear strike operations, and that it's actually being upgraded sometimes next year. I find this...concerning? Says they're upgrading terminals and data storage, which seems pretty harmless, but I feel like in terms of nuke-launching tech, "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" is a pretty good philosophy to live by.

<comment><USER14> How do you know it ain't broke?

<comment><USER13> True, but I'd at least regard such a system as likely fairly fault tolerant, considering its been in use for 50+ years.

<comment><USER15> I'm sure plenty of replacement parts of EOL by decades. Heck, the terminal upgrades alone are likely necessitated by the fact CRTs are no longer manufactured in quantity.

<comment><USER16> I was running into this doing requisitions for a precision approach radar that was commissioned in the late 60s. By this point, all of the part suppliers had long since moved on to other things or gone out of business, and the usual avenue became "Order the part, and wait for enough air stations to also need the same part. Then, and only then, will the government commission a custom fabrication job to manufacture the parts needed for an obscene amount of money."

Two results happened. First, we ended up paying $15k for parts that were worth $500 because that's what it costs to set up a fabrication job when you only want 50 circuit boards. Second, we did whatever the hell we could to avoid having to spend $15k on a $500 part, and the radar was therefore held together with gummy bears, duct tape, and black magic. It was a clusterfuck, and we were always putting out fires with that thing, sometimes literally.

Horrifyingly, the military has never been able to create a better PAR, which is why it's been around for so damn long.

I got out in 2014, and last I've heard, they just re-extended the EOL for the radar to 2025. They'll probably be sending out lance corporals with binoculars and walkie-talkies to yell "TOO HIGH" and "TOO LOW" by then.

<comment><USER17> > Horrifyingly, the military has never been able to create a better PAR, which > is why it's been around for so damn long.

Not enough pork involved for a Congresscritter to push it and not flashy enough for a flag officer to do so.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> It's not difficult to find those systems in the government and some big companies. Adding logic to some some source code that was last modified in 1985 and recompile it 30 years later is magical.

<comment> semi-extrinsic Indeed. The Norwegian IRS equivalent still publishes updated Cobol programs that businesses can use to calculate employee taxes:

[http://www.skatteetaten.no/en/Bedrift-og- organisasjon/Drive-...](http://www.skatteetaten.no/en/Bedrift-og- organisasjon/Drive-bedrift/Arbeidsgiver/employers-order-electronic-tax- deduction-cards/Documentation-and-program-for-calculating-prepayment- deductions-2014-and-2015-income-years/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Its all about cost and rish. These are bespoke systems that were written decades ago -- the entire operations of the agencies were organized around the abilities of the system.

In the 60s, there was a clear ROI, the money spent zapped an army of clerks. Standing up a new system is high cost, high risk, and brings low measurable benefit.

</comment><comment><USER20> Sounds like the cheapest way of upgrading hardware for the IRS is to write an emulator that can understand IMF assembler and stick it in a virtualised environment. Given the server it is running on is now underpowered, a medium sized server could handle what it does at a fraction of the cost.

<comment><USER21> The article says it's already running on modern IBM mainframes.

> "While they've upgraded the hardware to more modern IBM mainframes, those > mainframes are still running vintage assembly."

This is one reason IBM is still popular - their modern mainframes are backwards-compatible with 50-year old software.

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

> The System z family maintains full backward compatibility. In effect, > current systems are the direct, lineal descendants of System/360, announced > in 1964, and the System/370 from the 1970s. Many applications written for > these systems can still run unmodified on the newest System z over five > decades later

<comment><USER20> Is there a reason for them to upgrade this system to newer languages?

<comment><USER7> Yes, to bring modern software to those platforms.

All IBM mainframes support C, C++ and Java in addition to the platform original languages.

<comment><USER20> That's not really a reason with a business case attached. That's just "these other languages are modern, use them instead!".

<comment><USER7> No, it is the other way around and it surely has a business case.

Instead of throwing out the investment done in years in the mainframe hardware, because juniors cannot grasp old technologies or don't feel like using them, bring them into the mainframe, while keeping the investment into the existing working stack.

Instead of writing a REST API in RPG, which doesn't know anything about Web APIs, used to create the customer support application, make use of JEE/Spring instead to provide a SOAP/REST API.

Just a possible business case, that is actually used in production for Java applications on IBM mainframes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> *that we know of.

(So this isn't a garbage comment: I imagine somewhere deep in Mt Cheyenne and elsewhere there are some even older milspec machines that have been running archaic code since mainframes were first invented.)

</comment><comment><USER23> The DOD one ("Strategic Automated Command and Control System") claims to be 53 years old and run on a Series/1\. But Series/1 first came out in 1976, 40 years ago. Anyone understand the discrepancy?

<comment><USER24> "We did indeed find the oldest computer in government, but it's not really a computer at all; it's computer software."

<comment><USER23> Except... I read that sentence as referring to the IRS systems, not the DOD system. Am I wrong? It's confusingly written.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> In the short term, there's always a lot more risks in scraping an old system and spinning up a new one, especially in large complex organizations. However, in the long term you're really better off with modern systems.

So it really is a difficult trade off.

</comment><comment><USER26> Previous similar discussion:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11772966](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11772966)

</comment><comment><USER27> Ha! Bravo! That is some old software! This hunt has reminded me of The Cuckoos Egg by Clifford Stoll.

<comment><USER20> Oh, fantastic read. It read it again the other day and I suspect that Stohl got mixed up with the NSA but didn't enjoy it too much.

<comment><USER28> Why?

<comment><USER20> They gave him short shrift, and he was a Berkeley man who was more at home at a Grateful Dead concert than tracking down overseas hackers.

He only discovered the issue because he was trying to teach himself how to program, and decided to chase down a problem with a discrepancy on the timeshared server that was causing it to be out of balance by about 5 cents.

<comment><USER27> Correction: 75 cents ;-)

<comment><USER20> I stand corrected :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Probably why the core IRS systems have not been hacked yet because few hackers know IBM 360, COBOL and 9 track tapes. New peripheral systems like the transcript request system have been hacked.

</comment><comment><USER30> How does this machine compare to a modern cellphone?

<comment><USER31> That's actually a very difficult comparison to make, because your expectations of them are so entirely different.

Will your phone:

      * Still be useful in 5 years
      * Still be functioning in 10 years
      * Still be receiving vendor support in 50 years

The actual "wow, my phone is faster than a 5-year-old desktop" makes fun headlines, but is entirely irrelevant.

<comment><USER30> If governments insisted that all hardware should come with a spec that runs on a universal virtual machine, then today I could probably run the old machine on my phone. But alas, thanks again to an unvisionary government, we're stuck with old hardware.

<comment><USER32> IBM i software was compiled as platform independent binary and converted into machine specific code by the operating system. Ok, it's a propietary spec far from being open etc, but the tech is there and even better than a vm (in certain aspects)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> And they're still using it with admin as the username and password as the password.</comment>


Show HN: Panhandlr, data-driven 25 best panhandling intersections in Austin - <AUTHOR> http://126.96.36.199:3000 <comment><AUTHOR> View the top 25 intersections for panhandling in Austin, Texas. Data collected from city of Austin site:

[https://data.austintexas.gov/Government/Traffic-Count- Study-...](https://data.austintexas.gov/Government/Traffic-Count-Study- Area/cqdh-farx)

It's supposed to be half parody half useful.

[https://github.com/amend/panhandlr](https://github.com/amend/panhandlr)

</comment><comment><USER2> Super neat!</comment>