Ask HN: Industries Ripe For Disruption? - <AUTHOR> After seeing the ticketmaster/livenation merger post, there's probably a long list of industries ripe for disruption. ie- ticketing, riaa/music,etc.  I'd love to start putting together a list of other industries, so hence the reason for this post.
Please post reasons and/or a piece of information that provides insight as to why that industry is ripe for disruption <comment><USER14> Look at a lot of big traditional B2B businesses. They haven't gotten much coverage because they aren't sexy and visible to the normal consumer.

\- ERP ssystems are impossible to understand for the people that work with them, and require an army of highly paid consultants just to get it up and running.

\- financial software for large companies doesn't allow managers to see numbers in real-time, is difficult to get numbers in and out of, and hard to use.

\- HR software for managing people, their interests, knowledge, track record, etc. in large companies.

These are just a few examples off the top of my head, I'm sure there are many more.

The advantage of B2B software is that you have a very good income model. A SAP ERP system for a company with 1000 employees runs into the millions. There are customers out there willing to pay you by the bucketload if you can make something that doesn't suck. And most of what is on the market today sucks badly.

This is an industry that has been resting on its laurels for many years, and is ready to be picked off by nimble competitors.

<comment><USER15> Right you are, but you'll find that even though you've got the technical and design chops to blow the current systems out of the water, the sales cycle for these large corporations are pretty long.

Part of the problem is that when things cost beyond a certain amount they need approval. With approval comes delays and red tape. You'll have to have some sort of pricing and buy-in strategy for you to be able to get the large company to buy your stuff if that's the case.

If you can manage that, then by all means, go kick ass.

<comment><USER14> Never said it was easy ;-)

But you're absolutely right - the sales cycle is very different. Not only do you have looong lead-times, but you also have to understand all the corporate bullshit, and weird decisions that get made based on the sometimes irrational behaviour of big corporations.

But if you do it right you can make big-corp pay for your development. If you sell it well some companies will give you the opportunity to sell them something you have yet to make, and that they full-well know will make your company very profitable. Nix the VC, go straight to the customer, and make them pay up front.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Title Insurance. See this article from Forbes magazine: <http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2006/1113/148.html>

Summary: Fancy this: racetracks that keep 93% of your money and return only 5% in winning tickets. They wouldn't last long, not unless they could somehow rig the rules to both forbid price competition and make the purchase of race bets mandatory. That's more or less what the title insurance industry has done to American homeowners.

<comment><USER17> Required for a mortgage, government protected, and 93%+ of the premium for profit/overhead. Wow.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Read the 'The 4-steps to the Epiphany' by Steven Blank ([http://www.amazon.com/Four-Steps-Epiphany-Steven- Blank/dp/09...](http://www.amazon.com/Four-Steps-Epiphany-Steven- Blank/dp/0976470705))

Things to look for in a disruptive market:

1) The presence of the 'Earlyvangelist'. It does not matter if you can disrupt an industry if no one will realize the value of the innovation. This means finding real people at real companies and gathering requirements for something they will buy.

2) An existing distribution channel that is available for the new product.

3) Existing product positioning that you can leverage. As a startup, its hard to disrupt when you have to spend all your money on advertising, branding, or explaining what your product is.

4) Large existing market.

The book has a helpful framework for analyzing markets base on some of these factors, maturity, etc. This identifies the primary constraints of market risk. From there you can work with the customer to build a better product, and if you are lucky the risk shifts towards execution.

</comment><comment><USER19> visas / immigration. you're looking at $400-900 an hour for lawyers to point you to the right webpage and tell you whether or not your particular situation fits through a loophole.

corporate setup & startup paperwork of all sorts. also housing rental contracts, contractor... contracts. etc.

patent applications. it's so hard to find good examples and templates. i'd pay to have something that said "type your overview here", "upload a picture here", etc.

college applications. they charge what, $50 per application they look at? save them time, save applicants money. and how many colleges would perfectly suit you that you never heard about?

make school scholarships more transparent and ease the application process.

keeping up with relatives. i feel a little dirty about this one, but i'd love to have a helper manage my familial relationships in a behind-the-scenes fashion. birthday email templates, friendly hellos, status updates, etc. although deciding to pay for a service of that sort would mean acknowledging that you're a terrible grandson/husband/etc.

warranties & mail in rebates. they all turn straight into money and dealing with them is total bs.

i'm going back to work...

<comment><USER20> _visas / immigration._

The perceived value of immigrating is high enough that the price is not objectionable to many clients. They just want to make sure it is done right. In a market I used to work, by far the most successful immigration lawyer was regarded as a sleazy guy by most of the other immigration lawyers. But he projected WEALTH, and that was perceived by clients as the ability to succeed with a case. So he had plenty of income to maintain the trappings of wealth, and the cycle continued. Most immigration lawyers have enough technique to do most cases, yes, and many clients (if they are good at reading English, which is not a given) could look up laws and forms on the Web and do their own cases themselves, but immigration lawyers trade partly in peace of mind.

<comment><USER21> Having been through the immigration process myself with a corporate immigration lawyer who used an online system for streamlining I can attest to this.

Lawyers are there to do 2 things, spot anything which might become a problem before it does, when it becomes a problem get your back. No 100% automated online system could do that.

However an automated system could probably reduce costs a lot.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> The largest industry that is 'over ripe' is the energy industry. In particular, electricity distribution. Creating devices that perform 'demand management' are nearly trivial.

In Australia, the normal price for large scale wholesale electricity from the national grid is Aust $48 per Mw/hr. But several times a year the 'spot price' is over Aust $10,000 per Mw/hr.

This is the reason companies have 'peaking' plants that only operate 3-5 days a year.

There will be 2 main stratergies:

1\. Owner / user generated power would be transferred back to the grid during high price periods.

2\. Load shedding (automatic turn-off of power) would occur during high price period.

The primary requirement is a 'smarter grid'

<comment><USER23> > The primary requirement is a 'smarter grid'

The grid doesn't have to be all that smart. It just needs to tell folks when the peakers are being turned on and off.

And, folks need to be compensated for reacting to said on/off.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Blackboard and other proprietary software that colleges use. Blackboard sucks and could be easily replaced by hacking together open source solutions and presenting it in a slick package (like 37 signals) but tailored for college instead of business.

<comment><USER25> I couldn't agree with this more. I work with Blackboard's software on a daily basis and it is a aweful, unstable mess. The only problem is that Blackboard seems intent on sueing any competitors out of business using patents (see desire2learn)

<comment><USER26> I think some of these have been invalidated:

[http://mfeldstein.com/all-44-blackboard-patent-claims- invali...](http://mfeldstein.com/all-44-blackboard-patent-claims-invalidated- by-uspto/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Job search. There are a ton of competitors in this space, established and startup, but so far its all crap. I've been looking for a new job recently and I'm completely dissatisfied with everything that's out there. Craigslist is still probably the best resource for finding tech jobs, at least in San Francisco but there has to be a better way.

A couple of ideas have popped into my head recently about ways to really shake this area up and to make it into a profitable business to start.

<comment><USER28> Have you seen indeed.com?

<comment><USER29> Wow, Quantcast/Compete estimate their monthly users to be 6-9 million. Their AdSense account must be quite healthy. I wonder how they got granted access to the data from the first few sites they index.

<comment><USER30> Yaw I was in the jobs industry. There's simplyhired.com and jobster.com ...

6-9 million uniques isn't really worth the funding any of them received, I don't think.

They didn't ask permission for the data any more than Google did. Scrape/index/refresh/repeat.

<comment><USER31> Some links from indeed have affiliate IDs in them, so there are definitely some partnerships involved for some of their sources.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Real estate listings. Only limited information on a MLS is viewable without a broker. And getting your house information on one can cost 200 to 500, or up to 6% of the price. There are already free internet listings, but those can lack listings and information on houses.

<comment><USER33> Seconded on all things real estate. This is more of a legal/social problem than a technical one at this point. Websites like zillow.com make a real estate agents role largely obsolete, yet they still try to command a huge commission on every sale. Another poster above mentioned Title Insurance as well.

I suspect over the next 5-10 years we will see major changes in this industry. Huge savings to home buyers & sellers are available if the bureaucracy and traditions can be broken and replaced with a more consumer friendly system.

<comment><USER34> Zillow hardly makes the role of a real estate agent obsolete - first off, their Zestimates are no where near correct in a lot of markets especially Today with all of the foreclosures and short sales. Second, the process of purchasing or selling your home isn't any easier because of zillow - <USER2> marketing a home is easier.

A consumer friendly solution is needed - when we purchased our home last year, the amount of times I needed to initial and sign documents and then sign again after changes and again when the conditions were met, and again when we removed the contingencies, etc - and each time Scan & Email or Fax it back to the sellers or a third party; it was just annoying. With all of the e-sign technologies and document collaboration, there has got to be a way to make this process easier, smoother and less archaic.

We got our home for a great price, and used a real estate agent, I could care less whether or not the realtor was removed from the process. What I want removed from the process is the pain.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> _Insurance industry_ : I have a close friend in the industry and he says there are tons of ways to improve the application, binder, and other processes.

 _Online learning_ : Large edu and enterprise players like Blackboard and Saba are due for a disruption IMO (I think the ball is already rolling on this). Schools and enterprises don't want to keep paying huge licensing and infrastructure fees, and students should be able earn an online degree from a combination of online courses (from multiple schools).

 _Online classifieds_ : I know this has been discussed here before, but I'm of the opinion that craigslist is due for a disruption of some sort.

 _Car buying and financing_ : I just bought a car for my wife. Even though you can apply for financing online, the entire process was a total pain. There needs to be a "TicketStumbler for cars" that includes a financing and insurance option. I should be able to apply for traditional financing as well as peer-to-peer (ala prosper.com) financing all in one swoop. It should pull listings from classifieds, dealer inventories, auto trader, etc.

</comment><comment><USER36> Almost any industry can be rattled if the power goes to the consumer instead of the vendor. This has happened with consumer products but could go to services etc.

-automobile disrupted by cars from asia - oh shit happened!

-book industry disrupted by self published electronic books

-shipping industry disrupted by automation - <USER13>

-pcs industry by netbooks with no moving parts/cellphones

-Windows/Office by Ubuntu/Openoffice (outside of USA)

-power industry by cheap solar cells - <USER7>

-housing industry by prefab homes - <USER7>

-newspapers by online media - <USER13>

-drug industry by Indian made generic drugs - legislation won't let it happen

-all driving trades (taxis, truck driver etc) by automated DARPA style cars - <USER7>

-most manufacturing jobs by cheap chinese/korean robots - <USER13>

-most farming jobs by automation (eg AutoFarm - gps/AI driven tractors) - <USER13>

-Californian/Arizona farming by cheaper farms in Mexico, Guatamala etc - <USER13>

-drive through order takers by voice recognition -Long distance by skype, calling card & SIP providers - <USER13>

-Business travel by HD Video conferencing systems - happening (Cisco + HP)

-Telecom equipment by Huawei

-Oil furnaces by alternative pellet combustion system (see Jon Udell) -??

-Military soldiers by remote controlled robots - <USER13>

-billboards by gps aware ads

-interbroker dealers by cheaper competitors (ITG - etc) - <USER13>

\- speeding ticket writing by RFID tag reading systems (UK) -various industries by the rental business (Netflicks, Zipcar etc)

Candidates that will not be disrupted

\- Governments - always political and loath change

\- Unions

\- Near monopolies (Heathcare, Cell phone)

\- Religion to an extent

</comment><comment><USER37> Classifieds.

CraigsList is not the be-all end-all of buying/selling things locally online. It may be a tough nut to crack, but it won't be hard to radically improve upon their horrible user experience. I would love to see some competition in this space.

<comment><USER38> Not going to happen. Craigslist is at that early Google period where everyone who uses it for the first time never looks back and is uber-loyal to the brand. A slick competitor with a great interface and new tools still has to climb that huge Ebay/Facebook-style mountain (no users no stuff, no reason)

<comment><USER39> I've used Craigslist for a car sale and wasn't impressed. I ended up paying a fee to AutoTrader and sold it fairly fast.

<comment><USER17> I'm working on the motorcycle equivalent at MotoListr.com.

<comment><USER40> Your interface is cleaner and more attractive, but cycletrader.com is a pretty well established competitor. Do you have a plan for beating them along any particular axis?

<comment><USER17> My plan is better dealer support. Direct line to my cell phone.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> online auctions.

ebay sucks, for both the buyers and sellers. and ebay doesn't even like auctions anymore, they're moving towards the amazon-style marketplace model.

<comment><AUTHOR> Good one. Ebay is just such a force to be reckoned with, but they've completely lost their soul. They've pissed their sellers off like none other. You would have to have something so different and innovative to start stealing their thunder. Maybe you start in a different niche ie- Etsy. I really like what Etsy is doing.

<comment><USER42> So far the only auction site I have seen that has gone anywhere is tfields.com which started as a transformers toys auction site and grew from there. It is a real catch-22, you need lots of buyers and sellers suddenly.

<comment><USER43> I think the best model to beat ebay is to create a "Ning" style auction site where you have separate auction sites dependent on the community that they target.

The best strategy for a startup to topple a massive corporation is to flank them. Hit them in their weak spots, grow, and eventually you might get enough resources to topple them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> Higher Education. Existing institutions are selling inefficient and grossly overpriced products in an environment in which objective evaluation is hard to obtain and the status quo fears innovation. If you could crack that nut, it would be massive.

<comment><USER45> There is another bigger one: College Book Industry.

The current system is pretty inefficient. This probably differs from country to country. The current system here works like this:

The universities give lists of subjects and prescribed textbooks to brick-and- mortar bookstores. They then buy the books and sell them at a huge mark-up.

Students generally do not order online because of the time delay/import BS and many do not have a fixed postal address. Secondhand book sales are a bit of mess because it is not centralised, etc...

There are possibly quite a few ideas on how to make this system more effective (esp. in countries in which the internet penetration is not that high but the cellphone penetration is).

<comment><USER46> Tangentially relevant:

8 Stupid Frat Boy Business Ideas [http://www.iwillteachyoutoberich.com/blog/8-stupid-frat- boy-...](http://www.iwillteachyoutoberich.com/blog/8-stupid-frat-boy-business- ideas/)

" _NO BOOK EXCHANGE HAS EVER REALLY SUCCEEDED. I HATE TO CRUSH DREAMS BUT PLEASE FORGET ABOUT THIS._ "

<comment><USER45> Ouch. There is a huge degree of truth in that. Situations differ however and I know of at least a few local book exchanges that are making a living (i.e. in operation 2+ years).

I do however not know of one central/large one. There are several reasons why in some cases it succeeds and in others not. In poorer regions/countries people would look for more ways to save money (the pressure isn't really on an Ivy League guy to buy a $50 book instead of a $100 one when his tuition is $40,000. In countries where students live on less than $3000 a year it is).

A solid business idea I have seen is a chinese copy center - you hand in a book and the next day get your book and copy for about $20 (this business is in operation more than 7 years without any uhm... legal problems).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> Text messaging. It's been discussed here before but it's worth repeating.

<comment><USER46> This is difficult to tackle if you don't already have a serious presence in the mobile industry.

<comment><USER48> There are still a lot of innovations you can make here without replacing the SMS backbone wholesale.

For example, users interact with user interfaces, not messaging layers. If you can get people using your interface, you can switch the messaging layer where appropriate. Notice Google now sending IM to SMS?

At my startup, Borange, we send group SMS for free on the iPhone, and are working with metadata and a user interface to innovate around sharing social availability and impromptu invitations, one of SMS's big use cases. When the time is right (read PUSH for iPhone?), we'll migrate users to a modern mobile messaging layer, and keep our backwards compatibility with free SMS for interacting with the rest of the world.

Check us out, by the way. We just launched our iPhone app and are looking for investors and partners who believe in the Matrix and major change in the communications space. <http://www.borange.com>.

<comment><USER46> You mean like 3jam, Limbo, sms.ac, Zemble, Google's Dodgeball, Yahoo's ill- fated "Mixd," and a dozen others who are no longer around and I forgot about?

Jeez, I truly do wish you guys luck, but group/social SMS is a pretty tough nut to crack.

(I used to cover the mobile industry for a trade publication.)

<comment><USER48> Well not exactly... The work we are doing at Borange is more concerned with scheduling and availability than sending group SMS, and my main point was that there are possible strategies for migrating people off of SMS by including SMS compatibility. It's the lowest common denominator in mobile messaging, and you really can't afford not to include it to some degree for moving forward.

Yeah, crazy dead heap there, though! How long until SMS joins it? :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> Finance is another area ripe for innovation. There's a crisis going on, as we've all noticed, and one reason behind it is that businesses in the industry who were perceived to be creating tons of value turn out to have just been running intelligent people in circles.

Here are a few thoughts: \- information and analysis. It's still too hard for consumers and too expensive for professionals to get access to reliable and usable information on the state of companies, economies, etc. \- sources of capital for individuals and businesses. New ways will emerge of providing good ideas and reliable individuals with cheap access to the capital they need to build businesses, buy homes, etc. Prosper and kiva hopefully are just the beginning. \- payments and micropayments. Does anyone out there love paypal? Or credit card companies, for that matter? Should it really cost several percent to handle every small and large transaction that takes place in the world? And several percent isn't all that bad compared to transaction costs in some industries, like healthcare. Should it really take 10 minutes and require complete trust in the waitstaff to not steal my information every time I use a credit card at a restaurant?

</comment><comment><USER50> You mentioned it, but I think the music industry is _really_ ripe for disruption. Their business model is definitely shifting as we speak.

ebay/auction sites/local commerce can be done better.

<comment><USER42> The problem is that everyone knows that the music world is changing and wants in on the pie and so far Apple has done the best job. The bad part is that they are doing a pretty good job. The hardware is nice and works, the software for the most part does work and gets music easily and cheap to users who are for the most part happy. A high obstacle. Let others try attacking the music problem and instead try one of the easier ones.

<comment><USER50> That's assuming that the current lone model of "searchable mp3 catalog online for $ per song." There are many different ways to profit from music: artist interaction, live venues, merchandise, provide a quality recommendation/review service, etc. The current market is skewed heavily towards what the content that the industry thinks will sell, which receives the bulk of marketing.

Not to mention the fact that the market naturally segments into people of varying levels of interest. People who love music and people who just care about the Top40 can be catered towards by very different business models.

<comment><USER42> The biggest thing I fear about music is that it is emotional. People want to be in a band and will work for less then minimum wage while living out of a van so they can maybe make it big, but really just to play music. Combined with the fact that in the mind of the consumer a song is near worthless means that the money has to either come from selling massive quantities, aka iTunes and they only break even or something else. And everything that is something else that I have heard of isn't that revolutionary.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Government. Now hear me out on this one. I think with new technology, and the push for open access to information (that's digestible) will disrupt the political system as we've known it. Doubt it will happen once things get 'back on track' financially in this country.

<comment><USER51> _Don't mistake this comment as me trying to make this thread a political flamewar._

I agree with you that technologies used by government are ripe for disruption -- and in my opinion the Senate and Geithner today pretty much guaranteed that 'back on track' will be years, if not decades, away. So this really is a good, maybe vital, area to create tools that improve efficiency.

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> Most of the publishing industry, esp. books. This is somewhat contingent on the success of ePaper/eBook technologies like (but not) the Kindle. They still need to develop for a while (2yrs or so) so the displays will be fast, have good contrast and be able to display color.

But even before that, we might see a lot more authors going online and developing new patterns of writing that are based on shorter publishing cycles and still lower revenue expectations.

I don't know how this will play out, but I'd bet that the RIAA/audio industry would make an embarassingly good model of what this very conservative industry will go through.

</comment><comment><USER53> Government, Governments are being run on antiquated software created by giants of the military industrial complex. There are huge hurdles on the procurement side, but the opportunities of making a 10x price performance improvement are all over the the place. One key is to make the product highly configurable to accommodate the different laws from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. Another key is to tackle smaller entities because they will be more flexible. Voice of experience: dont start with the California DMV or the Illinois Secretary of State.

</comment><comment><USER54> The insurance industry is a technological dinosaur. Many opportunities here.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Music Industry

This may be one of the most obvious ones out there. Artists don't need the record labels anymore. The money is not purely in the music, but ticket sales, merchandise, extra content,etc.

I like what topspin media is doing. Myspace has made great strides, but it's just a start.

<comment><USER55> iTunes much?

<comment><USER38> His comment would have made more sense if he said "iTunes' instead of the Music Industry.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Health Care.

<comment><USER56> HIPPA, medical records, billing, medical office automation. The medical industry is in the information dark ages and finally being dragged into relative modernity by the government.

<comment><USER57> Forget medical records. What about an online health care expenses manager like Quicken. If you've ever dealt with many doctors, or more than one insurance, or just the US health care insurance system in general it's a nightmare to keep track of what's been claimed, billed, paid back, written off, reduced, etc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> Television + Highly accurate profiles of the person watching the TV at any moment.

</comment><comment><USER59> I think the enterprise sphere as a whole is ripe for disruption, which we've been witnessing with SaaS and other web 2.0 applications coming out as of late.</comment>


Articles on container implementation - <AUTHOR> http://pierrchen.blogspot.com/2018/08/understand-container-index.html <comment><AUTHOR> a book will come out of those articles [http://pierrchen.blogspot.com/2018/09/book.html](http://pierrchen.blogspot.com/2018/09/book.html)</comment>


Kubernetes, Object Storage and Why Appliance Vendors Are in Trouble - <AUTHOR> https://blog.min.io/high-performance-object-storage-with-kubernetes/ <comment><USER2> Min.io will bite you, if you expect it to work like S3 API, we were bitten by it already as it does not aim for full S3 API implementation and it's not their focus.

So be careful using min.io, as cloud storage abstraction library which helps people to work with multi-cloud. There will be unexpected errors with min.io, as most libraries are using S3 API and min.io is not fully compliant with S3 API.

<comment><USER3> Can you be more specific about how you were "bitten"? min.io is a drop-in replacement for S3 - you can seamlessly use any S3 client with it.

I'm an engineer at min.io and our focus from the beginning has been to stay S3 compatible. We will continue to uphold our customers' trust and stay compatible with S3.Can you explain in non-speculative terms how that is not our focus?

<comment><USER2> Please see the issue closed as " _WONTFIX_ " an issue of incompatibility with S3 raised by one member of team [1]. The response from the team:

 _" Issue: I have problems that minio is not listing directories that it does in AWS. It is listing only directories that is empty.

Response: I am afraid we are not interested in supporting directories at the moment. It is a niche use case to provide POSIX behavior it's not in our interests."_

[1] [https://github.com/minio/minio/issues/6047](https://github.com/minio/minio/issues/6047)</comment></comment></comment>


Touch Bar MacBook Pro teardown finds some unpleasant surprises - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/apple/2016/11/touch-bar-mbp-teardown-soldered-ssd-cosmetic-speaker-holes-and-more/ <comment><USER2> _Please submit the original source. If a post reports on something found on another site, submit the latter._

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

the source already has a discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12965581](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12965581)</comment>


Sri Lanka Is Declared Malaria Free by World Health Organization - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.wsj.com/indiarealtime/2016/09/06/sri-lanka-is-declared-malaria-free-by-world-health-organization/ <comment><USER2> Sri Lankan here. We're not exactly celebrating because within the last 10 years, cases of dengue fever has risen from about 9000 to 32000:[http://www.dengue.health.gov.lk/index.php/information-on- den...](http://www.dengue.health.gov.lk/index.php/information-on-dengue/sri- lankan-situation)

Another interesting thing: when DDT was banned in the 1960's, Sri Lanka's malaria cases went from 17 to half a million: [http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2005/02/17/ddt3/](http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2005/02/17/ddt3/)

<comment><USER3> > when DDT was banned in the 1960's

It's even more interesting that the link you provided explains that that's a complete myth. Read the whole thing.

<comment><USER2> My parents and grandparents lived through this period. I suspect what you're trying to say is that the DDT connection is a myth and not that you're discounting the collective memories of an entire nation?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Does anyone know what eradication techniques they used to such great effect on malaria, but allowed for an increase in dengue? I would've expected malaria and dengue to move together for any commonly used eradication technique.

<comment><USER5> Different mosquitos

>Success in controlling malaria over the past century has been attributed predominantly to widespread implementation of insecticide-treated bednets, household spraying of residual insecticides, and effective drugs to reduce mortality and interrupt transmission

doesn't work with Dengue because they bite during the day and there are no effective drugs.

[http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3574272/](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3574272/)

though there are other ways we might take out the aegypti blighters [https://www.technologyreview.com/s/600689/we-have-the- techno...](https://www.technologyreview.com/s/600689/we-have-the-technology- to-destroy-all-zika-mosquitoes/)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11536074](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11536074)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Truly a monumental moment in human history, the beginning of the elimination of malaria, one of the biggest killers of all time

<comment><USER7> Not really the beginning, but hopefully another big step. The USA was declared Malaria free in 1949 after a specific elimination project - it seems the CDC actually evolved from the Office of Malaria Control in War Areas, established in 1942.

[1] [https://www.cdc.gov/malaria/about/history/elimination_us.htm...](https://www.cdc.gov/malaria/about/history/elimination_us.html)

<comment><USER8> And now there are more and more cases of Dengue and W. Nile and Yellow Fever in the US, mostly because the CDC stopped doing national mosquito control and its near powerless to resume that since NIMBY is more important than not catching tropical diseases apparently.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> A much faster solution: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gene_drive](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gene_drive)

<comment><USER10> > Gene drives function only in secually reproducing species

I don't see why this is necessarily the case. Couldn't you, say, slow yeast budding to the point of population collapse?

<comment><USER11> Sure, causing your expensive crispr yeast to die out, while having no effect on wild yeast?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> As a person of Sri Lankan descent, this is great news. However, the elimination of malaria in Sardinia was correlated with the rapid rise of multiple sclerosis and type-1 diabetes. This is because the parasite that causes malaria is also thought to be protective against MS and diabetes [1]. I hope that was considered in this case, because if not we're just trading one problem for another.

[1]: [https://bmcmedicine.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s1291...](https://bmcmedicine.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12916-015-0306-7)

</comment><comment><USER13> Any ideas if this means the region is now also free of dengue fever causing virus that is also spread by mosquitoes?

<comment><USER14> I would guess not, because even Singapore and Bali are not dengue-free even though they are malaria-free. (But that's just a guess -- I'd be interested in a reliable source.)

<comment><USER15> I was there on a holiday a few weeks ago. While they told us that malaria isn't a problem anymore, they still warn tourists to protect against mosquito bites as they can still carry dengue fever. From a quick google it seems that malaria and dengue are spread by different mosquitoes, which might be why only one if the two is gone now.

<comment><USER16> Yep. Malaria is spread by _Anopheles_ mosquitoes, while dengue, West Nile, yellow fever, and other Flaviviruses are mostly spread by _Aedes_ mosquitoes.

In addition, Plasmodium (malaria) strains are much more species-specific than Flaviviruses. That is, while non-human animals can get a form of malaria, their malaria is usually not transmissible to humans. The Flaviviruses are much less selective (e.g., West Nile can infect birds as well as humans). This makes controlling the Flaviviral infections more difficult, as there's a virus reservoir in the animal population. Just wiping out the mosquitoes around humans isn't enough. You'd have to wipe out all the mosquitoes throughout the entire region.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Compensation for Venezuela...

<comment><USER18> I dont get it.

<comment><USER19> Venezuela was the first country that was ever declared malaria-free, but is currently dealing with an epidemic due to various social and economic reasons. [http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/15/world/venezuela-malaria- mi...](http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/15/world/venezuela-malaria-mines.html)

<comment><USER17> Yes

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Declared malaria-free by _who_?

(Sorry, couldn't resist...)

Seriously, this is very good news. But... does anyone know how hard it is to _keep_ someplace malaria-free? Is this once-and-for-all, or does it require continual maintenance?

<comment><USER18> [https://www.cdc.gov/malaria/about/history/elimination_us.htm...](https://www.cdc.gov/malaria/about/history/elimination_us.html)</comment></comment>


CDN-hosted JavaScript Represents an Additional Point of Failure - <AUTHOR> http://daemon.co.za/2014/03/from-trenches-js-cdn-point-of-failure/

<comment><USER2> Also hosting static files is probably the easiest thing to do with your web app. So why introduce another point of failure for something really easy? You may save a few milliseconds but definitely not worth it in my opinion. I'd rather have better control and if you really want to speed things up then combine and minify all your static assets.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah chances are you're already running a static webserver of some kind anyway. Typically at least apache or nginx proxying things to your app.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I agree that a CDN introduces a potential point of failure. Another reason I host locally is that I compress and minify my CSS and JS into single files (e.g. application.js and application.css in Rails).

</comment><comment><USER4> Everything but the most well thought-out app is itself a SPOF.

1\. design and develop solutions appropriate for your audience; consider their location, access to the network, and possible speed or lack thereof.

2\. I love using professionally managed SLA-backed CDN's - like Akamai. A browser can only load so many items from the same host at one time, so I've found using a CDN helps, given my usage scenario. (see above)

<comment><USER5> yeah, using a professionally managed CDN is fine. as long as you host everything near each other.

I dont think hosting your vendor code on cndjs, and then your application code from wherever you serve the rest of your static files, is wise.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> > I also feel that if more people understood that the internet is basically > held together by duct tape, they would have a lot more reverence to the > miracle that it works even remotely as reliably as it does.

The fact that the internet (and especially browsers) works at all is the main wonder of our age.</comment>


Trying out Kubernetes - <AUTHOR> http://container-solutions.com/trying-out-kubernetes/ <comment><USER2> Thanks for posting, great intro! With Kubernetes just releasing the 1.0 version, things got serious :) Did you know Red Hat is the second contributor to the project? Next month I'll touch up about Kubernets and its integration in Openshift at the Docker Randstad November Meetup ([http://www.meetup.com/Docker- Randstad/events/225580948/](http://www.meetup.com/Docker- Randstad/events/225580948/))..but you probably know that already :) see you soon!</comment>


Feds: There are hostile stingrays in DC, but we don't know how to find them - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/04/dhs-to-senator-malicious-use-of-stingrays-is-a-real-and-growing-risk/ <comment><USER2> I work in wireless telecom: Really doubtful "we don't know how to find them". The FCC's enforcement bureau has a set of vans equipped to find unauthorized transmitters. IMSI catchers must transmit and remain on the air. It would be very risky to operate, even briefly, a portable imsi catcher in a briefcase and move it around WA DC, nevermind one that remained in fixed locations for hours. The only other explanation I can think of is being operated from embassies with full diplomatic protections, but that runs the risk of the host county (USA) PNG'ing several staff with 24 hour notice as punishment.

Quick edit: Whole US federal agencies have their own TSCM (technical surveillance countermeasures) staff entirely separate from the FCC. It is a job position at the dept of state. Evolved from bug detection and removal in the analog days to now encompass just about everything that can leak data.

<comment><USER3> Depends on how much the devices cost to procure, and the budget of the party using them. Seems like these could be treated as "black-throws" given the right cost:budget ratio.

<comment><USER4> OpenBTS and Ettus USPR (software defined radios) have made it inexpensive enough for hobbyists to set up cellular base stations at Burningman.

The difference between an open source base station, and a homebuilt stingray in negligible.

While a grand or two's worth of radio hardware and however many weekends/evenings spent getting it all set up and the a software configured is _kind of_ expensive - it's effectively free at criminal org, corporate espionage, or state levels of action.

<comment><USER5> Try less than $200. LimeSDR Mini or a couple Motorola C123s running Osmocombb with a filter swap...or a hacked femtocell

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Most will probably be owned by law enforcement. Many will be operating without the benefit of a warrant. So what do you do when you find one? You won't make many friends if you interfere with an ongoing investigation particularly if you raise questions about the legality of the operation at the same time.

Things were much the same back in the old days. If a telephone employee would find listening devices on the lines they were best off just quietly removing them and disposing of them. In the wild, surveillance equipment legally installed under a warrant looks exactly the same as all of the other kinds.

So in practice everyone got to tap phone lines, just as long as they didn't annoy anyone too official while doing so. The targets would never find out, unless the were willing to climb a telephone pole and check for themselves. The same thing will probably happen with stingray type devices. People like private investigators are likely already using them.

<comment><USER7> That reminds me of some photos my dad took years ago of a line technician on a crane truck fiddling with some equipment on a utility pole at the edge of our front yard for about thirty minutes. He thinks the guy was testing for some illegal cable descrambler on the line although I suppose it could have been anything since this happened in the DC Metro area :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Can someone please explain to me why this cell security problem seems to be completely ignored? If encryption algorithms are broken, they're phased out and untrusted. But if 2g is insecure, there's not a single peep from networks or phone manufactures or Google or Apple about phasing out 2g. There isn't even an option to disable it.

Why don't towers have a sort of encryption certificate verifying they're legit?

Why doesnt my cell provider just provide my phone a list of it's legit towers?

I can think of so many ways to solve this problem. But it's super hard to find any information if how this all works.

<comment><USER9> I think there is a perfect storm of savant security nerds with piss-pour communications skills and telcos over-indexing on mba/finance leadership.

The security nerds make blustery comments that "anyone with motivation and a couple g's worth of gear can target ANYONE."

There are a bunch or problems with this argument. Gnuradio is not easy. You need to be in radio proximity to your target. Targeting someone requires some homework and luck (converting msisdn to timsi isn't trivial. It's doable, but the nerds double down on trivial, burning credibility by claiming triviality that can easily be argued against by half-wits.). The mbas (whose job it is to move the needle on billion dollar businesses) are getting asked to add expenses that require new software at the base stations, replacement of mobile endpoints, Break roaming and generate NO ADDITIONAL REVENUE BECAUSE CONSUMERS DONT REALLY CARE ABOUT SECURITY.

What would you do? These are not the best and brightest. They have built careers in avoiding risk.

The MNOs have a serious culture problem. The single best solution would be to incentivize competition, but the only thing the SV people want is net neutrality, which only entrenches the established players.

We only have ourselves to blame for this mess. The moves that would resolve this problem: taking on risk that most wont recognize will not move the needle in the right direction. Consumers think mobile internet is too pricey- they won't pay more for security. The solution creates costs. We are doomed.

<comment><USER10> Naive question: how does net neutrality entrench companies? To me it seems the opposite, the more you can pay the better service your company can offer which directly benefits larger entrenched companies, no?

<comment><USER9> Imagine deciding to run a local ISP for 300 homes in your neighborhood. You don't know if all 300 will sign up for service. You don't know how long it will take to get to 300.

Do you pay for peering agreements that will meet the demands of 300 homes for the two years it will take to get there, or do you try to build up gradually? Will you be in a situation where you can't meet your existing customers' demand? Who will have leverage in that next peering agreement? It's clearly the entrenched backhaul provider.

If you have some ability to steer & prioritize traffic, you will have some wiggle room when it comes time to negotiate your next agreement. With net neutrality concepts- you lose that tool. You're totally dependent on the accuracy of your traffic predictions & the peering partner has a significant negotiating advantage.

You're going to take on the risk of digging trenches & negotiating peering agreements for underserved, rural or suburban locations. You're going to need a mass of homes to agree to the trenching & installation. You're going to have to negotiate labor for digging these trenches & laying cable in a way that will resist water damage & other threats.

All of this sucks and is hard.

>>the more you can pay the better service your company can offer which directly benefits larger entrenched companies, no?

I don't believe that anyone really wants to rate websites differently than they already are (via peering arrangements- which are how the Internet works, folks). But the argument that most people want to make is that ISPs will block access to example.com. The best example of access to a website being cut off I can point to is google's decision to block Amazon devices from accessing youtube.com.

If no ISP is doing this kind of blocking, then what's the point of exposing ISPs to risk of unfounded claims from random customers that you are violating net neutrality principals? Do you now need to absorb the cost of Audits to prove you're not? Digging trenches is hard, expensive & risky. What happens when you pile on more regulations?

Who is excited to get into this business? The established providers already have legal teams & are prepared to deal with legislators. Startup ISPs are annoying bugs that can easily be crushed with regulatory pressure. Add "ability to absorb regulatory & legal tangles" to your list of runway calculations.

All I see are increasingly challenging hurdles for startup ISPs that need pricing flexibility to manage the early, high risk tasks of starting an ISP.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'd say let's hope they'll remember that the next time they'll ask for backdoors in some other technology.

But in reality I have very little hope that they will.

<comment><USER12> That was the first thing that struck me too. There's some irony about these showing up on the streets of DC.

New technology only stays in the hands of "our team" for so long before ultimately showing up on our doorstep. Especially when that's low cost surveillance technology...

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I wasn't familiar with the term 'stingray', so this headline was both confusing an amusing to me. I was confused about why they would even be looking for 'hostile' cartilaginous fish. I can't be the only one.

<comment><USER14> I too thought that for a brief moment when reading the title before remembering what stingrays were.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> As a resident, let me pose to you this : The government doesn't always know what the rest of the government is doing. I would be surprised if there weren't rogue Stingray's out there, and even more not surprised that it's some discreet arm of the government.

<comment><USER16> Yes, I'm sure both likely exist, but that doesn't make Stingrays operated by eg. China, Iran, DPRK, Russia any less of a problem !

<comment><USER17> You're jumping to conclusions. You don't need to be a nation state to operate a dingy IMSI-catcher.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> This is not limited to the US. In fact, you are late to the party. Both in Oslo and in London these where uncovered and published about, that was 2015.

[https://www.aftenposten.no/norge/i/kamWB/New-report-Clear- si...](https://www.aftenposten.no/norge/i/kamWB/New-report-Clear-signs-of- mobile-surveillance-in-Oslo_-despite-denial-from-Police-Security-Service)

[https://commsrisk.com/reporters-find-20-imsi-catchers-in- lon...](https://commsrisk.com/reporters-find-20-imsi-catchers-in-london/)

</comment><comment><USER19> > IMSI-Catchers also allow adversaries to intercept your conversations, text > messages, and data. Police can use them to determine your location or to > find out who is in a given geographic area at what time. [1]

Does turning one's phone off not disable pinging cell towers?

[1] [https://cellularprivacy.github.io/Android-IMSI-Catcher- Detec...](https://cellularprivacy.github.io/Android-IMSI-Catcher-Detector/)

<comment><USER20> Wrong. This is an exaggeration at best and just plain wrong for most US LTE users. LTE is very hard to fully MiTM. You can still catch / observe through IMSI, but the phone won't deal with your rogue tower. If you can downgrade someone to 3G you can more easily observe voice and or texts. Data is actually harder to MiTM, even on 3G. That said, it is not feasible to down grade any modern US LTE devices as far as I know.

Turning your phone off usually does prevent tower pings, but some phones have been known to be sneaky.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Why can't they find them the same way government agencies normally enforce radio licensing? Drive around with a receiver (a cell phone, basically) enumerating all the purported cell towers in a geographic area, then cross- check that with a list of legitimate carrier infrastructure?

<comment><USER22> It MAY not be that easy... femtocells and whatnot may make that a difficult task. I wondered this myself, since nearly all pirate radio stations are caught.. but cell sites don't work the same way. Just a thought.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I think this is good news. I think the kinds of politicians that are typically over-friendly with the police are also the kind that want a strong military. The use of "law enforcement" technology like stingrays by hostile intelligence agencies, might create a useful tension in them that could help convince them to harden domestic communications against law enforcement spying.

<comment><USER24> If only they cared about protecting our rights in the first place, as much or more than they apparently care about alleged spying by foreign powers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Seems like a good reason to install and use something like

[https://cellularprivacy.github.io/Android-IMSI-Catcher- Detec...](https://cellularprivacy.github.io/Android-IMSI-Catcher-Detector/)

Do the Feds have bounties for catching illegal stingrays?

</comment><comment> et-al Layman question: one can limit their exposure with encrypted VoIP communications (e.g. FaceTime) and chats (iMessage, Signal), correct?

That being said, the intercepter would still know:

\- phone being connected (IMEI)

\- location of the phone

\- which servers were requested, but not the encrypted content (yet)

\- how much data was transmitted, "call time"

So if two phones were talking with each other over FaceTime connected to stingrays, a third-party can still deduce that they were talking to each other given the amount of data being transferred and when the requests occurred.

<comment><USER2> Re: your last sentence, a stingray rarely if ever offers actual network connectivity, either ss7 or data. Its purpose is just to catch the unique ID numbers from the phone. Whatever you have set into your phone for LTE APN data settings isn't going to work with a random imsi catcher. Such a thing won't have an uplink anyways outside of its command/control functions.

<comment><USER26> Doesn't that make them really detectable? A deadspot with full signal bars would be really suspicious.

<comment><USER2> A phone doesn't stay connected to a stingray, it will get the imsi and then move on to a real site of the phone's carrier.

<comment><USER27> How/why? Could you elaborate? Will the rouge tower drop the phone? Won't the phone try to connect again and again to the tower with the strongest signal?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER2> Possibly rogue IMSI catchers have also been spotted in in Ottawa. If I had to bet they're run by CSE, which of course will neither confirm nor deny.

[https://www.google.ca/search?q=ottawa+imsi+catcher&oq=ottawa...](https://www.google.ca/search?q=ottawa+imsi+catcher&oq=ottawa+imsi+catcher&aqs=chrome..69i57.4289j0j4&sourceid=chrome- mobile&ie=UTF-8)

</comment><comment><USER28> For those confused about the terminology in the title...

> The devices, which are also known as stingrays or IMSI catchers, are > commonly used by domestic law enforcement nationwide to locate a particular > phone. Sometimes, they can also be used to intercept text messages and phone > calls. Stingrays act as a fake cell tower and effectively trick a cell phone > into transmitting to it, which gives up the phone's location.

</comment><comment><USER24> My understanding is that all stingrays are by definition hostile.

<comment><USER24> And if the NSA and FBI had devoted less energy to turning this country into a corrupt republic on its way to a totalitarian nightmare, I am sure they would have had the ability and resources to ensure that such stingrays were _impossible_ to set up.

<comment><USER24> Here is what the EFF says: "[Stringrays] can also intercept metadata (such as information about calls made and the amount of time on each call), the content of unencrypted phone calls and text messages and data usage (such as websites visited). Additionally, marketing material indicates that they can be configured to divert calls and text messages, edit messages, and even spoof the identity of a caller in text messages and calls." [1]

 _This_ is what the FBI and NSA love. They never try to protect the American public from such weaknesses in the country's infrastructure, although that is what they are supposed to be doing. All so they can spy on everybody, feed illegal parallel-construction activities, and generally nurture the growth of a police state; it is also clear by now that these agencies have been interfering with national politics. _These are not friends of our freedoms._

[1] [https://www.eff.org/pages/cell-site-simulatorsimsi- catchers](https://www.eff.org/pages/cell-site-simulatorsimsi-catchers)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Is that Russian ship still parked nearby? I recall reading about that a while back. Maybe that's where the signal is coming from. [https://www.cnn.com/2018/01/22/politics/russia-spy-ship- us-c...](https://www.cnn.com/2018/01/22/politics/russia-spy-ship-us- coast/index.html)

<comment><USER30> I admit that I don't have much expertise on the matter, having only ever operated a GSM cell site simulator (never LTE), but the max range I remember (in ideal conditions) is something like 35 miles.

<comment><USER4> 35km - which is a TDMA timing issue, not a radio range one - that damned pesky speed of light problem...

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

(Note there's and "extended range" feature, where you can halve the cell site's capacity by waiting two timeslots in the TDMA schedule instead of one - which lets you go as far as 120km...)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Ambiguous title. On my first reading I thought: do they mean animals? ...or missiles? ...oh no it's even scarier then the first two!

</comment><comment><USER32> Is Milenage still a safe protocol?

Or are all of these stingrays still dependent upon forcing you to switch down to the older 2G protocols?

<comment><USER33> Yep most of this bullshit is because garbage like 2G (and 3G) is still in operation. Phones should just phase that out (less code, thus less attack surface).

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> The headline doesn't at all agree with the what the article and its sources say, which is basically a whole lot of nothing.

</comment><comment><USER35> Why would they admit that they could find them?

</comment><comment><USER36> The same backdoors politicians want in our devices will come back to haunt them.

</comment><comment><USER37> >we don't know how to find them

Triangulation?</comment>


Mother Earth Mother Board (1996) - <AUTHOR> https://www.wired.com/1996/12/ffglass/ <comment><USER3> This is an extraordinary essay. I read it on an hour-long bus ride, expecting a history of undersea cabling to put me to sleep. Instead, I devoured it.

The history of undersea broadband is the history of human civilization - <USER2> requires amazing leaps in technology, in international cooperation, in private-public negotiation. These three forces shaped the 20th century and are going to determine whether we survive the 21st century.

Absolutely essential reading.

<comment><USER4> I hate to be the low-life slouch here, but is there no _shorter_ version – one that rather just lists the facts than sets a mood? The information density seems so low. I dove eight paragraphs deep without hitting any solid material at all.

If there is none, maybe I should one day condense it to its essential points myself.

<comment><USER5> It's basically the story of laying the FLAG cable with heavy digressions. The wikipedia page is enough if you want just the facts ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiber- Optic_Link_Around_the_Gl...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiber- Optic_Link_Around_the_Globe))

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It was better in print. I mean honestly, it was so beautiful. Teenage me read it and re-read it. Wish I still had my old copy.

<comment><USER7> Yup. Kept my old Wireds for a decade or more, but I think I eventually let them go.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I just finished reading Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon (very good book), and this article was included at the end of the E-Book version (literally finished reading it this morning).

As someone who's interested in technology (obviously) and boats / the ocean, this article hit an unexpected confluence of interests, on an unexpectedly complex subject. I definitely recommend reading it.

</comment><comment><USER9> This is, afaik, the longest article ever published in Wired. It is one of the most iconic tech articles ever.

</comment><comment><USER10> A classic. This is reprinted in Stephenson's book _Some Remarks_ , which also has some other essays and stories (all quite a bit shorter than this though). Worth checking out if you like Stephenson.

</comment><comment><USER11> This is one of my favourite ever Wired articles. I remember reading it in the mag originally, and printing it several years later to read again - it was something like 53 pages?

</comment><comment><USER12> I re-read this every few years. I love the combination of technology, geography, and history.

I'll now probably lose the next few hours panning around undersea cable maps. Again.

</comment><comment><USER13> One of my favorite long form pieces of all time. I think about this piece probably once a month.

</comment><comment><USER14> 1990s Neal Stephenson was incredible.

<comment><USER15> He still is. Reamde is a fantastic story of the seedy underbelly of World of Warcraft gold.

<comment><USER16> Disagree. Nothing fits together and the whole thing makes no sense. He even explicitly acknowledges how the real-world/game integration is entirely pointless, and then just proceeds to go straight past it. It's his weakest work of all aside from the collaborations.

Seveneves is much better, though still not quite up to his early standards.

<comment><USER17> Anaethem was incredible, but since then I haven't enjoyed his stuff as much, but based on his earlier work he's still one of my favorite authors

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Is there an audio version? I am happy to read it but this would be perfect for a podcast length piece. He could be the tech Dan Carlin!

<comment><USER5> > He could be the tech Dan Carlin!

I think Neal Stephenson might be a bit more accomplished than that, no offense to Dan Carlin.</comment></comment>


I replicated an $86M project in 57 lines of code - <AUTHOR> https://read.acloud.guru/how-i-replicated-an-86-million-project-in-57-lines-of-code-277031330ee9 <comment><USER2> I'm not a fan of the title, which is rather clickbaity. The author addresses that in the article near the bottom.

> To be fair, I have absolutely no clue what the $86M figure includes — nor > can I speak to the accuracy of my open source tool with no localized > training vs. the pilot BlueNet system.

While I have no doubt that the author's solution is a cleaner approach more suited to real government than the cronyism probably involved in that 86M figure, sensationalizing the difference doesn't help FOSS government advocates. 57 lines of code also doesn't include the libraries involved, so I feel like this is just meant to grab attention. It's pretty rad, but the way it's presented doesn't lend itself to credibility and adoption.

</comment><comment><USER3> Having worked for a traffic enforcement company. It is actually more than what meets the eye. ANPR and hardware is probably 5% of the actual infrastructure. Rest of it is generally a pipeline that most of time has to be retrofitted with their existing infrastructure. Lot of the cost into project management and aligning the spec understanding. So when someone says a project is worth $86 million it is not just the hardware and anpr but the whole pipeline integrated with various complicated government workflows, assuring SLO and various other guarantees

</comment><comment><USER4> This is the 4th time this post came up.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18681759](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18681759) [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21844164](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21844164) [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20774985](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20774985) (It was flagged here as a duplicate to 18681759)

Flagging it again.

</comment><comment><USER5> I agree that a lot of projects are too expensive but this is a little silly. There is more to a public project besides nailing together a few lines of code. You need documentation, maintenance, user training and lot of other stuff. The actual tech is usually the easy part.

</comment><comment><USER6> This is like saying I can replicate Google with:

SELECT * FROM websites WHERE title like '%dancing cats%';

<comment><USER7> Dude you've replicated alta vista at best. I'm going to take my google to market and dominate:

        SELECT * FROM websites WHERE LOWER(title) LIKE '%dancing cats%';

<comment><USER8> SELECT * from ad_buyers WHERE LOWER(title) LIKE '%dancing cats%';

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Medium blog post from 2017, could we add the year to the title please?

</comment><comment><USER10> [2017] previous discussion [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18681759](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18681759)

</comment><comment><USER11> On the first paragraph I had a feeling I have read that post before. Then I checked the date it was posted and baaaam, 2017.

</comment><comment><USER12> I'd just like to say something as someone that's sold/installed security cameras and software in both the private, gov and LE sectors.

Yes, there's a lot of "over priced" cameras (and software) out there that are pretty much no better than a $20 usb webcam. That includes the "security" aspect. In my experience (did it for about 3 years), most of these are the white labeled cameras. A majority from China, but Germany and the USA have put out some absolutely dogshit cameras as well. Especially when you factor in the price tag. At least with the Chinese ones, you get a discount for bottom barrel.

At the same time, there's something most people don't really understand about security cameras, longevity. These are like servers (and technically are). They're meant to run 24/7, without stop. Quite a few (if not all newly manufactured one at this point... I hope) can have weekly scheduled reboots, which I always recommend customers set. Most don't and actively refuse to allow a 2 minute block of downtime at an obscure hour. Camera manufacturers know that, and have to deal with it by having a product that just runs constantly.

Next up comes physical protection. You start getting into the $300+ per camera, it's supposed to survive someone hitting it with a baseball bat a few times. Then comes protection from weather and generally being able to survive 120 deg f outdoor conditions or -40 deg f conditions. Your standard camera and embedded board can't do that.

Now, there's a lot of asshole integrators that oversell to governments a lot. My career was primarily based around fixing the last integrator's complete fuck ups. I've seen how government agencies can be bent over and taken for a ride in that industry. Sad part is, none of these folks were even paid off. Just flat out duped. At least the ones I dealt with, I'm sure there's plenty that took money under the table.

On the software side, this is tricky. Yes, the basics of LPR can be done in a few lines of code. But there's more to law enforcement and government accountability, even private sector when developing a case to hand over to the police after an incident. The software company (video management system, VMS), has to guarantee the information has not been tampered. A chain of custody of information has to exist. Video from the VMS cannot be altered in anyway when exported or a lawyer can just wipe his ass with it and throw it out of court. Then there's usability, cross-platform support, driver support for a plethora of devices (there are hundreds of camera manufacturers with hundreds to thousands of SKUs each of devices that one software has to manage). And that's just the tip of the iceberg. I haven't even gotten into general security so it can't be hacked... at least easily (I think Genetec is still top dog in this, it's been 2 years, may have changed. They use to run really good bounty programs, don't know if they still do).

I think 86mil is still retarded as hell because there are plenty of off the shelf solutions that accomplish exactly what they want already, from 2+ years ago. Would only cost them a less than... maybe 8-10 mil in license fees. I don't know how big the city is or needs spec, so it'd take me a while to properly quote... eh, I also never did an international project. I don't know if some of the vendors I dealt with have a different pricing structure for Australia (I know some countries get charged more, for various reasons). So, there's that too.

So just saying, it's a much more complicated issue than most people imagine. The VMS companies do have a large workforce of programmers that have a job I'd never take and do need to be paid. I also over simplified quite a bit and left out other "fun" aspects of selling and deploying physical security... the reasons why I don't do it anymore. Hell, I didn't realize how much of a bitch of a problem it all was until I actually had to do it. I can't blame people for not knowing. Just... be aware, it's not a clear cut situation like this guy makes it out to be.</comment>


Robo-fish powered by battery 'blood' - <AUTHOR> https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-01951-8 <comment><USER2> Now if only someone would invent an energy-storing liquid to power our cars.</comment>


Ask HN: Seen any interesting NLP links? - <AUTHOR>

Dear HN,<p>I've been doing some reading on natural language technologies -- and it seems like there's a huge amount of potential there! Have you seen any killer apps? <comment><USER2> There's several companies working on sentiment analysis. The NYT had a roundup: [http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/24/technology/internet/24emot...](http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/24/technology/internet/24emotion.html)

Backtype is a YC company that probably does some NLP stuff on the backend. <http://www.backtype.com/>

Also, Powerset and Wolfram Alpha.

The most obvious killer app is sentiment analysis applied to product reviews. Overall I don't feel like NLP has game-changing applications yet since good data is structured data. The research is in place, though.</comment>


Aggressive code deprecation - <AUTHOR> https://dangoldin.com/2018/11/25/aggressive-code-deprecation/ <comment><USER2> This counts for me as typical destruction. Destructive types who like to destroy software projects either announce that cleanup which will everything make better "It's also a strong investment in keeping your code clean and light which improves future development speed" or that destruction is good.

"All references to the deprecated should be removed across all relevant repos" No one should ever know what was there before.

Fork a new major version and don't destroy the old version. Let others maintain that if you don't care anymore.

<comment><AUTHOR> Author here. The old code should still be in version control but there's very little reason to keep it in an active code base. It just adds complexity for someone actively developing.

I'm not saying destroy for the sake of destroying but more when you have made a choice to remove something do it to completion.</comment></comment>


Tech Recruiters that Pay to Contact you Through Email - <AUTHOR>

I'm starting up a website called http://www.ubercapable.com/professionals.html, for experienced tech professionals that want a buffer between them and recruiters or people who are looking for tech co-founders. It's currently in beta and active. The way it works is when you sign up we create an email address for you. And when anyone emails you at this email address they will have to pay certain price to reach you. We will then send you a notification in which you could accept or deny this request.<p>When you accept this request we will link you and requester up to engage in conversation with them and the money they paid to talk will be waiting for you. <comment><USER2> This service is awesome. I can earn passive money from getting stupid recruiter mails. Awesome!

To be honest: 1) adding another layer between me and my employer makes no sense 2) recruiters pay for mailing me? Good luck with this. Every recruiter paying money to tech guys for mailing them are not the kind of recruiter which I would like to use.

<comment><AUTHOR> I appreciate your honest feedback and we are constantly finding ways to improve our messaging. To address your concerns:

1) This site is for experienced developers who already have a job and interested in opportunities but not looking. That layer is only for recruiters that have serious positions they are offering geared towards your profile.

2) Recruiters already pay to mail you, the difference in this case is that you get money for your time talking to them.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How do I find ML consulting clients? - <AUTHOR> I want to make the move from in-house machine learning work to working as a consultant. I have a good grasp of how much I should charge, but I'm at a loss for how to find clients. My expertise is in medical computer vision but I have experience working with many other data types. Should I limit myself to one small niche?<p>What is a good way to start finding clients? I have attempted to make a list of potential companies from LinkedIn, but it also occurs to me that companies I find through LinkedIn are more likely to already have a sizeable ML/AI team. That in turn means it is less likely they have a need to contract some of their ML work. <comment><USER2> A company with an inhouse team of ML/AI workers is the best candidate for consulting because it already values ML/AI and has a substantial budget but limited capabilities (because existing staff doesn't know everything (and neither do you)). In addition, those organizations contain people in the industry with whom to network. Person A at company 1 used to work with Person B at company 2 and Person B has moved on to company 3.

Even more important the worst thing you can do is give yourself excuses to avoid the possibility of rejection. Your choices are either no work (unless there's a miracle) or facing the possibility of rejection.

Consulting is a long term business. Relationships matter. Nearly every potential client won't have work right now. The best clients already have consultants. Consulting is about digging up work more than it is about doing the work...you can always hire people less capable of digging up work for that.

A contemporary idea in sales is to maximize the number of rejections. Cold call for ten or twenty rejections a day. Not one success per month.</comment>


James Dyson's newest creation: the Dyson Air Multiplier (without Fan Blades) - <AUTHOR> http://www.unplggd.com/unplggd/air-water-quality/dyson-air-multiplier-a-bladeless-fan-098362

<comment><USER2> Dyson does it again. Its a plain old coanda air mover like we've had in the paint shop for 20 years. Dress it up, go on and on about super-duper patented technology and resell a freakin' _fan_ for $300. He's definitely brilliant (for some value thereof).

Edit: Here's one. They look like this:

<http://www.thermofluids.co.uk/mover.php>

<comment><USER3> I wonder if you can get a CPU cooler out of this? An extremely sexy, very high priced one, of course.

<comment><USER2> There's nothing at all fancy about an air mover like this. You can make one on a lathe in about 20 minutes with a few bits of roundstock scrap. You do still need an air source to use it. In this dyson thing, there's just a hidden blower in the base. In a computer, it would allow you to use a much larger, separate source to cool your cpu, which could be useful. It would rock even more to use a vortex cooler...

Edit: Doh! Cited above while I was typing! Great minds and all that yap...

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

<comment><USER4> wow if it actually has a blower in it then it's pretty much pure gimmick! Thanks for outing this!

edit: I should qualify my skepticism by saying that the vacuum cleaners are amazing and if I had carpets I'd own one.

<comment><USER5> What's amazing about them? Consumer Reports never rates them that highly.

<comment><USER6> Actually Dyson usually rates far higher in consumer tests than bagged vacuums, and it usually rates slightly higher than most bag-less vacuums.

Vacuum ratings are generally low to begin with, yet still get purchased. All portable vacuum cleaners fall flat on their face in terms of convenience compared with central vac, however not many people are stupid enough to pay thousands of dollars for a slight improvement in convenience.

<comment><USER7> Having had both central vac and a Dyson luggable, I vastly prefer the Dyson. Carrying around the 30 feet of tubing for the central vac was hardly convenient at all.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Wow.

Anything that brings my dirty, chaotic, and often-frustrating existence closer to the orderly, bright, and shiny world of the Jetsons: +1

Can he fix my fucking Roomba next? It rolled through a stray cat turd again.

<comment><USER9> Sorry, not even Jetsons technology can solve cat-related problems.

<comment><USER3> Actually, right in the opening of The Jetsons, aren't there a few hitherto- unknown pet-related problems?

<comment><USER10> Zappa?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The Dyson Airblade hand dryer is the thing I really like (<http://www.dysonairblade.com/homepage.asp>). I used it in an airport and it worked great.

<comment><USER6> Agreed, one of the malls near me has it . . . however they then go and have a push door on the men's lavatory, which is just asinine.

It works amazingly well though, especially compared to a traditional hand dryer, in that you can actually feel it _push_ the water off your hands.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> As I sit here, looking at the dirty fan blades inside the cheap plastic fan we have next to our bed, I realize this man has the resources and business genius to see opportunity where I only see annoyance.

<comment><USER2> Keep in mind that this device still has a fan in it. He just calls it an "impeller" and hides it in the base. Its still a blower with blades. The fancy wing shape circle is just a duct to direct the blower's air stream out the top.

<comment><USER12> he should just replace the hidden fan with a smaller version of the air amplifier... and then have another smaller air amplifier for the blower in the blower, eventually he could minimize it into an ultra tiny electrostatic air mover.

<comment><USER2> Yeah, I didn't quite grasp how turning a small volume of fast moving air into a larger volume of slow moving air maps to the concept of "amplification" either.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> A better introduction to the device:

[http://gizmodo.com/5379890/dyson-air-multiplier-review- makin...](http://gizmodo.com/5379890/dyson-air-multiplier-review- making-a-300-fan-takes-cojones)

</comment><comment><USER14> "Supposedly this new design not only eliminates the need for fan blades"

No idea what a "mixed flow impeller" is, but on the picture it very much looks like it's just a fan in the base of the device.

But hey, it's the same technology used in jets. Effectively, you can put your own jet in your house for less than 2000$.

<comment><USER6> Just spray propane into the air intake in the base and light up the air outlet in the fan apparatus . . . I'm _sure_ it would be safe.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> It seems kind of odd for a UK company to launch a table fan at the start of our winter. Summer's been so hot here too - I'm sure they'd have made a killing if they'd got this in the shops 6 months ago. Alas, this is the kind of novelty product that, by the time it gets next summer, everyone will have realized is a bit crap and overpriced.

<comment><USER16> Adding a heater would be an interesting mod.

<comment><USER6> Just put propane into the air intake and light the exhaust, instant afterburner . . . possibly instant death too if you sit on the wrong side of it, or if you set your propane tank on fire.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> The headline should read: Dyson kills Darth Vader.</comment>


Ask HN: Do you have problems solving Google reCAPTCHA? - <AUTHOR> About once a month I must login to a website where login form is protected by Google reCAPTCHA mechanism. I did not care much about this, because it took about 20-30 seconds to solve. Acceptable for me. And of course it added some protection against bots.
But last month it started driving me crazy. Now I have 10+ tries until it accepts me as a human. I'm clicking images for about 5-10 minutes just to login to a website! I'm clicking all roads, all road signs, all cars and still failing the test. I live in Europe and the funniest thing is after 2-3 failed attempts I'm starting to get images from more exotic places like China. I have very big problems problem with distinguishing between road signs and ads in China because I don't know how road signs look there and what is written. So failed combo just continues...
As a web developer I really like this mechanism, but as a user it became the wall hard to get through (at least for me).
I'm wondering is just me? Maybe someone else have similar problem with solving reCAPTCHA? <comment><USER2> Yes, I'd say 1 out of 3 times I fail the first test, and have to solve another identification task. I have to do these quick often because of the VPN service I use, which triggers Google searches to use their anti-DDOS measures.

The puzzles where there is a single image divided into cells, often I find myself not sure if a cell should be selected or not. They may ask "select cells with street signs" and there will be a cell with a small corner of the sign shown. Should I select that? Technically it _does_ show a part of the sign, but I honestly don't know if clicking those leads to successes or failures.

Additionally, ones that show multiple images and you need to select all images that contain some object, I struggle with ones where there _might_ be a sliver of a car, or storefront, or street, within the view. Should those be selected? They obviously aren't the subject of the photo, but again, technically they are a part of the image. Again, I don't know what Google is looking for with these questions.

<comment><AUTHOR> Once I was watching my dad solving puzzle. He got road sign that was hidden in 95% behind leaves of tree. We discussed for a minute should we select this or not. He selected. It was accepted. Puzzle solved. Then I thought it's ridiculous.

Maybe someday someone writes a book "How to solve reCAPTCHA? Guide for beginners".

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Often, if confronted by captcha/reCaptcha, I will simply bounce. I'm tired of the degrading experience of being used -- for no compensation -- as a human robot to train Google's image recog. algorithms.

Even worse is when it gets used by a site that /already knows I'm a human/ \-- because I've had to jump through KYC hoops or for similar reasons. It's reached the point where such abuse of my time by a site is strong cause for moving to a competitor (and there's /always/ a competitor!)

"As a Web Developer" please, PLEASE reconsider using Google's Invasion of Humanity Device.

<comment><AUTHOR> Do you know any alternatives?</comment></comment>


The Awkward Leader - <AUTHOR> http://blog.idonethis.com/post/35313330535/the-awkward-leader

<comment><USER2> The premise that "information gathering" is a manager's most important task is a pretty interesting assumption underlying this post.

I recommend reading Andy's book "High Output Management" for more insight into this assumption.

</comment><comment><USER3> Essentially a leader is not defined by your ability in doing something, it's defined by how well you are able to utilize your team's ability to achieve something that can't be done by one person.

</comment><comment><USER4> An analogy to this could be having a chat box available on your website (olark for example). Let your users know you're always free for an informal chat.</comment>


Run-of-the-mill startup seeks mediocre designer - <AUTHOR> http://jobs.37signals.com/jobs/7759

<comment><USER2> From now on, this sentence will appear in all the job descriptions I write:

> We'd like someone who isn't all "durrrr" when they look at Photoshop.

</comment><comment><USER3> Gotta have fun somewhere in life, why not a job ad?</comment>


More About "Magic" in Rails - <AUTHOR> http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.com/2009/07/more-about-magic-in-rails.html

<comment><USER2> I like his point about the phrase "right now". I've often used the expression myself when talking about the progress of a web development project.</comment>


FCC says it has no documentation of cyberattack it claims happened - <AUTHOR> http://thehill.com/policy/technology/342971-fcc-says-it-has-no-documentation-of-cyberattack-that-it-claims-happened <comment><USER2> Another agency taking the well worn path which Trump and his staff have made into an art form - just lie.

The Trump base doesn't care. The Republicans in Congress may care but they are too concerned with repealing ACA and not getting primaried and the Democrats are unable to form a coherent strategy.</comment>


Accelerated Mobile Pages Project - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml <comment><USER2> Why, would you need a javascript library to help you deliver fast static content? This seems like a solved problem one that we have been able to deal with for a decade of slow clients, latency and bandwidth limits. But since it has Google origins it will be popular.</comment>