Facebook launches Portal TV, a $149 video chat set-top box - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2019/09/18/facebook-portal-tv/ <comment><USER2> I'm sure lots of smart people spent a lot of time and effort working on this, but unfortunately my answer is: Hell no!

<comment><USER3> As someone in the same boat as you, it does seem like Portal webpage is directly acknowledging this sentiment and addressing them[0].

Whether or not this page can be trusted, we'll have to see what people find out (I sure ain't going to pay for it to do that myself).

[0]: [https://portal.facebook.com/privacy/](https://portal.facebook.com/privacy/)

<comment><USER4> In typical facebook style, their answers are all "does not", whereas they should be saying "will never". It is in their nature to shift the goalposts. I wont be getting one, and I'll be making sure noone close to me gets one either.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> More info about the underlying technology: [https://ai.facebook.com/blog/smart-camera-portal- advances](https://ai.facebook.com/blog/smart-camera-portal-advances)

More info about the privacy settings: [https://portal.facebook.com/privacy/](https://portal.facebook.com/privacy/)

Disclosure: I work at FB, my team developed the underlying MaskR-CNN technology.

<comment><USER6> What exactly is the benefit of this? The video says it uses neural networks and fast algorithms, but doesn't say what they're used for, or how it would benefit me as an end user.

<comment><USER5> The smart camera automatically follows and zooms in people. This ads shows it in action: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oZVFzDjBBq8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oZVFzDjBBq8)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Many people here (myself included) are anti-FB due to privacy issues and then some, but I think this is pretty great.

The smart camera panning using facial recognition looks very useful. Right now I Facetime a lot with my iPad and will prop it up to chat with folks and often move around but then run back to come into the field of view. This solves that problem (for people who use Facebook and have a TV).

And Watch Party looks pretty great too. They've essentially taken a significant part of the "second screen" interaction and just embedded it in the primary screen. And it looks like they're doing it well. I can see this being a fun interaction.

<comment><USER8> >> I can see this being a fun interaction.

Oh for sure, unfortunately, it's the Facebook label that makes this cool product toxic. Since the Facebook brand is synonymous with poor privacy practices (Firefox even has a 'facebook container' to help reduce tracking), I don't see how someone didn't think to market this under a different parent company and make it 'facebook compatible'.

<comment><USER9> That would become another press bomb in the future. They can't keep that a secret forever.

<comment><USER10> The "Whatsapp box". The "Instagram Connect". The "Zukerberg eye". There are many names better than Facebook.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I really dig this sentence in the FB press release masquerading as a TechCrunch article:

"If you can get past the creepiness, the new Portal TV let you hang out with friends on your home's biggest screen."

Lets see what else we can apply this kind of logic:

"If you can get past the creepiness of having that weirdo look at you naked, he can give you cookies! You do want cookies, right?"

The real fun, however, will be when some 5 year old is naked in front of that thing and Facebook employees and/or contractors end up watching it in the name of machine learning followed by the record of it showing up on Pornhub. Though maybe at that point "think of the children" finally gets some people to go to jail. Maybe by that time we get someone like Warren ( regardless how misguided she is in some other aspects ) be the POTUS and push through the jail time for executives.

</comment><comment><USER12> 1984 is not a business model.

<comment><USER13> It's actually a fantastic business model if you care more about profits than ethics, and it seems like Facebook wants a piece of the living room surveillance pie that Smart TVs/Alexa/Google Nest have been enjoying these last few years. It's a shrewd business move on Facebook's part; think of the things people discuss and do in their living rooms and the additional data they will end up giving Facebook.

<comment><USER14> I think they actually mean that 1984 _shouldn't_ be a business model.

<comment><USER13> I get that. But the fact remains that it _is_ a business model, whether we like it or not, and as we've seen it can be very profitable. Until laws catch up, there will always be companies like Facebook that are devoid of ethics and will abuse surveillance technology to enrich themselves.

<comment><USER14> Yes. Which makes it obvious that laws are what is needed. The GDPR is nice.

(Those who downvote parent, please don't make an is-ought misinterpretation.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> "Smith 6079W! Bend lower!"[0]

[0] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CCfW6HFP5cI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CCfW6HFP5cI)

</comment><comment><USER16> Honestly, being expatriated, I can kind of see the value in this - unfortunately I doubt the people I actually want to communicate with regularly will be adopters of this. The tech savvy being too untrusting of it, and the unsavvy not sure what $150 buys them over tools like Skype.

</comment><comment><USER17> On an aside, and I know this is a shot in the dark, but does anyone know where to find a copy of the seemingly impromptu talk Zuckerberg gave some several years ago now, where he explained that he wanted Facebook to replace the internet?

It is one of those rather notable regrets that I did not save that video, even though it clearly struck me to recall it all this time. If I recall correctly, it was a seemingly impromptu talk outside in the open either at a charity or corporate socializing event. It was definitely not in some venue, let alone in a large one where he's basically parroting corporate talking points. Which may also explain the candor and seemingly single mention of his intentions that has stuck with me all this time.

</comment><comment><USER18> Is anyone even buying the portal? Maybe it's the information bubble I travel in, but to me it seems Facebook has destroyed any trust that would make anyone ok with putting a video camera and listening device from them in your home.

</comment><comment><USER19> Fool me once, shame on me... fool me twice, er... don't fool me agian.

</comment><comment><USER20> I know there probably won't be much actual discussion on anything but privacy concerns here on HN (don't get me wrong, it's an important discussion to have, but it tends to push out literally everything else), but I did want to point out that this quote from the article is nice to see:

>We've done what we can in this latest generation of products, now with integrated camera covers that are hardware, indicator lights when the microphone is off, and form factors that are less obtrusive and blend more into the background of the home.

I actually really like the idea of a dedicated camera device for communicating with family and friends who aren't nearby. And I've been looking for something that lets us do things like play couch-coop games, watch movies, and just in general act like we are together while not physically being together.

For example, some of my closest friends and a bunch of my family are across the country from me. I've played DnD over video chat, i've watched birthday parties from a phone, i've tried to do the thing where we do a voice call over some service then try to start a streaming service like netflix at the same time so we can watch it together. All those options suck in their own way, from poor-quality mics, feedback, connection issues, needing to hold a phone or device or somehow prop it up, and taking up a device which you might otherwise want to use while with those people.

Granted the Portal looks like it won't get very far without buy-in from companies like Netflix and other streaming services (although that whole ecosystem is so fragmented now and it's only getting worse that i'm not sure my hope will ever actually come true). And without the ability to really integrate with games outside of the facebook ecosystem this is going to be a non-starter for couch-coop as well in most cases.

I really like the idea, but Facebook isn't going to be able to build a better Netflix and a better game console AND be the only one doing video chat with those products. They have the chat/messaging side, but IMO that's not enough to really pull me toward this ecosystem, and I've been looking for something just like this for a long time now. Unfortunately, walled gardens are probably going to kill this just like they've killed countless other things.

<comment><USER21> The first Portal devices as well as this Portal TV are using an OS based on Android AOSP.

So porting Fire TV or Android TV apps will be much more easy for developers who want to offer their content on the Portal TV.

<comment><USER20> I just don't have any faith that any of the major streaming services will want to port their services to this device, even if it's simple and straightforward for them to do technically.

In fact it's more likely that they will try to come out with their own hardware IMO. At every step of the way streaming companies have made it harder and harder to actually use their services. From exclusivity deals with one vendor over another, to having shows and movies jump from service to service over the years. Unless I can get some kind of assurance that i'll be able to actually use this to watch a good amount of tv shows and movies with friends and family, i'm not going to gamble on it.

Sure, they might be able to get Netflix on it eventually, but Amazon probably won't touch it, Google will probably steer clear if they can, and the "cable- based streaming services" don't look like they even have the time or ability to maintain the apps and services they already have.

At the end of the day I expect some basic services to come eventually, but they probably won't bother integrating with the more advanced features like simultaneous streaming on multiple devices and other stuff. I'd love to be surprised, but I just don't have much faith any more.

<comment><USER22> They already have integration with Alexa voice commands, so maybe there's some hope of adding prime video

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> They've solved some real business problems here and there's a lot of cool engineering tech. I'm surprised this is buried so far that I had to use HN search to find it. Unfortunately the fact that this comes from Facebook is the albatross hanging around this product's neck as illustrated by most of the comments on here.

I couldn't convince any of my friends or family to get one of the last-gen Portals even with the discounts. I still don't know anybody who actually has one.

</comment><comment><USER3> What none of the privacy-related prose defense by Facebook addresses is the abundant value of the metadata that Facebook will be able to harvest. Check out what leaking even just the metadata can tell about you.[0]

[0]: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bM0PmwOlifE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bM0PmwOlifE)

</comment><comment><USER24> Hahahaha... how about no?!

</comment><comment><USER25> I can't find the article, but the "Facebook Showerhead" and "Facebook TV" were both joke products back in the early '10s. This is hilariously predictable.

</comment><comment><USER26> Cool. Would consider using this, but for business videoconferencing.

</comment><comment><USER27> If you accept the premise that Facebook is hemorrhaging users (or worried about hemorrhaging users), these sorts of products makes sense as a means to ensure you ALWAYS have a active Facebook account.

Kind of like everyone has a Google account, either through personal gmail- esque services, a google-for-education account, an android device, a Google IoT device, their work account, etc.

</comment><comment><USER28> "There will be no fight. It will not be hard to keep an eye on the masses. No one will be duped into giving up their rights. The sad part actually, is that they will take it willingly. Gladly, and they will be happy with it." \-- Someone, somewhere, I can't remember.

</comment><comment><USER29> What demographic is this intended for?

<comment><USER30> People who would by an Alexa show and still watch normal TV. So, my parents for example. Though an interesting thing has happened. Event though this is very similar to Google or Alexa devices with cameras, I'd bet money on my parents having a similar "how about no" reaction to any Facebook hardware. They are Facebook users, but I think there is a lot more inherent scepticism around Facebook that has been growing over the past year. Maybe, if this came out before the show, it would have been the other way around. I'm in Germany btw.

I'm definitely not the target. The two features here (TV and video chat) are completely opposite to my needs. I want a dumb (relatively) box to which I can hook up my Netflixes and Prime Videos etc. and view them without any ads in the UI (looking at you, scum of the earth Smart TV manufacturers). Apple TV, Roku or whatever. The hardware that is, not their respective services.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> > The Portal TV is genius

No.

<comment><USER32> Objectively, it kind of is though. No one is claiming you have to buy it or that it's a good product (privacy-wise, usability-wise, execution-wise, etc. it's all tbd IMO), it's a very interesting move that makes a lot of sense, and there are some good ideas here.

It's relatively cheap since you're not buying a touch enabled LCD panel with the device. You want the best audio and video quality? Piggyback off TV and sound system manufacturers and the fact that people who care about these things probably already sunk a lot of money on nice home entertainment hardware.

People won't have to worry about where to put another screen. You also have the fact that the living room is semantically already a "social" space, with a "stage". Most people have a couch to fit several people in front of their TV, it's essentially a room already built for video calling.

Strategy-wise, they're using their core competence (social networking) to move into the living room— which is pretty cool and unique in a world where the other options (Roku, Apple TV, Chromecast, etc) mostly rely on entertainment. Also, technology that right now only Portal has— the whole smart camera to find you in the frame thing. They probably released the other Portals before this to battle test it, since this device will probably rely more on it than previous ones.

Honestly, why don't more companies make smarter TV boxes like this? It'd be cool if Google made Chromecast more "Google". Imagine a Chromecast with Assistant built-in, that makes smarter use of your TV when you're not watching it (Google News, Google Finance, Traffic info before your commute, a couple of important calendar reminders, etc). Now I'm thinking an Apple TV with FaceTime and and Siri built-in could be cool too. I could use FaceTime on my TV more than another smart speaker, and would buy it over a HomePod, personally.

There's good ideas here. Of course, wether you want to buy is a separate issue. Honestly kind of sad there's all the privacy concerns, because it sounds like a cool device.

<comment><USER31> The bulk of your argument seems to boil down to "video calls on TV, much wow". This is not brilliant, or new. My kids were doing that on the Wii U in 2012. Probably at least a third of all conference rooms in America are equipped to do that.

<comment><USER31> Too much work to edit my comment on my phone. Obviously the Wii U chat only enabled communication with a limited audience, and I think it might be deprecated now anyway. But the Kinect does Skype.

<comment><USER32> Didn't know about this, huh. That's pretty cool. No questions about the Wii U, but I do wonder why Skype on the Kinect didn't take off more.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I wouldn't be surprised if they are not generating any revenue by selling it at this price point considering manufacturing, designing, hardware, and engineering costs.

</comment><comment><USER33> Man, I have a hard time carrying a smartphone after what Snowden revealed to us. I'm surprised anyone would even think about putting one of these in their home.

</comment><comment><USER34> i don't even understand the product after reading the article. what is the value of this?

its an always on teleconference with my facebook friends? no thanks.

<comment><USER24> The value is giving FB video stream data to analyze and monetize.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Another device to spy on people? A privacy audit needs to be done on anything FB touches or produces. They cannot be trusted.

</comment><comment><USER36> Logitech has (or had) a Skype camera that you'd clip to a TV to do a similar thing; it's been around for years.

</comment><comment><USER37> If you think what the office space guys did to that printer was bad....</comment>


Ignaz Semmelweis - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignaz_Semmelweis <comment><USER2> Now,I might seem like a grumpy old fart, but isn't semmelweis taught in secondary school? In what way is it relevant to the HN crowd? I am genuinely curious. IIRC he died a very dishonoured and sick man in some sort of mental institution, so the whole "keep fighting for what you believe in" didn't really work for him.</comment>


Show HN: Generate hundreds of animated designs with one image - <AUTHOR> https://app.offeo.com/smart-create <comment><USER2> I'd recommend you land people on a page that shows what the product does, and gives some examples. It looks like your home page tries to go there, but it still wasn't 100% clear.

If you link people to a mostly blank page that says, in short, "Upload Images Here", you are asking for too much action without any motivation of why we should do so.

<comment><AUTHOR> Great point, thank you. The main site is offeo.com, from there is it better?

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> So this is basically a simple video intro generator?</comment>


iPhone X ears - <AUTHOR> https://dribbble.com/shots/3807679-Earsbar <comment><USER2> Am I the only person on the planet who actually likes the ears?

</comment><comment><USER3> Looks much better!

</comment><comment><USER4> you guys already killed it.</comment>


My Private MMORPG Server: 300k users, 4k concurrent, 7 DDoS attacks, 0 resources - <AUTHOR> http://shenglong.posterous.com/the-tale-of-eternity-part-1

<comment><USER2> The claims of it being so significant are odd given that I've never heard of them (or have forgotten or it was during a time I was not involved). Some reference to _when_ might help as there have probably been 5 different servers with the same name.

Some of the background information is not current. For example, iRO does not require a subscription to play (even on the the VIP server). I would also disagree with the characterization of iRO's servers as not having inter-guild competition, but I don't think HN is a place for debating the history of Loki, Chaos, Iris and Sakray.

<comment><AUTHOR> You're right - I'll make an edit with time frame. The project started about three years ago, and went through 3 versions. I'll make sure to mention all the details in future posts.

Send me an email, and I'll forward you some more definitive proof if you like. You could visit our forums, but I've archived old version discussions in preparation for v4, which may not launch (plus there might be too much trolling for this community to enjoy!). But yeah, I don't want to debate RO specifics here - that wasn't the point. I just wanted to share the experience.

<comment><USER3> I ran an RO server back in 2006, I had about 80k users, and 400 concurrently from a 4 month run before closing.

I'm not sure this is valid news...

Damn Porings.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I clicked back to the prelude because I didn't know what RO was but then came across this sentance:

"Thanks to 17 USC 102(b), some privacy laws, and inter USA-Canada-China-Korea legal confusions, running emulated software is apparently legal, as long as you make it really annoying and costly to find you."

Can someone explain this? There are lots of Ultima Online shards that run without problems. On top of this classic emulation software has been legal for years (I'm thinking NES, SNES, MAME, console and system emulators, etc). Or is it not legal at all?

<comment><USER5> Console emulation certainly created an uproar during the crescendoing prevalence of "ROM" game packaging and "warez" communities, but distribution for a 120kb Gameboy emulator with 13kb ROM files was so widespread and underground that everyone stopped caring. I also remember every emulator resource having this staple legal disclaimer that probably demonstrated that what amounted to repackaged "game backups" didn't fall under any hard legislation.

Ultima Online shards usually were based off reverse-engineered unsupported clients and were mainly populated when UO say larger changes to game mechanics so users could play different eras of UO. I remember people frequently discussing community stratification with the release of certain patches that popularized the idea of playing on private shards. Back in the early 2000s, we're talking about shards with communities that exist in an IRC channel. Today, I see World of Warcraft private servers with blogs and publicity, openly trying to recruit a userbase, and those seem to get abruptly shut down.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Do you have any analytics data for your site for this time so we can a better picture of of its growth? What is happening to your servers now? It seems you guys are in the middle of a massive transition.

</comment><comment><USER7> I'm sorry for going on a tangent, but how can you not remember the name of the person who funded you when nobody else would? That's just unfathomable to me, not to mention extremely disrespectful.

<comment><AUTHOR> I remember his real name, but not his screen name. Because I don't want to reveal identities, I decided not to use his real name. Sorry for the confusion.</comment></comment>


NASA picks SpaceX to deliver cargo to the Lunar Gateway - <AUTHOR> https://www.engadget.com/2020-03-28-nasa-spacex-lunar-gateway-cargo.html <comment><USER2> That's great news for space in general.

SpaceX has proven to be far more efficient than the usual suspects for making stuff happen in space.

Finger crossed, let's hope the Gateway program don't get downsized to oblivious by the impending crisis.

</comment><comment><USER3> Saw the Starlink train go through Orion last night, a tiny sliver of the trashing of the night sky that is to come.

SpaceX is no longer cool. I plan to tell this to everyone who will listen.

<comment><USER4> This seems akin to being against wind power generation because it "ruins" the view. Most space "views" are already ruined by light pollution, surely you don't propose we eliminate cities as well?

<comment><USER3> Yeah, but it isn't akin though, is it? Well, it is if you _only_ consider the aesthetics of the sky, which is not the problem here. It's the science of astronomy being made more difficult and/or expensive. You might not think that is important, but some people do. For what it's worth, I thought the satellites looked amazing and my kids were thrilled, but I'd looked up for an ISS pass, which was until recently a rare sort of event. And so it goes.

<comment><USER5> You might not think connecting remainder of the world is important, but some people do.

Ground telescopes have reached their limit. We use giant radio telescopes that account for satellites and space based telescopes for all the recent discoveries.

Yes keeping the night sky clear is important, light pollution is the worst offender.

It just seems like feigned outrage tbh, especially when you're ignoring the fact that SpaceX has addressed your concerns and have proposed adjustments.

I could see your point more if they had not commented at all.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Myplane.info – Find your aircraft model before your flight - <AUTHOR> https://myplane.info/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hello, main reason I've made this tool is to provide a quick look into the flights bound to the flight number with mobile-first design. Compared to other flight lookup services, it only shows future flights, prints the plane model and respects the crappy airport connection. Technical background: flask + flightaware API + milligram.css. It has been an enjoyable UX project. Thanks for trying!

</comment><comment><USER2> Not working for airlines in India.

<comment><AUTHOR> I appreciate the feedback. I've just tried an example flight: AIC124 and seen it worked, hopefully you're trying the similar format (ICAO).

<comment><USER2> Even that is giving a server error. Generally in India, IATA codes are used for flight numbers.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hello again, I couldn't get an answer from the provider so I've acquired IATA codes and added a local conversion. Now it should cover the most of the airlines. Cheers</comment></comment></comment></comment>


MacBook hacked in contest at security event - <AUTHOR> http://news.com.com/MacBook+hacked+in+contest+at+security+event/2100-7349_3-6178131.html?tag=cnetfd.mt <comment><USER2> My favorite quote:

 _CanSecWest organizers relaxed the rules Friday after nobody at the event had breached either of the Macs on the previous day._</comment>


CentOS 7 Release Candidate now available - <AUTHOR> http://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-devel/2014-July/011288.html

<comment><AUTHOR> ISOs available here:

[http://buildlogs.centos.org/centos/7/isos/x86_64/](http://buildlogs.centos.org/centos/7/isos/x86_64/)</comment>


Bitbucket's outage window game, Bit's Quest, open sourced - <AUTHOR> https://bitbucket.org/atlassian/bitsquest

<comment><AUTHOR> I got sign-off to release the code as an Atlassian open source project. I'm hoping someone will want to make it better.</comment>


CIL (C Intermediate Language) - <AUTHOR> http://cil.sourceforge.net/

<comment><AUTHOR> To answer some points in a single comment:

I believe the usage "C Intermediate Language" predates the usage "Common Intermediate Language." Regardless, I think it is a simpler, cleaner "thing" than LLVM, and serves as an interesting "compare and contrast" point when talking about compilers, intermediate languages, and program optimisation.

I see CIL and LLVM as having different purposes. I agree that if one is writing a compiler and looking for an intermediate language and surrounding tools, then probably the LLVM is a better vehicle than CIL, but if you're trying to simplify a huge C project, CIL is better than LLVM.

I've seen jey's profile and acknowledge that s/he knows more about this than I, but I still see CIL as a useful thing to know about, and possibly understand.

</comment><comment><USER2> CIL is already the name of the standard for the IL used by .NET and Mono. (Common Intermediate Language)

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

<comment><USER3> Nope, it's just an overloaded name. They're both intermediate representations for programs, but entirely different in their approach.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> LLVM > CIL.

<comment><USER4> You care to expand on that, please? For hackers unfamiliar with both subjects simultaneously, perhaps?</comment></comment>


Roger Lowenstein: Should we save or spend to save the economy? - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/18/magazine/18FOB-wwln-t.html?ref=magazine

<comment><USER2> What we need to do is invest in durable goods. It seems to me that the last economic cycle has seen the most idiotic waste of resources ever.

Disposable products made in disposable factories and sold in disposable buildings. It's all crap and all the energy money and time that went into it was wasted.

You can't borrow money to build a nice solid house and you are hard pressed to borrow money to fund growth as a small business.

But you can borrow money all day long to buy a poorly made overpriced house and a car that might last ten years.

Our passenger rail system is a joke, any day now another bridge is going to fall down because we have no money for our foundation.

Our foundation is our infrastructure, highways, schools, and a healthy economy which has a diverse mix a businesses, favouring the small and medium sized ones who can weather and change with the times rather than the enormous, too big to fail ones who are leveraged out at insane levels.

</comment><comment><USER3> Save money to start a company that will create goods for export to improve our trade deficit.</comment>


In Blackbeard Pirate Ship Case, Supreme Court Scuttles Copyright Claims - <AUTHOR> https://www.npr.org/2020/03/24/820381016/in-blackbeard-pirate-ship-case-supreme-court-scuttles-copyright-claims <comment><USER2> Having been paid with public funds, shouldn't the work be in public domain?

<comment><USER3> Having been paid to do the work, wouldn't it be classed as a "work for hire" so not eligible for him to copyright in the first place? (Not sure how US law stacks up on this issue.)

<comment><USER4> If Allen (the videographer) was an employee of the salvage company, sure. He was almost certainly an independent contractor though and who knows what the terms of his contract were (or, for that matter, what the terms were of the contract between the salvage company and the government).</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: MostPopular.xyz – Discover top-rated Amazon products, iOS apps and more - <AUTHOR> http://www.mostpopular.xyz/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hi HN!

I'm excited to share MostPopular.xyz. It's a place where you can find the highest-rated Amazon products, iOS apps, and Chrome Extensions.

I was inspired to make this product after realizing how much I have come to rely on customer reviews when making a purchase decision—trying to find that sweet spot where a product has a high rating from a large number of reviewers (e.g. 4.8 stars from 13,000 people). So I thought it would be helpful to collect of bunch of these top products in one place.

I think the result is awesome. MostPopular.xyz provides a super clean shopping experience. \- Rather than getting 50,000+ results when searching for a bluetooth speaker, you get one result that most people love. \- Rather than seeing confusing "best seller" labels, you get one result that was carefully selected based on number of reviews, average rating, release date, ratings fraud indicators, and more. The site is great as a starting point or reference during your search for something to buy.

Check it out! I would love to hear what you think.

p.s. Happy Amazon Prime Day!</comment>


Replacing x86 firmware with Linux and Go - <AUTHOR> https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/738649/81007748bf15c1e5/ <comment> chroem- And to think that posting about Intel ME on HN only a couple years ago would have commenters swarm you with accusations of being a deluded conspiracy theorist. Neat. It's good that people are finally becoming aware of the problems that it poses.

<comment><USER2> Really? Every thread on HN I've seen about ME has been hordes of people lamenting the fact that you can't buy a processor without it.

<comment><USER3> I share GP's opinion. Snowden changed a lot. The internet really has a global passive attacker that can control US-based companies like puppets, and is doing so.

William Binney said the companies are paid money for providing data and access. How is that not subsidizing that industry? Financial helps are a first-class reason for other governments to impose duties, restrict international trade and subsidize local competitors. Yet, there is no reaction in Europe. Microsoft can freely sell their OS and Intel is free to have their monopoly, and uses that to backdoor everybody.

It is creepy that european countries don't take action.

LiMux was a good example of moving in the right direction. Recently it was abandoned. I didn't see big unseen powers at play there, just the harsh reality that most people don't understand computers and don't care.

<comment><USER4> > global passive attacker that can control US-based companies like puppets, > and is doing so.

And... this is where the deluded conspiracy theorist accusations the upthread poster was complaining about come from.

There's no evidence for any of that[1]. The ME's capabilities (low level system controller with access to all memory and hardware, with special access to network hardware that can operate cleanly along with a running OS) have been known and even _advertised by Intel_ for years. The news of the moment is that it's subject to a few rather embarrassing exploits.

But that's rather better explained by incompetance instead of evil. Yet everyone jumps to "back door" because that sounds more fun I guess. (In fact, to the extent there is evidence of government involvement here, it's in the opposite direction: the NSA appears to have demanded an "off switch" for the ME).

[1] Edit to clarify: I'm talking about the ME folks. Yes, the government does bad things. The EC flaws under discussion in this subthread are not among them, so citing them as evidence paints you as a conspiracy nut and not someone serious about security.

<comment><USER5> > Yet everyone jumps to "back door" because that sounds more fun I guess.

IME is (by construction) a backdoor. It's primary purpose is as a management tool, but all management tools are by necessity backdoors. The only distinction between the two is whether the person using the backdoor has ownership over the machine.

> In fact, to the extent there is evidence of government involvement here, > it's in the opposite direction: the NSA appears to have demanded an "off > switch" for the ME.

It also shows that the NSA is in communication with Intel and is capable of getting them to implement something that large corporations like Google were unable to convince them to do. Which should be concerning, because it makes you wonder what else the NSA might've asked as well.

Also these really aren't conspiracy theories anymore. We know that the NSA and CIA do these sorts of things thanks to the information we learned from Snowden and other whistleblowers.

<comment><USER6> No, the Snowden leaks showed that NSA _did_ do something, not that it does every malicious thing that people accuse it of. How does it help anything by making unfounded accusations?

Historically, Australia has heavily interfered in PNG affairs. Should you be accused of espionage or subversion if you decide to hike a portion of the Kokoda Trail?

Would it be appropriate for Indigenous People to accuse you of attempting to steal their children, a practice that occurred until the 1970s?

<comment><USER7> > No, the Snowden leaks showed that NSA did do something, not that it does > every malicious thing that people accuse it of. How does it help anything by > making unfounded accusations?

It shows they'll do anything within their power, legal or illegal, in order to get at more people's data. Of course they have involvement with this, why wouldn't they?

> Historically, Australia has heavily interfered in PNG affairs. Should you be > accused of espionage or subversion if you decide to hike a portion of the > Kokoda Trail?

> Would it be appropriate for Indigenous People to accuse you of attempting to > steal their children, a practice that occurred until the 1970s?

Bizarre points in support of your initial comment I think.

<comment><USER6> _> Of course they have involvement with this, why wouldn't they?_

I think you give them too much credit and unnecessarily slander Intel, which has little reason to go along with NSA (no large DoD contracts, almost all consumer and B2B market).

Also, you overestimate the amount of resources NSA has. If they have enough money to overcome Intel's appetite for risk, then why doesn't the NSA just run every single internet and hardware service out there? Your threat model needs to have bounds. It's worthless if you expect the adversary to have unlimited resources.

<comment><USER8> Overestimate the amount of resources? Wikipedia:

> In 2012, the NSA said more than 30,000 employees worked at Fort Meade and > other facilities.[2] In 2012, John C. Inglis, the deputy director, said that > the total number of NSA employees is "somewhere between 37,000 and one > billion" as a joke,[4] and stated that the agency is "probably the biggest > employer of introverts."[4] In 2013 Der Spiegel stated that the NSA had > 40,000 employees.[5] More widely, it has been described as the world's > largest single employer of mathematicians.

Let's assume they have 30 000 employees and the large majority of them are highly educated, that would make it into one of the largest organization on Earth in terms of intellect capital.

In terms of actual budget it's obviously classified but estimations are probably around 10 billions USD per year.

[https://www.globalsecurity.org/intell/library/budget/index.h...](https://www.globalsecurity.org/intell/library/budget/index.html)

That's not a small budget by any feat, and we know they operate huge data centers for surveillance, so they are certainly not a "passive" intelligence agency.

<comment><USER6> Wal-Mart has more employees, is it more powerful? Number of employees is a negative metric. It means the NSA has less ostensible secret bribe money.

Throwing up a big number is dazzling, but when you look at what the NSA does with that $10B, there is a limit. For example, the supposed 40k employees already eat up $3.2B, assuming an extremely charitable average fully-loaded cost of $80k per employee.

Including facilities and supercomputer costs, this rapidly dwindles.

That leaves maybe $5B for bribes, according to your accounting. Is that enough to subvert everybody?

 _> they are certainly not a "passive" intelligence agency_

What is this addressing? Are you attempting to change the goal posts? The topic is ostensible unlimited NSA resources to corrupt every proprietary technology.

<comment><USER8> > Wal-Mart has more employees, is it more powerful?

I doubt wal-mart has as many highly educated employees as the NSA. Numbers don't mean anything by themselves, but if you hire thousands of mathematicians they are bound to deliver more than Wal-Mart in the datascience and cryptography department.

> Including facilities and supercomputer costs, this rapidly dwindles.

Well, considering the overall surveillance budget of all secret agencies constantly increases, it does not seem that they will ever lack funding.

> That leaves maybe $5B for bribes, according to your accounting. Is that > enough to subvert everybody?

Why would you need bribes when you have the Law and the full might of government power behind you? If you can convict of high treason anybody who speaks publicly about what the NSA does, why would anyone at Google, Microsoft or other companies working with the NSA have any incentive to say anything?

> The topic is ostensible unlimited NSA resources to corrupt every proprietary > technology.

Resources is not only money. When you work for the government (and furthermore of the military establishment), as I said earlier, you can bring down a whole new level of pressure that money itself cannot buy. If that were not the case, then a bunch of secrets (take for example everything related to nuclear testing in the US) that were only revealed way, way after the facts, would have emerged much earlier in all likelihood.

<comment><USER6> _> If you can convict of high treason anybody who speaks publicly about what the NSA does, why would anyone at Google, Microsoft or other companies working with the NSA have any incentive to say anything?_

This is where your rhetoric is getting ahead of the facts. The Snowden leaks were published in American newspapers. Company officers from each of those businesses publicly berated the NSA. FBI national security letters did force companies to disclose information about foreign intelligence targets, but this is not because of secret NSA powers, it's from a law passed by Congress.

 _> When you work for the government (and furthermore of the military establishment), as I said earlier, you can bring down a whole new level of pressure that money itself cannot buy._

What does the military have to do with Software-as-a-Service providers? Can you name an instance when the modern military provided a chilling effect or seriously impacted these services?

<comment><USER5> > This is where your rhetoric is getting ahead of the facts. The Snowden leaks > were published in American newspapers.

Snowden is being prosecuted under the Espionage Act, the reporters were threatened repeatedly by the authorities, The Guardian was forced to destroy their copies of the Snowden Archives, etc etc.

Also, just because the "secret NSA power" of National Security Letters are a tool made legal by Congress doesn't change the ethics concerns relating to their use.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> You'd think if the ME truly wasn't nefarious that Intel would offer chips without it and capitalize on the extra features in the enterprise market. I've yet to encounter anyone who actually wants it.

<comment><USER10> I say it also has to do with them just not caring about what their users want. You're still gonna buy an x86 processor and AMD has their own ME-like tool too. What are you gonna do, run your desktop on ARM or RISC-V?

<comment><USER11> And even with ARM (I'm not familiar with RISC-V), you're likely going to have binary blobs for critical drivers.

<comment><USER12> Worse, in Qualcomm chips you have essentially the same OS as in AMD "Secure" Processor. Trustonic TEE OS. Handling ARM "Trust"Zone.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I would gladly trade in raw 30% performance from my Intel chip for some other platform that did not have American corporate/Deep State/NSA interests behind it.

I just want a minimum bootloader (open source) that boots into Linux - that's it. No "Enteprise management" crap, no NSA crap.

I don't think I have any options. I certainly wouldn't buy Chinese or Russian, and I'm not aware of any EU member state having anything in the works either - but I think it's time we started seriously considering this.

Google/Amazon/Microsoft have the muscle to actually do something about this, but no motivation. I'm surprised that they even trust Intel - it would take _one_ high-profile security breach to turn their respective Cloud Computing businesses upside down - people are already jittery.

I don't know if IBM Power is the solution, or ARM, but it's become abundantly clear that you can't trust Intel or AMD, or the x86 platform, anymore.

<comment><USER14> Both Facebook and Google are working at disabling ME. They make no secret that they not trust it.

NSA & other US orgs receive hardware without ME already.

Surveillance is for the rest of us.

<comment><USER15> > _Both Facebook and Google are working at disabling ME. They make no secret > that they not trust it._

I'm aware of Google's work with Coreboot and Chromebooks, but not Facebook's. Can you tell us anything?

<comment><USER16> I don't know of fb's direct involvement in any ME related stuff, but they do develop openbmc which is a replacement for proprietary bmc firmware. BMC isn't quite as nefarious as ME though, and is optional anyway.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Can anyone ELI5 how two additional OSs can run network stacks without interfering with each other and the user OS networking?

I assume ME and UEFI use DHCP to get their addresses yet my modem/router only shows the one from my user OS.

Where do they get the drivers for whatever NIC happens to be installed? Do the motherboard vendors have to put blobs in place during manufacturing?

<comment><USER18> To get the network capabilities of the ME, the machine has to have a compatible NIC, AFAIK.

<comment><USER19> This is a good reason to buy a machine that is not _all_ Intel (or _all_ anything else)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> The Go portion of this -- a Go-based Linux userspace -- sounds very interesting, but not directly related to all the firmware stuff, unless I misunderstand.

Anybody got some good links about the Go userspace?

<comment><USER21> [https://github.com/u-root/u-root](https://github.com/u-root/u-root)

Let us know if you have any questions. There's a slack channel (see contributing.md) where Ron and I are pretty active.

<comment><USER22> Hi,

I have kind of a "FOSS diplomacy" question: is the kernel core team involved in this effort, or is it something totally third party to them? (the purpose of this question being to know if linux core team gets involved in go programming)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Ron's been beating on this drum for years, and I'm glad that the wider world finally seems to be catching on.

</comment><comment><USER24> _Go is a compiled language, but it is often used for scripting. Minnich uses it that way "all the time"; he stopped writing Bash scripts years ago in favor of Go. It is "easier and more reliable" to write scripts in Go._

Interesting.

Also, the NERF (basically negate most of UEFI, in particular the extensibility) firmware using Linux, has an initramfs containing all the user space stuff as uncompiled Go, and a compiler which compiles on the fly.

</comment><comment><USER25> _> Some people say to switch to AMD processors, but that is not really a solution now. Ryzen is touted to be open, but that is not truly the case, there are still closed parts._

Can anyone elaborate please. How does AMD compare to Intel's problems with ME?

<comment><USER26> Prior to Zen based processors there are a decent number of offerings under the Opteron and AMD's embedded SoC families (possibly others, but these are the ones I'm familiar with) which did not contain ME-like capabilities. Projects like Coreboot generally have pretty good support for these AMD parts. For an embedded example, see the PCEngines APU2 boards: [http://pcengines.ch/apu2.htm](http://pcengines.ch/apu2.htm)

Zen based parts from AMD have their PSP (platform security processor), which I believe is generally a dedicated Cortex-A series CPU within the silicon to do many security related things. Its functionality is similar to some of what the ME provides on Intel parts.

<comment><USER27> Actually AFAIK the APU2 SoC includes a PSP already, the APU1 is still free of that. But even the APU1 SoC has a small LM32 core that you have no source for, see Rudolf Marek's CCC talk "AMD x86 SMU firmware analysis".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> > The user-space piece is all written in Go, which is generally more trusted > than C within Google

Someone should read "On Trusting Trust" and note its author…

<comment><USER29> You can get around that by cross-compiling. I think in this day pulling something like that off on a compiler as popular as Go would get noticed.

Anyway that issue is orthogonal to the language choice.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Doesn't the ME firmware to power saving, suspend, restore, etc?

<comment><USER12> 1) Not at all. Tables are in UEFI. Control is in kernel space. It can remotely issue a boot or shutdown command among others. Probably hard shutdown too considering the watchdog.

2) Only in so far as it goes into power saving mode itself. (Which is kind of fake, does not disable magic networking junk.)

3) Like in any other boot if unhibernating. Does not touch suspend which is handled in UEFI.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> I understand the urge to remove networking capabilities, but why do privacy folks freak out about the entireties of UEFI/ME/SMM? It's a fact that the hardware is the one with control of the system at boot, and you're always at the mercy of the vendors in terms of bad code (whether intentional or otherwise). You can't get rid of hardware-specific code, and you also don't have any control over the designs of the chips. Both of those are places where it will always be possible to do something nefarious if the vendor feels like it. Unless you feel like fabricating your own chips from scratch, at some point you have to trust all these layers. Why suddenly freak out when it comes to new layers?

<comment><USER32> Did you follow yesterday's news? The ME is _remotely vulnerable_ , has full control over the machine, and it's not even clear that it can be upgraded in a secure way.

Why wouldn't you be interested in turning it off?

And why would you classify people who'd rather not be running remotely vulnerable code they can't control as "privacy folks"?

<comment><USER33> > The ME is remotely vulnerable,

Could you please post a link on that? I read about the AMT bugs, which require the user to manually provision it.

<comment><USER34> [http://cve.circl.lu/cve/CVE-2017-5712](http://cve.circl.lu/cve/CVE-2017-5712)

Summary: Buffer overflow in Active Management Technology (AMT) in Intel Manageability Engine Firmware 8.x/9.x/10.x/11.0/11.5/11.6/11.7/11.10/11.20 allows attacker with remote Admin access to the system to execute arbitrary code with AMT execution privilege

EDIT: I'm not sure this was the one the GP referring to

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> I've been wondering if there would ever be a killer feature that would make ARM-based servers really compelling, and now I'm starting to think that we have one. Intel are handing ARM a massive opportunity with the IME issues.

</comment><comment><USER36> Am I missing something or is the next step going to be Intel making ME impossible to remove without bricking your CPU? If so, seems like these efforts are fairly futile if they'll only work for the current gen of processors.

<comment><USER3> It is already impossible to remove the ME. If one does, then the system either doesn't boot at all or reboots after 30 minutes. All you can do is to apparently cripple it on some models.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Am I correct in believing the AMD variant of this is 'Trustzone'[0]? If not, does AMD have something similar?

[0]: [https://www.arm.com/products/security-on- arm/trustzone](https://www.arm.com/products/security-on-arm/trustzone)

<comment><USER38> AMD PSP (Platform Security Processor) is what you're looking for. Essentially the same thing as the ME, just for AMD processors.

<comment><USER12> It is now called AMD Secure Processor.

<comment><USER37> Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Is there any link to that talk?

Edit: yes at the end of the article [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iffTJ1vPCSo&list=PLbzoR- pLrL...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iffTJ1vPCSo&list=PLbzoR- pLrL6pISWAq-1cXP4_UZAyRtesk)

</comment><comment><USER40> Linux has MILLIONS of lines of code. Please don't. EFI is already bloated as it is.

Support efforts like coreboot instead. And FFS, firmware should not persist once the operating system boots. Persistent firmware is cancer.

<comment><USER41> > And FFS, firmware should not persist once the operating system boots.

Generally I agree with you, however there is one thing that cannot be done without a RAM-persisted firmware: any kind of power management. It's highly dependant on the specific chips (sometimes, chip revisions) on the motherboard, and while integrating even ultra low level stuff into the Linux kernel might help there, we see the consequences of doing so in the Android world: manufacturers do not have the time/money to get their code in a shape that's going to be accepted by the kernel community, so they fork it and the users are screwed.

<comment><USER12> RAM persisted what? Table of hardware pstates and cstates per device? A flag to reinitialize busses and hardware, skip memory clear? Handling PCI and CPU reinit should be easy. It is not because manufacturers are keeping critical parts under NDA or completely secret.

<comment><USER41> > A flag to reinitialize busses and hardware, skip memory clear

It's not just a simple flag - it's basic stuff like for example which clock pin is mapped to which clock consumer(s), which GPIOs on which pins are mapped to stuff like LEDs, the power/reset switch, which hardware interrupt line is mapped to which GPIO... all stuff that's best kept inside the BIOS where the manufacturer can easily patch it if needed in contrast to the Linux kernel with its notorious difficulty to get stuff accepted into mainline, much less into a kernel that actually runs on users' computers - think LTS users, for example. I can take a 2010 kernel and it will likely run fine on a recent x86 machine, but if I needed to wait for motherboard support to ship in kernel, that would be not very cool.

Yes, something like FDT would be nice but even on the relatively small ARM space it has its fair share of issues - I don't even want to think about having FDT in mainstream x86.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Epsilon: A No-Op Garbage Collector in Java - <AUTHOR> https://openjdk.java.net/jeps/318 <comment><USER2> Nice! That GC surely helps a lot with profiling and optimization.

Also, the short-lived process scenario never even occurred to me!

<comment><USER3> A good place to find good Java Problems will be at ( [http://geeksquiz.com/java](http://geeksquiz.com/java) )It has problems on the basic topics in Java like Inheritance, Polymorphism, String Manipulation and the likes.</comment></comment>


A Dirty Business: New York City's top prosecutor takes on Wall Street crime - <AUTHOR> http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/06/27/110627fa_fact_packer

<comment><USER2> single page link instead of 12 parts.

[http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/06/27/110627fa_fact_...](http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/06/27/110627fa_fact_packer?currentPage=all)

</comment><comment><USER3> I bet this kind of thing is happening ALL the time on Wall Street. This is just one particular case, one particular set of guys that got caught. I also believe that one unofficial purpose of the existence of many CxO roles (at large companies) and more especially Board seats, advisor roles, "strategic consultants", and both banking and legal advice is to help make this kind of insider info and quasi-legal information flow around to parasitic folks so they can make profitable bets on it. Especially the modern _de facto_ aristocracy that exists.

There are just way too many people, pursuing their own self-interest, trying to maximize the money they make, with too many easy ways for folks to communicate or collude without a damning document trail, for this not to be the case. It's human nature. Particularly the kind attracted to the Wall Street kind of lifestyle and career.

The situation is complicated by the fact that the line is sometimes blurry between a case where you can make an ethical bet versus an unethical one. A legal bet versus an illegal one. Even supposedly ethical/legal investment is a form of betting.

I'll also go on record as saying I think the true purpose of _some_ IPO's is to serve as a veiled excuse to induce an event that will enable people within that parasitic class to earn bucks from insider info bets. Not truly, and especially not solely, to raise investment money from the public.

For any pedants who may come back with criticisms: note my use of qualifiers like the word "some". I don't think it happens all the time, in all cases, and I don't think everyone involved in Wall Street or on a corporate board or at a consulting firm is necessarily unethical or doing these kinds of activities. But I've seen tons of evidence over the years that suggests that it is both common and _by design._

To sum up my take overall: Entrepreneurship and business good. Parasitic financial shenanigans and aristocracy bad.

</comment><comment><USER4> One day, mathematicians will prove that any fund doing better enough than the index must be insider trading. All those people from the 90s and 2000s, long retired by then, will be convicted. It's like in cycling when they measure too much hemoglobin in the blood they conclude the guy's doping. The funds' financial records will be their frozen piss samples.

<comment><USER5> Or very lucky. Or good at spotting trends. Or going out of their way to notice patterns indicative of insider trading on the part of other funds. Insider trading is not the only way to do better than the index.

<comment><USER6> Depends on the timeframe. If you consistently get lucky, you most likely weren't.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Rajaratnam could have roped in a Congress member. Insider trading is legal to Congress <http://www.cnbc.com/id/43471561>

</comment><comment><USER8> The article lionizes prosecutors and demonizes Wall Street, even to the point of quoting Eliot Spitzer on honesty. It also goes on and on about the ethnicity of the accused in this case without ever mentioning the ethnicity of many of the players in the mortgage crisis. Finally, it puts the entirety of the blame for the crisis on Wall Street and cites Dodd Frank as good legislation...and puts zero blame on the shoulders of Barney Frank, the CRA, and the Bush/Clinton/Obama push for "affordable" minority housing.

George Packer has an agenda, and that agenda is not truth.

<comment><USER9> You are correct that it lionizes prosecutors and demonizes Wall Street. The article keeps shifting focus way too much - first it's about Galleon, then about Preet, then the financial crisis, and it ends with a comment about Goldman Sachs, with some implied cynicism on the part of the author.

I'm not sure if the blame should be put on Clinton/Bush for pushing affordable housing however. At the end of the day, no one forced people to purchase a home beyond their means, just like no one forced people to purchase stocks during the late 90's tech bubble. It's a decision people made on their own.

<comment><USER10> incorrect..sir..

When the regulatory bodies allow a no-doc loan for a house to be entered into by the consumer they are in-fact complicit in fraud.. Uniform Commercial Code already implies that such a loan as a contract is extremely leaning towards fraud.

The biggest entities involved Bank lobbyists encouraging others to look the other way rather than enforce laws and rules laready on the books

<comment><USER11> This makes no sense. A no-doc loan is precisely that. If an applicant chooses to lie, the government is not responsible.

If your claim is that the applicants are being encouraged to commit fraud (by their local mortgage broker), then the government should start with regulating mortgage brokers. That's where the rot started.

While it's natural for politicians to point fingers at their opponents, or the Wall Street bogeymen, the reality is that neither party caused the massive run-up in housing prices, and nor did Goldman Sachs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> With HFT you can do Insider Trading.

</comment><comment><USER12> tl;dr?

<comment><USER13> Tl;dr: The article documents "the largest insider-trading case in history" where a hedge fund set up kick backs to individuals who provided the hedge fund insider trading tips.

<comment><USER14> tl;dr v2: inside look at how Wall Street functions - these just happens to be people that got caught.

<comment><USER15> luckily they did get caught. 11 pages in I was praying to FSM that they didn't get acquitted.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> If you meet anybody from India, ask him 'What Is Your Caste?'</comment>


Replace 'suicide' as a verb - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/nodejs/node/issues/3721 <comment><USER2> Interesting. I think equating "suicide" to "kill" is not correct, however. If the "kill" command were actually called "murder", then the analogy (used by those defending the term) would be more complete.

In short: I agree that "suicide" is markedly more upsetting to some than "kill", and probably should be changed.

<comment><USER3> In this case, the denotation of suicide as the voluntary choice to end oneself is certainly more valid than kill, as the tests in the related PR indicate ([https://github.com/cjihrig/node-1/blob/c0de81bd09875c8ff9b3f...](https://github.com/cjihrig/node-1/blob/c0de81bd09875c8ff9b3f1f405076017000415e9/test/parallel/test- regress-GH-3238.js#L10-L18)). This conversation feels to some extent like political correctness, which I'm generally opposed to–words are just words, and we have to call things something–though the use of the term "suicide" when "detach[ed]" would have sufficed, was rather rash.</comment></comment>


Languages on BEAM, the Erlang virtual machine - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/llaisdy/beam_languages <comment><USER2> In case you are wondering what to use as your next programming language, please consider Elixir!

It has a lot of advantages:

\- it is an easy to use, well-designed functional programming language, that happens to boost productivity and be (a lot of!) fun at the same time

\- it is modern, with modern tooling around the language (e.g. mix, edeliver)

\- it has Phoenix, a modular web framework, ideal for APIs and traditional MVC, very modular

\- it is rock-solid for a relatively young language

\- stack traces are clean, readable, and point you in the right direction most times

\- performance is decent on a single-core, but since it's basically Erlang, it scales better on multicore than most solutions out there

\- it has a world-class concurrency model powered by OTP, but more approachable to the average programmer, lots of high-level concurrency abstractions built-in

\- Umbrella projects for those who need or want a truly modular application without going all-in with microservices

\- it is the only language besides Erlang proper, that runs on the ErlangVM that seems to be getting a lot of traction (or at least a lot more compared to the alternatives)

\- the community is very welcoming and open, lead by José Valim and Chris McCord who are smart, pragmatic and very nice people

<comment><USER3> I love Elixir as much as the next guy, probably more, but I want to temper your enthusiasm a bit:

> it is modern, with modern tooling around the language (e.g. mix, edeliver)

Sort of. Mix is a nice package manager. Edeliver is a series of hacks on deliver, a five-year-old Capistrano clone. But don't expect Elixir to fit into 2015-class deployment systems just yet.

> stack traces are clean, readable, and point you in the right direction most > times

Other times, the error happened in another process, all you see is a timeout, and it takes some spelunking. Not uncommon in my experience.

But I'll also add a couple of points:

\- the docs system is fantastic, in particular the automatic generation of handsome docs websites, and the `doctest` system which allows example code in your docs to double as test code

\- I'm not sure there is anything better than supervisors for isolating and recovering from errors. Defensive programming is one thing, but sometimes your RAM stick gets hit by a cosmic ray. Shit happens; have a plan.

<comment><USER4> I am not sure how you define 2015-class, but building a release with distillery, and running docker build on a Dockerfile that copies the tarball (that includes everything needed to run your app (ERTS, app code, NIFs, etc)) makes a docker container that you can deploy as you'd expect. If you want to use clustering it's a bit more setup, but I was able to get a simple phoenix app running clustered on Google Container Engine (Kubernetes) in about 4-5 hours, starting with zero knowledge about Kubernetes or Elixir deployment. I pushed my code to github[1], and I did a talk on it at our local Elixir meetup[2].

Now that I have it figured out it's totally painless to upgrade, especially because of the Kubernetes tools. Simply make a new release, build a new container, push it to your docker registry, and then do a rolling update with kubernetes using the new version of the container. You can also add/remove scale on the fly, libcluster handles it all.

[1][https://github.com/bbhoss/k8sexamplephx](https://github.com/bbhoss/k8sexamplephx)

[2][https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SNll1r6ZtO0&feature=youtu.be...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SNll1r6ZtO0&feature=youtu.be&t=4788)

<comment><USER3> It fits into industry-standard deployment systems, yes, but not without sacrificing some inherent benefits of the Erlang platform. In particular, hot upgrades and downgrades are no longer there, as Docker images try pretty hard to be immutable. Of course there are also the effects of flushing all server- local cache and/or memoization upon deploys too. Probably a bunch of other stuff I can't think of now also.

So far I've preferred to stick to the Erlang way of doing things because it let me be laziest and it hasn't failed me, but someday I would like to see tools that allow the Erlang way and the e.g., K8s way to work together.

<comment> vertex-four On the other hand, most people seem never to touch hot upgrades, even in Erlang, preferring the traditional rolling update across a cluster of machines. A lot of libraries aren't built for it either.

<comment><USER5> Yes, hot upgrades sound incredible but the other advantages of docker seem to outweigh them. There is no reason you can't write a script to download the release and do the hotupdate but it feels like you are treating your containers as mutable then which is frowned upon.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It's great to see this list. As an Erlanger there's one thing that's started to bother me of late, and that's how subdued and declining the community feels. There are a handful of passionate and capable people making great strides to improve things (rebar3 is excellent for instance), but the momentum seems to be all behind Elixir these days.

Most of the action around Erlang (conferences, etc.) seems rooted in nostalgia not in finding ways to connect to new users or new use cases. Looking at the speaker list for Erlang Factory 2017 I'm trying to figure out why there's nobody from Whatsapp, MZ, Facebook, Amazon, Visa, Goldman Sachs, etc., and why so many of the speakers are repeats of years past (in some cases multiple times over multiple years past).

Despite having a ~15 year head start, and some really high-profile use cases, it seems like the Erlang powers-that-be haven't figured out how to capitalize on much of that, and it's a real bummer for people in my situation (and I'd argue the industry as a whole is worse off for it too). I'd really like to have my team use Erlang, but I'm feeling increasingly irresponsible suggesting they invest in it instead of Elixir.

<comment><USER7> Erlang Just Works(tm) for me, I have a problem and I write code to solve it, no whiz-bang new features or frameworks needed. That said I do partially agree, in particular advancing the state-of-the art in regards to inspecting and debugging would be great. Rebar3 is indeed excellent!

<comment><USER6> I totally agree. It just works for me too. That's why I prefer it.

But it needs new users and new use cases to stay relevant and to be defensible as an investment of time, money, and people in companies and enterprises that are willing to depart from the traditional strongholds of Java or whatever the latest thing out of Google is unfortunately. To say nothing of the more risk averse institutions, which are vast and numerous.

Given how great it is I'm often at a loss for why it's ecosystem feels stagnant and much of its evangelism (what little there is to begin with) appears unable to build much excitement. :-(

Anyway, back to Erlanging and hoping more people discover how pleasant, simple, and robust it can be.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The programming style encouraged by Erlang/BEAM is a good multi-computer style as well as a good multi-core style. Everything is passed by value -- there are no pointer or reference types to put in messages. If you want a shared value then it has to be a key into a database.

If a company gets its major apps onto BEAM one could imagine a fairly straightforward auto-scaling story. As the number of scheduled BEAM processes grows for a given app, the need for CPU and memory could be expected to grow more or less linearly with it.

</comment><comment><USER9> I'm really sad about the fate of Reia. It could have been the OO like language that migrated millions of developers to concurrent functional languages. Potentially much more effective at that than Elixir, which looks like Ruby at a distance but it's very different when one sits at the keyboard.

[http://reia-lang.org/](http://reia-lang.org/)

</comment><comment><USER10> I read that processor makers are betting everything on multicore. More and more cores.

Languages with great support for these hardware features will be the languages of the future and today.

Elixir is definitely a great bet, you'll max all your cores and not break a mental sweat about it.

Really compelling stuff and great developer UX.

</comment><comment><USER11> Missing Alpaca, [https://github.com/alpaca-lang/](https://github.com/alpaca- lang/)

<comment><USER12> It's there now!

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I'm diving into Elixir now to compare it with Golang for a new web app backend I'm working on. I really enjoy the functional paradigm but from what I've seen deployment can be a bit annoying. Whereas with Go you can compile and drop it easily into production.

Does anyone have experience with this?

<comment><USER14> Deploying to production is a pain in the ass to setup the first time and has a lot of gotchas. I know, I've done it.

It is getting better but right now the few things I can recommend the most are:

• learn what an "OTP release" actually is and what it means. This alone will save you days of your life.

• do rolling restarts, doing live upgrades is difficult and not necessary for the vast majority of applications.

• read the prod.exs config, there's a commented out setting you'll need to enable. I forget the name of it, but it's on my github "tehprofessor" with the repo "flying with Phoenix" (its probably outdated in many ways but that setting is essential).

• remember the application is compiled and then run, so you really won't get any runtime configuration (likes Rails' environments).

• Docker can alleviate build pain a bit, as it stabilizes your environment-- I don't use it myself but it makes building a bit more pleasant from what others have told me.

• you'll very likely need to include all the applications, including ones listed in your dependencies (it's a pain in the ass), in your mix.exs applications list if you're using exrm.

... it's been a couple months as I've been on a coding hiatus for health reasons (and a broken arm) but I believe most of the above should still be very true.

That said and even with all the bitching I've had about it, I still love Elixir and Erlang. Though I've been moving more to pure Erlang as time goes on (FWIW).

Edit: clarity and note about loving me some elixir/erlang.

<comment><USER15> _edit_ : my experience has been with Erlang deployments, I don't yet know what the landscape is like for Elixir - at least the first part of my comment below can be disregarded. I would assume it's similar to deploying an erlang application, but I don't know for sure.

I think the second part is still possible, since if it can be done for Erlang it can be done for Elixir.

\-- Original post --

I haven't found production deployments to be particularly painful, I'd be interested to hear what kind of troubles you've run into.

Runtime configuration is definitely possible - you can deploy configuration files with your application and determine which one you want to load. It's not built-in, but it's a few lines of code to do it manually. You can also always use environment variables, which is arguably a better approach.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> hi, here's a talk i gave called "how beams are made"

[http://marianoguerra.org/talks/beamba-buenos-aires- meetup/#/...](http://marianoguerra.org/talks/beamba-buenos-aires-meetup/#/how- beams-are-made)

follow the commits on this repo from the beginning to se how a fairly complete language is built

[https://github.com/marianoguerra/otl](https://github.com/marianoguerra/otl)

</comment><comment><USER17> So besides Elixir and Erlang, is anyone using any other language in this family in production?

<comment><USER3> Hi Omri! No.

<comment><USER17> Heh. So, I'm doing smart grid stuff, and looking to see just what tools the sector really, really needs.

For some things: Rust. For other things: BEAM/OTP

<comment><USER3> If you're interested in getting chocolate in your peanut butter, check out Rustler: [https://github.com/hansihe/Rustler](https://github.com/hansihe/Rustler)

<comment><USER17> OOh. That does cover it. Where I need safety assurance: rust. Where I need resilience for crashes: BEAM. This does fill in the gaps.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> xor-xor I'll just leave this here, especially for Elixir fans:

[https://notamonadtutorial.com/interview-with-robert- virding-...](https://notamonadtutorial.com/interview-with-robert-virding- creator-lisp-flavored-erlang-an-alien-technology-masterpiece-c37003945c)

</comment><comment><USER18> Erlang community is really bad.

I went to a couple of meetups at OpenX. It's majority older programmers.

The topic of the day was how to attract new programmers to Erlang.

I've stated perhaps we need to emulate Ruby and have some killer framework such as Rails. Their community is very vibrant.

The response was no, stay the course, we don't need to do anything. What's the point of this talk of attracting new programmers to Erlang if the consensus was stay the course and do nothing?

This way back before Elixir was on the radar.

Stopped going to that Erlang meetup, the programmers were out of touch.

I am mighty glad that Elixir and Phoenix is taking off. Shows them that I was right. Either Erlang community change their mindset or stay the same.

</comment><comment><USER19> I wanted to ask if any of you have found a market for Elixir devs and/or what you think the state of it might be.

<comment><USER20> There was a lot of chatter in a post a few weeks ago about Ruby shops adding Elixir to their toolkit. Erlang remains a niche, sadly, but Elixir looks poised to be mainstream.

<comment><USER21> I feel like Erlang is already mainstream; it's just mainstream in a different setting than Elixir (namely, Elixir seems to be targeting web development, while Erlang has traditionally targeted telecom and related fields). Erlang feels like a niche in comparison because there are a lot more companies that need websites nowadays than there are companies that need to build their own nine-nines-capable telecom systems.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> 3 days later, 146 comments and no love for lua on the beam?

<comment><USER23> it's there [https://github.com/rvirding/luerl](https://github.com/rvirding/luerl)

<comment><USER22> yes! and it's awesome! (=</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What is the state of distributed P2P instant messaging? - <AUTHOR>

I am talking about "no-central-server(s)" networks. There are things like Pastry http://www.freepastry.org/ but this doesn't look at all usable yet. So I am interested what is the "practical situation" at the moment. Any kind of information is welcome. <comment><USER2> From the Crytter Github repo:

"distributed peer to peer social networking feeds

This module uses append-only which uses scuttlebutt so you can make posts to your feed offline or while only connected to some subset of your followers and when you come back your feeds will be integrated in an eventually consistent ordering across all nodes."

<https://github.com/substack/crytter></comment>


'Brain' In A Dish Acts As Autopilot, Living Computer (2004) - <AUTHOR> http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2004/10/041022104658.htm <comment><USER2> Well, the story is ten years old but scanning Google, I think the scientist who did this is still at it. Still, it may have gone as far as its going by itself.

However, one thing that occurs to me is that one of the main arguments against full brain simulation is that a brain too many parts that are too complex. It seems to be that a construct like this might be much simpler and so might be something that the European Brain Project and similar efforts might target to understand braincell computation.

<comment><USER3> In the lab I worked in, we literally studied two neurons coupled together. Simplistic networks are good for learning certain things in isolation but some phenomena might only be the result of complex systems and studying small networks may never lead us towards understanding these complex phenomena. The obvious one is "consciousness" but even things like sensory perception which in part is the result of complex, distributed calculations would difficult if not impossible to understand from studying simple networks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Harnessing the principles of neurogenisis may be the only scaleable way to build large comples ANNs. If so, it will be interesting to see what role evolutionary development (evolved genes encoding the developmental process).</comment>


Ask HN: What is now on the fringe? - <AUTHOR> I was watching a video of Steve Jobs the other night talking about the experience of the Homebrew Computer Club and how these guys were working on the fringe rather than mainstream. Steve Jobs was looking at the fringe for new ideas and innovation so I was wondering what do we see at the fringe these days? What are those ideas that are not mainstream today but could become the "personal computer" level of idea in a decade or two. <comment><USER2> Mesh networking has captured a lot of my attention lately. It isn't that new, but it isn't exactly available to people. Given that we overcome some of the existing challenges with meshes, we could have deep Internet penetrantion without having to deploy a lot of infrastructure.

There are some communities on the net who are working on homebrew cybernetics. I've seen experimental designs for transdermal data/electric ports, health monitoring implants, and implanted secure elements, &c. CyborgNest recently started taking pre-orders for a "north sense" implant[1]. Definitely my favorite fringe.

[1]: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11778249](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11778249)

<comment><USER3> How does one attach the north sense?

<comment><USER2> Two surface piercings[1][2].

[1]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surface_piercing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surface_piercing) [2]: [http://www.cyborgnest.net/north-sense- faq](http://www.cyborgnest.net/north-sense-faq)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Vector representation of symbols, concepts, terms, image chunks, thoughts or words along with the unique ways to construct the feature attributes for these vectors and calculations for similarity between them. Essentially, new ways of mimicking human cognition without built-in rules. See also Computational Theory of the Mind (CTM) [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computational_theory_of_mind](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computational_theory_of_mind)

<comment><USER5> Interesting: yes. Fringe? Not so much. Vector representations of linguistic entities (tokens, types, concepts) have been the foundation of information retrieval for many years. There are new ways of finding better feature definitions but vectors for encoding natural language information isn't a new idea.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Strong AI at [http://www.nlg-wiki.org/systems/Mind.Forth](http://www.nlg- wiki.org/systems/Mind.Forth) was on the fringe for a long time.

</comment><comment><USER7> What about Cyc?

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

I think it could work, and best if paired with an application project. Not everything is scalable and a long, hard march may be required to create some kinds of systems, especially with respect to Agent based computing.

Personally I think Agent based computation is the next big thing after Social, but it is hard to tell what form it may take. I am far from convinced that Apple or Google have the chops to do what is necessary, because it would surely require them to violate their own interests and probably legal obligations.

Talking of that sort of thing, you should look into Urbit.

Urbit is a network computer that could hypothetically allow Agent based computation to actually work.

[https://urbit.org/](https://urbit.org/)

Urbit is definitely fringe science stuff, I'm sure Walter would approve.

<comment><AUTHOR> I did research in Multi-Agent Systems and always believed that they are going to be the next big thing but in the end realised that our technological capabilities are not there yet. The urbit is probably a good idea towards that kind of computation, still a long way before that.

<comment><USER7> You could very well be right, it could take decades.

I think Augmented Reality will abruptly allow a lot of non-geeks to suddenly be aware of certain realities (imagine seeing a calorie counter on your food, or the fact their data flows are going off somewhere outside of their control), so I hope that will accelerate progress in an Agent based direction.

Agents will be easier to build if they are visualized, they may allow for metaphorical understandings across millions of people.

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree that AR will allow for software to live between us. We don't have that paradigm at the moment. Yes we have a lot of devices that we use but they are all passive, nothing that we can visualise, interact with and that is active in real time like AR entities.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Open source architecture, as in real estate.

<comment><USER9> Just curious, why do you think this? And what would it take?

I am personally working on open source tools for architectural design data communication, hence my curiosity.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Honestly I would look toward manufacturing, particularly if you can incorporate ideas from the world of the digital -- for example crowdsourcing, mass customization, or continuous delivery of updates/modifications. I read an article in WIRED oh, I guess about five years ago now, called "Atoms are the new Bits" that talked about companies using 3D printing, crowdsourcing, etc, but to make real world products.

Part of the reason I think this area is hot is that it's harder to do than apps. Every "app" I can think of has already been done, and in fact there's probably a dozen versions of it languishing in app stores. Manufacturing is harder, and is often geographically local, so there are fewer competitors and more niches.

Another leading indicator for me is the general rebellion of young people against the fact that "shop class" has been taken out of schools. Lots of kids are trying to find ways to be "makers". In my state, when I was in school the "dummies" were pushed toward taking vocational classes in plumbing, welding, etc. Now (20+ years later) the vocational classes are the most competitive, prestigious classes that students fight to get admitted to.

If I had to guess, the new manufacturing is going to be smaller scale, extremely high quality, locally sourced materials, with some kind of digital "twist" on the business models.

</comment><comment><USER11> Affordable housing solutions. We are increasingly pushing people out into the street. If you can really solve this, there is a huge market for it.

<comment><USER7> It could already have been solved at least in theory.

A Tiny House on Wheels or THOW can be built for between 5000 and 50,000 dollars depending on specifications. I have even talked to two people (on HN and on Reddit) on the verge of homelessness who are building small transports for shelter (several hundred dollars) which they can haul by bicycle. These can be very effective in the colder months.

The sticking point is Land, or rather, Parking. Tiny Housers are very political active and slightly devious but for people in cities in particular this is tough.

There is a nice technical problem to solve for here if you could build a closed loop system for each input and output for a small house. I don't know that the technology exists for getting it to work properly even on a small scale at reasonable cost.

Because if one _could_ solve that, then lots of problems go away.

<comment><USER12> How are tiny houses better than small apartments? Being able to vertically stack things sounds hugely more efficient.

<comment><USER7> Density or going 3D does make things cheaper.

However there are still three problems.

0\. Zoning in the UK and USA is prohibiting new construction. This is a fact that can't be got around. It is a political problem.

1\. House prices. Extant legal construction builds have gone way above what millennials can afford on their stagnant wages. It is a logical consequence of monetary policy at zero % interest rates can cheap debt but many people, including myself, have no desire to be buying a building which will take several decades of work to pay for. Renting isn't a solution either.

It used to take between 5 and 10 years to pay off a mortgage. Builders I've talked to say their new builds in the US are never less than 350k per unit.

2\. Work is not what it used to be. Even jobs which have decent wages have not kept up with the kind of house price inflation that exists in London and San Francisco. People go where the work is, and it is becoming ridiculous to shackle yourself to a thirty year debt when the job you went there for lasts about five-seven years on average.

Summation: Tiny Houses are a good solution to a world of stagnant opportunity and a schizophrenic economy. They are about putting a backstop against getting fucked by going bust or becoming homeless to put it plainly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Polygamy, polyamory, short-term relationships throughout life, coliving communities, not settling down, minimalism, no ownership.

<comment><USER14> Sounds like life in '68?

<comment><USER13> Good point and I think tech is making us neo-hippies, getting us away from conformity (in some ways) and closer to our desired

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Editing your own genome. (Note well: I am _not_ suggesting this!)

</comment><comment><USER12> VR, AR, and AI (not ready for strong AI yet, IMO)

<comment><AUTHOR> Aren't these mainstream areas of research though?</comment></comment>


Bikes vs. Cars: The Deadly War Nobody's Winning (2015) - <AUTHOR> https://www.outsideonline.com/1930211/bikes-vs-cars-deadly-war-nobodys-winning <comment><USER2> I agree with much that is in the article. Riding a bike on the roadway is a technical activity. You need to make your intentions clear and protect yourself as best you can from the mistakes of others. Like when riding a motorcycle, you need to take responsibility for your safety by making smart decisions on speed, where you ride in the lane, making yourself visible, etc.

"Idaho cyclists can treat stop signs as yield signs, which isn't the case in most other places." This sounds like a good idea to me. The cyclists who would abuse the rule, for instance by blowing through a stop sign or red light at high speed, are already abusing it.</comment>


Religious Children Struggle To Separate Fact From Fiction - <AUTHOR> http://www.iflscience.com/brain/religious-children-struggle-separate-fact-fiction

<comment><USER2> A deep man believes in miracles, waits for them, believes in magic, believes that the orator will decompose his adversary; believes that the evil eye can wither, that the heart's blessing can heal; that love can exalt talent; can overcome all odds.

Emerson</comment>


Scan Your Food For Bacteria With Your Cell Phone - <AUTHOR> http://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2012-02/new-cell-phone-scanner-finds-e-coli-your-food <comment><USER2> It's cool that these types of products are being built though I don't see myself or others carrying around a bag of cellphone "add-ons."</comment>


Ask HN: How do instructions on opening the Soyuz capsule survive reentry? - <AUTHOR> I saw a Soyuz reentry vehicle today at the cosmonaut museum in Zhytomyr. At the bottom of the capsule there're instructions in both Russian and English for opening it. That makes sense since the thing could land far beyond the designated landing zone. What I don't get is how the text could survive reentry since it's printed where the heat shield is.<p>Here's a picture: https://ibb.co/RgfZfPR <comment><USER2> I would think your question boils down to "how do these layers of paint survive reentry?"

Firstly, they aren't on the heat shield, but on the part of the capsule it shields.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_entry#Ablative](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_entry#Ablative) explains how that shielding works:

 _"The ablative heat shield functions by lifting the hot shock layer gas away from the heat shield 's outer wall (creating a cooler boundary layer)"_

So, it's not only that insulation layers in the heat shield slow down direct heat transfer to the capsule. Also, evaporation of the heat shield pushes the place where heat is produced away from the heat shield.

The shape of the capsule also helps, as it prevents (most of) the hot gases from coming close to the wall of the capsule. [https://blog.scienceandindustrymuseum.org.uk/re-entry- gettin...](https://blog.scienceandindustrymuseum.org.uk/re-entry-getting-home- safely/):

" _WHY IS THE CAPSULE BLUNT?

When we think of vehicles that are designed to go fast, they are usually sharp and slender to minimise the drag. However, with a space capsule we want to maximise drag to slow down for a safe landing. The blunt capsule design was first proposed by Harvey Julian Allen in 1953 at NASA Ames research centre. It had two advantages—not only the high drag needed to reduce speed but also the blunt shape, which resulted in the shock wave detaching from the surface of the vehicle. This helped to reduce the very high temperatures (around 1,648°C for the space shuttle nose) from directly contacting the surface, which would otherwise melt."_

(That page has a photo of the shock waves around a Soyuz during recently)

</comment><comment><USER3> That part is underneath a primary heat shield: [https://i.imgur.com/CovYbor.png](https://i.imgur.com/CovYbor.png)

You can see it dropping off @ 5:20 here: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GWusG5EW3dU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GWusG5EW3dU)

</comment><comment><USER4> Clicky: [https://ibb.co/RgfZfPR](https://ibb.co/RgfZfPR)</comment>


Ask HN: How did you learn to dance? - <AUTHOR> I am especially interested in good video tutorials, but any advice would be greatly appreciated. <comment><USER2> Are you trying to learn a specific style of dance? If so, lessons.

Or do you just want to not feel awkward in a nightclub? If so, MDMA.</comment>


Google Traps Zenter in Coding Zoo - <AUTHOR> http://startupalpha.com/chatter/2008/03/22/y-combinator-google-traps-zenter-in-coding-zoo/

<comment><USER2> Where's my down arrow? I was hoping for an update on how the Zenters were faring at Google and when we'd get to use something derived from their work. Instead I just got this vitriolic ramble.

</comment><comment><USER3> The proper way to read this article:

1\. Read the last two paragraphs and realize it's an ad. 2\. Omit to read the rest.

</comment><comment><USER4> Gah. The blood's in the water, eh? What a nasty, self-serving piece of work.

</comment><comment><USER5> Wow, this is bad. But it gives me an opportunity to counter her main point. I actually talked to Wayne of Zenter about this very thing - I asked him whether he felt any remorse or negativity about going from starting Zenter to working for Google. I was really curious about it, personally. He emphatically refuted any such notion! He told me he has been very happy there and was impressed by the way that google works and the process they have. I anticipated that response but it seemed very heartfelt and emphatic. I suspect that Google probably doesn't fit in to many of the big company stereotypes... I think that would've been obvious to anyone who'd done even a little bit of homework on the topic.

</comment><comment><USER6> Nice marketing stunt, lady

</comment><comment><USER7> I don't know what I should be annoyed with more: the fact that idiots like this person are making pointless (or argument-less) noise or the fact that such noise is making it to the top of HN! I mean, anti-YC news is absolutely fine, but it should at least be making _some_ point!

</comment><comment><USER8> "Donna Bogatin's purported distaste for YCombinator is belied, however, by her self-interested appropriation of Paul Graham's essay to pitch a competitive offering."

</comment><comment><USER9> Bitterness, thy name is Donna Bogatin (whoever that is).

</comment><comment><USER10> There isn't unnecessarily a duality here. After all, he is doing the lions' share of the creative and coding work before the startups get sold.

</comment><comment><USER11> Investment bankers trashing hackers. What to say.</comment>


Startup Quote: Joe Kraus, Partner, Google Ventures - <AUTHOR> http://startupquote.com/post/10144996044

<comment><AUTHOR> If you're going to put your product in beta - put your business model in beta with it.

\- Joe Kraus (@jkraus)

<http://startupquote.com/post/10144996044></comment>


Show HN: Visualise academic citation networks - <AUTHOR> https://whocites.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hmmm... It's a problem. It's very much a side project (I only built it because I needed it), and building a demo that works when you aren't logged in is a bit of a nightmare as I'm sure you can imagine.

Thanks for commenting though, I have written about what it does here if you'd like to see before you sign in.

[https://mystudentvoices.com/scraping-google-scholar-to- write...](https://mystudentvoices.com/scraping-google-scholar-to-write-your- phd-literature-chapter-2ea35f8f4fa1#.utanxkpgk)

You'll also need a Chrome extension, all very annoying but sadly unavoidable.

</comment><comment><USER2> Why should I give you an e-mail address before I've seen anything of your site?

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Added a picture to make things clearer...</comment>