NumPy receives first ever funding, thanks to Moore Foundation - happy-go-lucky https://www.numfocus.org/blog/numpy-receives-first-ever-funding-thanks-to-moore-foundation/ <comment><AUTHOR> Wow, I'm surprised that this is the first funding they've ever got.

It wouldn't be a big stretch to say that 90% of quantitative hedge funds use Numpy in some fashion, whether its directly, or via a library that sits on top of it like pandas or tensorflow.

I can't think of a more ubiquitous library in the financial space, maybe QuicFix ([http://www.quickfixengine.org/](http://www.quickfixengine.org/))...

Maybe numpy's problem is visibility?

Possibly it does its job so well that people don't know they are using it when they use library libraries like scikit learn and Pandas?

<comment><USER2> I didn't know it needed funding until I read this.

It's just an assumed resource in quant finance, like air or water. You do realise you're using it, though. When you're using scikit or pandas it's very normal to do "import numpy as np". And you get the odd np.nan reminding you.

Do people still use QuickFix? I dropped it years ago, it was noticeably slower than alternatives when I tested it.

<comment><USER3> Tons of people still use QuickFIX. As I think you know, people very concerned with speed try to avoid using any kind of FIX for trading but still use QuickFIX for things outside the hot path such as drop copy (duplicate stream of trades for reliability).

QuickFIX is open source too, so you can make it somewhat faster without abandoning it. I did.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> It's great that the Moore Foundation provided funding for open source data science tools in Python. Good for them!

That being said, I do wonder if numpy is the most appropriate recipient. In my experience with data science, the tool that would benefit the most is not numpy, but pandas. While data scientists rarely use numpy directly, every data scientist I know who uses pandas says they are constantly having to google how to do things due to a somewhat confusing and inconsistent API. I use pandas at work every day and I'm always looking stuff up, particularly when it comes to confusing multi-indexes. In contrast, I rarely use R's dplyr at work, but the API is so natural that I hardly ever need to look things up. I would love if pandas could make a full-throated commitment to a more dplyr-like API.

Nothing against pandas -- I know the devs are selflessly working very hard hard. It's just that it seems there is more bang for the buck there.

<comment><USER5> If you look at the design documents for pandas 2 there is a good illustration of how a lot of pain points in pandas 1 spring from numpy ( [https://pandas- dev.github.io/pandas2/internal-architecture.h...](https://pandas- dev.github.io/pandas2/internal-architecture.html)). I think any significant development effort numpy would probably greatly benefit both libraries.

Will have to check out dplyr :) love to see how they master the magic that is multi-indexes.

<comment><USER6> In many cases, the use of multi-indexes in Pandas is (I think) a result of culture/style or expectation that the cells of a dataframe should have scalar values. If that would change and it became common to have nested dataframes, the use of multi-indexes would diminish.

The tooling to support nested dataframes (and maybe even lists) is simple to create, It can even be a third party library. I find that multi-indices though may be an accurate conceptual way of thinking about certain data, they tend to be practically more inconvenient than nesting the dataframes. In all cases I have encountered only single level of nesting is required.

<comment><USER7> If you're excited about non-scalar values in DataFrames, you should take a look at xarray ([http://xarray.pydata.org](http://xarray.pydata.org)), which implements a very similar idea in its Dataset class.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Just to note that if you know of anyone who is interested in working on NumPy and potentially to move to UC Berkeley then tell them they probably should contact Nathaniel – if NumPy got funding they'll likely hire developers/community manager/technical writer ... etc . UC BIDS is a fantastic place to work at, and Nathaniel is an extraordinary person to work with. I'm going to assume there is also some opportunity for remote work.

</comment><comment><USER9> Really surprised there wasn't already funding for this.

Numpy is an amazing library, and it's basically Python's "killer app." The fact that you can seamlessly blend numerical/data science computing with more general web applications is what makes Python great.

</comment><comment><USER10> Imagine if .1% of wall street profits from shops that use numpy were donated to the project. Or some similar scheme for the other OSS projects used for profit by large firms.

<comment><USER11> Why would they do that? Numpy gave it to them. It's theirs now. "Screw you nerds" is their opinion. Don't like that? Then dual license. Copyleft and a commercial license. They can pay, break the law, or go leech off something else.

<comment><USER12> The funny thing is, open source projects _scramble_ to offer the most permissive license possible. It's either BSD/MIT or go home. I've seen people shit on projects that use copyleft (GPL, even LGPL, etc).

Sounds a little schizophrenic to complain about the (lack of) money at the same time?

I personally think this may be connected to the "academic" origins and mindset of much OSS. Everything's "free" in that world, which can make a software's transition into the world with real economic constraints and sustainability challenges somewhat painful.

<comment><USER13> I would think that's because most open source projects don't start with money in mind, so their first goal is users. And as a user I can tell you GPL or even dual-licensing frustrates me, because it _limits my options_.

Consider: today I might be working on FOSS. But maybe tomorrow a friend asks me to help him with his (small) business, by e.g. adding a little bit of automation. Suddenly, all my knowledge and experience of GPL-ed libraries goes to waste, as I won't be able to use any of that to help my friend.

Given two equivalent libraries, one on GPL and one on MIT, I'll always go for the one on MIT. MIT, BSD, etc. seem to be the libraries that give you most _options_ (I'd say freedom, but that's not how GPL sees freedom) while still maintaining the integrity of the library itself. Those are the licenses that best and at the same time satisfy the needs of developers who are not in it for money, and users who don't want to waste their brain cycles on going through possible legal scenarios around all their actual and imagined use cases.

<comment><USER14> > Suddenly, all my knowledge and experience of GPL-ed libraries goes to waste, > as I won't be able to use any of that to help my friend.

Help me understand this please. In what legal way is GPL obstructing you as opposed to say an MIT or a BSD license.

GPL license has noting against use in a proprietary setting, its only if GPL'ed software is being sold/distributed, that it is required that the source and the changes be made available as GPL. Google uses GPL'ed software all the time and is far from the only one.

<comment><USER13> Last time I checked, the GPL, as opposed to LGPL or GPL with Classpath Extension, basically forced your product to become open source.

<comment><USER14> Only if you are distributing/selling the software to others. If you and your friend are using it as a company internal tool, GPL has no issues with that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I wonder what they plan to use it for. Numpy kind of seems finished already.

<comment><USER16> That's not to say there aren't things NumPy doesn't do that it _could_. How about lazy evaluation or even just matrix chain multiplication? Either could save a _lot_ of computation.

<comment><USER7> Matrix chain multiplication was added to NumPy recently, see numpy.linalg.multi_dot: [https://docs.scipy.org/doc/numpy-1.13.0/reference/generated/...](https://docs.scipy.org/doc/numpy-1.13.0/reference/generated/numpy.linalg.multi_dot.html)

<comment><USER16> Hooray! Still, it's not exactly transparent in a way that you could get with lazy array evaluation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I could have sworn that Continuum had gov't funding for numpy development, but maybe that was just for Blaze?

<comment><USER18> [https://www.continuum.io/blog/news/continuum-wins-darpa- xdat...](https://www.continuum.io/blog/news/continuum-wins-darpa-xdata- funding)

It was blaze and bokeh. The description of blaze given in the article is pretty out of date at this point.

<comment><USER19> Continuum co-founder here and previous NumPy developer. We received funding for Bokeh and also explorations around scalable "NumPy-like" work. The efforts around Blaze produced Numba, Dask, and Datashape as well as a more limited in scope library called Blaze.

While we continue to develop those things, we are working on taking the core ideas in NumPy and creating a set of lower-level C and Python libraries that could be used by pandas, xarray, Numba, dask, arrow, and potentially NumPy: [https://github.com/plures](https://github.com/plures). This work is not directly related to the NumPy funding.

<comment><USER17> Thanks for the clarification, Travis, that's pretty exciting to hear.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Are they going to make Numpy work on GPU? There is a library called Cupy (from Chainer) that does that but not quite well enough. In fact on my attempt to swap Numpy with Cupy, my program ran slower.

[https://github.com/cupy/cupy](https://github.com/cupy/cupy)

<comment><USER21> If you are looking for performance optimizations beyond Numpy (GPU or CPU) take a look at Numba by Continuum

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> They've come a long way without funding. Good for them. Mathworks taking notice, I'm sure.

</comment><comment><USER23> You can donate here. [http://www.numpy.org/](http://www.numpy.org/) [https://www.flipcause.com/secure/cause_pdetails/MzUwMQ==](https://www.flipcause.com/secure/cause_pdetails/MzUwMQ==)

</comment><comment><USER24> Slightly off topic but you can use most of the Python stack from MATLAB since version 2014b. The syntax is a little funny but it works well outside of ABI mismatches in shared libs.

</comment><comment><USER25> Wasn't Google funding the lead dev on NumPy for a while?

<comment><USER19> No. I'm not aware of this happening.

NumPy built on Numeric which was primarily written by Jim Hugunin while he was a grad student at MIT. While I was a professor at BYU, I wrote the the core of NumPy with a lot of community input -- outside of my regular job. I sold a book "Guide to NumPy" for a while that I used to replace the grants I should have been writing and pay for a grad student to help write iterative solvers for SciPy. Chuck Harris joined the NumPy effort early and has been steadily contributing ever since without direct funding. Many others have contributed volunteer time since then.

A major reason I started Continuum was to help create places where people could get paid to write open-source. I am happy to say we have been doing this for 5 years though mostly outside core NumPy itself (Numba, Dask, Bokeh, conda, etc.) We are working to support many more open source projects more generally -- and our devs have now made additional contributions to NumPy itself. We have a thriving 40 person Community Innovation team at Continuum supporting many open source projects. I expect this funding to help bring more new people to the NumPy development ecosystem.

The community also started NumFOCUS at this same time to be a community-run foundation that could be a focal point for donations and support to projects including NumPy.

Nathaniel Smith wrote a great proposal and put the effort into securing this funding. It is real work to secure funding. I look forward to NumPy getting better for the benefit of all because of this work.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Congratulations!! Nice work...looking for lots more math libraries :-D!

</comment><comment><USER27> Does anyone have a link to the text of the proposal?

</comment><comment><USER28> I really wish I could help!

<comment><USER29> What's stopping you?

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> About time.

</comment><comment><USER31> $645020 is good for what? 4 jr developers or 3 slightly experienced developers, working full time on numpy for 2 years?

<comment><USER32> What's your point with this post?

<comment><USER33> free/open/libre software takes time and skill to create. more companies should probably be paying some kind of support or at least donating since they are no doubt using it to extract some kind of value from the market.

<comment><USER34> This is a charitable foundation that gives scientific grants, not a company.

<comment><USER33> my point stands. more public money should be going to free/libre projects too.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


This is why you sanitize your inputs - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rJta42I1YQA

<comment><USER2> haha. can you put javascript into dns txt records? very creative...</comment>


The robots are coming and will terminate your jobs - <AUTHOR> http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/0ca021c0-680b-11e3-a905-00144feabdc0.html#axzz2osNJ24m5 <comment><USER2> it's quite annoying</comment>


Inside the Anonymous Hacking File on the Steubenville 'Rape Crew' - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlanticwire.com/national/2013/01/inside-anonymous-hacking-file-steubenville-rape-crew/60502/

<comment><USER2> I'll never understand the idolatry of athletes. Football in America, soccer in Europe, hockey in Canada. If sports fans spent as much playing sports versus watching it, the world (especially America) would be in better health.

<comment><USER3> My thought is that it is a manifestation of a tendency for tribalism that was selected for during the hundreds of thousands of years before modern society made the concept largely obsolete.

That would at least explain why people affiliate with teams based on geography, which doesn't make sense to me otherwise.

 _(There have probably been thousands of proper studies on the topic. I have read none of them.)_

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The big pain point is not the rapist kids, but the adult cover-up. OK, there are charges for the rape and there will be a (hopefully) just trial for that.

But what would it take to put behind bars the justice system adults involved in the numerous alleged instances of covering up ? Their (alleged) crime is even more disgusting and it directly facilitates numerous other rape cases that didn't go to trial; they are harming more girls than the footballers themselves.

</comment><comment><USER5> Since people tweeted about it and posted video/pictures that presumably crosses state borders, can the FBI get involved to prosecute these players? It seems clear the locals are all in cahoots.

<comment><USER6> My goodness yes. If the feds get involved, the Mann act will almost certainly have them incarcerated even if actual rape isn't proven.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> "As you are probably aware, this web site was recently hacked into illegally numerous times by a _terrorist group_."

Wow, really? If this guy turns out to be guilty of possession, this is a glaring example of how meaningless the term "terrorist" has become in the USA.

<comment><USER8> Random website authors in Steubenville, Ohio are using the term "terrorist" hyperbolically. This tells us something about America. Specifically: that random website operators in parts of America are, as statistics have long assured us, dumb.

<comment><USER7> >this is a glaring example of

This instance of the abuse of the term "terrorist" is _an example of_ , not _proof of_.

Further the author isn't using the term hyperbolically, he is making a direct claim. Namely, that the people who "hacked" his site _are terrorists_.

<comment><USER9> By that definition so is the FBI and the police since they might frighten people.

Hacking is not terrorism.

<comment><USER7> This is my point when I say, in my original post, that:

>this is a glaring example of how meaningless the term "terrorist" has become in the USA.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I think your missing a huge opportunity. Help someone grow up in the way you didn't get to. Minimise and prevent the bad things that happened to you from happening to them. Do it the best way you can. If this is the only reason you're not having children, it seems a shame as your experiences can be used to better others lives.

Edit: argh, sorry, this was a reply to damn, who's comment is below and had me feeling rather depressed!

<comment><USER11> If that's your motive, then adopt. There are perfectly fine children, languishing in child welfare systems, who need good people to show them how to be decent humans. The world has no lack of humans, which would require us to keep creating new ones -- let's take care of the ones we have already.

In my opinion, opting for biological procreation fails the Categorical Imperative (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Categorical_imperative>), thereby making that option unethical. Common-sensically, again, what is the rationalization for choosing to create a new human when you have the power to rescue a condemned innocent? Almost every answer reduces to vanity.

<comment><USER12>
      > Common-sensically, again, what is the rationalization
      > for choosing to create a new human when you have
      > the power to rescue a condemned innocent?

Rescuing a condemned innocent is difficult. Sometimes moreso than having a child of your own. Children in the system tend to be special needs of some sort whether it's behavioural issues, learning disabilities, or mentally challenged. Having your own child comes with such risks, but you're already invested by the time those risks bear out.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Here seems to be the definitive source for the information concerning this incident: <http://localleaks.blogs.ru/>

<comment><USER14> I'm glad we have Anonymous. I hope they bring a world of hurt to those involved in the rape and cover up.

<comment><USER15> I don't know if you'd say that when they inevitably manage to collapse a case.

Clearly, it is a good thing that Anonymous is drawing attention to this case: going by the Atlantic's and the NYTime's reporting, there's a lot of suspect stuff going on and it should absolutely be investigated by people without any skin in the game.

 _However_ , Anonymous are not lawyers. Releasing potential evidence into the public eye is _hugely problematic_ , because it may in the end not be admissible.

Suppose there exists a piece of evidence that appears to absolutely and totally prove the guilt of the accused. However, this evidence is inadmissible in court (this happens more than you might think). The jury wouldn't get to see or hear about this evidence. Now, imagine this key piece of evidence is leaked before the trial by somebody like Anonymous. Suddenly, it's everywhere, all over the news. The defence team are going to have a field day: it's mistrial time. Their client can't possibly receive a fair trial.

So I am in two minds about this: on the one hand, it's undoubtedly a good thing that attention is being drawn to this case. This would have been unlikely to happen on such a large scale if Anonymous hadn't gotten involved.

On the other, if Anonymous keep going down this road they _will_ cause a mistrial. And that's going to result in the complete opposite of what they're trying to achieve.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I'm curious who KnightSec is. This seems to be their first attack and they are using this name quite liberally.

I'm curious if they'll turn into another LuzSec.

</comment><comment><USER17> If you have a daughter this is so scary! Thanks for posting.

<comment><USER18> High school football players are treated like Gods in small-town America, and are allowed a shocking amount of leeway in terms of behavior. It's sad to see people turn so irrational over a game of teenage boys knocking one another over and playing with a ball. I never personally understood the fascination, which certainly didn't do me any social favors when I was in high school.

<comment><USER17> What is amazing is that the adults in this whole tragedy are acting irresponsible and like kids. These adults also hold position of power like police officers and prosecutors.

<comment><USER19> I wish I was amazed by adults being irresponsible and immature.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Low-code HTML forms that submit directly to your email address - <AUTHOR> https://dev.to/mailslurp/low-code-html-forms-that-submit-directly-to-your-email-address-free-serverless-forms-44b4 <comment><USER2> Simple, I like it!

I did similar with my project [https://jogly.io](https://jogly.io)

It across form and webhook submissions and pipes it to slack and your email.</comment>


At 88, doctor pursues a long-ignored treatment for strokes, heart attacks - <AUTHOR> https://www.statnews.com/2018/04/06/victor-gurewich-harvard-stroke-heart-attack/ <comment><USER2> What this story leaves out is why we are moving away from thrombolytics - besides them kinda sucking.

Once a clot has matured they tend to be useless, which is part of why there's a solid upper cap on time to administration. You cross a line where any clot they're likely to bust isn't one you want to bust. So, a window of a couple of hours. Urokinase doesn't change that, to my knowledge.

Surgical removal of the clot, on the other hand, has recently been shown to offer enormous benefit to at-risk tissue (tissue not yet dead but in the watershed area) 24 hours later, without risk of hitting the wrong clot. It's no miracle either, but evidence is piling up that it's got more Pros and fewer Cons.

Thus, no one really following armchair hypotheses (one old non RCT trial not withstanding) about combining two increasingly undesirable drugs.

I respect the guy's thought and effort, and have to admit he might be right about their combined effectiveness, but this article leaves out a lot of the context as to -why- this isn't getting attention. Writing a hagiography-by- omission is below what I've come to expect from statnews.

<comment><USER3> Whilst angioplasty or clot retrieval is the optimal treatment (have not seen evidence for clot retrieval for strokes in longer timeframes but will be interested to jump into some research tomorrow) in countries where there are enormous distances between tertiary referral centres (ie Australia) thrombolytic agents are still strongly used.

Our ambulances are equipped with r-tPA or similar (there is a tendency to avoid streptokinase as rural/indigenous populations have high exposure to streptococcus/hx rheumatic fever and therefore high risk of added complications) and in the event of STEMIs can be administered en route to ED. Similarly many peripheral sites will administer tenecteplase or similar in Emergency Departments as there are almost no sites that are set up to perform out-of-hours angioplasty once you are out of the major cities; even less chance for neuro-radiological intervention, I think there are only 6 or 7 sites in the country and they are all in major cities.

If his research does bear fruit, I could see it immediately becoming the standard of care in Australia outside of major centres

<comment><USER4> I'm a volunteer ambulance officer in Western Australia. We certainly don't carry thrombolytic agents. What we do have though is a protocol for getting stroke patients (with good predicted outcomes) into a helicopter or fixed-wing aircraft ASAP so they can get to a hospital with a thrombectomy (clot retrieval) service. If called promptly, then there shouldn't be many patients that we can't get to the right care within a suitable timeframe.

<comment><USER5> > "If called promptly, then there shouldn't be many patients that we can't get > to the right care within a suitable timeframe."

I worked with stroke centers, doctors, etc in building stroke access systems, and that doesn't fly with reality.

Number 1, is that its hard for patients to recognize they are having a stroke. so "If called promptly" is a bit of unrealistic idealism.

Although they say 4 hours, tPA administered after 1 hour has lost most of its benefit, and places that can do thrombectomy 24/7 (in US dedicated stroke centers) is not numerous. You are losing a lot of that hour just for time for the helicopter to warm up, find a spot, and land + your ambulance time getting to /stabilizing the patient.

I'm sure the patients on your beat had suitable access, but that's a bit of selectivity bias no? In the US, although the majority of the population is within the golden hour, there are still a ton of population that does not have access to a stroke center. I find it extremely hard to believe that this is not the case in Australia - where I have heard stories of people getting a finger cut off and having to drive 3 hours to the nearest hospital.

<comment><USER6> Remember that Australia is ridiculously urbanised. About 80% of Western Australians live in Perth. Contrasted to the US, the most remote Australians must be a lot further from a referral hospital, but the median Australian might actually be closer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Here's an alternate and more informative headline for anyone who wants a bit more detail rather than clicking through and trying to skim for the needle in a digital haystack:

>>> "At 88, doctor pursues clot-busting medication combination to aid in treatment of heart attacks and strokes"

<comment><USER8> This is a much better title. Considering that the now favored course of action is surgery, a potent drug combo would be my choice. Once you start cutting, Docs often want to keep cutting.

<comment><USER9> The favored course of action is interventional radiology and those guys like to get done and move onto the next patient to rake in the dough.

<comment><USER10> Actually, its interventional cardiology for heart attacks and neurointerventional surgery/interventional neuroradiology(NIR) for strokes. (Not IR which cover non-neurological and non-cardiological interventional procedures).

I'm a NIR and most of us are not paid per surgery/intervention. Also these interventions tend to be loss leaders in terms of hospital reimbursements. Funding for stroke centres can be profitable but that's a very long discussion.

In addition, at least 7 randomized clinical trials have shown the benefit of thrombectomy in acute stroke (actually something of a modern medical technological miracle).

<comment><USER9> I find that surprising. What's the typical compensation model? Salary or hourly?

<comment><USER10> Salary (unless you're moonlighting - which is less common, and overall less attractive).

Why do you presume that our intentions are nefarious when you have no idea what you're talking about?

<comment><USER9> I don't at all presume nefarious intentions. As if physicians don't try to make money. My original comment was a tongue in cheek defense of the status quo because I took offense at the comment that surgeons just like to keep cutting. Sure, I'm "just" a veterinarian, but I like to cut as little as possible.

I do know that doctors like to keep it moving. Surgeons like to start early and finish early. Nobody wants to get bogged down in a specific procedure. As far as profitability (or cost recovery, whatever euphemism) is concerned, doing several short procedures beats one longer procedure, even when surgery time is billed by the minute.

You ignore the fact that many doctors leave the strict employ of the hospital for a private practice that still bills through the hospital. While they are still salaried, they also get a profit share, usually divvied out on productivity. There is no one model. But you're right, I have no idea how it's typically done in IR, NIR, IC etc.

<comment><USER10> For the sake of completeness, I'll expand:

It's rarely up to the interventionalist if and when they will treat a stroke. There are clear guidelines on treating these patients (which mostly take place at comprehensive stroke centres), mostly defined by the neurology service, which functions somewhat independently. These guidelines have been expanding as newer evidence has shown a role in wider time windows but this point remains the same. There is very little opportunity for an individual interventionalist to increase his patient volume independently (at least for ischemic stroke).

I agree in principle with most of the points you make, although I think perverse incentives are largely a function of the US healthcare system in general rather than the domain of any particular specialty.

In specific relation to the original article, I'm extremely doubtful that combing two anti-thrombotic agents would be a miraculous therapeutic regime for treating stroke but I'd be happy to be proved wrong by a legitimate trial. However, I'd worry that we'd be sacrificing patients that could otherwise be treated if we assigned them to an arm of a trial that precludes established therapy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> For me, it was the persistence of the researcher -- well into his ninth decade -- that caught my eye, rather than the somewhat arcane details of the thrombolytic therapy that he's been pursuing.

A strong sense of purpose seems to be a factor in health and longevity. Is it just good fortune that allows some people to develop that sense of purpose, or can it be consciously and effectively nurtured?

<comment><USER11> Hell yeah. I wish I'll be that persistent when I get old. But then again, relaxing and traveling the world might be nice, too. Well, we'll see

<comment><USER12> Travel the world now, it gets harder as you age.

<comment><USER13> Travel is overrated, and environmentally catastrophic. Enjoy where you live, or if you don't like it, move.

<comment><USER14> Travel is fairly trivial environmentally. Having a long commute by car is worse than traveling around the world by air every year which is extremely uncommon.

On average a passenger mile on a modern jet uses significantly less fuel than driving that same mile.

<comment><USER15> Erm no, since you don'r fly a plane for 5 miles usually. Plane flights are by nature long distance and consume way more than your yearly car consumption even if you have a 2 hours commute every day.

<comment><USER14> Sure, but it is reasonable to consider a long trip vs a longer commute in terms of lifestyle and environmental costs. At which point you care about total fuel costs not direct equivalency.

747 burns approximately 5 gallons of fuel per mile and holds 568 people. They are over 70% full on average which works out to:

568 x .7+ / 5 ~= 80+ MPG. At the equator the world is 24,901 miles ~= 300 gallons at worst though most most people consider around the world to be US > EU > Asia > US which is shorter than that.

Edit: US average is 75mpg per passenger in 2014 though longer trips are above that. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_economy_in_aircraft](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_economy_in_aircraft)

On the other hand at 3 gallons (which is far from extreme) / day x 48 x 5 = 720 gallons ignoring all other driving.

PS: On top of that for longer trips aircraft tend to take more direct routes. You can't just drive from NY to LA on a strait line which significantly reduces cars effective MPG.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> That's brilliant, using heart attacks to treat strokes

<comment><USER17> At first I thought oh I guess the symptoms aren't as awful then I realized you interpreted the title differently from me... Wow yeah I guess they hit the title length limit for HN and had to get creative.

<comment><USER18> Couldn't OP have replaced the last comma with an ampersand?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> uggh, i need to use summarizers. Several paragraphs in and it finally said the cocktail was a combination of tpa and urokinase precursor

<comment><USER20> I seriously couldn't get past the first full page. Someone needed to give me an idea of what his treatment was. I love that he's old and still doing something. The comments here tell me it's somehow using heart attacks to treat strokes, but this thing had so much crap before giving me a detail I could process.

I hope he saves more people and lives to 120, but yeah, summary... or at least slightly better writing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> >What if tPA worked like the starter motor that turns on a car, and urokinase was the gasoline that ran it?

No comment on the underlying science, but I will express my continued frustration with popsci writers and their counterproductive analogies. It's especially unhelpful when it's wrong on the dumbed-down end. A starter motor does not run on gasoline. It's an electric motor that runs off the battery.

<comment><USER22> That's the whole point of the analogy. From the next paragraph:

> When a clot forms, tPA in the bloodstream is quickly recruited to the site > to begin dissolving it. But too much of a clot-buster could lead to bleeds, > so once the process is sparked, the body rapidly clears out tPA. Urokinase > comes along, carried on the surface of platelets and certain white blood > cells, to finish the job.

tPA kicks off the process, and once it's started, urokinase does the rest. I don't know the biochemistry in enough detail to say whether this is a really good metaphor (can urokinase only be activated if tPA has acted? is urokinase consumed by this process?), but the author is not suggesting that a starter motor runs off gasoline.

<comment><USER23> OP simply mis-parsed the last "it" of the sentence to refer to the starter motor, when the author intended for it to refer to the car.

<comment><USER24> That's a strange mis-parse since the rule is that pronouns refer to their closest reasonable antecedent (in this case 'car' is closest to 'it').

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I hope I'm still productive at my job at 88.

</comment><comment><USER26> Did anyone else read this title as implying that heart attacks were a potential treatment for strokes?</comment>


Jim Keller (Intel): Moore's Law Isn't Over - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/id_aa_carmack/status/1173995694820134913 <comment><USER2> Is this with or without security issues?</comment>


John Oliver Explores the Sad Reality of Civil Forfeitures – Rolling Stone - <AUTHOR> http://www.rollingstone.com/tv/videos/john-oliver-amplifies-the-absurdity-of-civil-forfeitures-20141006 <comment><AUTHOR> This is essentially highway robbery -- by the police. Excellent piece by John Oliver last night based on a detailed reporting done by Washington Post earlier.

<comment><USER2> > essentially highway robbery

And sometimes literally highway robbery.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What could an alternative to the C standard library look like? - <AUTHOR> My understanding of compiler history is that before the C standard, compiler vendors created their own C libraries that shipped with their compilers. Code written to be compiled with one compiler likely would not work without modification using another compiler.
The C standard obviated this portability problem, and arguably standardized problems of its own. Functionality that became standardized, such as strcpy and scanf, now considered unsafe and best avoided, is retained for backwards compatibility. Some functions, such as strtok, modify static buffers and are not re-entrant. Manual memory management is still du jour, without any standardized alternatives such as an interface for reference counting.
The C standard also lacks implementations of common data structures and algorithms, which keeps the language light and easy to learn, at the cost of often needing to reinvent the wheel.
C isn't going anywhere. Many lament the unsafety of the language, and for good reason. However, it's often the lowest common denominator in ABI compatibility. The performance and explicitness of C is unparalleled in a lot of tasks. At the same time, it's rather easy to disable the standard library during compilation, and link to a different one.
I've been wondering for a while, has anyone recently (or ever) attempted to create a competing C standard, or language based on C with only a different standard library? What are the pros and cons of such a project? If you could start fresh on the standard library, could a modern perspective and different design choices yield a better language? How different could the result look? Has something similar ever been done with any other language? <comment><USER2> I would not add common data structures or an interface for reference counting. C has no generics so there is no good way to implement these. You could use macros, but that would be abominable. You could use void* , but that leaves a lot of performance on the table (see: qsort, bsearch).

What I would do is purge null-terminated strings from the standard library and use exclusively pointer-and-length strings. (const char * str, size_t str_len). That would be a massive improvement, especially to the IO library, which currently has to support both null-terminated strings and pointer-length strings (since only the latter allows binary IO).

The C locale library is really awful. printf() needs to have a way to choose between locale-dependent and locale-independent formats, and the latter should be the default.

strcmp(), strcpy(), and strcat() would all be gone because without null- terminated strings these can be replaced by memcmp() and memcpy().

It would also be nice if the IO library allowed creating memory-backed files, since this is a very common extension and would make FILE * more useful for defining APIs that take or output to streams.

Would add a standard interface for getting a directory listing.

Make char unsigned by default. (Currently it's implementation dependent, and usually signed, which is almost always incorrect).

And I would get rid of isupper() and other functions that can't handle multibyte characters.</comment>


Tips for taking over someone else's code - <AUTHOR> http://www.geero.net/2008/04/tips-for-taking-over-someone-e.html

<comment><USER2> Overall, fairly sound advice. Where possible, I'd add _characterisation tests_ , which are incredibly useful if you're having to replace some chunk of code in a large piece of unknown software.

I'm not so sure about the author's advice of rewriting code. This might be fine if you're changing the code for yourself, and if said code is reasonably small, but I'd consider it quite risky if this is code that's in use by other people, and you've been tasked to fix a bug or extend its functionality. Unless that code is actually not working properly, I tend to either just document/rename it, or possibly wrap the APIs on it if I need to call it from my modifications.

That said, it _can_ be very helpful to conflate copy & pasted code. Often, the copy & paste was done with little thought, and will actually contain bugs itself. It therefore deserves extra scrutiny.

<comment><AUTHOR> That middle one's a good point - I guess I should have explicitly said that the code in question was a) pretty small and self-contained, and b) doesn't have lots of people wanting to make modifications to it simultaneously, so fairly drastic refactoring was possible in a way that it sometimes isn't.

Writing some automated tests for the code is next on my list of changes to make (which I agree is probably backwards)

<comment><USER2> Really, the main risk of changing code that doesn't need to be changed is that there is input data out there, which you don't have access to, that works fine with the current code but your refactoring might introduce some incompatibility. Of course, depending on the situation, it can still be worth munging the code to be more manageable, but I would certainly not do that without a reasonable set of tests.

Well, writing the tests _after_ some exploratory programming can work just fine, especially when you're tackling a defect of some kind, such as "this input doesn't work". The first thing I'd do is figure out why it doesn't work, and then try a fix. Then try and guess at some possible new failures you might have introduced, and feed the original code and your changes with the test cases and see if you get what you expect. Then throw in loads of random real- world input data to make sure that still works.

I'm not suggesting there are hard-and-fast rules here, I'm just trying to suggest some techniques that have worked well for me. Foreign code is always tricky and is always as much about making your own changes as it is about damage limitation. It's like making changes to your own code, except with blindfolds on.</comment></comment></comment>


Soundcloud launches customization feature. rips off geocities - <AUTHOR> http://soundcloud.com/qotsa

<comment><USER2> Chalking this one up to the calendar. Soundcloud aren't this stupid even if they are struggling with infrastructure performance problems.

</comment><comment><USER3> Fooled me for a second, the opposite of the old myspace have always been their guideline.

</comment><comment><USER4> Not quite; there are no "under construction" icons to be a complete Geocities ripoff!

</comment><comment><USER5> Hilarious! Blast from the past for sure.

</comment><comment><USER6> <3</comment>


Dean and Deluca Is Closing Its Stores - <AUTHOR> https://www.eater.com/2019/7/16/20695333/dean-and-deluca-stores-closing-debt-fancy-food-market-rise-and-fall <comment><USER2> Dean & Deluca was among the first online stores built with Viaweb in 1996 (the founders of Viaweb went on to start Y Combinator). I remember some difficulty trying to get their copperplate font to render nicely into GIFs without dithering. (There were no webfonts at the time -- if you wanted a branded look, you had to render an image on the server.)

</comment><comment><USER3> > And for months, small businesses have turned to social media to complain > about the company's outstanding debts.

Though D&D was a company and the situation is _somewhat_ different, this reminds me of my tutoring experience with a few supposedly affluent NYC clients; they had a similar capacity to appear posh while somehow being unable to pay their invoices without heavy cajoling. Made me happy I forced clients to sign up for recurring payment with stripe, which at least reduced the number of times I had to "remind" them. My own experience is obviously anecdotal and specific, but if anything I found a negative correlation between external markers of wealth and ability/willingness (same result on my end) to pay invoices.

</comment><comment><USER4> When John Kerry was running for president, I heard that his wife, the heir to the Heinz fortune, shopped for groceries there. So I went. My goodness... $11 cubes of chocolate, $90 bottles of maple syrup, it just seemed... way overboard. I'm surprised it lasted this long.

<comment><USER5> _"...it just seemed... way overboard. I'm surprised it lasted this long._

In NYC and quite a few other cities it can last forever. They are a lot of super rich people and $100 for them is like a penny to us. Expanding is a different story...

<comment><USER6> Whole Foods and Harris Teeter are just 2 of many stores that have taken over the gourmet markets... Pretty sure their expansions are what killed D&D.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'll go against the grain here and say that I absolutely loved Dean and Delucas when I found one when I was living in Tokyo last year. Yeah the packaged goods were super obnoxiously priced but the hot prepared food was very very good and was priced in line with anything else in that general area(maybe $10 for a lunch).

Some of the best pastries I've ever had from a chain bakery. F

<comment><USER8> I'm not sure about this, but it seems that the Japanese Dean and DeLuca is just a Japanese company owning and operating the brand under license or joint venture. This is how a lot of foreign brands enter Japan (for example, Taco Bell and Baskin Robbins), and why many remain even when the original company more or less goes under (for example, Mister Donut). I wouldn't be surprised if this ends up being the same.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Nothing special, just overpriced. Eataly is basically what they tried to, and should have, become.

<comment><USER10> I find Eataly also overpriced and nothing special, just less dated (for now).

I've had more delicious food in European airports.

<comment><USER9> It's pricey, but it feels like a Disneyland for foodies, which is what D&D should have tried to do and why AFAIK they keep expanding worldwide (just saw a new one on the Strip in Las Vegas, no less). Also the restaurants and rooftop in the one in NYC are all great as far as atmosphere goes. Food is reasonable IMO.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The foods here used to be special but in the last 10 years seemed more focused on tourists.

</comment><comment> W-Stool This company somehow managed to not make money in a store located in Napa Valley. Think about that for a minute.

</comment><comment><USER12> Awww, the ones in Bangkok made a nice little place to get American food and a glass of wine

<comment><USER13> There is/was one in Khao Yai. I stopped there once. It was a freaking food truck selling 400 baht hamburgers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> They had stores??

<comment><USER15> Interesting you said this because I always thought this was actually an Asian brand having mostly only seen them in Japan and Korea.

There's a trend of Asia reviving some old western brands, like 7-Eleven, Denny's, Yahoo, Mister Donut.

<comment><USER16> 7-Eleven has been a Japanese company for close to 30 years, and started opening stores in Japan long before that. If there's a trend, it long predates it, but my sense is that 7-Eleven never sold itself as American kitsch but was simply a business model that worked well elsewhere. It seems similar to KFC in that regard--far more KFCs overseas than in the U.S. as fried chicken has near universal appeal--though KFC and Colonel Sanders in particular is much more of an American cultural export.

Chains like A&W began opening stores in Asia in the 1960s. And not just around American military bases--a franchise was started in Malaysia in 1963. In general I think the trend isn't one of revival but more that these brands were already global when their American market disappeared. But maybe chains like Denny's and Mister Donut are different stories.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> >$75 bespoke ice cubes

Yep, this place needs to die before it summons Slaanesh.</comment>


NTT Docomo abandons its Tizen smartphone launch plans for now - <AUTHOR> http://www.unwiredview.com/2014/01/16/ntt-docomo-abandons-its-tizen-smartphone-launch-plans-for-now/

<comment><USER2> Samsung having problems with software quality?

It would be more surprising if this actually gets released in a usable state.</comment>


Show HN: Vim editor for Standard Notes - <AUTHOR> https://standardnotes.org/extensions/vim-editor <comment><USER2> Looks cool. But I dont know if its vimium or what, but once I got into insert mode theres no way out of it (esc and C+[ dont work).

<comment><AUTHOR> Pressing escape work for me. What browser are you using?</comment></comment>


Murders per Month from 1976 to 2017 - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/Crimealytics/status/1111066150975275010 <comment><USER2> Nice! So annual cycle (people don't feel like going out for fight in the dead of the winter as much) and economic cycle (people aren't so likely to go violent when they have a job to do) of around 10 years are very well visible. Correcting it per unit of population would be nicer though, so gradual fundamental reduction of crime appears even more evident.

<comment><USER3> Right, this is incidents, not rate. Rate is currently bad 1960s record lows. It's intersting that the number of incidents has remained fairly steady since the 90s, but not meaningful other than to see the year-over cyclic.</comment></comment>


Experimental USAF space plane breaks record for orbital spaceflight - lil-scamp https://techcrunch.com/2019/08/26/experimental-u-s-air-force-space-plane-breaks-previous-record-for-orbital-spaceflight/ <comment><AUTHOR> [https://spaceweathergallery.com/indiv_upload.php?upload_id=1...](https://spaceweathergallery.com/indiv_upload.php?upload_id=154946)

Here is an impressive photograph that an amateur astronomer took in June/July of this year.

<comment><AUTHOR> Too late to edit my comment but amateur astronomer was a poor label for the guy who took the picture. He is the best astrophotographer for satellites that I've seen. Here is his personal website where he has his collection:

[http://www.ralfvandebergh- astrophotography.simpsite.nl/home](http://www.ralfvandebergh- astrophotography.simpsite.nl/home)

<comment><USER2> There are two groups of people who take pictures of satellites:

1\. Amateur astronomers like this guy.

2\. Nation states who take clandestine photos of other nation's spy satellites. These pictures are better, but you haven't seen them.

For everything else, there's some guy working in the lab who's like, "oh, you want a picture of our satellite? Of course, there's like 40 of them on our press site. Do you need more? I can ask around and see if anyone's taken selfies from interesting angles." So there's no open institutional force behind it. So the only reasonable outcome of natural market forces is that amateur astronomers create the best pictures of satellites in orbit.

Amateur astronomer isn't a slur either, if that was your point. Take a look at the galleries on cloudnights, a lot of it wouldn't look out of place on NASA/ESA homepages.

<comment><USER3> (3) Astronomers - usually not on purpose

<comment><USER4> Astronomers usually aren't tracking satellites, so if one shows up in an image it's only as a streak. You need to be moving the camera to track the object to get a reasonably clear image (or very short exposure times, which are relatively uncommon in astronomy).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > breaks record of orbital spaceflight

It broke it's own record of "time-in-orbit" and as far as spaceflight records go this is one of the least relevant. Once a spacecraft gets to orbit it is very easy to stay there almost indefinitely.

Hell, the ISS breaks the record for "continuous habitation in orbit" every day.

<comment><USER6> Man, if you wanna get points in Tony Hawk Pro Skater, you gotta land the trick.

Same thing... I don't think the ISS is gonna land that trick, as far as I know... I'd be stoked to find out I'm wrong about that, though.

<comment><USER7> What?

<comment><USER8> I believe they're saying that the requirement of landing after staying in space for a long period of time should constitute a new record, and that they would be excited to learn about plans to land the ISS back on Earth in some capacity as this would place the ISS in the running for this record.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Obvious missions for a long-mission mobile shuttle like this include

* intercepting and deorbiting space junk

* fixing friendly or sabotaging unfriendly operational satellites

* future weapons platform for offense or defense (say intercepting ground-launched sat-killing missiles)

* on-demand surveillance (with ordinary spy satellites you have to wait until your orbit is in the right spot, adversaries will know when your satellites are above them and adjust their activities to avoid surveillance)

* more routine human activities in LEO (spacecraft assembly, staging for higher orbits or interplanetary activities, shuttling between stations in LEO)

* Netflix and chill with our alien overlords

* Prep for mining activities further out

<comment><USER10> Space isn't like a highway where you can move from A to B at minimal expense. Switching orbits, both orbit heights but mainly orbit inclinations, comes at a very high delta-V expense and therefore propellant expense, which this craft simply doesn't have the volume to hold.

This cannot shuttle between LEO stations and switch orbits to imitate multiple observation sats unless those sats and stations are very close in terms of orbits.

<comment><USER11> The U.S. Air Force's former top civilian, Heather Wilson, said it dips into the atmosphere and uses its aerodynamic surfaces to change its orbit.

Ref: [https://www.military.com/daily-news/2019/07/23/former- secaf-...](https://www.military.com/daily-news/2019/07/23/former-secaf- explains-how-secret-x-37-space-plane-throws-enemies.html)

<comment><USER12> It uses an oblong orbit to gain a small window where the next orbit cannot be perfectly predicted by an adversary that can only watch half the sky.

You can't gain delta-v by inducing additional drag on the craft.

<comment><USER2> If a spacecraft is traveling at 4,000 m/s and it plows headlong into a planet, it has gained 4,000 m/s of delta v.

Delta v a measurement of a vector, not a scalar. The fact that its kinetic energy with respect to Earth is decreasing does not mean it isn't gaining delta v. In addition to the obvious (lowering your apogee) you can also use this delta v to change your inclination. It's not "free" of course- you need to do other engine burns to both put the craft into the atmosphere and then another burn to reestablish orbit once you're out the other side. But it isn't clear to me that this is less efficient than just doing the burns without the atmospheric assists.

<comment><USER13> > _If a spacecraft is traveling at 4,000 m /s and it plows headlong into a > planet, it has gained 4,000 m/s of delta v._

Yes and no. You've changed your velocity by 4km/s. You didn't gain usable ∆v, and you've just lost your spacecraft.

∆v means few related things. One, the amount of velocity change your mission plan requires. Second, the velocity change your craft is capable of using its own propulsion. Say you're plotting Mars orbit insertion. It requires (via [0]) 1.5 km/s ∆v. But you're a cheater, and decided to use aerobraking to bleed off (guessing a number) 1km/s of that velocity. This means you can complete this maneuver with a craft that only has 500m/s ∆v at the point of insertion. This does _not_ mean the _craft_ has gained ∆v.

\--

[0] - [https://www.reddit.com/r/space/comments/29cxi6/i_made_a_delt...](https://www.reddit.com/r/space/comments/29cxi6/i_made_a_deltav_subway_map_of_the_solar_system/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I'm mainly surprised that we have reusable space planes at all. You'd think that would get more attention.

<comment><USER15> this still gets launched with a rocket, it's basically a very small unmanned space shuttle, so it's not as "cool" as, say, something that goes to orbit from the ground on its own.

<comment><USER13> Are single-stage to orbit (SSTO) spaceplanes even possible on Earth with current chemical rockets? They're a PITA to build in Kerbal Space Program, and there the universe is 1/10 the size of the real one (albeit with the same gravitational acceleration).

<comment><USER16> They are _possible_ , but not economically feasible. Tim Dodd has a fantastic video showing just how ineffective they are.

Two (or three) stage rockets are just so much more efficient.

<comment><USER16> Went and looked it up: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sfc2Jg1gkKA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sfc2Jg1gkKA)

Tim Dodd (The Everyday Astronaut) is just a very good speaker on all space- related topics. Him and Scott Manley (with a healthy dose of Kerbal Space Program) are incredible teachers about space.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> > NASA began the X-37 program in 1999;

Maybe officially, but I definitely know people who were working on a Space Plane program in the early 90s.

<comment><USER18> There have been people working on spaceplanes continuously since the Nixon administration. Shuttle was _a_ spaceplane but there were/are lots of other programs that fit that title.

<comment><USER19> Personally, I put the beginning of this program with the NASA Lifting body program[1]. The most famous one for me being the M2-F2 which was shown crashing in the opening sequence of the six million dollar man TV series.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lifting_body#List_of_Armstrong...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lifting_body#List_of_Armstrong_Flight_Research_Center_lifting_body_vehicles_\(1963_to_1975\))

<comment><USER20> Those who played the classic computer game _Buzz Aldrin 's Race into Space_ (which was completely open-sourced a few years ago: see [https://www.raceintospace.org/](https://www.raceintospace.org/)) will remember that one of the key decisions in that game, which was all about building a space program that could get you to the moon, was whether to use traditional capsules (Gemini/Apollo on the US side, Voskhod/Soyuz for the USSR) in the mid-to-late game, or to go with reusable lifting body-type vehicles instead. The American player could build the "XMS-2", a fictional vehicle derived from the X-20 Dyna-Soar ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_X-20_Dyna- Soar](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_X-20_Dyna-Soar)), and the Soviet player could build a similarly fictional vehicle based on the MiG-105 ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mikoyan- Gurevich_MiG-105](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mikoyan-Gurevich_MiG-105)).

It was a big decision gameplay-wise, as capsules were much cheaper to research and purchase, but the reusability of mini-shuttles meant you didn't have to buy a whole new crew vehicle for each shot. So if you could scrounge up the money to buy a few in the mid-game, you could free up big bucks in the late game that would otherwise have gone towards buying all those capsules.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Without knowing anything about the classified missions of this thing, I can, with complete confidence, say that the program is mismanaged; my guess is the problem is at the very top.

The only unique quality of this vehicle is that it can re-enter the atmosphere and then be launched again. Everything it does while in orbit, including grabbing something to bring back, could be done by something else not unique.

Yet, they have exercised its unique capability only three times, and the rest of the time kept it to activities that could be better done without it.

The alternative is that there really isn't much use for this thing, so they keep it parked in orbit between uses.

</comment><comment><USER22> Ralf Vandebergh has some photos of it on his twitter @ralfvandebergh [https://twitter.com/ralfvandebergh](https://twitter.com/ralfvandebergh)

He has some good ISS captures too.

</comment><comment><USER23> I dont consider the X-37 experimental anymore, how long has in been flying? It's kinda old news already, cool though.

</comment><comment><USER24> Cool a mini space shuttle that is still flying around for testing stuff. Any chance it has seats and can be used for rescues?

<comment><USER25> to rescue what exactly?

<comment><USER26> Chinese or Russian satellite "rescuer".

<comment><USER27> I won't be surprised if a military satellite of any state capable of launching military satellites will self-destruct if taken away forcibly from the designated orbit. A simple acceleration test would suffice.

I also won't be surprised if when self-destructing, such satellite will try to deliberately damage everything in its close vicinity.

<comment><USER28> I don't think they make boobytrapped satellites that explode, but they may remotely activate a self-destruct process which renders abduction pointless.

If they exploded it wouldn't it create more problems than it solves in terms of more flying debris they have to track as well as friendlies in the same orbital path? (Like when Iridium 33 crashed into a defunct soviet satellite.)

<comment><USER29> I also don't think the attack would involve changing orbits. The attack would be inserting electronic backdoor etc.

<comment><USER30> Nah. Bolt cutters on an arm, or even just spray paint. You don't need to be close to do an electronic attack. If you're close, you might as well hit it with a hammer or snip the antenna and solar arrays off.

<comment><USER27> This kind of sudden malfunction, along with acceleration not due to firing of any engines, would be a signal for the self-destruction device, likely chemically powered (explosive) and mechanically actuated. It would be sure to shatter the interesting electronic parts, burning or detonating any remaining fuel for bonus points.

<comment><USER31> I suspect the arguments about how much launch mass to devote to self destruct explosive and mechanism - compared to useful payload or manoeuvring propellant - would be interesting to see...

<comment><USER13> I suppose your self-destruct mechanism could be "aim retrograde and burn _all_ remaining propellant". Might not turn out well for a spaceplane that latched onto such satellite.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Why does the vehicle look rusty? And what the the duct tape looking stuff on the wing leading edge?

<comment><USER33> The vehicle in the photo has clearly been processed, and is ready for handling or shipping. Not sure if the photo is after-flight or perhaps before.

 _> rusty_

The "rusty" parts look like crevices between protective tiles being sealed with kapton tape[1] - general protective material that handles well extreme environment, and is often used in consumer electronics, especially in places where high temperatures are expected.

 _> duct tape looking stuff on the wing leading edge_

Looks like temporary protective coating of foam, for safe on the ground handling, to prevent damage to the wing leading edge. If the leading edge is anything similar to Space Shuttle's, it's hollow inside, surprisingly thin, and somewhat brittle. Any cracks or damage would cause risk of overheating during re-entry, thus need for extra protection. \--

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

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Anyone with links to credible speculation on the x-37's mission?

<comment><USER35> [https://www.military.com/daily-news/2019/07/23/former- secaf-...](https://www.military.com/daily-news/2019/07/23/former-secaf- explains-how-secret-x-37-space-plane-throws-enemies.html)

Long term heat management hardware for space electronics. Among other things no doubt.

<comment><USER36> _" I think it creates more misconceptions about what the mission of the X-37B is and could lead to more international concerns that it's some type of weapons platform," Weeden said. "I think that works against U.S. interests because it will create more diplomatic problems for the U.S. when it tries to point out Russian and Chinese 'unusual behavior in space' and push for discussions on space norms of behavior."

In short, "it gives Russia and China one more talking point about how the U.S. is the one 'weaponizing' space, even if that's not true," he said._

That's a huge potential downside. Like the Soviets believing in US first strike intent. Having this craft do odd things only reinforces belief the US is not operating in good faith at all times. And this, when manned spaceflight to the iss depends on international cooperation still.

<comment><USER37> >>"Like the Soviets believing in US first strike intent."

the soviets? We are really going back, aren't we?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Excellent. Never the less, still super curious about the tictac thing. :)</comment>


Ask HN: Why the red bar in HN? - <AUTHOR> Why is the main top bar red? Is it a Christmas thing or is it a permanent change? I'm just asking because eyes are kind of bleeding right now. <comment><USER2> It's a Christmas theme - check out the numbers on the items as well. When you have enough karma you can set the top-color for yourself, and that over-rides the default. I hadn't noticed the color change because it doesn't show up for me.

</comment><comment><USER3> The alternation between red and green numbers on the front page would seem to suggest an xmax theme

</comment><comment><USER4> It is red because corporations need to sell their stuff in winter. Red is a commonly used color in marketting.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_Claus#20th_century](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_Claus#20th_century)

For this, they abused the memory of Saint Nicholas, who was a bishop, therefore usually represented in red costume [http://tinyurl.com/odppxql](http://tinyurl.com/odppxql) and who is celebrated on December 6th.

They paganified him, renaming him Santa Claus, or Père Noël, etc; and moved his feat on the night of 24/25 december in order to further disparage Christianity.

<comment><USER5> HN: come for the erudite discussion, stay for the Christmas spirit!</comment></comment>


Secret life of phones: how one contacted 315 servers a day - <AUTHOR> http://www.channel4.com/news/phone-mobile-data-24-hours-apps-security-secret <comment><AUTHOR> I wish they'd give a transcript of what they actually did during the day, what apps they actually started by hand, what happened without user action initiating it, and so on.

It'd certainly be useful to know more about the activity while the end user is idle. Not only for privacy reasons but also since you sometimes (e.g. when roaming) want to strictly limit data traffic.

<comment><USER2> Maybe someone could write an app for this. :-) And better yet, put the transcript in plain English.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> The really crazy part of this is that this article is restricted to simple internet traffic that can be traced. There's as much -- or more -- information available at the transport layer, which can include where you are, who you call, how long you're on the phone, and so on. Then there's reading of MAC addresses from the phone's WiFi passively and tracking folks down to the sub- meter level than way.

The modern cell phone is one of the pinnacles of mankind: it is able to tag, track, and monitor the individual's thoughts and actions on a level never dreamed of by science fiction writers.

</comment><comment><USER4> Title is deceptive. ONE test Android phone did this and much of the traffic was related to one app.

<comment><AUTHOR> Fair criticism on the title; I weakened it and made it specific to Android. [Edit: op edited subject after I did.]

Your comment about the one app (Talking Tom) isn't quite accurate. Most of the times the phone sent its IMEI, this was due to Talking Tom. But the sheer number of servers contacted is unrelated to that app--and there was no testing of how many other apps that weren't installed would have sent the IMEI.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is why my Android phone is rooted and uses Xprivacy to control app permissions.

Though I still have no control over all the information Google itself leeches using it's own framework.... which is sad.

<comment> chestnut-tree This article, if true, reveals even more invasive measures from Google

 _" Google takes its tracking into the real world"_ [http://digiday.com/platforms/google- tracking/](http://digiday.com/platforms/google-tracking/)

Just as depressing as the story however is the lack of scrutiny of online companies on privacy matters. Google arguably tracks and records online behaviour with far greater capability than any other online company. Yet Google gets an easy ride on privacy issues from the tech community.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Sticking a VPN on a smartphone then sniffing the traffic always yields a surprising number of ad requests in the background.

<comment><USER7> I once put a proxy in front of an HN client for iOS. Every time I tapped on something or performed an action, it would send at-least 10+ requests to various analytics firms. This included locking my phone. Additionally, almost every private key was transmitted in the clear, over HTTP. Nothing was encrypted, not even the connection to HN.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Am I the only one who found this incredibly uninformative and sensationalist? Their 'special device', just a wireless proxy, measured 350,000 requests, which to someone who doesn't know how many dozens of requests loading an average webpage would make, might be frightening. Every level you win on Candy Crush, and every profile picture loaded on Facebook would be a request. The number of requests mean nothing. I'm going to stop myself from continuing to rant because there's too much to be said about this video. Their aim seems to be to frighten, not inform, people.

<comment><USER9> The number of requests is irrelevant from a privacy perspective, but it does mean one thing - reduced battery life. Making 30,000 requests when the phone is idle over just 45 minutes is a good way to kill the battery.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> My MOTO FONE (Motorola F3) contacts zero servers per day while idle.

<comment><USER11> I had one of these too! I finally caved and got a Nokia N9. Before that, I had my F3 and an iPod touch together. All in all, sadly, the convenience of a smartphone beats the ridiculous durability and talk time of the F3.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I got Xprivacy on my android so it doesn't affect me. Before that I had Pdroid. These things don't affect me because I take privacy in my own hands.

</comment><comment><USER13> FYI man, you can sit at home and do absolutely NOTHING -- and your name goes through like 17 computers a DAY, man.</comment>


Alibaba Unit, Yunfeng Start CNY1 Billion Cloud Computing Fund - <AUTHOR> http://news.morningstar.com/all/dow-jones/us-markets/201110240532/000129/alibaba-unit-yunfeng-start-cny1-billion-cloud-computing-fund.aspx

<comment><AUTHOR> Nevermind the part where it's an Android clone (isn't it?).

It seems that time after time domestic (Chinese) businesses trump foreign competitors - but they're hardly operating from a position of strength. The fund is privately held (murky though ownership can be in China) and Alibaba's been pretty successful on a global scale, so perhaps they _do_ know what they're doing!

Have any YC alumni (as individuals or businesses) made significant inroads into China? It's an area of great personal interest and would love to hear your stories.</comment>


What if we don't need advertising at all? - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@dsearls/what-if-we-don-t-need-advertising-at-all-cf8ae123f2d3#.cao4zmwte <comment><USER2> If you want to kill advertising only go to sites without ads you know the ones you pay for. Where advertising helps best is new companies. It's hard to get referrals and word of mouth when your customer base is zero.</comment>


ITeleport Sales Data after iPad Launch: The Case for Universal Apps - <AUTHOR> http://blog.iteleportmobile.com/the-case-for-universal-apps <comment><USER2> +1.

One app I loved for the iPhone, "Air Mouse" decided it made more sense to make a new app for the iPad: "Mobile Mouse"

First I was confused. Is this the same app? Their naming is all over the place.

Then I was angry. The iPad can run the iPhone version I already paid for just fine and it works surprisingly well. So why do I have to pay for a new version?

Well the cost isn't too much, so I don't really mind paying again. But... while I'm looking maybe there are other apps? Sure enough there's one I never heard of, Rowmote Pro. And it's a universal app so it'll be very consistent on both devices.

So I paid for that, installed it on both my iPhone and iPad, and uninstalled Air Mouse. They lost me as a customer by not having a universal app.</comment>


Tips for Successful App Store Review - <AUTHOR> https://www.dashdevs.com/blog/how-to-successfully-submit-an-app-to-the-app-store-for-review/ <comment><USER2> The Apple team has a strict vision concerning the quality of mobile applications. This is really great for the users, because the Apple team works hard to make the App Store a trustworthy ecosystem. The App Store has a high threshold and tough requirements, not only for the app's performance but for the implementation of appropriate security measures. The user can be sure that iOS applications are reliable.</comment>


Bad advice on preventing government snooping - <AUTHOR> http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2012/apr/02/how-to-hide-emails-government-snooping

<comment><USER2> Existing Law: RIPA - (<http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2000/23/contents>)

There are proposed changes to allow certain LEOs to have "realtime" rather than "retrospective" access to addressing / routing data, without a warrant. Access to content would still need a warrant.

The article doesn't do a great job of explaining the difference between "private" and "anonymous".

> _Even an encrypted email will usually include the addresses of the sender > and the recipient in its headers._

but then the article goes on to say

> _There are simpler ways to send private and/or anonymous emails. For > example, anonymouse.org offers a simple form for AnonEmail, as does the > sendanonymousemail.net website. There's also Mailinator, which provides free > disposable email addresses, and Hushmail, which works like an ordinary email > service but encrypts all your email._

That "and/or" in the first line is important. They should have been clearer because, as they acknowledge, many people just don't get this stuff. (Also, Hushmail (and I guess all services) say they comply with correctly formed legal requests. Hushmail will go as far as crafting a backdoored java app and serving it to the customer. I guess that's not particularly worrying for regular users from England.)

Public key encryption is hard with anonymity because you tie an identity (the keys) to messages.

The other problem is the risk analysis you have to do. Protecting email content and routing data is trivial if the attacker is "the smart 14 year old" or "the very smart, experienced 45 year old with industry connections". But in this case the attacker is a well funded, first world, technically advanced government. GCHQ are not idiots. They don't lack computer power or math expertise. Anonymising traffic data is going to be hard, even if you use a bunch of different proxies.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> "Examples include hidemyass.com, anonymouse.org, Guardster, Proxify, IDzap and Megaproxy."

Does anyone else also think it might be a really really bad idea to login to your email account using any of these services?

<comment><USER2> You'd log into your email provider using SSL.

Is there a working MITM attack?

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> This would be a good foreword to an introduction to computer messaging security, for those who are unaware of encryption or proxies. It may be too basic for most users of this site to find it useful.</comment>


Centrifugal Machine Guns - <AUTHOR> https://armourersbench.com/2019/12/08/centrifugal-machine-guns/ <comment><USER2> 2000 rounds per minute is pretty impressive. Though miniguns/Gatling do much better these days...6k/minute.

And not terribly complicated in how they work. The concept fits mostly in one animation: [https://qph.fs.quoracdn.net/main- qimg-e01cffa77db21231f6d9da...](https://qph.fs.quoracdn.net/main- qimg-e01cffa77db21231f6d9da19970d9ef3)

</comment><comment><USER3> In a similar vein the H&K G11 also had ambitious objectives and was shock-full of clever ideas, however such beasts make the KISS principle (rather decisive for a weapon) difficult to follow.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QGKcvM2Hh4g](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QGKcvM2Hh4g)

<comment><USER4> Oh man, that video reminded me of Metal Storm[1], something I hadn't paid attention to since 2008.

The idea seemed so cool to the college grad in me. Clearly there are problems with ammunition handling in actual battle situations and/or long term storage that probably made this a non-viable war machine similar to the G11.

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

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> The Mythbusters built one of these.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y3cRNEyUTF8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y3cRNEyUTF8)

</comment><comment><USER4> Love the idea from an absurdity aspect.

Accuracy is very low, portability requires a vehicle, wear is quite high on the "outside" side of the channel.

Feels as effective as a repeating shotgun mounted on a car.

<comment><USER6> "Feels as effective as a repeating shotgun mounted on a car. "

Dunno, an AA-12 loaded with HE-12 explosive rounds mounted on a car or truck could be a very effective mid-range area of denial tool.

<comment><USER7> See the PAW-20 for an example of this taken to its logical conclusion.

<comment><USER8> Good overview of PAW-20 [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QHbqHx3TLBE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QHbqHx3TLBE)

<comment><USER9> Wow. That was a wild hour-long trip down into weird and wonderful weapons!

Thank you!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> _It wasn't until World War One that the concept began to be considered again. In June 1918, Major Edward T. Moore and Saul Singer filed a patent for a centrifugal machine gun powered by an electrical motor (US #1,332,992). The motor spooled up the centrifugal barrel assembly to rotate extremely quickly and impart centrifugal force on projectiles. According to Julian Hatcher the gun could fire steel ball bearing projectiles at approximately 1,200 feet per second. Fire was controlled by a stop pin in the ammunition feed tube. Moore claimed the weapon could fire a projectile 1.5 miles with enough force to kill a man. He also suggested the weapon's rate of fire approached 2,000 rounds per minute. It appears that Moore's gun may have been tested in 1918 but Hatcher described its accuracy as 'extremely poor'._

<comment><USER11> Modern bullets are not spheres because spherical projectiles don't want to fly straight, especially when you impart a bunch of spin on them first.

<comment><USER12> It's true that the spin from a centrifugal gun is unlikely to make bullets fly straight, although ironically "impart a bunch of spin on them" is also one of the foremost techniques for making bullets fly straight: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rifling](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rifling)

> In firearms, rifling refers to the helical groovings that are machined into > the internal (bore) surface of a gun's barrel, for the purpose of exerting > torque and thus imparting a spin to a projectile around its longitudinal > axis during shooting. This spin serves to gyroscopically stabilize the > projectile by conservation of angular momentum, improving its aerodynamic > stability and accuracy over smoothbore designs.

<comment><USER13> Relating to spinning spherical projectiles, some airsoft guns impart backspin on the spherical plastic pellets they fire to flatten their trajectory: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hop- up_(airsoft)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hop-up_\(airsoft\))

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I'm rather surprised that there isn't more innovation in firearms. For example: Has anyone tried to build a rifle that fires inert pellets using a combustion chamber powered by hydrocarbons (say… propane) and an oxidizer (oxygen or nitrous oxide)? That would make ammunition much lighter and cheaper, eliminate the need for brass feeding/extracting mechanisms, and allow for "dial a velocity" by feeding different amounts of gas into the combustion chamber.

Another possibility would be to have a belt that accelerates the projectile. The "ammunition" in that case would be batteries and inert projectiles. Like a propane gun, velocity could be customized for each shot by varying the belt speed.

<comment><USER15> I'm pretty sure the next big thing in small arms will be electronic triggers in bullpups. Bullpups' main problem is weird trigger pull, electronic trigger solves that, and also allows some more benefits (like automatic range- adjustement if you put a cheap camera and rangefinder on the weapon).

Basically when you pull the trigger rangefinder finds the range and camera takes photos one after another - waiting for the gun to get up enough so that the point that was targetted will be hit with the range that was measured.

Gunner's hands are shaking a little so he will soon get on target, and then the trigger is electronically released. You also need some timeout so that if more than for example 100 ms passes without arriving at the target it fires anyway.

The technology is there, very similar algorithms are used in smartphone cameras to harness shaking hands for higher photo resolution. The main problem is gun people distrust towards electronic in their guns.

<comment><USER16> The implementation would be fairly easy and an electronic trigger would be neat, but imo the problem with bullpups will always be the somewhat awkward reload technique that's required with that design. With an AR-15 style (or an AK) I can reload it while keeping the weapon more-or-less on the target, and dealing with malfunctions is easier because you have more space in your "shelf". With a bullpup you have to reach basically into your armpit - it's not comfortable compared to an M4.

(Again, my opinion.)

<comment><USER15> With electronic trigger you don't need impact primers, you can just put a very thin electric wire in each cartridge that gets hot when you pull the trigger and ignites the powder.

So you can make magazines that aren't possible with the traditional cartridges - like pipe magazines for strong rifle cartridges for example (hard to do with impact primers).

I'm thinking a long plastic pipe with cartridges inside that is attached paralel to the barrel. Then you just discard it with a button and put another pipe magazine under the barrel from the front. Should be fairly comfortable even with bullpups.

Additionally you can make a side port in the magazine so that you can load it with single bullets like with old wild-west rifles :)

<comment><USER16> Interesting. Didn't think of that. I've always liked the advantages of the bullpup (longer barrel with shorter overall rifle relative to M4 designs). Does this mean we'd be introducing some battery requirements for operating the rifle though? That would be a flat no go for me then. Or are you saying that pulling the trigger itself would generate enough charge to operate the mechanism as you describe? Man ... turning all that stuff into plastic would sure save on weight. But I'd be a little concerned about durability.

Someone really needs to try this. I'd love to mess around with a prototype. What if you could 3D print your magazine pipes?

<comment><USER15> Maybe it would be possible to use the trigger pull energy to ignite the bullet, but it would probably make the trigger pull awful.

I'm thinking just a small battery, or even a capacitor. Charged by the recoil.

<comment><USER16> "Regenerative braking" meets "regenerative recoil".

I love it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> not high velocity, not high accuracy, but they can be effective. small prototypes capable of delivering a _withering_ stream of BB's are well within the capabilities of the misguided teenager.

<comment><USER18> Sounds awesome :) Are you speaking from personal experience?

<comment><USER6> We had centrifugal pellet guns at roadside carnivals 30+ years ago, glass bottles were the targets. You could barely hit the target from 25 feet away because the power simply wasn't there, and so many times those pellets simply ricocheted right back at you. Those got replaced with the more 'fair' and powerful tube/air-fed rifles which got used to shoot out a star on a piece of paper (which in and of itself is a bit of a scam if you don't know the trick.)

<comment><USER19> The trick being to shoot around the star I presume? That's the only "trick" I've ever heard of - curious if there is another.

<comment><USER2> I believe it is a few things. Light finger to get single shots versus repeated. First few shots to figure out how bad the sights are. Shoot around the star until you have a good perimeter. Shoot the center to pop it out.

Though you can find credible marksmen that know all this, yet fail to win. It's rigged.

<comment><USER20> It is rigged, but it's the paper targets (star diagram). The paper intentionally is strong enough that it is highly improbable that any bb/pellet gun will have the force to knock out the remaining 20% of the outline of the star no matter how accurate the shooter is. The inner part of the target will begin to fold on purpose.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> is it feasible to make an electromagnetic machine gun powered by a battery or bank of caps?

it would have the same advantages - cheap projectiles, no gunpowder and mostly silent.

there's also this:

[https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=oWEqyrKLz6M](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=oWEqyrKLz6M)

[https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=AEu9LLQpOF8](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=AEu9LLQpOF8)

<comment><USER22> Sure but it takes quite a bit of energy per shot. A fairly standard 7.62mmx51mm NATO shell puts out a bullet with about 4000 Joules of energy. That's roughly a 0.4F, 100V capacitor or 2,000 200uF, 100V capacitors (around $2,500) _per shot_. 20 rounds means that the gun has around $50k worth of capacitors and that's before we start talking about rapid-discharge/charge rate systems and energy transport.

Once the electrical rail machine gun is built, the per-shot costs are pretty low (copper, lead, machining) and grid supplied energy (hello supply-lines), but then a 7.62x51mm NATO round is $0.42 (in volume).

The rail guns that being trialed are monsters: not a whole lot of point in shooting a $0.42 NATO round when you have nuclear power generator to recharge the gun. By the same token, there's probably not a whole lot of point spending $100k per soldier to kit them with a barely portable weapon that is matched by a $2,000 AR-15 firing $0.42 mass-produced ammunition with a mature supply line and easy portability.

But, yeah, I'd like to see them, too...

<comment><USER23> Conversely, a base Tesla Model 3 puts out about 200kW sustained for longer than most machine guns fire a string; 5.56 NATO is about 1800J; a M16 fires at 13Hz; if your process is 100% efficient this is about a power demand of 24KW or about 1/8th of what the Model 3 draws from its battery pack.

Incidentally, such a Tesla-machinegun would not be regulated as a firearm in many/most jurisdictions.

> the per-shot costs are pretty low (copper, lead, machining)

Bullets are not machined (except for exotic uses where insane accuracy is required-- 1000yd championships employing exotic chamberings and weapons, etc).

<comment><USER24> > Incidentally, such a Tesla-machinegun would not be regulated as a firearm in > many/most jurisdictions.

I'm reasonably sure that anything that can fire projectiles with more than a few Joules is a weapon in Germany.

<comment><USER25> And it would be regulated as a firearm in the UK ("a lethal barrelled weapon of any description from which any shot, bullet or other missile can be discharged"; section 57 (1) Firearms Act 1968). There is also a specific list of prohibited weapons in the same act which are firearms even if non-lethal.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I wonder if such a weapon could be feasible given the affordance of modern technology. Very steam spunk, if so.

Not to say I condone such matters, but curiosity wonders the same.

</comment><comment><USER27> DREAD from 2004

[http://www.defensereview.com/world-exclusive-video-dread- wea...](http://www.defensereview.com/world-exclusive-video-dread-weapon- system-devastating-jam-proof-and-silent/)

</comment><comment><USER28> Centrifugal force is a fictional force it's due to centripetal acceleration

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

<comment><USER29> relevant xkcd: [https://xkcd.com/123/](https://xkcd.com/123/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> I guess the lack of rotation of the bullet made it inaccurate?</comment>


Writing Tool for Focus and Creativity - <AUTHOR> Hey Hacker friends,
As a hobby project, I've built and acquired one of the most viral writing tools that breed focus.
For those who don't know, if you stop typing, it deletes your work.
Then I added a new feature to it that helps induce creativity with 500+ writing prompts.
The outcome?
Version 1.0 of a tool that helps writers be more focused and creative.
https://www.squibler.io/writing-prompts <comment><USER2> I thought this was a joke but damn! It sure does force you to focus.</comment>


What Kurzweil is Forgetting - <AUTHOR> http://asserttrue.blogspot.com/2013/01/what-kurweil-is-forgetting.html

<comment><USER2> Agh, not again. As far as Kurzweil theories are semi-crazy and border on beliefs, he is not forgetting about social learning. What you are forgetting is that these things could be done much more faster on a machine than on a human being, especially if we had a better grasp on how they happen. Especially considering they don't need to also develop a physical body. And some things that we learn when we are babies could be "built-in". Also, I don't believe that Kurzweil would say "We wouldn't deliberately build in any pathologies of any sort."

And to finish this rant, the idea is that this "improved social learning" would also be applied to humans, not only to AI, because it would be a really important tool. And that may be the main reason why we would develop something like that.

</comment><comment><USER3> What this post's title is forgetting: a 'Z'</comment>


Please review Hikify, a hiking and mountaineering website - <AUTHOR> http://www.hikify.com

<comment><USER2> Hey Artur,

Good work on your site!

I started a climbing news site last month, so I think we are in the same boat. Here's a bit of advice based on what I've experienced so far:

1\. Focus on the front page.

People want to find something interesting or relevant as soon as possible or they will leave.

For your target audience I'd imagine that they'd want a list of hiking trails in their area. Make it easy to find. Craigslist has that nailed by redirecting to your current city after you hit their main site.

2\. In the beginning it's going to be all about YOU.

It's tough to find quality contributors when you don't have much content on your site. You are going to have to put a ton of work into your project, and only then will others be motivated to help you.

A site like this grows from the inside out. Don't provide links to empty information -- it's misleading and frustrating to users. Instead, start by providing quality, unique information about one small area, such as your hometown, and then spread to other areas. Advertise to local hiking groups, outdoor stores such as MEC/REI, climbing gyms, etc.

3\. Keep at it!

There's going to be a lot of doubters and naysayers, but they are almost always the most vocal ones. Prove them wrong by working hard at your idea and constantly improving it. Small steps will help you on your way to success!

I hope this is helpful, and wish you good luck. Feel free to send me a message if you'd like someone to bounce ideas off of: email@example.com.

<comment><AUTHOR> On your first point, do you mean it would be better to make a content front page rather than a "sales" one?

You make good points, I'll certainly keep them in mind (and in the todo list).

Thanks for your encouragement!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> You are off to a great start--nice work! Here's my initial impressions:

1\. Is this for hiking or climbing? Your homepage text made the target audience/user-base a little unclear. I think you will find that the two communities are unique and strategies to market will differ between the two. Perhaps refine the focus slightly.

2\. You will absolutely need to seed this with content. I hit the homepage and had no desire to proceed since I don't see any user generated content.

3\. What advantages would I have using Hikify over say Trails.com or the Trailspace forums? I want to share/participate with an existing community. How will you create yours?

Remember, if this gains traction it will be about the community you establish first, and the technology that powers it second.

<comment><AUTHOR> 1\. For the moment it's about peaks and hikes leading to a summit. Perhaps I should remark that a bit better.

2\. I'm working on this one in my local area, trying to reach enough peak density in it to be of bigger utility.

3\. You're right in the importance of a community. It's something I have in mind and I will start working on it soon.

Thanks for your feedback.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The first thing I wanted to do was search by region - my go-to site is <http://www.santabarbarahikes.com/> \- but it looks like local low-key hikes like those aren't included.

<comment><AUTHOR> The search functionality is not there yet, sorry. It is planned for the near future.

You're right that for most areas there are no hikes yet. Feel free to add your favourite peak (no need for it to be a very high mountain).

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Do you know <http://www.hikr.org> ? It seems to fulfill the same purpose. It's centered on Europe and reports are mainly in German and other West European languages, but there's an English-speaking community on there, too. It has been around for a couple of years, has a huge community and tons of hiking reports already.

How is Hikify different?

Also, I think the copy of the three steps could be tightened. Something like "Find an interesting route near you - Climb it - Log your achievement and share your experience and your pictures."

<comment><AUTHOR> As far as I see it, hikr.org is more about hiking reports, and hikify.com is more about a peaks and routes database. There are also many interesting ideas that I have not had time to implement yet :)

Thanks for the copy advise. As English is not my native language, copywriting is not my greatest virtue.

<comment><USER5> The nice thing about hikr for me is that the reports together form a routes database, but with personal first-hand insights from different viewpoints. That goes beyond a traditional guidebook or route database. Sorry, I really don't want to bash your site, just trying to help you understand my perspective as a hikr user.

Beware about the copy, English is not my native language either, and neither do I have any experience with copy writing. It was just a suggestion, before changing your site you should consult with someone who's better at that!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Good luck. I always like to see more hiking sites :)

We used to work on something similar - www.trailbehind.com. It started as a social hiking site, but we turned it into a search engine later. You might find, like we did, that you can link to a lot of cool content. One site we crawled was summit post.com, whihis very relevant to hikify.

As another commenter noted, it's hard to get traction for something like this, especially with several other similar companies so far ahead. It's amazing how well-competed the space is, considering there is no money in it.

We do iPhone apps now instead oh hiking websites :)

</comment><comment><USER7> What "user story" are you trying to fulfill here?

Are you trying to be a reference site for worldwide peaks? Or are you trying to be a resource so someone looking for a hike near them can see what their options are within a few hours of their current location? Or is this for trip/vacation planning?

What you have right now does not fulfill any of these due to lack of data, not localized, etc. You need to pick and audience, cater to them, and focus your site.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Hikify is a hiking and mountaineering database, in a wiki-style, where anyone (registered) can add or edit a peak, a range, a route, or a division (country, state, region, etc).

There are few peaks introduced yet, but the number is (slowly) growing.

Please feel free to add your favourite local peak if it's not there yet (it won't probably be).

Any feedback will be welcome.

</comment><comment><USER8> This is really exciting, nice work.

Can you delete this photo? I accidentally uploaded a DNG which resulted in a really crappy resized version.

<http://www.hikify.com/images/2/>

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm glad you like it.

The image has been deleted. If I assume correctly and you have climbed the McKinley, you can do a climbed log (I have to change the wording to make it more clear).

<comment><USER8> Thanks, I'll have to dig up my journals. I'll try to do when I have a bit more time. Once again, great work.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> landing page could use some more inviting photography and the color scheme could be more suited to the subject matter

other than that i have no suggestions, because i never leave the house.

<comment><USER10> A giant photo stretched across. Make me want to go out.

And I dunno, I browsed around a little bit but I'm guessing that the peaks are like k2, not the trail near my neighborhood.

It might be interesting to see trails on Google maps though, instead of having to browse around a directory.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's true the first peaks I have introduced are very difficult ones, but the site is also appropiate for average peaks.

Perhaps I should stress it better.

Browsing with Google Maps could be indeed interesting as well, I'll try to implement it later.

Thanks for your feedback.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Petty perhaps, but it strikes me as a difficult name to pronounce: I kept reading it hɪk-ify not haɪk-ify

</comment><comment><USER12> You should promote this to users of whiteblaze.net. Huge community there, if not a Web 2.0 one.

</comment><comment><USER13> Sounds like a site that'll give you hickups.

</comment><comment><USER14> The map has to be larger (or at least possible to enlarge) and also the "Google Earth" plugin should be enabled.

<comment><AUTHOR> Right now the map width depends on your resolution (and that is something to improve).

Meanwhile you have a "See in Google Maps" link, which perhaps should be more outstanding.</comment></comment>