China's assault on Cathay Pacific - <AUTHOR> https://www.economist.com/leaders/2019/08/22/why-chinas-assault-on-cathay-pacific-should-scare-all-foreign-firms <comment><USER2> [https://www.newsweek.com/cathay-ceo-refused-name-hong- kong-p...](https://www.newsweek.com/cathay-ceo-refused-name-hong-kong- protesters-chinese-government-named-himself-instead-resigned-1455371)

> The Taiwan News claimed that Cathay Pacific CEO Rupert Hogg's decision to > resign last week came after he refused to name names to the Chinese > government when he was asked to provide a list of employees who were > involved in the Hong Kong protests.

> China's Civil Aviation Administration ordered Cathay to provide a list of > employees who were involved in a recent protest. He was also ordered to > suspend the employees. According to the Taiwan News, Hogg provided the > list—but it included only one name: his own.

> His resignation was first announced by CCTV, China's state-run television > station, 30 minutes before Cathay Pacific announced Hogg had stepped down.

<comment><USER3> (Some say this version of events is an untrue rumor.)

<comment><USER4> Who is "some"?

<comment><USER3> The first hit on Google for "Rupert Hogg" gives a HK journalist claiming the story is a canard.

<comment><USER2> Jack Ma's and SCMP's neutrality is a bit up in the air at the moment, I feel. Last time I looked at that story it was just trying to sow doubt, without any evidence to the contrary. I'm sure you'd inform us in great detail if that had changed.

<comment><USER3> I literally said "some say". Chill out. I totally agree the SCMP is biased.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> >Chinese inspectors have started screening the phones of Cathay crew for anti- Beijing material.

If that doesn't persuade ordinary Hong Kongers to love and trust the mainland authorities, I don't know what will.

<comment><USER6> If you're a Hong Kong resident, what are your options? Can you flee the country with a visa to a first world country with rights less under pressure from a totalitarian state?

Edit: I genuinely appreciate all of the replies to this comment as this humanitarian crisis unfolds.

<comment><USER7> HK allows dual citizenship and there are around 300,000 Canadians living in HK right now[1]. Not sure about other nationalities. And I think HK passport can go to many countries visa free or visa on arrival[2]. So in a sense many protesters do have a plan b if needed.

1\. [https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/unrest-in-hong-kong- fue...](https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/unrest-in-hong-kong-fuels- speculation-of-spike-in-re-return-migration-to-canada)

2\. [https://www.immd.gov.hk/eng/service/travel_document/visa_fre...](https://www.immd.gov.hk/eng/service/travel_document/visa_free_access.html)

<comment><USER8> The protesters are more working class than the richer HKers with multiple passports. Sure, they can leave, but it is much harder for them to establish themselves in a new country. They can buy a plane ticket, but then what?

<comment><USER9> They can do what the Chinese have done since the 19th century: move and adapt. It's what my family did. Easier said than done, but I feel it's pretty ingrained now when you can even find Chinese families in places like Africa.

<comment><USER10> It was much easier to move somewhere in the 19th century if you had the money.

Its essentially impossible to move to another 1st world country without years (or decades) of process + usually a highly valued university degree these days

<comment><USER9> Doesn't matter. imo Chinese people can still adapt. It's part of the culture. My family came to the US as illegal aliens with no money and poor education (their degrees weren't of much use). We still made it work. I know it's anecdotal, but there are a lot of anecdotes throughout Asia, Europe, the Americas, Africa, and even in the Middle East (it was surreal when I met a Chinese guy from Saudi Arabia who was looking for a potential 7th wife).

EDIT: it wasn't easy immigrating the US in the 19th century

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti- Chinese_sentiment_in_the_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti- Chinese_sentiment_in_the_United_States)

<comment><USER11> Don't understand why GP is downvoted. Of course Chinese people (like many others) can adapt, but how are you going into a country and stay there legally? For most people, asylum is hardly an option (though Germany has granted asylum to several leaders of the HK protests). If you don't go via asylum, you have to go via normal immigration routes, and they are normally either investment or skills based these days - you need lots of money or excellent education. You cannot just go and live in any country you want anymore (for most people).

<comment><USER9> > but how are you going into a country and stay there legally?

The same way startups figure out how to survive and eventually profit: by continuously adapting and continuously looking for opportunity. In our case, some of my relatives saved up enough "under the counter" money to pay a citizen to marry them until they were able to get a green card; after which they divorced. Others just married citizens. Others got enough education to get a work visa (I don't remember the details). You get the picture. It's a waste of time and energy, dwelling on what you don't have vs how to accomplish what you need to happen. I'm not saying that you should be ignorant of obstacles and challenges (you need to know what they are), but you need to focus on the openings & opportunities to get through. This is a generalization, but I feel that most if not all Asian cultures have this same spirit.

Here's a modern example.

[https://www.scmp.com/lifestyle/article/1774417/how-modern- da...](https://www.scmp.com/lifestyle/article/1774417/how-modern-day-chinese- migrants-are-making-new-life-italy)

I didn't downvote anyone on this thread

<comment><USER11> Ok, that's really funny. It would never in a million years occur to me to pay someone to marry me so I could live in some country. And, yes, some recent startups have skirted or crossed the line to illegality.

My point remains - nowadays (unlike a century ago, if I'm not mistaken), the majority of people can not choose in which country to live (legally, at any rate).

<comment><USER9> The past is often romanticized, but the reality is that it was never easy.

[https://www.huffpost.com/entry/american-chinatowns- history_n...](https://www.huffpost.com/entry/american-chinatowns- history_n_6090692)

I didn't say that your point was invalid. I'm just pointing out that when you're desperate enough to escape an authoritarian regime or other dangers, legality isn't as important of a consideration. There's plenty of grey areas to work in. ie if there's a will, there's a way

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> China is applying a lot of pressure on Hong Kongers right now, including searching devices at the border for any signs of protest photos. The Hong Kong police have requested Octopus card records (the mass transit card that is linked to individual user IDs) and CCTV footage of the airport protests last week. There is evidence of information sharing between Hong Kong police and mainland authorities.

The implied threat is that anyone who participates in protests risks their livelihood and prospects of future education, and that major companies in Hong Kong will not be allowed to remain apolitical, but must choose sides.

These pressure tactics are intended to break the Hong Kong protests, and while taken very seriously by Hong Kongers, have so far failed to achieve that aim.

<comment><USER13> I don't think border searches like this are out of the norm even by Western standards.

<comment><USER14> The likelihood of a US border search that turns up protest materials costing you your degree or your next 5 job prospects is essentially 0.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Samsung magically fell to zero market share in China in the span of 2 to 3 years, that's a warning to any company doing business in China, now they are targeting Fedex over the alleged intentional diversion to the US of some Huawei packages, when China is angry at Korea, Lotte and Samsung became sacrificial lambs to the pent-up ire, Fedex and maybe some other American campanies may be the new ones (Amazon narrowly escaped the witchhunt of anti- China items since they exited China themself just months ago).

<comment><USER10> Yep, any western company that thinks the Chinese government is going to allow them to have a large market share in China long term is straight up delusional (or thinking so short term they don't care at all)

Company after company has been raided for IP and forced out of China, stop falling for the siren song.

<comment><USER13> Apple still has a large market share in China. Maybe Samsung just sucks and couldn't compete against Huawei? Only reason Huawei hasn't beat out Samsung in the US is because of anti-Huawei sentiment in the US.

<comment><USER16> That's not true...Huawei stole from Nortel and it's just that tech initially. Samsung was doing great before the forced anti Samsung protests (Huawei was already 1 at the time).

<comment><USER17> i'm a former nortel employee. so sad to see people lose their houses and pensions due to chinese theft. The hacking wasn't even publicized as a warning that other companies could heed - get your security in order, be careful with your IP, or you will go from 140,000 employees to a small cadre of lawyers and accountants managing the pittance that is left over. But at least none of the management at Nortel was embarrassed by the bad publicity of getting owned by the chinese and their inability to do anything about it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Why don't we form a new WTO, without China or other dictatorships, and only allow in democracies that are liberal or liberalizing? There's no point in opening our arms to China if they aren't moving on the right track anymore towards becoming a free and fair society.

<comment><USER7> Potentially because people have different understanding of what a free and fair society is.

<comment><USER19> > Potentially because people have different understanding of what a free and > fair society is.

Simple.

Give people a choice which society they're allowed to live in. China currently does not do that.

<comment><USER7> Totally agree. My question is which country does do that? I have voted once by moving. But I still don't have the choice to live in a society that I think is free and fair.

I wish I can live in a society where inequality is minimal, where people work and innovate not because of money, but because they enjoy their work and enjoy innovation. I wish I and my fellow citizens can have universal health and dental care, free higher education. I wish a political system without bribing disguised as lobbying, without innovation-killing monopoly. I wish we have similar chance of being happy irrelevant of how rich our parents are. A place where mental illness people are treated, instead of being free to be on the street. Where I can freely roam the city at any hour without the fear of being robbed or raped. Where the urban/transit design makes people free from using cars if they feel not like to. Where I don't have to work as a housing slave.

Now, if my view of a free and fair society is a majority view, why there's isn't one that I can go? If my view is a minority one, then I still don't have the choice in a democracy isn't it?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> And today, Cathay Dragon sacked the head of the flight attendant's union.

[https://news.rthk.hk/rthk/en/video- gallery.htm?vid=1476318](https://news.rthk.hk/rthk/en/video- gallery.htm?vid=1476318)

<comment><AUTHOR> The head of the flight attendant's union was fired by Cathay Dragon, and according to her press conference regarding the termination [1], the case was based on her friends-only stories on Facebook ([1], 48:10 in Cantonese) which showed some post-it notes saying Happy Birthday to her colleagues ([1], 48:45 in English)—post-it notes are common in Hong Kong's Lennon Wall—but it remains to be seen if there is enough grounds for termination.

[1]: [https://www.facebook.com/standnewshk/videos/646850612491620/](https://www.facebook.com/standnewshk/videos/646850612491620/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> It's sad to see a company suffer the cost of nationalism. This is what happens when nationalism trumps human to human connections.

Protest in Hong Kong has descended into nationalism and sovereignty issue for 1.4 billion people. Majority wins even though there is some protection guaranteed in most nation and there are plenty of examples in recent days where majority wins. In social media it's majority wins, minority is always relegated to corner.

I hope it resolves amicably.

</comment><comment><USER22> I don't know if this is a coincidence but Cathay Pacific is symbolic of colonial times.

The founders were not Chinese, the main shareholder has always been British, the CEO until a week ago was British. It's always been a western (anglosphere) company operating in China/Asia, not a Chinese company and perhaps the Chinese authorities want to make clear that it is now a Chinese company.

<comment><USER23> Not sure if this is a coincidence, but your account is less than 65 days old and seem to mainly to post comments that are pro-Beijing. It's entirely possible that you have a bit of a bias in regards to Cathay Pacific.

<comment><USER22> Wow... Why the gratuitous personal attack? Am I guilty of a thought crime?

And how are most of my comments "pro-beijing"? The world is complex and trying to have a measured approach and to understand the different points of view is not being pro or anti anything.

HN promotes intellectual curiosity, not narrow-mindedness.

<comment><USER24> This is a fascinating stanford prison experiment level social experiment spearheaded into the mainstream by twitter, facebook, youtube. I guess religious wars takes away the burden of petty intellectualism we've been trying so hard to get rid of.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> It seems like the most dangerous threat to Cathay is the following line from the article:

> China's airline regulator declared it unsafe

Based on other sources it means that Cathay would be forbidden to enter China's airspace. It entails much more than not being able to land in China: since the airspace of Hong Kong is surrounded by that of China, it is virtually impossible _not_ to enter China's airspace when using the only international airport in Hong Kong. Being forbidden to enter China's airspace means not being able to fly to and from Hong Kong, a death spell for Cathay.

<comment><USER25> If China is using "safety" as a political weapon, I think other countries need to respond with sanction. The idea of safety is not some abstract concept. Safety is an objective measures with international norm, standards and processes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Can anyone recommend a good book on China, or modern geopolitics?

<comment><USER27> Not trolling, just read 1984 or animal farm. It's just the same story

<comment><USER26> Thanks, I've read those and they're great, but I'm looking for something that's less of an analogy. Something that puts China in the context of modern geopolitics. Preferably helping me understand their development in the last century.

<comment><USER28> In that case I'd recommend

The Hundred-Year Marathon: China's Secret Strategy to Replace America as the Global Superpower [0] by Hudson Institute's China expert.

and

Unrestricted Warfare: China's Master Plan to Destroy America [1]

These are rather hawkish but unfortunately also nailing the truth.

[0] [https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/20696000-the-hundred- yea...](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/20696000-the-hundred-year- marathon)

[1] [https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/855077.Unrestricted_Warf...](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/855077.Unrestricted_Warfare)

<comment><USER29> Any emergent superpower will want to replace the existing one. China hawks seem to rule Washington but Chinas prosperity has been beneficial for the rest of the world by decreasing the costs of electronics and manufactured goods. It goes without question though that the largest and most populous countries on earth will rapidly grow (barring geopolitical events that completely break the system) and eventually attain the status of coequal powers, if they manage to not start more wars.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> [https://outline.com/NG6tPU](https://outline.com/NG6tPU)

<comment><USER31> How does outline work? how do they get around the login feature

<comment><USER32> If they told you that, the target sites would find a way to block it. Obscurity is just another weapon in this advertising-and-bloat-blocking arms race.

<comment><USER15> Actually it's hard to block them, since they just need to cache every new article once, and you can't block a user just coz he accessed every new article.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qwest#Refusal_of_NSA_surveilla...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qwest#Refusal_of_NSA_surveillance_requests)

</comment><comment><USER34> The assault is real enough not just executives are gone and some employees are resigned (or fired?) due to their support of hk protestor. Not sure anyone has been fired if they post support of the police. But a related firm dragon air has top Union lady fired after confirming her holding a Facebook account.

The power of china given its economic power and land mass and no of people should wake up people. Unless there is a way to constrain it, if should be contained one way or the other.

</comment><comment><USER35> This should be a notification for all companies, it is time to think about more than profits. This sort of behavior must not be enabled by continued business with the Chinese state.

</comment><comment><USER36> Does this scare YC China?

[https://blog.ycombinator.com/yc-china-qi- lu/](https://blog.ycombinator.com/yc-china-qi-lu/)

<comment><USER37> Almost certainly yes. But more importantly, they are probably never going to say anything about it publicly, so that they don't face backlash.

<comment><USER15> Just found out that HN is no longer accessible in China, and now you have to pass reCAPTCHA to log in.

[http://ping.chinaz.com/news.ycombinator.com](http://ping.chinaz.com/news.ycombinator.com)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> This is getting ridiculous. There's too many paywalled articles posted on HN and the web link is no longer a reliable work around. Bad user experience is just going to drive people away. Please think about reworking your algorithm otherwise comments are just going to be based in the title since few people can actually read it. Yes, I realize this is going to get downvoted because of posting policy but I'm willing to take the karma damage to try to improve the community before it's too late.

<comment><USER39> The practical solution (which is what i do) is to flag a submission if the article cannot be read. The result will be that the article will be flagged (unless enough HNers pay for that website's subscription so it is ok for it to be shared)

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> [http://archive.is/tAfRq](http://archive.is/tAfRq)

</comment><comment><USER41> Honestly, this shouldn't surprise anyone.

</comment><comment><USER42> As opposed to Trump's or Thiel's assault on Google?

<comment><USER43> Thiel is just trying to find out if Alphabet's life sciences division has made any advances in eyebrow regrowth.

<comment><USER44> He's probably just mad he couldn't sell surveillance tools to China like Google does.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> They should make a backup of the phone and then reset it to factory defaults then restore the backup once out of the country.

Does the chinese gov have backdoor access to gmail/gdrive?

<comment><USER46> There is still the possibility that border agents could implant devices with a persistent backdoor. Especially if the devices are taken out of your sight during the checks

<comment><USER45> Well the nsa has been doing that on intercepted cisco devices for literally three decades.

Basically you need to assume no privacy whatsoever but at the same time, still stand the fuck up for free speech.

Fu k all authoritarians.

Recall when jetpack (reddit founders) were trying to sell sentiment manipulation to the government?

Where the fuck is palantir these days?

Twitter is the shithole of the internet.

Reddit is now compromat by tencent

Voat.co is compromised

8chan is gone

4chan is also uselessly trustworthy (although i admit i have been impressed over the years as to some of the things they have accomplished) ((my secret conspiracy on that is there are many intels on 4chan that know how to post true-anon and reveal shit))

I personally feel really bad for all my interest in the cyberpunk future i thought we were heading for - but instead we built digital 1984.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> I have said it before but all of this is pretty classic fascist behavior where loyalty to the corporate state is demanded without question. This is for all serving purposes a monster that the West created. I just worry about what this looks like going forward, where we have this huge massive superpower which acts this way and can't be questioned.

<comment><USER48> No disagreements with your base assessment, but how did the west create this situation?

China has a longer continuous timeline than the western powers by far. Are the current political moires there not another node on that chain?

<comment><USER49> I won't say "the west" because I think it's really "capitalism", but

Global capitalism created this situation by deepening trade relationships with China to the point that we're all dependent on them to the point that there's very little leverage over their international behaviour.

Look at how the PRC is behaving against Canada right now. Illegal torture-like detention of two of innocent Canadian citizens in China, in retaliation for the very mild house arrest (for extradition) of a Huawei executive, something Canada _had_ to do (treaty) on US request.

How they behave domestically (against Hong Kong citizens for example), yes, that's another question.

<comment><USER50> That is absolute bullshit. If Western countries had _refused_ to trade with China for human-rights reasons, we'd be hearing accusations of economic imperialism! Now we're responsible for their ultra-nationalist authoritarian capitalism because we _don 't_ impose our imperial authority on them?

<comment><USER47> See anyone saying anything against Western countries for not trading with Iran, Venezuela, or North Korea?

<comment><USER51> It is a rather popular position among the American left, especially the one represented by Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and AOC.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> > When the Chinese aviation authority, absurdly, accused the airline of > imperilling safety because its employees had joined the protests, Cathay > dumped its chief executive.

Question: Is there even remotely a legitimate security concern here? Let's say in a hypothetical scenario, the unrest spirals out of control into a state of complete desperation. The HK government and the CCP refuse to compromise on any of the five demands, and the protestors refuse to stand down.

Let's say politically polarized HK pilots and cabin crew are flying a plane full of mainlanders.

Would you be 100% comfortable being a passenger on that plane as a mainlander?

<comment><USER20> If this is the case, seeing that there are lots of people around the world who are sympathizing with Hong Kong protesters, shouldn't the security directive also apply to every airline worldwide that have mainland Chinese among their passengers?

<comment><USER52> Yeah that could be one possible solution. Not allowing Cathay flights over mainland China could be considered another.</comment></comment></comment>


PokeBin: Schedule free demo to view apt/house remotely to save on flights/hotels - <AUTHOR> http://www.PokeBin.com <comment><AUTHOR> The riskiest part of relocating is securing housing ahead of time. You want to make sure that your new home is comfortable and that there are no regrets when you purchase or sign the rental contract. Unfortunately, sellers and landlords are not always honest. They conveniently leave out the negative aspects when they advertise their offerings. One of my co-workers from Europe even got scammed out of his apt and left homeless on arrival! That is why many people have to go see the place in person before committing. However, sometimes that is not possible because of time and money. Not everyone can take time off to fly in and book hotels. My goal is to solve this issue as a real-time remote video assistant.

After scheduling a viewing, a PokeBin representative shows up at the apartment and conducts a live walkthrough with you via FaceTime or another video calling app of your choice.

It could also be used for anything where you need eyes on the ground (i.e. check on CraigsList meetup, your pet from work, crowdedness of restaurant, if a party is popping, for a specific talk at a conference).

Please let us know what you think.</comment>


A crazy Ruby quine: a spinning globe. - <AUTHOR> http://d.hatena.ne.jp/ku-ma-me/20100905/p1

<comment><USER2> Equally impressive: <http://d.hatena.ne.jp/ku-ma-me/20090916>

A Ruby -> Python -> Perl -> Lua -> OCaml -> Haskell -> C -> Java -> Brainfuck -> Whitespace -> Unlambda -> Ruby quine!

<comment><USER3> A polyglot quine! There should be special obfuscated contest just for that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> 1\. Copy one of the above as a.rb.

2\. Run

while true; do clear; ruby a.rb | tee b.rb; sleep 1; mv -f b.rb a.rb; done

<comment><USER5> Smoothing the animation:

       while true; do clear; ruby a.rb 3 | tee b.rb; sleep 0.1; mv -f b.rb a.rb; done

<comment><USER6> Here is a video - <http://screencast.com/t/yyoO5UJIPif>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> That is pretty cool, but the ultimate work of this type that I've seen is this mandelbrot fly-through in perl:

<http://www.perlmonks.org/?node_id=329492>

Seriously -- try it.

<comment><USER8> Awesome. Works perfectly on OS X.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Does anyone know what kind of process was used to create this?

<comment><USER10> Port from the original Perl version.

<comment><USER11> Where is the original Perl version?

<comment><USER7> Here is one:

<http://www.perlmonks.org/?node_id=332609>

<comment><USER12> I don't think that's the same thing: the perl code is a spinning world visualization, the ruby code is code producing other code that in the end produces the original one, where the different programs _also_ are visualization of the world, which is a tad cooler :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> At least the Japanese rubyists remember how to have fun :)

</comment><comment><USER14> His translated version of the article <http://mamememo.blogspot.com/2010/09/qlobe.html> (not that there is much to read :-) )

It's really impressive :-)

</comment><comment><USER15> Here is his presentation video about quine at RubyKaigi2010: <http://vimeo.com/14817369> (Japanese)

</comment><comment><USER16> This is certainly an amazing piece of work.

</comment><comment><USER17> That is truly impressive.</comment>


Thinkgeek Redesign - <AUTHOR> http://www.thinkgeek.com/redesign/ <comment><USER2> Ohhh .. nice background slider on the home page. Scroll the page and see how background image blends into another. Never seen this done before.

But an overall impression is that they have added way too much visual noise. Bigger font and more colors doesn't necessarily mean a better user experience. In fact, sticky fancy background (as nice as it is) only contributes to the problem.

In short, it was better before. And they should've really run this interface through a public beta first to gather a feedback.

<comment><USER3> Really? I don't think there's any more stuff on there than before, particularly looking at the screenshots they show. Looks like they just freshened things up a bit.

<comment><USER4> I think the redesign is great - but the background, while awesome and creative, is distracting and adds noise to the UI.

The rest of the design is awesome though - there are some decent improvements to discoverability.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Can anyone explain why the "feedback tab" on the lower left of homepages is becoming so popular?

<comment><USER6> It was started by the GSFN (getsatisfaction.com) tab. Although this one isn't GSFN.

<comment><USER7> Actually, I'm pretty sure the UserVoice folks started it. When we added it to Dawdle (still there), the GS folks didn't offer one.

<comment><USER8> I have been wondering about that damn Feedback tab for a while, thanks for letting me know who to blame.

<comment><USER7> Blame all you want, but it's been invaluable to us. We have a Help link on every page, which goes to Contact Us (i.e. an extra step), but for whatever reason, the signal on UserVoice feedback is much higher than messages sent via our Contact Us form.

<comment><USER8> Sorry, its probably just my setup, but those tabs really distract me on a lot of websites. I am however glad they helped you... I just wish they didnt stand out so much, though that would probably defeat the purpose.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> MY EYES!!!

Gah! "More Loud Colorful Clutter" does not automatically equal "Better". It's a store for geeks, not the MySpace crowd.

</comment><comment><USER10> Now all they have to do is get some new interesting products!

I've been shopping Thinkgeek (mostly t-shirts, but sometimes other things) since 1999, and it's been a while since I've seen any new, interesting shirts.

<comment><USER9> I bought a cute little Martian file server from them years ago when they sold interesting hardware.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I don't have time to have a look at their code right now, but I would love to know how they did their background (The scroll transitions). Neat effect.

<comment><USER12> The main background is a PNG with the robots and zombies. It has black objects, gray objects and the rest is transparent. Beneath that PNG, there is a JPG gradient that goes from gray to black. The PNG is fixed to the bottom, while the gradient isn't, so as you're scrolling, the gradient makes the background of the PNG appear different, revealing different objects.

<comment><USER13> The png: <http://www.thinkgeek.com/images/refresh/robozombies7.png>

Or, one of them, anyways. There's 2 to 6 as well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> the background is amazing</comment>


DIY Cellphone - <AUTHOR> http://web.media.mit.edu/~mellis/cellphone/index.html <comment><USER2> What I criticize is that the GSM modem on the Arduino GSM shield (Quectel M10) comes with no open firmware for this baseband processor - thus it's owned by your mobile network provider since he can update the firmware silently. See [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6722292](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6722292) for a more detailed discussion about that topic from about two weeks ago.

<comment><USER3> If someone would sell / kickstart a completely open GSM (or what cell phones use nowadays) module, I would be tempted to buy it. Not that I have much use for it ;-)

It shouldn't be _that_ hard. A million dollars, a few people who know about RF hardware, and the (possibly leaked) GSM specs should be enough.

There _might_ be some trouble with encryption / carrier's private keys, but I think that shouldn't be an issue, since a multiband GSM phone works with every strange operator in every remote country, as long as the frequency is supported.

Some cool applications for a really free GSM from the top of my head:

\- Virtual SIMS, you only use the data from the SIM, not the physical card to login. (Might be tricky because the SIM protects its information. If you don't want to resort to attacks ala chip shaving and electron microscopes to get the keys, you might just setup a simless private network with a DIY SIM tower (that already exist, AFAIK), as a kind of proof-of-concept.)

\- You can see when you recieve a silent SMS ("type 0"), that authorities use to ping your phone to trace you. You can also send them.

\- You can record audio from and play it to the phone, which is not possible in most consumer phones

\- You can implement hardware encryption (which is tricky for voice, since GSM uses psychoaccoustical compression techniques that might not work on a encrypted stream - nevertheless this is a solved problem and there should be papers on this)

\- You would find a bunch of security holes in the network, since its been relying on obscurity and trusted devices for so long.

\- You could have a phone that's bottom to top trusted and open-source.

<comment><USER4> been done [https://www.sparkfun.com/products/9533](https://www.sparkfun.com/products/9533)

<comment><USER5> I don't think the firmware for that module is open source, which is what he wanted.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> If all of the phone components/hardware came in a ready to build box, I would definitely follow the instructions and give this a shot. Otherwise, looks like a lot of overhead just trying to gather all the parts together. Cool nonetheless.

<comment><USER7> I've tried to source the components using as few vendors as possible (currently DigiKey, SparkFun, and Arduino, plus ordering the PCB) but it's definitely more work than just buying a kit. I'm working on a better solution but it's probably a ways off.

<comment><USER8> Not sure about DK/SF, but Mouser lets you make public project BOM lists so users can just one click and purchase all the components.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I went to a workshop where David Mellis provided the components and walked everyone through constructing this (he works in the MIT Media Lab, so the laser cut wood was also done using their equipment).

The interesting thing was that several other people at the workshop were very gung-ho about how building their own phone in this way makes them in some way free from oppressive phone manufacturers. This didn't really strike me as quite correct given this is mostly just assembling parts from similar manufacturers.

</comment><comment><USER10> Make the circuit board smaller and shove it in a gutted old phone - now you have open source phone, unrootable and not suspicious.

Edit: sorry, wolfgke informed us that still we can't have the cake.

<comment><USER11> Two things:

1\. In a sea of people carrying iPhones and/or other various touchscreen smart phones, the minority of people using any kind of alternative seem to possess minscule flip phones with full-color displays. I haven't seen a candy bar phone in ages, unless it happens to be some venerable variety of nigh-defunct BlackBerry. I can't imagine this kit being resized down to a scale that would ever fit into what might be regarded as "common", especially since DIY kits need to be produced with parts big enough to man-handle, lest they risk total obscurity. No DIY kit will ever be successful if the parts involved are small enough to warrant a jewler's or watch maker's precision. Would you sell the kit with a loupe and tweezers?

2\. Why should an unorthodox handset be suspicious? I guess it depends on the country one might live in? Also passing through customs and airport security, I guess?

<comment><USER12> _I haven 't seen a candy bar phone in ages_

I still use a candy bar Samsung with a slide-out keyboard.

<comment><USER11> But is your phone large enough to accomodate easy-assemble-DIY parts?

Do you think it would be possible to gut the phone, and replace it with your own home-brew parts? Would the slide-out keyboard be likely to integrate into whatever DIY parts you select?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Actually more interested in a DIY calculator. The milled enclosure by Yoav Sterman looks realy great.

</comment><comment><USER14> I will make one. Oh yes, I will.

In fact, I switched from Verizon to T-Mobile after a decade just so I could have a GSM phone. Haven't gotten the pieces together yet, but I'm so down with this because I totally want a wooden phone.

And all the hipsters will squeal with jealousy.

</comment><comment><USER15> Or spend $200 on a mid range Android or Nokia..</comment>


Will – A cross-platform universal inking solution by Wacom - <AUTHOR> http://will.wacom.com

<comment><AUTHOR> It's a bit of a struggle to find useful info on the site. According to the site WILL (Wacom Ink Layer Language) is a new standard for digital ink (they mention 'open' without defining it) which is better than InkML or other competing formats. This link [1] has some decent info.

[1]: [http://will.wacom.com/get-started.html#c109](http://will.wacom.com/get- started.html#c109)</comment>


James Shore: Dependency Injection Demystified - <AUTHOR> http://jamesshore.com/Blog/Dependency-Injection-Demystified.html <comment><USER2> > Dependency injection means giving an object its instance variables. Really. > That's it.

I think the more standard term at the heart of this is "late binding". Really, it is about pulling in an object (data+code) at runtime.

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree with you, DI is just a fancy name for a must-have feature :)</comment></comment>


Paraplegics learn to walk after years with the help of VR and exoskeletons - <AUTHOR> http://qz.com/757516/paraplegics-are-learning-to-walk-again-with-virtual-reality/ <comment><USER2> I wonder how expensive it would be to build a patch that someone who suffered from excessive tension in a certain muscle could stick on, say, their lower back which would detect the level of tension. Then, using a bluetooth connection and an iPhone game, they could train themselves to become better at consciously relaxing that muscle.

<comment><USER3> Doesn't bluetooth have delay that would be nuisance to walking?

<comment><USER4> Bluetooth 4.0 maxes out at around 25Mbps. Bluetooth 5.0 is supposed to double that speed. As far as latency, that should depend on how far away the devices are from each other and how quick the movement is from device to device. You would encounter the same issues with wifi, but 802.11 ac allows for 500Mbps for a single link and up to 1Gbps for multiple links.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The bit about regaining bladder and bowel control is particularly interesting as this wasn't part of the thing the exoskeleton would have simulated.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, the resiliency of the organic body is impressive. I would hazard a guess that similar therapy for stroke rehabilitation could be even more effective if one were able to actuate the hand like researchers in the OP have done with the legs. So far I've only seen therapy that is essentially VR equivalent of mirror box therapy [https://www.researchgate.net/publication/278157406_Reinforce...](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/278157406_Reinforcement- Induced_Movement_Therapy_A_novel_approach_for_overcoming_learned_non- use_in_chronic_stroke_patients) I think I'm going to put an OpenEEG setup together...

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Previously: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12270477](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12270477)

<comment><AUTHOR> Ah, sorry for the double post, didn't see it originally!

<comment><USER6> No big. Just more evidence that luck and timing are huge factors as to what hits the front page.</comment></comment></comment>


Using Google Ngrams to figure out Gaddafi's correct spelling. - <AUTHOR> http://www.ecogito.net/anil/2011/02/how-do-you-spell-gaddafis-name/

<comment><USER2> Part of the problem is that his last name contains a couple problematic letters for transliteration.

ق (Qof) is often transliterated as Q, but it's pronunciation varies widely in the Arabic speaking world. In Egypt, depending on the context, it's either a K sound or a glottal stop, and in Gulf Arabic, it's similar to the English hard J sound. In Libyan it's often closer to a G (thus the G in Gaddafi).

ذ (Dhal) is the voiced dental fricative: like the TH sound in 'the', 'weather', or 'loathe' (but not thin, with, or within). Arabic also has an unvoiced version of the same consonant (ث), so ذ is sometimes transliterated as dh (d is the voiced version of t).

<comment><USER3> In addition, the transliteration also depends on the target language. E.g., in English Qaddafi seems to be the more common form, while in German almost always Gaddafi ist used:

866,000 Google hits for: '"gaddafi" site:de'

9,090 Google hits for: '"qaddafi" site:de' (and nearly all of them are English articles)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Clever, but the real correct spelling of his name is:

معمر القذافي

"Qaddafi" is only "correct" in the sense that it is the most common Latin alphabet spelling...

<comment><USER5> A "correct" use of language, after you get past all the prescriptivists, basically means whatever is most effective and efficient at triggering the right neuronal firings in the most people's minds. For instance, more people will understand "their dogs" than "there dogs" (people who speak English as a non-native tongue are unlikely to understand the latter at all)—and the ones who understand both will understand the former more quickly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> [http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/world/2011/0223/12242906...](http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/world/2011/0223/1224290629972.html)

According to the Irish times, there are a total of _112_ different English spellings of the name. Transliteration from Arabic to English is always tricky, it seems.

</comment><comment><USER7> How to recognized the leader of Libya:

        $name =~ m/M[ou]'?amm?ar ([aAEe]l[- ])?(Q|[GK]h?)a(d|dd|dh|dhdh|th|zz)afi/

</comment><comment><USER8> I posted this a little while ago... <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2253472> :-)</comment>


Ask HN: Recording presentation slides and audio from desktop - <AUTHOR> What software do you use to record a presentation of slides and audio from a desktop? <comment><USER2> I have been using Camtasia for many years at work to make tutorials and video docs.

I would highly recommend it. The alternative is software called screenflow.

If you have a MacBook, there is a way to do it with QuickTime for free, but you do not get all the integrated post production tools.

</comment><comment><USER3> Camstudio and camtasia are quite good.

<comment><USER4> Seconded, I've used Camtasia in the past and it's very user-friendly.

Not sure if it's what the pros use though. Maybe check on bloggers and streamers to see what they're using now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> PowerPoint has this ability built in, you can add narration and export it as a video. Alternatively Camtasia.

</comment><comment> ng-user OBS</comment>


UserVoice for iOS: Add native in-app user support to your iPhone or iPad app. - <AUTHOR> http://www.uservoice.com/ios/

<comment><USER2> Awesome, thank you! The native aspect of this is so important since it is usually so difficult to be in touch with customer support through apps.

<comment><AUTHOR> What was most surprising was the staggering amount of junk emails on larger consumer apps (user clicks "help" link, goes to Mail view, freaks out and hits send to get out of it). We've also seen Apple reject apps that link out to a web experience for customer support that has any sort of sign in link. Native all the way.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Looks interesting.

Doing anything beyond a "give feedback" email link means a bunch of integration headaches for app developers.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's deceptively a lot of work to do anything more than a Mail link. You've got server side calls, user identity, etc. Hopefully this SDK fixes that.</comment></comment>


Why the XBox 360 Kinect needs a Marketplace for Apps - <AUTHOR>

I think the true potential of Kinect and it's 3D realtime tracking ability will lie in marketplace apps. Thousands of new applications with minority-report-style UIs can be built to do everything from internet browsing to trying on clothes at your favorite stores to video editting. The possibilities are endless.
What app would you design?
I would create a dressing room application filled with the latest styles from dozens of popular stores, allow the user to try them on in 3D and then quickly make a purchase. I could see this being quite the killer app for shopping... <comment><AUTHOR> Note: XNA for creating games exists, but this isn't the powerful app-store / developer API functionality that it would need (<http://creators.xna.com/en- US/>)</comment>


The State of LTE (June 2017);South Korea leads, India springs a surprise. - <AUTHOR> https://opensignal.com/reports/2017/06/state-of-lte <comment><AUTHOR> As expected, South Korea leads both in 4G availability (rank 1) and 4G speed (rank 2). India makes to top 20 with 81% ( rank 14 )availability, though with lower average 4G speed.</comment>


Kickstarter: rails.app - <AUTHOR> http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1397300529/railsapp <comment><USER2> Please excuse the language, but what the fuck is happening to our world right now?

What the hell has happened to "I want to build something, so I'll build it"? Now you have to [1]pay $100 for the _privilege_ of reading the mailing list for an _open source_ project? And some guy needs $25,000 just to _start_ it?

Guys this is...not good. Can you imagine if apache's kickstarter never got funded? If the linux kernel's didn't? What if MySQL didn't properly manage their prize levels? Now it's "I want to build an alternative social network. Bootstrap me with $200,000" or whatever that was.

Kickstarter is really cool for a lot of things, I see it [and contribute to it] for large-scale art projects (burning man), but now every hacker I know has got a $25,000 wall in front of them called "kickstarter" and they don't want to start working until they scale it.

Stop this. This is _really_ bad.

[1]: From the page: > [$100 gets you] access to the internal list for the project, where I'll be soliciting feedback about how to nail this. Great open source projects rarely come from the ideas of just one person, and your input will guarantee that Rails 4 is as great for beginners as it is for experienced developers.

What the hell is this? I have to buy a ticket to "help steer the project"? What happened to community? We're charging a cover at the door now?

<comment><USER3> Let me get this straight: so a prolific, proven open source contributor makes some money, and the community gets a problem fixed. This is a bad thing? Who loses here?

What if Yehuda's company gave him 25% of his time to work on open source - would that be different? He'd get that same $25k (or whatever), and the software would get built (and open sourced). Only difference I can see is the source of the money, so are you against the idea of companies letting their devs work on open source?

There's this attitude in the open source world that somehow developers getting directly paid for open source is evil. This is -- excuse me -- fucking bullshit. I can't think of anything better than the idea of developers getting paid to write open source software. We need to grow the hell up and understand that paying developers to write open sourced software is a _good thing_ \-- open source devs get money, and the community gets software. Again, who loses?

I don't use Rails, and I probably never will, yet I kicked in some money to help see this through. I can think of about a million worse ways I could have spent that cash.

<comment><USER4> The problem here is the ego, you have to notice how Yehuda put an accent on how important his contributions to rails 3 were. I'm not arguing they're not, but as Plato put it, when you think you reached the absolute wisdom you couldnt be further from it

<comment><USER3> Oh, I see. So the problem isn't that Yehuda's asking for money, but that he had the temerity to state his qualifications.

Again, we gotta grow up. Yehuda's contributions to Rails 3 _were_ important. What's wrong with taking credit for that? I'm often critical of the Rails community for an excess of ego, but this is not one of those cases.

It seems pretty clear that the idea of an open source developer asking for money seems vaguely filthy to a bunch of people. I think this is unhealthy and poisonous. It condemns open source to be the provence of academics, the unemployed, those able to snatch free time away from their friends and familier, or those working at the largess of their corporate employers. That's a shitty limit on the scope of free software.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> As much as I like yehuda, he's tackling a non-issue here and I'm at a loss to understand how he even arrived at the project scope as he describes it.

Installing Rails on a Mac is largely trivial. It's literally 5 shell-commands, depending on the current level of breakage of rubygems (but that's a different story). Write a tutorial in your blog if you really feel this is hard for newbies.

The hard part is installing the exact _same_ Rails on multiple Macs and deploying the exact _same_ Rails to production servers that are not Macs. And when I say "Rails" then I mean the entire dependency chain which reaches far beyond Rails and Mysql. The hard part is having controlled service startup/shutdown scripts that work locally and across any number of servers in your production deployment. The hard part is configuration management and safely toggling dev/production/staging modes across all involved services. There's lots of hard parts; bootstrapping a vanilla rails is not one of them.

In fact: Naive bootstrapping can be _harmful_ , just like the still virulent code-generator brain-rot in rails itself.

I make a living managing these things and have evolved multiple approaches ranging from chef/puppet, over canonical git-repositories that work cross- platform, to VMs. There is no one-size-fits-all once your stack outgrows Rails+MySQL, and it always outgrows that.

 _If_ you wanted to solve the real problems surrounding all this then a single-platform bootstrapper is nowhere near cutting anything.

For that you'd have to start writing a better chef/puppet, which are indeed more than ripe to be superseded. But this is far beyond the scope of a kickstarter project and I hope Yehuda will rather keep his focus on Ember...

<comment><USER6> As you pointed out, your problem and the problem he is trying to solve here are completely different. Your problem _definitely_ exists, and lots of people are working hard on solving it, whether that means those working on improving chef and puppet themselves, or on other less flashy configuration management systems, or on new projects that are attempting to improve on the existing solutions in a more fundamental way. Presumably Yehuda is simply less interested in contributing to that work than in trying to solve this other unrelated problem. You may argue that this problem does not exist, but the many articles decrying how hard rails has become and the competing projects that are also working on this suggest that you are wrong.

Also, it's way more than 5 shell commands and even if it were only 5 it would be worthwhile to make it easier.

<comment><USER5> _and even if it were only 5 it would be worthwhile to make it easier_

Seriously?

1\. Install XCode and homebrew

2\. sudo brew install {postgresql,rbenv,ruby-build}

3\. Close terminal. Open terminal.

4\. mkdir proj && cd proj && rbenv install 1.9.2-p290 && rbenv local 1.9.2-p290

5\. gem install rails && rbenv rehash

6\. rails new foo

Honestly, we can argue if this was 5 steps or 8. We can also argue if 'rbenv rehash' should be necessary (I'm not even sure it really is, wrote that down from top of my head).

But if someone fails on these instructions that fit on a Post-It™ then they should overthink their ambitions towards a programming career.

And if they run into bugs during that procedure then these bugs must be fixed. Because this is (and should be) the canonical way to install a vanilla Rails on OSX.

<comment><USER6> Dude, take a step back and forget that you know this stuff already and do it professionally. That list is not easy and far from obvious, even for real programmers coming from other environments, let alone for actual programming beginners.

Your list is far from canonical even at this very moment and hasn't even been _common_ for very long. To figure out your list, I have to:

1) know that homebrew is the "right" way to install software that rails depends on, rather than MacPorts or Fink, or the Mac app store, or download.com, and oh yeah, there is this thing called sudo, and I should install homebrew recipes using it, or should I??,

2) know that rbenv and ruby-build are things that exist and that they are competitors to RVM but are either more or less in vogue depending on who I talk to,

3) understand that rbenv doesn't just work in the current shell without closing and re-opening it,

4) know that the "right" version of ruby to use is 1.9.2-p290 (I have to know the patch-number?!) and that I need to install it and set it as my local version (wait, what does that mean, why do I need a local version?),

before I can get around to actually installing rails and using it.

Now, I could just blindly follow someone's list from a blog post (randomly chosen presumably, because the theory here is that I don't know enough about these things to make an informed decision). Maybe I would even get lucky and find a list that works properly with the version of rails that the official documentation is talking about, but it would _still_ be a much better experience by far to go to the official rails site and be told: "hey, download this all-inclusive, up-to-date, guaranteed to work disk image straight from us!".

<comment><USER5> _To figure out your list, I have to_

No. You have to know none of that. You just have to copy/paste the steps from the rails-homepage (where they should be prominently listed, the lack thereof is the real bug).

 _"hey, download this all-inclusive, up-to-date, guaranteed to work disk image straight from us!"_

Wait, how is that different from above?

Yes, you may be done 2 minutes faster. But you just deprived yourself of at least getting a glimpse on which parts are involved, even if you don't understand them yet. That means you're now even more hopeless when stuff breaks later (and stuff always breaks later).

And as a fun fact: Any sane bootstrapper would use _the exact same script_ behind the scenes anyway. There simply is no other way unless you plan to re- invent homebrew and rbenv along the way.

I'm really troubled to understand who we're trying to care for here. It sounds like you want to make this Really Easy for absolute beginners who can barely setup a printer.

That is a noble goal (for a printer driver), but if you want to teach someone programming then there's a point where you have to stop dumbing it down artificially. And that point is as early as possible.

The worst you can do to a newbie is to put him into an opaque sandbox with different behaviors and errors from what the "big guys" are using.

<comment><USER7> 1\. Install XCode and homebrew

2\. sudo brew install {postgresql,rbenv,ruby-build}

3\. Close terminal. Open terminal.

4\. mkdir proj && cd proj && rbenv install 1.9.2-p290 && rbenv local 1.9.2-p290

5\. gem install rails && rbenv rehash

6\. rails new foo

\</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>-

"hey, download this all-inclusive, up-to-date, guaranteed to work disk image straight from us!"

Wait, how is that different from above?

\</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>-

 _Really_? You _really_ have to ask how those two processes are different?

"stop dumbing it down artificially"

If (sometimes competing) complexities weren't continually added, there wouldn't be a need to 'dumb it down'.

"(and stuff always breaks later)"

Wow. Most other web framework communities don't have _that_ much problems with 'stuff always breaking later'. Maybe Rails has reached a tipping point?

"There simply is no other way unless you plan to re-invent homebrew and rbenv along the way."

Or until someone else _does_ 'reinvent' one of those, and all the cool kids start using it, leaving everyone who learned the 'legacy' way out in the cold without an upgrade path beyond "start over".

 _with different behaviors and errors from what the "big guys" are using_

I think part of the purpose of the kickstarter project is having one of the 'big guys' behind it. Supposedly that would mean at least one (or more) of the 'big guys' would indeed be using the same process as the 'newbs', reducing this chasm.

Sounds like you're threatened some by this - it was hard for you, therefore it should always be hard for everyone for now and forever.

<comment><USER5> _Sounds like you're threatened some by this - it was hard for you, therefore it should always be hard for everyone for now and forever._

Yes, I'm threatened by this. But not in the way you think, because as shown above, it's not really hard. It's _5 lines_. What's wrong with kids these days?

I'm threatened because I'm the guy who comes in to clean up after "junior programmers" who couldn't even be bothered to learn 5 lines to install their dev-environment and who consequently also don't have the slightest clue about basic realities such as "diskspace is finite" or "No, /Users/Bob/rails/tmp is not a valid path in production".

At least give the kids a chance to learn. Don't lure them with shortcuts that result in unsustainable habits that cause great frustration in the long run. Unlearning is harder than learning.

Rails with its false sense of simplicity is breeding plenty diletantes already as it is. We need _less_ of that, not more.

<comment><USER8> It's not "5 lines", and it's not about "junior programmers". My designers need to work with my Rails apps, and learning the intricacies of setting up a Rails stack is not their job description. Just like maintaining their dev environment isn't mine. There's a bigger issue here than "those kids will never learn things the hard way".

<comment><USER5> _It's not "5 lines"_

Would you mind scrolling up to my original comment where I posted the exact 5 lines?

 _My designers need to work with my Rails apps_

Then you should have noticed that installing rails is the least of your worries. Database seeds, missing dependencies, test-users, broken fixtures, broken mocks, missing external APIs, version control conflicts, gem screw-ups, failing migrations, _rails upgrades_ , _differences to the production setup_. Those are the daily timesinks over here in the real world.

The initial rails installation doesn't even register in the grand scheme of things.

<comment><USER6> I can't tell what you're actually arguing for or against in this thread. There seem to be two different things:

1) The rails.app project wants to solve a problem that doesn't exist. There are a lot of comments here from other people who think getting started with rails is confusing, and who point out that your much-touted five steps are not complete, canonical, or easy, so I won't further beat that dead horse.

2) There are many harder problems you'll come across when doing rails professionally. This is incredibly true, nobody disagrees, but it's irrelevant to the rails.app project.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I propose a different funding model for this project. Why not approach Rails hosting vendors like Heroku, Engine Yard, etc. to fund this project, in exchange for built-in one-click deployment to their hosting environment.

Would be a win-win for the user and hosting provider.

<comment><USER10> Presumably they can consider the $10k sponsorship option if they want something like that.

<comment><USER9> Yeah, it could also be an ongoing funding partnership. My impression would be that this is something that Heroku et al would be very interested in supporting, and even developing themselves.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> If there's someone I'd trust to do a project like this through Kickstarter it's Yehuda. And since his time isn't cheap I understand the $25,000 price tag.

To me the elephant in the room is simply would people do this for free like most open source? The Rails community is large and dedicated. If the core team started this as an official Rails project would the result be at least the same, possibly taking a little longer?

</comment><comment><USER12> I'm interested in whatever Yehuda Katz comes up with, but I've been a Rails dev at a Mac shop since 2007? and I have never been too frustrated by getting Rails running.

Does anyone here have specific problems? From my experience, it really has been a matter of "gem update --system; gem install rails".

<comment><USER13> As a fairly recent OSX and a fairly recent Rails user, I had no trouble learning either.

That is, except for Lion and XCode 4.2/4.3, which caused me about three lost days. 'rvm get head' and 'rvm install 1.9.3-head' fixed that, though.

<comment><USER14> I would say that that three lost days getting set up is a large, large problem for Rails, though.

<comment><USER13> Oh, absolutely - but don't confuse a Rails problem with a Ruby problem. It wasn't Rails causing problems, it was Ruby itself.

<comment><USER14> If I'm getting set up, I really don't distinguish between Rails itself being irritating and one of its dependencies being a PITA. Those dependencies are part of the architecture of Rails, so it gets the blame. It's not like I need foo version of ruby if I'm just doing some quick scripting.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I don't understand why this needs $25,000 in funding. He doesn't seem to mention where the money is all going to (I'm assuming just as 'salary' to work on it?)

<comment><USER16> He's taking time off of work to do this:

<https://twitter.com/#!/wycats/status/185113407429677056>

<comment><USER15> Well I guess I should have just asked him :) At least he didn't agree to your other assumptions as to how the money will be used.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> 3 step process:

Step 1: Download the "Command line tools for Xcode" here

<https://developer.apple.com/downloads/index.action>

Step 2: Install homebrew with this command

/usr/bin/ruby -e "$(/usr/bin/curl -fksSL [https://raw.github.com/mxcl/homebrew/master/Library/Contribu...](https://raw.github.com/mxcl/homebrew/master/Library/Contributions/install_homebrew.rb\))

Step 3: gem install rails

<comment><USER18> Yah, rather then funding a project to make Rails easier to install on OSX (because it's not with the plethora information guides and bootstrap scripts), why not tackle real problems like concurrency and websockets in Rails.

<comment><USER19> While I understand the frustration, wycats, like any other open source developer gets to pick his battles.

Lowering the Rails entry bar is a good thing, making things simpler is a sign of maturity for a product. To address your bit about concurrency and websockets in Rails, people are working on the issue, see the talks given by Ilya Grigorik for example, concurrency will be coming to Rails at some point. And so will the integration with client-side framworks like Backbone or Ember. It just takes time.

<comment><USER18> Agreed, but isn't this a good cause to fund to expatiate development.

A year or two back if you ask, "how do I built my bleeding edge web application" the answer normally was 'use Rails'. My point is the Rails has been sorely lagging behind other invitations.

This just feels like a waste otherwise.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> oh god yes please I am a rails n00b who tried fooling with Rails a couple weeks ago and found the installation process INTENSELY FRUSTRATING. Especially compared to the unthinking ease of MAMP.

Gimme one .app and a directory structure I can just throw into /Applications (and later throw away if my experiments come to naught), gimme a nice control panel to stop and start Rails. Let me get it up and running on my system without hassling with the Terminal. Because I really really avoid the Terminal as much as possible.

 _pledges ten bucks_

<comment><USER21> "Because I really really avoid the Terminal as much as possible"

I don't mean to sound condescending, but if you're interested in using Rails (or any similar web platform), you need to be comfortable with the command line. It's not hard to learn, and there's even a good Peepcode video called "Meet the Command Line" that serves as a gentle introduction.

If you're really adamant about staying away from the terminal, you should look elsewhere.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22>
        PLEDGE $100 OR MORE

        The previous rewards, plus access to the internal list for the project,
        where I'll be soliciting feedback about how to nail this.

This feels awkward. Paying for this seems very much unlike the OSS model. Not that I'm complaining, but it threw me off a bit.

</comment><comment><USER23> I feel like this is overkill. I have been using RailsReady (<https://github.com/joshfng/railsready>) to setup several Mac and Ubuntu boxes and it has never been more than one click.

<comment><USER19> To be fair, he said he didn't necessarily want to duplicate the effort of others. I'm sure he will garner any information he can from those projects to help make that app awesome.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> As Rails founding fathers complained of Java frameworks bloat, today's micro- framework fans complain of Rails bloat. Quite a cycle we've come through, isn't it ?

<comment><USER12> He's not complaining about bloat. Unlike many other high-level languages, Ruby has several viable execution environments (MRI 1.8, MRI 1.9, Rubinius, and JRuby) and Rails works on all of them. OS X ships with a system Ruby. The result seems to be that some people have trouble getting the right combination of runtime and libraries running.

<comment><USER24> And that's my point, Rails has a lot of functionality that it provides through a lot of dependencies.

Exactly the opposite of the self-contained mini-framework (if not micro-) it started as.

<comment><USER25> I don't think it's fair to characterize Rails' early accusations against Java webdev as "The frameworks are too large." They accused Java frameworks of requiring too much ceremony, repetition and verbosity, but I can't think of many instances where early Rails advocates attacked Java for having too many features.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> If someone won't make the effort to learn how to get an environment up and running, what makes him think that environment will have any real user once it's ready? There's a certain value of the commitment one takes when they decide to push forward and figure things out necessary to proceed.

</comment><comment><USER27> I tried the locomotive solution back in the day and there was a reason it died. It sucked. Installing Rails was not the problem. Learning it was.

And again, the problem with Rails 3 today isn't the install. Instead it's that:

1\. There is a shit-ton of old Ruby/Rails documentation out there that confuses the living shit out of people, and this is a duck-typed language, which is fine, but it means that people are even less likely to know what the fuck is going on when the code they are trying to use from someone's blog doesn't work.

2\. Most of those using Ruby on Rails are _not_ new as they once were, so since the majority know a little more about what the fuck they are doing, they are less likely to write things for those that don't know what the fuck they are doing.

But, writing an .app won't solve that. Instead, spend that time trying to take bundler, Gemfiles, rvm, the more complex Rails directory structure, asset pipeline, etc. and simplify the whole damn thing to create Rails 4, and chalk 3 up to an oops. A lot of the changes in Rails 3 were warranted, but the additional complexity will drive people away, and that is against the soul and original intent of Rails.

Want something that people would be really interested in? A framework that makes both development _and_ scaling EASY. Development was easy with Rails years ago, but scaling was nearly impossible because that wasn't the intent. Now people scale Rails, but it is still hard, and development has gotten much harder. That's bad, because there are already ways to learn to develop quickly, and other solutions for scaling well. Being halfass at both is a sure way to fail miserably over the long-term, and Ruby and Rails is awesome; it shouldn't fail like this.

</comment><comment><USER28> Setting up a vagrant script would be worth more. Portable development environment (Ubuntu running in a virtual box), cross platform support, easily configurable and duplicatable, and segregated from host machine.

You never know what kind of things people are doing on their machines, don't deal with that, use vagrant.

P.S. I'm sure a rails script exists for vagrant so he could just improve that with whatever he's going to do.

</comment><comment><USER29> I can't help but wonder how these developers that are struggling to install rails on OSX will go when it comes to setting up rails in a production environment.

<comment><USER7> Seemingly everyone just does

git push to heroku

and that's been heralded as the best thing ever, so people don't have to futz with all the server setup/management.

But with regards to people looking for similar ease of use on the desktop for local development, they're all blithering idiots who shouldn't be allowed to touch a computer because they don't understand the intricacies of rvm vs rbenv.

There seems a bit of a disconnect here. Most people are proud of all the hard- won knowledge (sometimes through months or years of experience), and feel that everyone else should have to go through similar hell to attain some magic level of guru-ness. But... don't take away my heroku account!

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> So did DHH give permission to use the Rails logo for this project?????

"The use of the logo is restricted as it always is when talking about a trademark. When the logo is used in a commercial setting, such as part of the promotion of a book, it legally requires that the trademark holder has been involved and stands behind the quality of the book. If that's not the case, you're on the way to lose your trademark. So I only grant promotional use for products I'm directly involved with. Such as books that I've been part of the development process for or conferences where I have a say in the execution."

[http://www.rubyinside.com/david-heinemeier-hansson-says- no-t...](http://www.rubyinside.com/david-heinemeier-hansson-says-no-to-use-of- rails-logo-567.html)

</comment><comment> ryan-allen I think crowd sourcing is a great idea. Being a professional programmer doesn't mean doing it for 120 hours a week. I'm more than happy to throw a little bit of money at something like this to have a good job be done of it.

Open source is amazing! But people have to eat. If people with great ideas and the ability to execute have to pull a contracting gig to pay their rent which takes away from important side-projects, I think that's a shame.

I'd like to see more things like this. If it means more high quality open source that helps people and saves them time, then great! I have donated $25 to this project. The direct impact it will have on me when it's complete is:

* I will be able to get designers/front-end developers up and running on a reliable rails setup without much hassle to myself. * It's very likely they'll be able to set it up themselves. * Programmers from other environments might be playing with Rails in 10 minutes on a weekend, enough to whet an appetite that will potentially give us a broader pool of developers to hire from.

This is great! Crowdsourcing is great! I hope he raises the cash required to focus on this and I can't wait for the result.

</comment><comment><USER31> I decided to learn Rails this week, and just went through the process of following <http://railstutorial.com> (actually I'm about half through it.)

The tutorial made it extremely easy. I was up in running in an hour or two, and it only took that long because I am taking it rather obsessively slow, following all reference links, and brand new to Ruby.

I, for one, do not see the need for this.

</comment><comment><USER32> Having been a Rails developer I don't have much trouble getting Rails up and going on a system. However I do have several friends who seem to have no end of trouble getting theirs setup working reliably. Given they are not full time developers, but they complain about how hard it is to get everything configured so I can see how useful something like this can be for many people looking to try out Rails.

<comment><USER33> I agree. I have been thinking about a shell script to setup a Django dev environment for my coworkers when needed, mainly the frontend developer because they are not familiar with or have many of the tools I take for granted. This idea is rather brilliant. It would be nice the app could open or setup a sublime text or textmate project for an app as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Installing Rails on OSX is trivial. If one really needs this process streamlined, maybe you shouldn't be coding? Or maybe you should just stop using a computer?

Similar to the Svbtle drama, this is yet another post lingering on the front page that has no business here.

I thought this was _hacker_ news. Seems more like "check out my super cool project that you can't use unless you're awesome or you pay me" news. :(

</comment><comment><USER35> It has a link to Yehuda's profile in the sidebar, where it shows that he's funded two KickStarter projects. One of them is this:

[http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/sferik/hubcap-a- github-c...](http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/sferik/hubcap-a-github- client-for-mac-os-x/comments)

Why shouldn't this turn out the same way? The person who started the HubCap project is a prolific open source contributor. I'm glad he didn't drop everything else to work on HubCap, as he made many great contributions to API client development last year.

I hope Yehuda changes his mind about this sooner rather than later. I really like seeing what Yehuda comes up with and this doesn't interest me at all. I use the command line, and I recommend homebrew to anyone on OS X who's serious about learning ruby, and so far it hasn't failed me. I've seen the Google App Engine launcher and I think it's pretty good but I still prefer the command- line tools.

</comment><comment><USER36> Im all for opening doors to newbies, and I think udacity and coursera are leading the way in that regard.

But if people desire to become programmers is it really that bad to have them come in contact with a little bit of configuration and head scratching.

</comment><comment><USER37> I used this guide: [http://pragmaticstudio.com/blog/2010/9/23/install-rails- ruby...](http://pragmaticstudio.com/blog/2010/9/23/install-rails-ruby-mac) when getting started, which was pretty painless.

There's also a GUI for RVM called Jewelry Box which makes handling gem sets and ruby versions easy: <http://unfiniti.com/software/mac/jewelrybox>

I think the money would be better spent on creating a comprehensive beginners guide since the 4th edition of Agile Web Development with Rails is lacking.

</comment><comment><USER38> I think that installing and configuring a database like Postgres or MySQL would be useful since it's often a non-trivial step in getting a production app ready (e.g. for Heroku).

</comment><comment><USER39> OSS development has to be funded somewhere and to date it has been the benevolence of bigger organisations that have awarded grants or developer time. This gives the opportunity for a developer to offer to solve a problem and for the community to vote with their pockets. It empowers developers and the community to get behind a problem space and if people don't want it it won't happen.

</comment><comment><USER40> JRuby will be in GSoC, and may also have a separate "summer of code" via an as-yet-unnamed benefactor. Perhaps we should just get Yehuda to mentor a student to build a single "Rails.app" that runs on _all_ platforms, rather than just OS X?

<http://jruby.org/gsoc>

</comment><comment><USER41> How would this compare to say the BitNami RubyStack:

<http://bitnami.org>

</comment><comment><USER42> Seems like this is connected to rails 4 release: sidebar: "and your input will guarantee that Rails 4 is as great for beginners as it is for experienced developers."

<comment><USER43> The main link to Rails 4 is that we've announced that Rails 4 will drop Ruby 1.8.7 support, which means that some sort of install will be mandatory on OSX beginning with Rails 4.

<comment><USER42> also, I would LOVE to contribute to the GUI design. Let me know... lukemh -at- gmail

</comment></comment></comment><comment> wh-uws What about on a virtual private server like at linode? Then one doesn't necessarily have to shell out for a Mac to run osx.

I would be much more interested in that.

<comment><USER44> If you're interested, I have a rails template with extensive documentation on setting it up on a server from scratch.

<https://github.com/Hack56/Rails-Template/wiki>

<comment> wh-uws Thanks alot im getting ready to redo an old wordpress multiuser site in rails and I was having trouble learning how to configure it

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> £25,000, how long would it take set up a repo so you could do go: sudo apt-get install rails-3.2 on Ubuntu/Debian?

<comment><USER46> Ubuntu has a rails package already, and nobody uses it. It only serves to confuse new users. Trying to mix deb and gem just hasn't worked well so far.

Making a Rails.app for Mac is different though, because everything would be isolated in your .app, while a .deb would install the files to the system and track them in the package management database, so trying to modify them outside of apt-get/dpkg just b0rks everything.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> As it wasn't mentioned, anyone have any idea of the license he'll be releasing this under?

</comment><comment><USER48> This would be brilliant way to fund new open source work. ☺

</comment><comment><USER49> I don't know. There are many good observations about what happened to Rails the last years in the comments. Rails is complicated and to get fluent in Rails takes some time. But this complexity came with a great flexibility. And that's a sign that we are facing a phenomenal ecosystem. I admit starting rails is frustrating, so many new concepts but everything like rvm has a reason why and even beginners will realize this quickly.

Yehuda's approach reminds me of the early days of webdevelopment where you could install a WAMP stack with one click on your windows systems. I never liked those one-click-installers—you don't know what happens to your system and deinstalling was a nightmare with still running db servers somewhere for years.

You can't wipe away Rails complicated entry with such an one click-installer. After you installed Rails with one click things aren't getting easier your still have to figure out next steps and which frameworks to choose (i.e. ERB or HAML, SCSS or LESS, MySQL or Postgre, etc.). Or something breaks within rvm: with an yehuda's approach you are completely clueless because you don't know anything about rvm, gemsets because the installer did all the work for you.

Sometimes there is even too much magic in Rails. I am still wondering if ActiveRecord is too much abstraction and if there are better more direct ORMs like DataMapper, I am used to ActiveRecord but still I can not fluently create data models, there's always something I forget, using the plural or singular, saving the updated migration, rolling back the migration, etc. Otherwise it's far beyond any ORM from other Frameworks I have ever seen in terms of speed. And its usage in Ruby is very consistent. Also Rails shell commands are very consistent, once you understand the rails syntax (like rails generate or destroy something you can quickly build anything in minutes), I tried several times to find something similar with python/django but there the entries seemed to me even more complicated, don't follow any system and felt restricted, i.e. Django's automatic Backend (no offense, i know not enough about django and python to say anything serious but that was just my first impression).

Another last great example of Rails: once you managed to install Rails, just put haml, less, less-bootstrap-rails and simple_form in your gemfile and run bundle. with this setup you can build web apps in minutes with perfect design and they are fully customizable. some years ago you needed hours or days to get to similar results. It takes time to get there but once you are there you have the power.

this pace and variety in the rails ecosystem comes from so many talented people who contribute. trying to set one standard for how things are done would slow down this pace.

finally, I think that Yehuda doesn't want to raise money, he just wants to get attention and the approval that he had the right idea.

</comment><comment><USER50> I have several problems with this. The first, and most important, is here:

<http://xkcd.com/927/>

The second is personal, so please take it with a grain of salt. I pointed out that Yehuda's Bundler gem has an automated condescension feature; if you try to use it without saying 'source :rubygems,' it heckles you and mockingly asks you 'did you mean to say source :rubygems? if so please go back and type it in.' this is pretty anti-Rails in my opinion, insofar as Rails is about sane defaults and programmer happiness. But I raised this issue, and the only response I got was 'fuck you.'

If I've had that kind of interaction with you, and you want my money, you better have an absolutely rock-solid plan for world peace. This is something other than an absolutely rock-solid plan for world peace, I've had that kind of interaction, he's not getting my money.

Not proud of taking the conversation there, but I do at least want to be honest. I gave Ze Frank $600 on his Kickstarter, but this project isn't getting a dime from me. I had in fact been thinking of contributing some amount in that range but after a brief attempt at talking to Yehuda spent it instead on a music class I wanted to take. :-)

Anyway, another objection: I've never heard of him doing anything with Objective-C and have no idea if he's ever even used the language before.

(If you follow @jm on Twitter you know where I'm stealing a lot of these ideas from.)

Another objection goes back to the first one, the XKCD 'standards' thing, and comes from a @jm tweet as well as from an undervalued comment buried way, way, WAY the fuck down at the very bottom of this page: we already have several projects of this nature. For instance:

<https://github.com/thoughtbot/laptop>

<http://bitnami.org/stack/rubystack>

<https://github.com/joshfng/railsready>

So yeah. There are too many competing standards. What to do? I know! Create a new standard!

I think a much better and simpler solution is to tell people to read <http://railstutorial.com/>

But the best objection comes from @patmaddox on Twitter:

[http://mobile.twitter.com/patmaddox/status/18513425005033472...](http://mobile.twitter.com/patmaddox/status/185134250050334720)

Step 1: make Rails hard

Step 2: ask for $25K to make Rails easy

Step 3: PROFIT

<comment><USER51> Do you mind going into some details about why the Bundler gem was mocking you? I'm a Python dev and only know rudimentary rails/ruby.

<comment><USER52> In your Gemfile Bundler requires you to tell it where to lookup for gems. For 99.99% of people that is going to be rubygems.org, but it doesn't have to be. There has been talk about making this the default and then allowing someone to turn it off.

edit: The RubyRouges podcast has a great episode with the maintainer of Bundler where a lot of the difficulties with Bundler are discussed in depth. That's the "talk" I was referring too.

<comment><USER50> well, this is what's insane about Rails these days. we have a value which is correct in 99.99% of the cases, and we are (at best) debating whether or not to make it the default.

I say at best because obviously in my case I did not see a whole lot of debate. the GitHub issue for it is likewise extremely not-discussion-y. wherever the discussion for this incredibly controversial idea is taking place, I haven't seen it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> Slightly ironic since I just got a MacBook for my new job and am trying to get it set up for Rails development.

<comment><USER54> ironic... or, just coincidental?

 _i‧ro‧ny - Incongruity between what might be expected and what actually occurs._

 _co‧in‧ci‧dence - A sequence of events that, although accidental, seems to have been planned or arranged._</comment></comment>


At 63, Israeli immigrant solves 38-year-old math riddle - <AUTHOR> http://www.usatoday.com/tech/science/mathscience/2008-03-20-road-coloring-problem-solved_N.htm

<comment><USER2> This guy helps illustrate my theory of why hackers and mathematicians have a reputation for being young.

First: Because both math and software don't require expensive equipment, credentials, or direct access to one's mentors (like Ramanujan, you can learn from books!) you can start your training as a mathematician at a very early age and be doing professional-grade work before you graduate high school. As I said the last time this came up, "software is one of the few fields where a seventeen-year-old can have ten years of pro-level experience".

Second: Mathematicians who want to get jobs in academia have large incentives to do good work when they're young: Until they make a splash, they're poorly paid grad students and postdocs. This is also true for other scientists, but in physics or biology you have to be in grad school before you can even get a long-term _job_ in the lab where you can _start_ learning to do great experimental work -- and then you still have to take reams of data, do multiple postdocs, etc.

By the time they hit age fifty, most talented mathematicians have already accomplished some math. They have jobs, and possibly tenure. They have children, they have committee meetings, they have books to write. They have already proven themselves. Even if they do accomplish some great math papers, you won't see headlines about "astoundingly old mathematicians". They'll be billed as "veteran math professors", whom everyone _expects_ to do great work, since they've been doing great work ever since they were twenty!

But then there's this poor guy, who somehow arrived in his forties and fifties without tenure or even a job. That was unpleasant for him, of course, but it gave him a lot of incentive to do some great mathematics in order to get and keep a new academic job. And, what do you know, he rose to the occasion. Perhaps if more sixty-year-olds had good reason to do great math, we would see more of them doing so.

<comment><USER3> There was actually formal research done on this topic; IIRC, the results are generally as you said.

<comment><USER2> Thanks. I did not know that!

If I were younger and looking for a job in sociology, maybe I would have done some of that formal research instead of posting half-assed speculation on news.yc. :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Here's the link to the paper: <http://arxiv.org/abs/0709.0099?loc=interstitialskip>

It's just 9 pages long, including an intro and bibliography.

</comment><comment><USER5> This is a riddle? Just work outward; Each of the destination's adjacent nodes point to it, and recursion does the rest.

<comment><USER6> Read the Wikipedia description:

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

You can't "point" nodes at each other to communicate the directions to the destination. Instead, you must communicate by coloring each edge with one of k colors (k is the out-degree of every node). Then, for any chosen destination node, you give a sequence of colors; the recipient of the directions starts _in any node_ (even the destination node) and simply follows the sequence of colors, ending up at the destination. The fact that such a coloring always exists is somewhat surprising.</comment></comment>


Motorola Droid RAZR source code released - <AUTHOR> http://sourceforge.net/projects/droidrazr.motorola/

<comment><USER2> Still hoping Motorola will unlock the bootloaders for some of their older Androids (Droid X please!).

</comment><comment><USER3> I wish they'd let us unlock the GSM capabilities that are apparently in the Razr- its the one thing holding me back.</comment>


A collapsible shipping container aims to revolutionize global shipping - <AUTHOR> http://www.fastcompany.com/blog/cliff-kuang/design-innovation/ingeniously-green-collapsible-shipping-containers?partner=rss

<comment><USER2> Does it really help all that much? Seems to me there is no point in bringing more empty containers to China than full ones back. There already is enough space for the full once, so what does one save by collapsing them? Not sure where the 25% less weight come from - another subject altogether (I don't think it is the air inside of the container...Also I think they are often in lower pressure anyway?).

<comment><USER3> I believe the weight savings is from the materials/design, not the fact that it collapses.

And it seems the advantage of collapsing containers is that you could more efficiently shuffle the empties in complex shipment chains.

Would you rather ship 100 containers to the US and have 20 China-bound US shipments and 80 empties come straight back? Or ship 100 containers to the US, take on the 20 China-bound shipments, collapse the 80 empties and have room for 60 more elsewhere-bound US exports you can drop off on the way back?

<comment><USER4> There aren't any complex shipping chains. Goods go china -> Europe/US the only thing that goes back is waste.

I can't see this helping. It costs more in a very price sensitive industry. Rollup doors means it isn't going to be used for shipping anything valuable or anything which then needs further onward shipping at the destination - are you going to have a truck full of DVD players going down the highway with canvas doors!

None of the existing handling systems is going to be able to deal with them, so you will need special cranes to load the collapsed ones - unless you load them inside regular containers.

<comment><USER5> > None of the existing handling systems is going to be able to deal with them, > so you will need special cranes to load the collapsed ones

Not true. The photos clearly show the standard locking mechanism present (twistlock holes in corners). The procedure to tie several of them into a bundle is probably the same as with flat racks, and yes, those can be lifted by regular cranes.

<comment><USER4> They are regular containers when up, but when folded they are just big flat heavy pieces of freight - so you can load them as any other 40' long piece of freight but that means extra handling gear, forklifts, cranes etc at the customer's site to collapse them.

You can put them on flat rack, but those are a pain to handle as well. Now if eg. 10 of these folded flat could lock together and be the same height as a regular container and and be handled as a regular container that would be great.

Frankly when you can pay < $1000 for a new steel container in China nobody is going to be buying expensive, unproven composite containers however clever.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> From my limited experience in the freight and export business, I am skeptical that they managed to design a collapsable container and reduce weight without compromising the structural integrity of the container. Standing in a shipyard and seeing a 40-foot container almost being _thrown_ around is awesome, but I can't see this standing up to the rigors of the day-to-day life of a container.

<comment><USER7> Reducing weight doesn't necessarily mean they've reduced the containers strength in anyway. Aluminum alloys, by weight, can easily be three-times stronger than Steel alloys. By volume, I believe it can easily be ten-times stronger than steel. By a three-fold price increase over a standard container, I'm certainly betting they've got aluminium in there.

A fully aluminum container could be significantly stronger/lighter (not both) than a steel container, and it would have a significantly longer lifespan than steel as a rigid container could be virtually maintenance free for virtually ever. The only losses to the industry would likely be when a ship goes down, and then the containers would remain ready and waiting for salvage to return to work.

However turning the entire freight industry from Steel to Aluminium containers would probably require depleting all the earths aluminium reserves, and then likely require discovering an extra-terrestrial source and probably depleting that too.

Honestly, I don't think this new container will catch on for being light or collapsible. Also, a thing to wonder, is if the amount of rust washed off of shipping containers annually is helping promote algal blooms.

<comment><USER8> > However turning the entire freight industry from Steel to Aluminium > containers would probably require depleting all the earths aluminium > reserves, and then likely require discovering an extra-terrestrial source > and probably depleting that too.

The 8 most common elements in Earth's crust (by mass):

      * 46.6% Oxygen (O)
      * 27.7% Silicon (Si)
      * 8.1% Aluminum (Al)
      * 5.0% Iron (Fe)
      * 3.6% Calcium (Ca)
      * 2.8% Sodium (Na)
      * 2.6% Potassium (K)
      * 2.1% Magnesium (Mg)

(from [http://www.windows.ucar.edu/tour/link=/earth/geology/crust_e...](http://www.windows.ucar.edu/tour/link=/earth/geology/crust_elements.html))

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> There's a u.s. company that reuses abandoned shipping containers , to build cheap homes for Mexican families.a family house built this way should cost $8000.

[http://renaissanceronin.wordpress.com/2008/11/01/drumroll- pl...](http://renaissanceronin.wordpress.com/2008/11/01/drumroll-please- welcome-the-8000-shipping-container-home/)

So it would be probably much more effective to reuse container to build homes for the poor , than to fold them.

</comment><comment><USER10> Here's a video of the collapsible container:

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vHlTrOVv9gs>

<comment><USER11> start at 1:05 to save time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> They forgot to add that it costs not insignificant amount to collapse and rebuild these things as well.</comment>


Billionaire Bunkers: Inside the World's Largest Planned Doomsday Escape - <AUTHOR> http://www.forbes.com/sites/jimdobson/2015/06/12/billionaire-bunkers-exclusive-look-inside-the-worlds-largest-planned-doomsday-escape/ <comment><USER2> > _has planned doomsday retreats in the past including private bunkers for > residences, but it is only now that this new location has come to fruition > offering up a unique potential for those who truly want the ultimate in > personal safety for their families._

In other words, advertising. But seems like it would be kept fairly tight- lipped and spread quietly among those who can afford such a luxury.

In any case, I always wonder about the logistics of something like this. How do you know you'd have time to reach the bunker or that your pilot would be available (or wouldn't simply refuse to spend his/her time shuttling you around in the midst of some dire threat)?

Also, who enforces your safety en route, your right to enter safely, etc.?

Seems that the mechanics depend on some of the very structure that would likely be unavailable in a true doomsday scenario.</comment>