Nexus S - <AUTHOR> http://www.google.com/phone/detail/nexus-s <comment><USER2> Since I know that many Googlers follow HN, I just want to say:

Thank you. Thank you for ensuring that a clean, root-able, modern phone is available for developers and all those who like to fully own the devices they purchase.

<comment><USER3> Um, almost all Android phones are rootable and can run custom firmware builds _(certainly all HTC's and most Samsungs)_.

Find instructions at [http://forum.xda- developers.com/wiki/index.php?title=Main_Pa...](http://forum.xda- developers.com/wiki/index.php?title=Main_Page)

(Just making the point, you don't HAVE to buy a Nexus line of phone for this)

<comment><USER4> Basically any Android device can be rooted and flashed but how difficult it can be is the problem. The HTC Vision (T-Mobile G2) has a complete copy of it's ROM on board to "restore" if you flash the phone. Motorola has also done a good job of locking bootloaders.

It won't be surprising if these "security" measures keep escalating as carriers try to find new ways to extract revenue, such as charging extra for tethering.

<comment><USER5> To be fair, I don't believe that was done to stop people from rooting their phones. One of the most common ways for phones to become damaged/bricked is for OTA updates to fail; the HTC Vision/G2/Desire Z method means that if that happens, the phone still works. Which is obviously better for the average user.

That said, it's not much of a stretch to believe it was a nefarious attempt to block rooters from rooting either.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> For those who have No Fucking Clue what NFC is: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Near_Field_Communication>

<comment><USER7> I think this is the coolest new feature, and I hope all new phones have NFC. RFID tags scan way quicker than QR codes, and don't rely on decent lighting (or an ugly code).

Further, NFC means the device _also_ has it's own RFID tag. Visa: please replace my credit card with an app. Your card readers already have the near- field hardware!

<comment><USER8> There's a similar system already in place in Japan, it's quite impressive. You can link a credit card to your phone and actually use it like a ticket at train gates, or buy stuff and pay the bills at convenience stores by scanning the phone. Adoption seems to be a bit slow though, probably because of the risk of linking a phone to a credit card, and sheer habit.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osaifu-Keitai>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> "Near Field Communications (NFC)"

So the ability to both emulate a contactless smartcard and interrogate passive rfid devices. Pretty damn cool - the ability to open doors/start cars/unlock computers/pay for stuff just with your phone without resorting to bluetooth/wifi hacks or addon hardware. Also opens you up to lots of potential applications for extra information in the real world on things that otherwise don't have barcodes.

<comment><USER10> Are rfid cards used for payment on any subway systems in the states? If so can you already use that card for payment in shops etc?

<comment><USER9> They're used in some subways - boston & new york at least - though I don't know if these are just trials or if they've perhaps ended. You definitely can't walk into a merchant and expect a contactless payment though - I'm pretty sure merchant roll outs so far have been limited to pay at the pump trials.

<comment><USER11> Boston is a completely contactless system using the same RFID chips as in London. It isn't a trial.

<comment><USER12> Although it also doesn't cover the entire system. The commuter rail trains go out where they can't rely on wireless coverage (in fact, there's at least one stretch on my line where we can rely on _not_ getting coverage), so they can't install the card readers. As a result, the monthly passes for zones beyond Boston are still in ticket form.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I'm disappointed nobody seems to be discussing the curved display. Are there any other touchscreen devices with curved screens? If so, have any of you had any experience using one? I'm quite curious to find out out if that's a useful feature or not.

<comment><USER14> Is the display itself curved or is the display cover?

<comment><USER13> Supposedly the display itself is subtly curved. <http://www.google.com/nexus/#!/features>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> TechCrunch review: <http://techcrunch.com/2010/12/06/google-nexus-s-review/>

<comment><USER16> HTC Evo's battey life is dismal? I have a Desire HD (the European equivalent) and I get two days of normal usage. Of course, I never use it normally, as I'm always browsing websites or playing games, but I did when I attempted it.

However, I do imagine that the AMOLED display will not draw as much power, so it might indeed last longer.

<comment><USER17> <http://images.anandtech.com/graphs/graph4045/34360.png>

from a recent review by Anand:

[http://www.anandtech.com/show/4045/lgs-optimus-7-samsungs- fo...](http://www.anandtech.com/show/4045/lgs-optimus-7-samsungs-focus- reviewed-a-tale-of-two-windows-phones/9)

Also, AMOLED will only be more efficient if you view dark screens more often than bright ones, which I don't think would be true for most web browsing.

Update: eliminated shortened urls.

<comment><USER18> Please don't use URL shorteners here. You still have time to change it.

Edit: Thanks for changing it!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> According to this [http://www.tmonews.com/2010/12/nexus-s-product-page-goes- liv...](http://www.tmonews.com/2010/12/nexus-s-product-page-goes-live- techcrunch-reviews-early-and-we-get-jealous/)

US pricing is $529 unlocked and $199 with two years on T-Mobile

</comment><comment><USER20> Other than NFC, more internal storage, and Gingerbread pre-installed, this pretty much has the same specs as my Nexus One, which I've been very happy with (no touch screen bugs here).

<comment><USER21> I think NFC changes the rules of the game. This is why I'd call it Nexus N(FC)!

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Nice! I have an N1, love it, and was apprehensive about my options going forward.

<comment><USER23> Wow. You love the buggy touch screen?

And the fact that google gave zero support for the phone, to the point of shutting down the community help forum.

Amazing.

<comment><USER19> My Nexus One touchscreen works fine. And the one time I called tech support it seemed acceptable.

<comment><USER23> wow. you will really tell me that your touch screen never, ever, becames crazy from time to time and you have to lock and unlock your nexus one so it can came back? mine happens 90% that the phone is charging and i pick it up. most of the time i have to call someone back because i couldn't even pick the call thanks to the touch screen bug.

or we have some 13 google employees here (who should be fixing those bugs instead of wasting time here :D) or your phone are really better than mine and some hundreds that complain about that. just check youtube.

<comment><USER19> Yes, I will really tell you that my touch screen has never, ever done that. I don't think my wife's has either. Perhaps there is a batch with a faulty hardware component.

<comment><USER23> Good to know. didn't know there were "good phones". will try to contact them for the 10th time and hope they will at least reply to me this time.

thank you

<comment><USER24> My recent RMA to HTC went quite painlessly.

FYI - my touchscreen worked fine.

<comment><USER23> Care to share the steps?

every time i contact google about it (i bought my nexus one via their store, with google checkout) i'm 100% ignored.

just contacted them again about the touch screen not working when i read the first comment here, and again, ignored so far.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Has anyone here cancelled their att iPhone service? i.e. gotten out of the 2 year contract early? I know this sounds ridiculous but I'd like to make the switch to T-Mobile and Android.

<comment><USER26> I don't think that sounds ridiculous.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> The product release landing page is here: <http://www.google.com/nexus/>

Quite a simple/beautiful HTML5 design, IMO.

<comment> brown9-2 This is a giant tangent but - what is HTML5 about this site?

<comment><USER28> Well for one, the whole thing is HTML5 given that the page's DOCTYPE is

        <!doctype html>

I don't have time to look deeper right now.

<comment><USER29> It looks like that's about it (other than a few "data-*" attributes thrown in). Unless I'm missing something, there's nothing here that couldn't have been done in HTML 4.

HTML 5 is great and all, but please let's not turn it into a marketing buzz- word when it's not really necessary.

<comment><USER30> > "but please let's not turn it into a marketing buzz-word when it's not > really necessary."

I think it's about a year late for that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> As this is a product page and not a comparison matrix, why does it specifically call out the omission of some features like infrared and physical keyboard? Not that I don't appreciate Google being forthcoming about what they chose to leave out (though who expects IR anyway?), but it seems an odd marketing choice.

<comment><USER32> I've never owned a cell phone so I may be ignorant, but isn't IR used all over the place for apps that want to scan barcodes or those fancy encrypted images to download an app off a webpage?

<comment><USER33> No, the camera is used for that. IR was used for what bluetooth is used for now.

<comment><USER34> Not in every situation. Still waiting for TVs to migrate to bluetooth ;)

<comment><USER35> IRDA was using for serial communications and the frequency are not compatible with TV remotes. the IPAQ pocket pc had wider range of frequency but most phones would not allow you to control your tv

<comment><USER36> Funnily enough, I can control my TV with my N900.

<comment><USER35> But you can't send and receive files with it. The N900 has consumer IR and not IRDA, indeed.

<comment><USER36> That's right.

I'm still not convinced that you couldn't drive an IRDA diode with TV remote data and have it work, though, at least on consumer units running at 870nm.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> I wish they would announce this sort of things months ahead of time. It's so hard to plan around contract renewals. I just bought a G2, but would much rather have had this.

</comment><comment><USER38> Under features, portable wi-fi hotspot is touted with no additional carrier fees. This currently works on T-Mobile with my Nexus one, but I assumed I was "getting away" with something. T-Mobile charges $15 for tethering/hotspot on other devices.

</comment><comment><USER39> No offline maps?! The Google boys need to go out more and see how the real world uses their phones. Very often, I found myself needing maps the most in areas with poor network reception (e.g., the Swiss Alps) and in places where data connectivity was not an option (e.g., London underground). I was very excited to hear about HTC implementing such a feature in their latest Sense builds and I hope Google will catch up and make it a native feature.

Edit: Okay, it seems they know about the problem and apparently the new version of Google Maps for Mobile will have some sort of offline caching capabilities. Hurray!

<comment><USER24> I suppose you didn't see this: [http://techcrunch.com/2010/12/06/android-map- app-3d-compass-...](http://techcrunch.com/2010/12/06/android-map- app-3d-compass-offline/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> I'm pleasantly surprised people aren't having a privacy freak-out over NFC yet. My concern is more practical: too many eggs in one basket. I feel like if NFC were to really live up to its hype I would need to keep a secondary device with me at all times as a backup in the same way I carry multiple credit cards and have a spare set of keys for my car. I suppose when it becomes a more mature technology that would be an ideal use for an older generation phone with NFC.

<comment><USER41> Yes. I'm kind of puzzled and sad about NFC in general - at a technical level it seems to be basically trying to do the same thing as bluetooth, just with a different security profile. If they had somehow built this thing on top of a bluetooth profile we might have seen way more rapid adoption with backporting to all kinds of different devices - as it is, I don't expect to see this at a retailer near me for years.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> When it says "Three-axis gyroscope" does it actually mean "Three-axis accelerometer"? Or can I really use my phone to stabilize myself in space?

<comment><USER42> Probably something like <http://www.sparkfun.com/products/9070>

iPhone 4 added one too: <http://www.apple.com/iphone/specs.html>

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> It's a shame the NFC support isn't complete. Supposedly can only read tags for now, not emulate them (though the NXP PN544 chip is perfectly capable of that).

[http://developer.android.com/reference/android/nfc/package-s...](http://developer.android.com/reference/android/nfc/package- summary.html) is looking VERY sparse. Hopefully it gets completed soon.

</comment><comment><USER44> That thing is a desktop PC. It happens to be phone shaped, but geez.

</comment><comment><USER45> Seems really similar to the Samsung Galaxy S (Vibrant) and I am disappointed to see it doesn't have the 1\. roller ball 2\. physical buttons (that you can feel) for home/back/menu/search 3\. LED (for notifications)

Now, if only Samsung would upgrade the GalaxyS owners to 2.2 (as promised) or 2.3 (wishful thinking).

<comment><USER46> Since it has bascially the same specs as the Galaxy S it would be really nice if Samsung would stop all there closed source/custom (Bada+)Android stuff.

I always waited for the opportunity to use a stock Android on my Galaxy S. Hopefully this will be possible soon.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> Ugh, Can't use it in my area of Canada. Need AT&T compatibility. Damn you, TMobile.

<comment> brown9-2 _Connectivity

Quad-band GSM: 850, 900, 1800, 1900

Tri-band HSPA: 900, 2100, 1700

HSPA type: HSDPA (7.2Mbps) HSUPA (5.76Mbps)_

AT&T doesn't work on any of these bands in your area? Which frequency do they use?

<comment><USER12> AT&T 3G is on 850 and 1900. So the GP would be able to use EDGE, but not 3G.

It's a little odd that a phone which clearly has the antennas to run on 850 and 1900 can't use them for 3G. (Yes, I know it's common. It's still odd.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> Hmmm. I wonder about much web surfing battery it has. There is quite a jump between talk time and standby time. I assume browsing uses up more battery than talking.

"Talk time 6 hours Standby time (max) 428 hours"

<comment><USER49> The Engadget review talks about talk time and internet usage as the same thing, so I guess 6 hours.

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> VoIP and NFC certainly look interesting. Will the VoIP/SIP support allow me to interface with my PBX for mobile extension calling? I sure hope so!

<comment><USER51> FWIW, i have been using VoIP with my original Android G1 all this time with the SIPdroid program. It works fairly well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> I'm mildly disappointed that it's only released on T-Mobile. I had figured that one reason to go with a Samsung device was that they already shipped a single core hardware set to every carrier, so there would be a low barrier to getting this thing on every carrier (or at least more than one). I guess this is not under Google's control, but still, I had hopes ...

<comment><USER38> I am too. I've been on T-Mobile for years, and I'm relatively happy with their service, but 3G reception (although fast when I can get it) simply isn't on par with AT&T.

Aside from that, I just don't like the fact that even though my phone is unlocked, I can really only use Tmo or wifi for fast data.

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> It sounds like since the Nexus S runs stock Android it may not include the Swype text input system common on other Android phones -- practically a killer app for touchscreen text entry. Does anyone know if it will be available on the Nexus S (either preinstalled or as an add-on)?

<comment><USER53> Swype may still be running their general beta, so there are APKs floating about that let you install it. I'm a SwiftKey guy myself, though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> Shiny and plasticky is the signature Samsung look. Great hardware, great screen, but the handset itself ends up looking cheap. This is one reason I returned my Galaxy S, and now Samsung have done it again.

Edit: okay, the actual images don't look that bad.

</comment><comment><USER55> Now, if only it could do HSPA on band 1900 so I could get 3G with it in Buenos Aires. :(

</comment><comment><USER35> mmmh. I was not impress with the iphone 4 and I am not impressed with this either. I have a nexus one and the only thing that make me jealous with the S is the NFC. Are we reaching a plateau in mobile phone development?

<comment><USER56> How can you be impressed or not with a device you have not even touched? What about it isn't impressive?

<comment><USER57> I'm withholding my final judgment until I can play with one in person, but honestly, I kind of see the original poster's point. If you have a Nexus One, what do you get by upgrading to the S?

The Nexus One already has the 800×480 screen, the 1GHz processor (though it's an older Snapdragon instead of the newer Hummingbird SoC), the 512MB of RAM... Where's the dual-core CPU? The higher-resolution screen? The extra RAM? There's not a lot of incentive to upgrade here unless you need a curved screen or NFC.

<comment><USER58> The nexus one's screen is actually more like 650x400, since they have some weird tricks to squeeze in subpixels. The Galaxy S line (I have a Vibrant, currently) has a much better screen.

Galaxies also have higher-resolution touch detection and better graphics chips; they offload a lot of the UI rendering to hardware, which makes the experience very smooth.

Unfortunately, Samsung is dragging their feet on upgrades. Current Galaxy owners are stuck on 2.1, with no news about 2.2. A Google-branded phone, with Galaxy hardware, is exciting.

That said, it's a $600 phone; if you've already got last-years $600 phone, do you _really_ need to upgrade?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER59> am I the only want noticing the speech recognition feature "go to reddit" ?

<comment><USER60> I thought that was a cute touch.

</comment></comment><comment><USER61> Is there a price anywhere?

<comment><USER62> No. I don't think Google will be selling the device themselves, like they did with the Nexus One. They will rather rely on external partners.

<comment><USER63> From the consumer landing page someone else linked to:

After December 16, Nexus S will be sold unlocked and carrier-independent initially through Best Buy stores in the U.S. and after December 20 at Carphone Warehouse stores in the UK.

{update} It looks like instead of selling the unlocked phone themselves, and selling carrier-locked phones in carrier-controlled retail outlets, they are using external partners to push the unlocked phone this time. At least they are learning from their mistakes. Presumably Best Buy will do some marketing for the phone (compared with the lack of marketing for the Nexus One).

<comment><USER4> They are using external partners to literally get these phones in people's hands. Consumers really want to touch phones before taking it home and Google seems to have taken this lesson to heart. Also having an army of blueshirts to provide setup help at purchase will make the less technically savvy happy campers.

Buying the Nexus One without feeling one first definitely was a little weird for me, but the return policy assuaged my misgivings.

<comment><USER63> To me that is part of marketing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER64> Why is this an exciting phone? Genuinely curious. The specs seem the same as (CPU) or lower than (display resolution) than N1.

EDIT: My bad. Looks like the screen resolution is identical.

</comment><comment><USER65> Can anyone provide us with a step by step instructions on how to get this phone?

I'm really confused about buying a phone plan after I buy the phone.

<comment><USER66> Wait until the 16th. Walk into Best Buy.

<comment><USER65> Will I choose a carrier at Best Buy, or do I have to sign up later? What if no carrier supports it and I'm stuck with the phone?

<comment><USER66> You can walk out with it unlocked, but it will only support T-Mobile's 3G bands.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER67> Still no FM Radio. I don't understand why it is so hard to get that feature.

<comment><USER68> Requires extra hardware, and I have to imagine that the vast majority of people would prefer to listen to their 16 GB of mp3s. I think you're just in the minority on demand for this feature.

<comment><USER69> > Requires extra hardware

Are you sure? For comparison the iPhone uses a Broadcom BCM4325 [http://www.broadcom.com/products/Bluetooth/Bluetooth-RF- Sili...](http://www.broadcom.com/products/Bluetooth/Bluetooth-RF-Silicon-and- Software-Solutions/BCM4325) for Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, this chip also can also do FM Rx. Of course that functionality isn't exposed...

<comment><USER70> The N1 has a similar Broadcom chipset (BCM4329), and although the FM radio functionality is not enabled on the stock N1, it's been enabled in recent Cyanogen builds.

<comment><USER67> Are there any additional licensing/regulation requirements around FM radios that would prevent them from just including it?

<comment><USER12> I doubt it, given that you can get FM radios under $10.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER71> >16GB of memory

Not the clearest phrasing. 16GB solid state, 512MB RAM.

</comment><comment><USER72> When will we see an international version?

</comment><comment><USER73> I apologize, this is barely tangentially related... but I'm excited to endorse Google and T-Mobile...

I'm currently paying Verizon $40/month for an extra line on a family plan, and unlimited data with no tethering (though I do for free via CM6.1). I could have _my own account_ with T-Mobile and get unlimited data for $50/month with no voice minutes.

I can use Google Voice and the Gizmo SIP Provider to be accessible via Voice Calls. I want the Nexus S. I am tired of Verizon, Motorola and HTC's nonsense with the locked NAND and the locked Bootloader. No new VZW phones have custom roms, in fact, hardly any since the Droid 1.

Go Google. Go T-Mobile. Thanks for not being (as) evil (as everyone else).

<comment><USER74> Watch out -- this was my thinking exactly when I went with an N900 on Tmobile. Unfortunately... didn't quite work out. The latency just kills calls unless I'm on Wifi. Pinging google.com, I get around 300-350ms latency on 3G and over a 1000ms latency on GPRS, which I have about half the time. In Boston, FWIW, not sure how it is elsewhere.

Now, that could just be the N900, which I'm growing more and more irritated by, but I think in this case it's more reasonable to blame the network than the phone.

<comment><USER75> I'd like to say that with my N900 on wind mobile in Canada, I get 200ms and skype is basically all I use. It works great!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER76> Man, looking at that landing page, you cannot have a doubt in your mind that google has absolutely no style. Emotion is an important part of decision making too, Google!

</comment><comment><USER77> no freakin' keyboard

</comment><comment><USER78> <sarcasm> at least it is still on the United States largest super regional carrier available in all 49 of the states I am not living in. </sarcasm> sigh.

</comment><comment><USER79> 1GHz CPU, 512MB RAM...

Kind of sounds like the iPhone 4 (from July) with NFC support and a built-in VOIP client.

<comment> mike-cardwell The Nexus One also had a 1GHz CPU and 512MB RAM, and came out before the iPhone 4.

What's your point?

<comment><USER73> The Hummingbird is a whole new beast though.

<comment><USER80> [http://thenextweb.com/mobile/2010/07/06/samsungs- hummingbird...](http://thenextweb.com/mobile/2010/07/06/samsungs-hummingbird- processor-destroys-its-competition/)

impressive... I have a snapdragon 1ghz in my phone and it is pretty decent. Would be interesting to see the difference if any on normal phone tasks.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


NBA chief Adam Silver says profit can't come before the league's principles - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnn.com/2019/10/08/media/nba-adam-silver/index.html <comment><USER2> Historically China's leaders have been very wary of even a small uprising: there is historical precedent for a dynasty being overthrown starting with the protest of just one man. It is believed by some that the memory of that potential is why Chinese authorities cracked down so brutally during the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests. Part of me wonders if cancelling access to the NBA, which has more fans in China than in the rest of the world combined, could foment discontent... and if that, along with some sufficiently acceptable apologies on the part of the NBA will cause everyone to resume amicability and allow the NBA games to be shown without interruption this fall. After all, without basketball to watch, more than a few Chinese might have the time to learn about what's happening in Hong Kong.

</comment><comment><USER3> Here's major props to Commissioner Silver for doing the right thing by Daryl Morey, the NBA, the Constitution, and the American people.</comment>


It's against US law to touch aliens. - <AUTHOR> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extra-Terrestrial_Exposure_Law

<comment><USER2> The link says the rule was revoked in 1977, so the link text, currently _"It's against US law to touch aliens."_ , is wrong.</comment>


Tell HN: Help funding (web)font autohinting project - <AUTHOR> http://www.freetype.org/ttfautohint

<comment><AUTHOR> This is a big deal.

Seeing this project to its completion would ultimately lead to a far greater adoption of advanced web typography and a better looking web in general. See [0] for the original announcement on Typophile and the discussion that follows.

As you may or may not know, there is a big issue with how bad a lot of fonts look in Windows-based browsers and this project is meant to address this issue by automating and simplifying the process of _font hinting_ [1], which is essential to making a font render decently on Windows.

\----

[0] <http://typophile.com/node/84404>

[1] <http://www.typotheque.com/articles/hinting>

</comment><comment><USER2> What happens if the $30,000 goal isn't met? Does everyone who contributed lose their money?</comment>


PyFileFixity: Helping long term storage of data via redundant ECCs - <AUTHOR> https://pypi.org/project/pyFileFixity/ <comment><USER2> For comparisons with PAR2, I had similar thoughts / concerns / notes, and note that the author of this has also factored PAR2 into their thinking:

> Parchive (PAR1, PAR2, MultiPar): well known error correction file generator. > The big advantage of Parchives is that an ecc block depends on multiple > files: this allows to completely reconstruct a missing file from scratch > using files that are still available. Works good for most people, but most > available Parchive generators are not satisfiable for me because 1- they do > not allow to generate an ecc for a directory tree recursively (except > MultiPar, and even if it is allowed in the PAR2 specs), 2- they can be very > slow to generate (even with multiprocessor extensions, because the galois > field is over 2^16 instead of 2^8, which is very costly), 3- the spec is not > very resilient to errors and tampering over the ecc file, as it assumes the > ecc file won't be corrupted (I also tested, it's still a bit resilient, but > it could be a lot more with some tweaking of the spec), 4- it doesn't allow > for partial recovery (recovering blocks that we can and pass the others that > are unrecoverable): with PAR2, a file can be restored fully or it cannot be > at all.

<comment><USER3> It's too bad that one tool exists that's 99% of the way there, but for whatever reason someone writes a different tool for the extra 1%, and now you have a split user base.

<comment><USER4> Do you think this would split the existing PAR user base, given that the pros don't matter much to those users (recursive directory blah blah... just create a zip file) and the cons (can't replace a missing file) matter a lot?

It's an eccentric user base to begin with, of course. Most archivists and ordinary users just create multiple backups, and the file integrity concerns aside from file sharing and archiving are best addressed at the filesystem level.

<comment><USER3> I'm mostly referring to the choice between "using an unmaintained, less popular utility" vs "using the industry standards that lacks some useful features".

It would obviously be nice if PAR were faster, for example.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Sigh, and it's py2 only and hasn't had a release in 4 years.

An archival programming effort which itself has fallen behind? I hope not, these sorts of things are pretty important.

<comment><USER2> Good point, I hadn't spotted that. Title should be updated to reflect that this is (2015)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> How about the code written by Backblaze (cloud storage and backup company)? [https://github.com/Backblaze/JavaReedSolomon](https://github.com/Backblaze/JavaReedSolomon)

Is it comparable?

<comment><USER2> Yep, they're the same underlying algorithm. I'd wager that the Backblaze code is probably better tested, by virtue of the scale that they operate at.

Assuming they still use it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> How this compares with HDFS Erasure coding?

[https://hadoop.apache.org/docs/r3.0.0/hadoop-project- dist/ha...](https://hadoop.apache.org/docs/r3.0.0/hadoop-project-dist/hadoop- hdfs/HDFSErasureCoding.html)

</comment><comment><USER8> In the old Usenet bin scene (which is actually still going strong) .par2 files and tools like QuickPar are used to provide redundancy sets for files and they work very well. It's a wonderful system. They work in a similar way to RAID or ZFS parity does, and you can create parity blocks for pretty much any set of files. Powerful and versatile.

</comment><comment><USER9> If it's for storage on optical disks I'm rather fond of dvdisaster ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dvdisaster](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dvdisaster)) which will fill up spare space on a disk with redundant data, specifically distributing it across the surface to prevent defects in one area leading to unrecoverable data.

Seems to have become unmaintained though, which is worrying.

</comment><comment><USER4> It would be quite mad to use this instead of something battle-tested like PAR2:

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

<comment><USER10> It'd be far better to modify Parchive to include these use-cases in a compatible way. Other Par2 users might want these functions and not even know it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I really like the idea behind storing error-correction codes at the application level. Disks should just store and retrieve a chunk of bits and it should be pushed up to the application level to decide whether or not those bits were what we wrote. From there, we can make the right decisions about how durable we really want a file to be.

Instead, people seem to have invested a lot of effort in going the other direction; let the application have less control and let many magic layers in the middle figure out the details. We have had filesystems for decades, which pretend to map names to a list of durable block numbers. Of course, the blocks are not so durable (nor is the database), so people lose their data all the time and act like it's normal.

People have a solution to that problem, though, make the block devices more durable! We can just add software or hardware RAID on top of a bunch of disks, and now suddenly what the filesystem thinks is just one block is now 3 blocks sharded across 3 disks. Some magical curator process then tells me when disks have failed (as though it can detect that with 100% reliability), and I pop in a new drive and magically everything has been repaired. Of course, in reality, the entire disk doesn't just disappear all at once; some blocks just return data with a flipped bit, or all 0s, or an occasional error. My experience in running RAID-1 arrays under Linux (for my workstation) is that I notice some errors in the logs and have to manually figure out which disk contains the correct block (this is why I always use 3 disks) and then dd the block from the good device to the degraded device. By the time the automatic curator shows up to detect and repair this problem for me... all three disks have been RMA'd. It is awful and I'd be surprised to hear a story where someone says "one of my disks failed, I was notified in a timely manner, and my array was repaired when I inserted a new disk". It just doesn't track enough data to actually work, because it ignores the important of error-correction codes. (Don't get me started on RAID-5. That has some parity, but not Reed-Solomon codes, and the parity just makes it unlikely that you could ever manually get the array out of a bad state.)

But even RAID isn't reliable enough, and people don't use it, so of course the disk pretends it is more durable than it actually is. Spinning rust disks have some spare sectors. If their internal heuristics that you cannot tune or read the source code for think something is wrong, it will store some data saying "now block 42 is actually stored at block 2389473" and my RAID controller, filesystem, and application never have to know! Hooray! SSDs are even more egregious; they amplify writes, they garbage collect, they compute proper R-S codes over the data, and have a multi-core CPU running god-knows-what code handling it all.

I think it is all crazy. In my dream world, an SSD would just be a bunch of flash-chips that are not very durable due to the nature of how TLC NAND flash works. Then my application can decide "this is an important photograph, so I'm going to shard it across 8 chips on two different controllers and use error- correction codes that can correct 100% of bit errors". But, that does not exist.

It all makes me mad because when I worked at Google I actually had control, at the application level, over all this. There was the underlying disk API that you could use directly that just stored a block, with the durability of a datacenter disk drive. Then on top of that were filesystems and databases where you had to pick the durability for every operation; you could pick between straight redundancy (write to 3 disks) or whatever level of Reed- Solomon correction you wanted (all these are tradeoffs between read speed, write speed, and actual durability).

Meanwhile in the real world, people build crazy things that still lose their data. ZFS loses data. Cloud block stores lose data. Consumer databases lose data. I know photographers and videographers that have lost all their work because of disk failure... they had multiple disks, but their applications did not uses the disks efficiently in a way that could detect and correct errors. So you come back a year later, and opening your file just says "sorry, error!" and you accept your loss and move on. Someday, I hope this can stop. I never want to watch a YouTube video like this again: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gSrnXgAmK8k](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gSrnXgAmK8k) (LTT's Windows-based fileserver with hardware RAID fails randomly and cannot be fixed; all their work gone)

<comment><USER12> > Then my application can decide "this is an important photograph, so I'm > going to shard it across 8 chips on two different controllers and use error- > correction codes that can correct 100% of bit errors". But, that does not > exist.

It's still not sufficient to backup to a single drive since the device may be lost or destroyed. And once you are storing in the cloud you have all the benefits of distributed redundancy and multi-regional support.

<comment><USER11> Well, yes, you lose the data if you lose all the hardware that is storing your data. But that's strictly better than the current case, where RAID controller bugs, SSD firmware bugs, "bit rot", etc. take out your files for absolutely no good reason.

The cloud is not made of magic. There are some things that work well, like immutable object stores that are okay with eventual consistency (S3 as an example), but these stores do not work well for things like databases, or logs, or editing video.</comment></comment></comment>


Looking at Chaos     - <AUTHOR> http://www.i-programmer.info/projects/38-windows/316-looking-at-chaos.html

<comment><USER2> Cross referenced to

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=804660>

submitted 23 hours ago.</comment>


Pyodide: Bringing the scientific Python stack to the browser - <AUTHOR> https://hacks.mozilla.org/2019/04/pyodide-bringing-the-scientific-python-stack-to-the-browser/ <comment><USER2> Wow, it seems to work really well. After giving it a small test drive, I'm impressed. Solid work from Mozilla, and a pretty informative article too!

That said, between this, iodide and ObservableHQ, I guess I give up. The browser _is_ the new OS.

My question now is - how can we make browser environment to be more like Emacs (bear with me)? My main complaints are:

\- Browser ergonomy absolutely sucks, and there's nothing you can do about it. You're at the mercy of each service's UI, which usually means you'll be clicking a lot and maybe sometimes get a keyboard shortcut here and there. Forget about advanced features, or consistency between sites.

\- You have near-zero control over your computing environment. Between sandboxing and half the code being obfuscated blob of transpiled JS (the other half of the code is on the server), you can maybe automate the UI a little with userscripts and fix it up with userstyles.

\- There's near-zero interoperability. Unless service authors agree on and implement some APIs, things can't talk to each other. Forget about _making_ them talk. Whatever little wiring you can sometimes do (thanks to services like Zapier and IFTTT), you never have control over the process, and it always involves communication through third-party servers, even if all you'd like is to transfer some local data between browser tabs.

If the browser is the next OS, can we make it suck less than desktop OSes in terms of ergonomy / productivity? Desktop OSes already suck in this regard compared to the promise of old Smalltalk and Lisp systems (that's why I live in Emacs most of the time), so all I see is a downwards trend.

Current state of things is fine for casual use and casual users, but if I'm to spend 8+ hours a day doing serious work in a web browser, the browser needs to be better.

<comment><USER3> > If I'm to spend 8+ hours a day doing serious work in a web browser, the > browser needs to be better.

Agreed! Jupyter notebooks are great, but I miss my Vim keybindings when editing code in cells.

(Plugins like Vimperator always collide with _some_ native keybindings.)

<comment><USER4> If you run EIN (Emacs Ipython Notebook module) in emacs with vim keybindings (via spacemacs or evil mode, or some other distribution/mode) you can get some pretty great results. Would definitely look into it if you're either already using emacs or willing to try it out.

<comment><USER5> I tried it at some point, but a minor inconvenience was that it kept adding superfluous metadata to the cells I was editing.

Since some of the notebooks I work on are collaborative and versioned with git, this was painful for reading diffs (even more so with the ipynb format) so I dropped it to my regret.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It's great to see how far WebAssembly and Emscripten has come and this is a really cool app!

> If you haven't already tried Pyodide in action, go try it now! (50MB > download)

I wonder though how ready is it for production usage. At Repl.it, years ago[1], we moved away from browser-based execution to the cloud because it excluded many users who don't have the client-side firepower to download/parse/execute this much JS/WASM.

Repl.it can already run a lot of the examples here [2] but I gotta say the DOM-integration is pretty neat. We could do interactive stuff on Repl.it using our new Graphics infrastructure (GFX)[3] but there is always the roundtrip delay. Here is the same matplotlib example running and streamed down on X11: [https://repl.it/@amasad/matplotlib](https://repl.it/@amasad/matplotlib)

[1]: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16578943](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16578943)

[2]: [https://repl.it/@amasad/pyodide- example](https://repl.it/@amasad/pyodide-example)

[3]: [https://repl.it/blog/gfx](https://repl.it/blog/gfx)

<comment><USER7> Browser vs server-side is always going to be a tradeoff, yeah. In some cases you're ok with paying for server time, and then don't need to depend on clients running your code. But in other cases it's much more cost-effective to run code on the client.

Note that the browser has gotten a lot better in the years since repl.it moved away from running code there. In particular wasm parses and executes a lot faster and takes a lot less memory than JS.

<comment><USER6> We're overdue on toying around and reevaluating wasm. It would be particularly great if we can make the decision on a per-use-case basis. I.e. fallback to cloud in underpowered devices or instances where it makes more sense.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> There is one area where "computing in the browser" misses the mark a little - browser interfaces (like Jupyter) are often used not just for the convenience they offer, but also because they serve as thin clients, which provision vastly better computing resources than you have locally.

So while I do some of my coding in the browser, the code executed is an EC2 far far away, close to my data, with excellent networking etc. There is very little that a Python stack directly in my browser would offer, to me (!) at least (your mileage may vary).

<comment><USER9> Not just that, but a lot of organization use the setup to give good starting interface to data scientist who might know nothing about how to set up all the python packages...

<comment><USER10> A data scientist wo knows nothing about how to setup the tools he or she uses daily?

Tell me more.

<comment><USER9> Well I have some friends doing genetics and their infrastructure is maintained by IT team. For them the whole programming experience is connecting to jupyter server running on pre-configured server. I think there are even some online services offering this kind of configuration for teams.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Incredible undertaking. Looking forward to play with it for simple machine learning tasks. I think that loading packages directly from PyPI will be a huge milestone.

</comment><comment><USER12> Would be curious to see if a version of Cython could be made to work with this. Much of my data analysis is me passing numpy arrays into C functions which Cython helps a lot with. So I would be looking for a version of Cython that would convert that to webassembly.

<comment><USER13> Cython works for ahead-of-time compilation. (Pandas requires it, for example). Making it work in the browser would also mean putting a C compiler there, which people have done. I have no idea how well that would all hold together, though.

<comment><USER11> Ideally Cython would allow to compile directly to Webassembly (and maybe using Pyodine converters), without going through C and requiring a C compiler also.

Of course that is a huge job and might very well never happen.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I want to believe so bad. Being able to do web development with Python instead of JavaScript has been something I've dreamed about forever.

<comment><USER15> Why not just use Django or Flask? Python web dev is great because you do have access to so many of these incredible scientific libraries like Pandas, etc.

<comment><USER16> I don't know anything about web dev, so maybe it's a stupid question, but you still need javascript for the front end, right? You can't build the front and back end development completely in python?

<comment><USER17> I think they're implying that you use a Python web framework and server-side rendering.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> > It's also been argued more generally that Python not running in the browser > represents an existential threat to the language

I do not believe that.

</comment><comment><USER19> Is anyone using this yet? What's your experience been?

<comment><USER20> I've used it for a couple small projects in the context of trying Iodide.

It's pretty good for data science—I can't speak to DOM manipulation that much, I've only done very minimal work with it for that. My two cents: it's bit rough around the edges—the performance is noticeably worse, and for data science, with medium-sized datasets it can freeze a tab for 10-15 seconds. Sometimes you get an odd edge case though where standard Python cannot run perfectly due to some combination of operations.

That said, overall, I'm really excited by where it's going, and I've always been able to work around the limitations.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Can this be used to create a desktop application using Electron?

<comment><USER22> That would be an interesting stack if you could write desktop apps using Python but use the DOM/Browser stuff for the UI layer.

<comment><USER21> Yeah I often run into the need to develop basic UIs for data analysis for people with limited programming experience. Currently I have to settle for using Jupyter notebooks with embedded ipywidgets, but it's not still not very user-friendly. And the desktop app libraries like PyQt5 are overkill for what I need, and most of the visualization libraries I use are designed for jupyter notebooks/web e.g. Bokeh.

If I could just port my jupyter notebook+widgets+plots into an Electron window and ship it to people that'd be awesome.

<comment><USER23> Maybe check out Dash by Plotly. It's helped me address that exact situation as well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Looks really nice!

I prefer the look of the JSMD format to the Jupyter notebook format and hope that is something that might get integrated into JupyterHub as well.

Question: is there some documentation for deploying your own Iodide server behind a firewall? The original Iodide post mentions this is possible.

</comment><comment><USER25> It's a cool project technically, but I don't understand the use case?

I mean surely everyone can just have real python/jupyterlab - if you run it in Docker it's easy to handle the dependencies etc.

Am I missing something?

<comment><USER26> I gave a keynote at PyCon last year that touched on this: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ITksU31c1WY#t=32](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ITksU31c1WY#t=32)

For me, the most important aspect of Pyodide is that it allows the scientific Python stack to go everywhere the Web goes. And the Web goes _everywhere._

That means I can share a link to a Pyodide notebook, and the recipient gets a fully interactive experience, no installation required. And that's _really_ important for the generation that's getting their start in computing through classroom iPads, Chromebooks, etc. which do not easily allow for "real" Python.

<comment><USER27> As someone not familiar with any of this: is that not exactly what Jupyter Lab does? I understood that the main difference between Pyodide and that is that Pyodide allows you to also use e.g. D3 for rendering?

<comment><USER26> A big difference is _where_ Python runs. With Pyodide, everything runs entirely in your browser, and the server side can be completely static. With Jupyter, you need a separate copy of Python running on a server somewhere to actually perform any computation.

<comment><USER28> Wouldn't it be more straightforward then to compile Python to WASM, and combine the resulting binary with Jupyter so everything can run in the browser?

<comment><USER29> Compiling Python to WASM was far from straightforward. That's essentially all Pyodide is, and why it is impressive. Presumably no one has taken the time to combine it with Jupyter since it is so brand spanking new.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I'm looking forward to try out Pyodide in Electron so that I can make use of all the great Python scientific and signal processing libraries for data processing.

<comment><USER31> lol what a crazy rubegoldberg machine - like the person beneath asks: why not just use "native" python

<comment><USER29> PWAs, running in a sandboxed/secured environment where installing native python isn't an option, bolting existing python code bases onto existing electron code bases. There are plenty of use cases. Just because you haven't encountered one doesn't mean there aren't legitimate applications. It's hard/impossible to judge someone's tech stack without understand the constraints they are operating under.

<comment><USER32> Exactly. Otherwise you'd need some other way to communicate between Electron and Python. This is possible, you could use ZeroMQ. But it would be a huge pain.

This would easily make sense where you want to execute your app's logic in Python, but want to keep the UI in HTML and JS.

<comment><USER29> Definitely. And a lot of the motivation for that type of approach is driven by team skill portfolios rather than raw technical merit. If you have a data science team specialized in python and a front end team specialized in JS (which I think we can agree describes the overwhelming majority of DS and FE teams), there's a really strong organizational motivation to bolt python and JS together in flexible ways that match the available deployment infrastructure, which, like it or not, includes electron.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Can it run cuda? Otherwise not that practical.

Minor interest. Can this approach run j/k or more important lisp?

<comment><USER34> _Most_ practical python programs do not use CUDA, even scientific ones.

<comment><USER35> Says the mkl user.

(Sorry, couldn't resist).</comment></comment></comment>


Can a magnet zap a hard drive like in Breaking Bad? Experts say likely not - <AUTHOR> http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2407192,00.asp

<comment><USER2> This post is a spoiler. Do not click if you haven't seen the premiere of Breaking Bad. I haven't seen it yet and I clicked the link and read the first five words and immediately clicked back.</comment>


Show HN: Collection of React.js Components - <AUTHOR> http://leesalminen.github.io

<comment><AUTHOR> I just built a little one-pager that I hope will become a useful resource for React.js developers.

If you've come across any useful React components, feel free to add them to the list!</comment>


One year after iPad: Is Adobe Flash still relevant? - <AUTHOR> http://www.zdnet.com/blog/perlow/one-year-after-ipad-is-adobe-flash-still-relevant/16967

<comment><USER2> I have yet to see anything come close to the power of Flash for interactive content creation. I find it humorous when people release things done with HTML5 and everyone says "whoa this is amazing" which is true, but it's been possible since some of the earliest versions of Flash.

It will take a lot more than the ipad to kill Flash, it will take people to build alternate tools that allow easy creation of interactive content... not a device that doesn't support the _standard_ (standard is in italics because it isn't technically the standard, but it's what lots of people use, the majority anyway)

An example of this from today: [http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/h1mc6/interacti...](http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/h1mc6/interactive_html5_canvas_demonstration_of/) and then [http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/h1mc6/interacti...](http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/h1mc6/interactive_html5_canvas_demonstration_of/c1ry9sd)

<comment><USER3> Flash is still the gold standard.

I'm still surprised that there isn't a more concerted effort to get Flash on more devices. HTML 5 is literally almost a decade behind Flash (Flash 7 feels like the closest, which was 2003).

The HTML standards body just moves too slow (basically all standards bodies do, its the nature of the beast). Look at how Silverlight has changed since its been released, compared to HTML.

I'm personally a fan of the plugin model in general. I feel like the only thing browsers should have is HTML/CSS and a way to talk to the DOM (maybe treat the DOM as a RESTful service). And then plugins that can be hosted for things like Javascript, C#, Flash, etc...

<comment><USER4>
      > HTML 5 is literally almost a decade behind Flash

It's not about Flash vs. HTML5 as many think. It's about flash vs. native apps.

<comment><USER5> I disagree.

Once devices that don't support Flash become pervasive enough, everyone will have to write their flash-based web sites to support them. For most sites, this would mean using HTML5 (or related technologies), not writing a separate app that would require a developer license, approval, forking the codebase, etc...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Seems like the answer is -- "no" for mobile. Sure, there has been an announcement about hardware acceleration, but how many of the existing handsets will be able to take advantage of this? There are a few components to this question -- 1) hardware capability; 2) manufacturer support for an upgraded OS; 3) the carrier willing to push it.

Fact is, with all the android devices out there, Flash is a joke. Initial impressions are proving Steve Jobs right, future technical advances will have a steep slope to prove otherwise.

</comment><comment><USER7> Um, yeah-- it sure is.

50% of Facebook logins are specifically to play games. Most of those games are Flash. (source: [http://socialtimes.com/facebook-gamers-hours-per- month_b2415...](http://socialtimes.com/facebook-gamers-hours-per-month_b24156) )

<comment><USER8> Well the question is whether people mind. For example most web content aimed at kids is flash-based (pbskids etc) so you can't play those on the iPad; but then if you have an iPad there are many equivalent native games that you can use for the same purposes. I am sure the same is the case for adult games. If you have 15 minutes to wait for the dentist, do you care whether you are playing a Facebook game or Plants v. Zombies on your phone? Either way, it helps pass the time.

<comment><USER9> What's your replacement for sites like Kongregate or Newgrounds, where literally hundreds of new games show up every month, and you can just jump in and try them out at a whim and socialize with others doing the same? I don't mean this sarcastically, I'd love to have anything remotely that nice when on my iPod touch.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> That was a very long-winded way of saying "I don't really know. What do you think?"

</comment><comment><USER11> Relevant? Yes.

Future Proof? No. (At least for the general web.)

Yet, I see a very bright future for Adobe. +1 for CS5.5 PhoneGap integration and subscription pricing.

</comment><comment><USER12> Flash not being on the iPad has nothing to do with its instability. It has to do with Steve Jobs wanting to control the App Store 100%. People being able to run Flash Apps gives a means for them to go around Apple's back and not give Apple money.

The fact is that JS/Canvas is where Flash was 8 years ago. And when they finally finalize the HTML5 spec Flash will be someplace else again.

Flash runs fine on my Nook Color, without destroying it. Eventually the competing tablets might coax Apple to embrace Flash at some point. Or not...

</comment><comment><USER13> _"Apple refuses to spend the time and due diligence with Adobe to fully optimize it correctly.

Unfortunately, as I have noted earlier, Google is also 100 percent guilty of this as well."_

It all depends on how Adobe is willing to adapt. It's easy to blame Google and Apple because we only know one side of the story. Linux sources are available but the Flashplayer still sucks on Linux. Android sources are also available. So I'm not sure about the 100%.

</comment><comment><USER14> Personally speaking, I consider the lack of Flash to be a feature; not a bug.

</comment><comment><USER15> I just watched President Obama's speech live using a flash-based player. I don't know of a to perform live streaming with HTML5.

<comment><USER16> On an iOS device, HTTP streaming would be the way (other clients like VLC support it too).

[http://arstechnica.com/web/news/2009/07/apple-proposes- http-...](http://arstechnica.com/web/news/2009/07/apple-proposes-http- streaming-feature-as-a-protocol-standard.ars)

It's got nothing to do with HTML5 though, which I think is a good thing.</comment></comment>


Seventeen Reasons Not to Be a Manager - <AUTHOR> https://charity.wtf/2019/09/08/reasons-not-to-be-a-manager/ <comment><USER3> This is a very idiosyncratic list. While they point out that the list focuses on intrinsic reasons, they seem the author's reason's not to be a manager but dont "generalise". For example, not having the opportunity to job hop, or you can do all the fun tasks an Individual Contributor. The first one may be true, but that in and of itself is only a tool to manage a career progression and pay. The second one is only true if you consider management to be only that which overlaps with a Sr individual contributor might do: mentoring, decision making. There is more on the management path. The type of manager a sr developer transitions into is really only the beginning of a career path - <USER2> the article is written from that perspective.</comment>


Ask HN: 300 employees, what is Twitter doing with them all? - <AUTHOR>

Twitter just announced their 300th employee [1].  I thought I would extend the question to people who might know.  What is a company like Twitter doing with 300 employees?  Of course this is all speculation, but I feel 300 is just too much.<p>I would love to hear what everyone here thinks!<p>[1] https://twitter.com/#!/twitter/status/28816319556 <comment><USER3> Factors to keep in mind:

Twitter is a global, high-traffic operation with a pile of dedicated servers. It takes a lot of facilities staff to deal with that.

Twitter is an HA service that is trying to build a reputation for reliability. You need enough ops staff to keep a 24/7 NOC up and running and to deal with illnesses and vacations.

Twitter is in an explosive growth phase. They are quite likely to be employing lots of engineers on strategic projects. It can be a mistake to think of your R&D team as some kind of cost that you need to contain. R&D is an investment in the future. And Twitter has a lot of VC money to invest right now.

Not everything scales. In particular: Sales and customer service don't scale perfectly unless you deliberately engineer that from day one. For example, if you build Google Ads (and are able to compete with the _original_ Google Ads) you can sell ads with Perl scripts. But traditional ad sales requires salespeople. Customers like to be talked to, they like to get their problems solved and their tickets closed by sympathetic humans. Depending on the various business models that Twitter is considering, they may need a bunch of sales people to negotiate deals with customers, and/or a bunch of systems integrators to help customers learn to process the data coming out of the firehose.

Twitter needs lawyers and moderators and ombudsmen. They receive DMCA takedown notices. They receive reports of threats and spam. People steal credentials and impersonate other people. There are privacy laws and telecom regulations. They have to deal with these things in multiple languages and around the world.

<comment><USER4> Just to give some deeper understanding of why sales doesn't scale: here at The Ad Agency, we're responsible for spending our clients' large budgets buying media from people like Twitter (I don't think we ever buy from Twitter, but we theoretically could). That process involves having Twitter come into our offices to pitch their platform to us, justify an investment, provide us with the tools to sell the idea to our clients, then provide us with ongoing account management to coordinate, implement, track, and report on the campaign. Ad agencies rarely do self-serve media buying, so media sellers need to pound the pavement in NYC to get big brands on their platforms.

<comment><USER3> _Ad agencies rarely do self-serve media buying_

And why is that, one might ask?

I'll take a guess: Companies hire ad agencies to pursue advertising strategies that go well beyond what's possible with self-serve media buys. It's not that you can't do a lot with self-serve media, or that there's not a huge business for such media. It's that ad agencies serve a different class of clientele, one that has bigger scope and bigger budgets. And, once the budget and scope grow beyond a certain point, it becomes worthwhile to have _actual humans_ negotiate the deals. After all, negotiation is pretty difficult to automate, and most ads are not commodity products.

<comment><USER4> Well said. There are better "self-service" marketplaces for TV, where the media sellers have organized, but the online landscape is too fragmented. It would be inane for an agency to train someone up in "Twitter buying", so instead there are people trained in "media planning" (usually specialized in TV, Print, or Digital) who then coordinate with specialists at individual vendors (Twitter, Facebook, Google, other networks).

Ad agencies add value to their clients through strategy, creative, planning, and experience in execution. The actual serving of ads is largely a pass along expense, and therefore ripe territory for smart technology companies.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> <http://twitter.com/positions.html>

That's a list of all open positions, maybe that will help give an idea.

</comment><comment><USER6> Jane answered this well on Quora: <http://www.quora.com/Why-does-Twitter- need-300-employees>

<comment><USER7> Nice to see that they have 20ish people on platform/API. That's about 3 times as many people as Facebook supposedly have on theirs.

<comment><USER8> ... and it shows. Facebook's API and platform are terrible.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> They have, for example, one person working full-time with relatives of deceased people.

<comment><USER10> What does that mean? Deceased employees? Which kind of daily task does this guy have? [http://everything2.com/user/ataraxia/writeups/Professional+m...](http://everything2.com/user/ataraxia/writeups/Professional+mourners)

<comment><USER11> Dealing with the accounts of people who have died, handing them over to family members or shutting them down, etc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Justifying their massive sale price to Google/Yahoo/Microsoft. You can't pay $3 billion for a company that doesn't have at least a few hundred employeees.

<comment><USER13> Alternatively, businesses can go the boring route and actually make enough profit to justify a $3 billion price.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I expect a lot of them are in customer service/business development/lead generation roles.

<comment><USER15> Almost exactly half (150) are engineers, leaving the other half for the businessy roles.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> People tells me that twitter guys are smart but it doesn't seems that way. They changed whole architecture again and again but there are still downs time by time. But that is another case. Anyway, with that point of view it might be required to collect some experience and ideas together to brought more stable product. But i'm sorry to say that if it is what they are thinking.. they are in the wrong way.

</comment><comment><USER17> Same as Digg. Betting they'll be acquired.

<comment><USER18> I don't think you can compare rapid traffic growth and a traffic slump and call them the "same".

<comment><USER17> Digg is just a couple of years ahead.

Lets see where Twitter is in 2 years.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> You know how when people count lines of code, and other people say it is a meaningless metric?

Number of employees is the same way. You can arbitrarily change the number by outsourcing non-core-business jobs. Like HR or payroll or whatever.

</comment><comment><USER20> I don't think they have enough employees.

When I send them DMCA takedown notices, they only remove the content if I remind them 3 or 4 times. After weeks of reminding them, the content has been seen by thousands. That kind of defeats the purpose of them even offering to take down the content.

</comment><comment><USER21> I hope they're re-releasing dabbledb for everyone to use...

</comment><comment><USER22> Defending Sparta from the Persians.

</comment><comment><USER23> \--- Thinking out loud ---

There is yet a thing to come of twitter:

I design big systems; HQ campus networks, Hospital networks and systems, RFID/RTLS tracking systems etc...

Back at Lockheed in 2002 we talked about this untapped M2M information layer that was just becoming accessible.

We imagined that there was a ton of data, contextual and revealing about what human actions were, that was happening and going to exponentially happen at a machine to machine level...

this device is here, in this state, with this sensor data and tethered to this owner... etc...

Twitter is kind of this sub-meta layer of information that has emerged - <USER2> not about machines -- about the human psyche...

there is a lot to be said for the 140 limit -- think of it as a protocol spec for the machine enabled telepathy that is the internet.

take that paradigm and apply it to the M2M idea previously stated: use twitter as a platform (middle ware, much like Emergin) to deliver short context messages between social systems, in an automated way) and then mine the fuck out of it for intent, interest, trend, etc...

This is like using it to data(sift) mine the information users put into the twitdome to determine such things as stock prices, national satisfaction on [issue], etc...

the beauty is that much can be gleaned DUE to the fact that the inputs are of a known, limited size.

I theorize THIS is exactly why the library of congress has chosen/forced? the archiving of all tweets -- as it is immensely valuable for "opinion mining" a populous due to the fact that all entrants are limited to post in a small, set frame. (better be more informed than the populous you wish to control)

Thus the issues about mining are much more manageable.

</comment><comment><USER24> Why don't you go start a company and show us how great you are at headcount?</comment>


On Filters - <AUTHOR> http://wayoftheduck.com/filters <comment><USER2> Go read "The User Illusion" <http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/106732.The_User_Illusion></comment>


Five Unsung Heroes of Seattle's Tech Scene - <AUTHOR> http://www.xconomy.com/seattle/2009/08/20/five-unsung-heroes-of-the-seattle-tech-scene/

<comment><USER2> I like that the Seattle startup scene is getting some more love. There really are a ton of smart entrepreneurs and great startups there.</comment>


Ask HN: What's the size of the WhatsApp web app? - <AUTHOR>

I mean, how many megabytes of assets would I download whenever I open that site?<p>I'm asking because it takes an awful lot more time to open than Facebook or even Youtube. <comment><USER2> Relevant [http://www.nukeador.com/23/01/2015/we-have-to-fight-again- fo...](http://www.nukeador.com/23/01/2015/we-have-to-fight-again-for-the-web/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Your link doesn't answer my question.</comment></comment>


Ticket Servers: Distributed Unique Primary Keys on the Cheap - <AUTHOR> http://code.flickr.com/blog/2010/02/08/ticket-servers-distributed-unique-primary-keys-on-the-cheap/

<comment><USER2> Although it's a cool hack, what's the advantage of doing this over using a GUID or a UUID? Fewer bits?</comment>


The Mind in the Whirlwind - <AUTHOR> http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2017/03/16/consciousness-mind-in-the-whirlwind/ <comment><USER2> We will never reach any real conclusions about the source of or reason for consciousness. All 'explanations' ultimately reduce to 'this happens in the brain then consciousness happens'.

It's an unsolvable mystery, in principle.

<comment><USER3> That's why, as they say in science, "it's always better to give up."

<comment><USER2> I don't think you're fully understanding the issue of consciousness if you think that saying it's impossible to solve in principle amounts to giving up. It's a legitimate philosophical position.

There is no scientific programme which has ever been put forth to understand how a physical system gives rise to phenomenological experience. This is not a matter of us not having the resources to conduct a series of experiments. This is us having absolutely no idea of what sorts of experiments we could run - forgetting resource constraints - to shed light on how matter generates consciousness.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Ok, is this a review? What book is the review about?

<comment><USER5> It doesn't look like a review. Found at the bottom of the page: "This is the sixth in a series of conversations on consciousness between Riccardo Manzotti and Tim Parks."</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Services for startups / gigs for hackers - <AUTHOR>

Hi folks,
Had a chance to meet some of you at the recent nyc meetup.  Had a couple questions that I'd like to ask the group out there.
As a bootstrapped startup, what are some "bite-sized"  needs that you'd be willing to pay someone local to do, assuming the process of getting this help was efficient?  (I'm thinking one to a few hours, maybe $50-200 compensation).
I suppose this might cut against the "do everything yourself" mantra (which I actually firmly subscribe to), but in some circumstances it might make sense considering the value of time (or perhaps the limitations of the founders' skillsets).
On the flip side, as a hacker, what are some services you could provide to a small company to make some cash?  Ideally this wouldn't involve creating significant IP, as that might get tricky.
Best, Ep. <comment><USER2> I was also at the NY meet up. This is off-topic, but do you know if there are labeled photos of people attending? I'd like to double check who everyone was and who I was talking to.

</comment><comment><USER3> You know, I've love a service where I can ask hackers how to do _stuff_.

Like Yahoo Answers, but hacker answers.</comment>


Of Course There's Going To Be A Newspaper Bailout - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/you-idiot-of-course-theres-going-to-be-a-newspaper-bailout-2009-5 <comment><USER2> Obama says, "No." He says Obama will weaken.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, I don't trust him. I'm afraid it's going to happen.</comment></comment>


Smooth Voxel Terrain - <AUTHOR> http://0fps.wordpress.com/2012/07/12/smooth-voxel-terrain-part-2/

<comment><USER2> If you're still interested in realtime voxel landscapes, I'd suggest checking out this series of articles from (sadly now defunct) flipcode: [http://flipcode.com/archives/Realtime_Voxel_Landscape_Engine...](http://flipcode.com/archives/Realtime_Voxel_Landscape_Engines- Part_1_Introduction.shtml)

</comment><comment><USER3> This looks like the basis for an extremely cool Minecraft mod.

</comment><comment><USER4> Beautiful, and if you didn't try the WebGL "DEMO" go back and try it.

I like the way the original faces map 1:1 onto the original mesh, too ... which would be important for a Minecraft-like environment with many block types, rather than the binary one discussed.

</comment><comment><USER5> The Reddit discussion linked to this video of an engine using Elastic Surface Nets. <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rc1ztktWxJs>

</comment><comment><USER6> That was really interesting. I had no idea there were better approaches than marching cubes.

</comment><comment><USER7> Great application of WebGL.</comment>


Lakka – The DIY Retro Emulation Console - <AUTHOR> http://www.lakka.tv/?hn <comment><USER2> 1) Grab a console from eBay, fleamarket, ...

2) Get a few games along with it

3) Hook it up

4) Play old games on/with real hardware

5) Fun! (sorry, no profit here ;) )

Really, nothing beats the experience playing those old games on their respective hardware. You're missing out if you're using an emulator (though more power & kudos to the devs!).

Only thing i'm using an emulator for is trying the more expensive games first if i even like them, since retro-gaming kinda exploded and the prices of used games with it :/

<comment><USER3> Absolutely true. However, as someone who has neither a television set nor an apartment large enough to fill with hardware I'd only use infrequently, and also has to travel frequently, I'm still a big fan of these kinds of projects.

It'd be even better if Nintendo could somehow convince publishers to re- release all their classic titles for the Nintendo DS, assuming it's powerful enough to reasonably emulate a fair number of platforms. I'd be more than happy to pay good money for good classics.

<comment><USER4> The Wii (dunno about the Wii U) had a pretty great collection of Virtual Console games for quite a number of platforms.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Virtual_Console_games_f...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Virtual_Console_games_for_Wii_%28North_America%29)

Also, there are flash carts that can run homebrew emulators for the DS, including an emulator that can play almost all NeoGeo games.

<comment><USER3> Nintendo's got an irritating policy of not releasing games that originally came out on any TV-based system since NES on Virtual Console for the DS.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Next we need a DIY handheld to go with this. I don't mean something like the 3D printed handhelds getting around, I mean something people could make themselves with only basic soldering skills.

I just discovered the Odroid-W, a very tiny Raspberry Pi clone. Surely one could sneak that into a PSP housing easily.

</comment><comment><USER6> I've been using this for months. Works really well! Almost everything works out of the box.

I just installed it on a usb stick, bought a £5 USB adaptor that let me use my xbox360 wireless controllers (up to 4 iirc), plugged it into the little nettop box I usually use for Kodi and I was up and running!</comment>


Heroku API is down - <AUTHOR>

Heroku API is down — Cannot login.
The issue doesn't appear on the status page, but other users on Twitter are reporting the problem and  a similar issue occurred last Friday[1].
https://status.heroku.com/
I first experienced the issue at 9:15pm EST.
 Now at https://status.heroku.com/incidents/506
[1] https://status.heroku.com/incidents/505 <comment><USER2> It might not affect everyone, it's still working for me.</comment>


Ask HN: Sponsor my travel for Startup School - <AUTHOR>

I have been accepted to Startup School (yaaaay!) but I don't have any money for travel (boooo!). So I am looking for someone to sponsor my travel expenses from SEA to SFO. According to http://www.hipmunk.com/startupschool the total cost of the flight will be between $220 and $320.
I have thought of several possible exchanges for the sponsorship but I am open to negotiations.
* Karma and a hug because you are awesome and have everything you need.
* A workday of consulting/contracting from me.
* Time spent coding or contributing to an open source project of your choice.
* An interview for a job at your company.
* A night of hacking on your project.
* A four month subscription to @therealcaro's baked good of the month club.
* Other stuff?...
Please feel free to contact me at email@example.com or @abraham. I'm actively looking for a job/startup to co-found, preferably working with a developer community and an API. <comment><USER2> Just today I bemoaned the cost of a design conference and random people banded together to help offset the cost for me... so it seems like this is a good time to pay it forward. You should have additional funds in your Paypal account, and see you at Startup School. :)

<comment><USER3> Your comment influenced me to chip in a little to help Abraham get there. He's a great hacker and has already made an impact on the Seattle scene.

It took me a while to realize I wanted to build/run a startup - anything I can do, however little, to help somebody else get there faster is a great thing in my eyes.

<comment><USER2> Kind of funny there are responses to the downers, but no thanks to any of the people who responded and helped out. I didn't feel like asking for money was a big deal like the others, but it's also nice to see appreciation (I'm a poor startup founder too :P). Ah well, c'est la vie.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Sent you $75, Abraham. I'm a big fan of your Twitteroauth library :)

</comment><comment><USER5> _"... The Hacker News community/West Coast is being unnecessarily harsh to @abraham here:<http://bit.ly/bT6yj4> Midwest folks: Let's sponsor him! ..."_ ~ <http://twitter.com/mathiasx/status/26501001577>

When did HN become the mean spirited place it's become?

<comment><AUTHOR> My guess is the natural evolution of all internet communities as their user bases grow.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Money sent... Thanks again for helping get Web608 off the ground, and taking part in Madison & Milwaukee's tech communities.

</comment><comment><USER7> Wow, people are kinda douche-bag-y. They're like, haha, you're really poor right now, that's hilarious and ALL YOUR FAULT. Funny, how people think they know everything about you after reading a single short post...

</comment><comment><USER8> Do you have a PayPal (or similar) account setup for collecting funds?

<comment><AUTHOR> email@example.com is a working PayPal account.

<comment><USER8> I'm good for $20.

Consider it payment for your work growing the tech community in Madison, WI as well as a down payment for your future evangelism on the behalf of Madison.

Oh, and I wouldn't mind some baked goods!

<comment><USER7> Since you're nearby, you get a few options of baked goods: fresh baked bread; key lime pie with or without meringue; fabulous old-fashioned gingersnaps; oatmeal raisin and/or chocolate-chip cookies; or chocolate cake with cream cheese or coconut/walnut frosting. Pick one, and we'll coordinate drop-off when it's ready :)

<comment><USER8> I would have pegged a Mainer to make a mean Fluffernutter Pie. :) I'd love the key lime pie (without meringue). Thanks!

<comment><AUTHOR> We hippies aren't so into the fluff.

<comment><USER7> (Although I do have a jar in my cupboard at the moment... Don't tell Mom... :p)

Oddly enough, I didn't know about fluffernutter pie until just a little while ago, reading a cooking blog that's written by a New Englander. Funny what you learn about your heritage when you're no longer in it! In any case, I'll gladly make one for you, if you'd prefer that over the key lime--it'd be a fun challenge :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Sorry to be a downer, but you just took the spot of someone who cared enough to think ahead the tiniest amount, and now you can't go? Seems like not a very nice thing to do...

<comment><AUTHOR> When I applied I fully expected to be able to go but sometimes things don't go as planned.

If it becomes certain that I won't be able to make it then I will RSVP no and Startup School can invite someone else.

<comment><USER9> That makes sense. Maybe I misread your post as glib when that wasn't your intention.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Take a bus. Or Amtrak. It's not like you're coming from Florida. Or Estonia. Or Australia.

<comment><AUTHOR> Greyhound says $230 for a round trip ticket with 48 hours of travel time. Four hours of flight time is hard enough for someone that is 6 foot 5 let alone 48.

<comment><USER10> Bummer. And there don't seem to be any services like BoltBus or MegaBus who are dirt cheap, offer wifi, and I'd think probably are more comfortable. (One of them was offering $2 fares between Boston and Philadelphia a while back. Right now it's $29. Not quite as far as SEA-SFO, though.)

My bad. As you were.

<comment><AUTHOR> I definitely miss MegaBus from when I was in the Midwest.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Can't you just like, um, get a job?

Seriously, work at McDonald's for a week, mow a few lawns, wash a few windows, pick up dog poop off someone's front walk, rake leaves, etc. It's not hard to make $300 in the US once you decide to get your ass off the couch.

<comment><AUTHOR> McDonalds is not going to interview hire and pay me in less then two weeks. No company will. I am looking into odd jobs though.

<comment><USER11> I know; I just threw that out there.

Here's the problem I have with what you're doing. You're going to a _Startup_ conference and asking that someone "sponsor" you. See the mismatch? You're off to learn about starting businesses, but really aren't showing any ambition or entrepreneurial thinking on your own. Someone sponsoring you has no reason to think that it would be a good "investment."

$300 isn't much to make in two weeks. Seriously. Around here you can charge $30/hour easily to scrub toilets/clean houses. I'm sure the rate would be higher in Seattle: just target rich neighborhoods and be polite. I just spent an hour on my riding mower and I'd have paid someone $20 to do the same thing using my equipment and my own gas.

<comment><AUTHOR> How is what I'm doing any different then what you are suggesting? Instead of targeting a rich neighborhood I choose the HN community and Instead of lawn mowing I choose web development my current practiced profession.

<comment><USER11> It could just be the way you phrased it, but your initial post came across as "here's this cool thing I want to do, can anyone send me some cash? Oh, BTW, maybe I can do something in return."

I don't know if that's the way you intended it, but it's certainly how I interpreted it.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Amazon Echo and integration with IoT devices - <AUTHOR> http://iotmash.com/posts/amazon-echo-probably-mellifluous-for-now/ <comment><USER2> what does mellifluous mean, the dictionary says 'sweet or smooth.' Not sure if this is a positive or negative adj here haha

<comment><USER3> It talks to you. One might say of a person that they have a mellifluous voice; one could literally say the same of this device.

It has an appealing set of features, and a seemingly-promising future. One might metaphorically say that the device "sounds sweet".

Thus, the title is a play on words.

Or the author meant to write superfluous.</comment></comment>


Farmers are hacking their tractors because of a repair ban (2018) [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F8JCh0owT4w <comment><USER2> Some previous discussion which may be of interest:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9414211](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9414211)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13925994](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13925994)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13802969](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13802969)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13990266](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13990266)

Edit -- and some more:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10897309](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10897309)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19900022](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19900022)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14074894](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14074894)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13925994](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13925994)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16386012](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16386012)

<comment><USER3> Also [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14176195](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14176195)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Are there any open source or open source hardware efforts to create or replace tractor software and electronics? I know of the Global Village Construction Set [1] but are there any others that exist that are gaining any sort of traction?

Are there any forums, GitHub (or other) repositories or other resources for folks to see what's going on and/or to help out? I'd love to see what's available and, if possible, help out myself but I don't even know where to start (I'm not a farmer and live in an "urban/city" environment).

It seems like this industry is "ripe for disruption" but I'm woefully ignorant. What stops farmers from slapping a Raspberry Pi and an Arduino with an array of sensors, GPS, modems and other electronics to "DIY" their tractors and other electronic/automated farm equipment?

I also know of FarmBot [2] but that project looks to be targeted at a different market. I also see OpenFarm [3] but that seems like it's more about knowledge sharing of crop growing rather than the mechanics/electronics/software aspect of farming.

[1] [https://www.opensourceecology.org/gvcs/](https://www.opensourceecology.org/gvcs/)

[2] [https://farm.bot/](https://farm.bot/)

[3] [https://openfarm.cc/](https://openfarm.cc/)

<comment><USER5> The solution is a legal one, force the companies to provide the software required for you to use your hardware. It is stupid as a user you can only see a red light and only an "authorized dealer" can plug a laptop and see the exact problem and detailed diagnostics.

Without the law your open source software would be blocked by DRM and I am sure the companies would attempt to void your warranty if they can find you modified anything.

<comment><USER6> This again? The solution is almost never legislation.

If just 20% of prospective buyers devoted 1/2 their budgets to a common open solution, they could break out. If there were a tiny company offering an old school model with modern features at a competitive price, that would be enough. Then, if farmers choose to lock themselves in, it would be a real choice and their own fault.

BSD didn't need legislation. GNU didn't. Windows still thrives, but people have a choice. Just convince ADM and a few others to throw some pennies at a startup. Except that the new licensing greatly benefits those giants. So you'd have to convince 100s of little guys to throw big money your way.

<comment><USER7> BSD didn't need legislation but it did need a long legal process to resolve in its favor.

<comment><USER8> I think there's even a theory that one of the reasons BSD is a small niche OS and Linux powers the world is because BSD was tied up in litigation for a while.

<comment><USER9> I don't know if it's a theory as so much as it actually happened. I remember the SCO lawsuits and it scared a lot of people away from BSD, the user base was a decent portion on free *nix at the time and it was virtually overnight Linux became the uncontested dominate force when that happened. SCO had a huge chilling effect on BSD which was it's intention all along.

<comment><USER10> Unless you have proof (not just evidence) it remains q theory.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I thought Horace Clemmons and his Oggun tractor was on HN before but I can't find the story. [https://thinkoggun.com/](https://thinkoggun.com/)

<comment><USER12> that's such an awesome concept and story! thank you for sharing the link.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> The perverse incentives that nobody spell out: this is good for monopolies.

from soy farmers in brazil to local contractors bidding on government road work in new york. Everywhere the bigger company, that can have several more machines than it need for the daily operation, all leased with warranty, will destroy the competition that can't lease because of bad credit etc and so will have downtime/missed deadlines/lost harvests because they cannot get repairs on time.

Some big pockets benefit a LOT from all this, not just the dealers.

Also, the root cause for this was when car dealerships start doing this with cars and nobody cared.

</comment><comment><USER14> There must be a market for repairable tractors and other farming machinery by now?

<comment><USER15> Yeah I'm not sure I understand the problem; the US is a free market, there are a lot of investors and a lot of engineers out there, why aren't there competitors putting John Deere out of business with products that the farmers do want?

Or are JD tractors so far ahead of any competition that their customers just suck it up? There has to be some anti-competitive lock-in for that to be a thing.

<comment><USER16> Building tractors efficiently at scale is not an easy task and requires lots of investment and experience. John Deere has decades of experience in production, building supplier networks and dealer networks and making tractors reliable. This is very hard to build up quickly and very expensive.

Big hardware is much more difficult than for example software or small consumer devices.

That's why we barely see any new car manufacturers either. Tesla may make it but it has taken them a very long time and very hard work.

<comment><USER17> Decades? John Deere has been in business for 183 years. That said, I think most of their products today are overpriced and under-reliable, and they richly deserve to be disrupted.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> We changed the URL from [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EPYy_g8NzmI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EPYy_g8NzmI), which is a copy of this.

It was discussed at the time, but only a bit: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16292410](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16292410)

</comment><comment><USER18> I fully support Right to Repair movements. John Deere/Apple et. al doing this is pure unchecked corporate avarice.

With that said, I have a hard time feeling sympathetic for midwestern farmers. They most likely vote straight Republican every election, and I'm pretty sure fixing this problem is something their Congress reps don't care about too much.

<comment><USER19> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Millennium_Copyright_A...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Millennium_Copyright_Act)

> _The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) is a 1998 United States > copyright law that implements two 1996 treaties of the World Intellectual > Property Organization (WIPO). ... Passed on October 12, 1998, by a unanimous > vote in the United States Senate and signed into law by President Bill > Clinton on October 28, 1998_

The political blame lies with both popular teams, as they both carry out the will of big business. They divide us over issues of taste, to push their dressed-up authoritarian agendas. Don't fall for it.

<comment><USER18> That may be true, but Democrats will at least be more ostensibly receptive of the issue. Bernie Sanders makes it an explicit point on his campaign website. I'm guessing other candidates have as well.

<comment><USER20> > That may be true, but Democrats will at least be more ostensibly receptive > of the issue. Bernie Sanders makes it an explicit point on his campaign > website. I'm guessing other candidates have as well.

As someone that grew up in a pure Red state for decades and grew up on a farm/ranch, there is zero chance of them voting Democrats for the reasons you think they should.

Want to know at least one reason why? Know those farm "subsidies" democrats love to hate? Also known as: the government pays for farmers to keep fields fallow so we don't get another dust bowl. Farmers like those subsidies, they're a good thing. City people hate them, think they're a bad thing "we spend taxes for farm states". Yes I'm overgeneralizing but i've real work to do today so I can't get super complex.

Get to know a few farmers and understand that your perspective on Democrats is highly skewed on their policies towards places with population centers. You can argue Republicans are worse in as many ways as you want, but until you understand why none of those ways matter to farmers, you'll forever lack an understanding of why things are the way they are.

<comment><USER21> > Farmers like those subsidies, they're a good thing. City people hate them, > think they're a bad thing "we spend taxes for farm states"

Could it be because those same farmers turn around and vote against government handouts for everyone else?

<comment><USER20> No, from the farmers I grew up with. They hated Democrats for wanting to remove those specific subsidies because it was good for the environment. But to do it it means you have to have land be otherwise "unproductive".

So they get rather angry at being forced to farm every acre of land knowing it will spite themselves later. Its a bit more complex than anyone makes it out to be. But easier to just call farmers dumb and that they vote against their interests. Which is ultimately self defeating and ignores the realities of modern farming and the history of how we got here.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Can you solve it? The four points, two distances problem - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/science/2019/oct/21/can-you-solve-it-the-four-points-two-distances-problem <comment><USER7> Nice to see this get a little traction ... I've posted the puzzle here a couple of times in the past, including posting a link to this article, and it's never got traction in the past.

It's such a lovely puzzle, and the _meta-_ puzzle is fascinating. Once you have a few configurations, how can you _know_ that you have them all.

It's like accounting for corner cases in code and user-interface design and implementation. How do you _know_ you've accounted for everything that might happen, especially when dealing with the unwashed masses.

</comment><comment><USER8> Yo - I'm not totally stupid - used circles and a table approach to show that there are only 6. Just took the time to write and draw in notebook.

<comment><USER7> Cool - I'd love to see your approach. Could you write it up and post a link? Or feel free to email me, my contact details are in my profile. Alternatively, the article here has a link to my blog, and there's a comment box.

Or just here: firstname.lastname@example.com

I'm always interested in seeing a better way to do things.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I wonder if multidimensional solutions are ok, or if we have to keep it planar. And if any metric is acceptable.

The answer is a really big set. All balls including really silly graphs.

<comment><USER7> The original problem I think intends the points to be on the plane. Feel free to find solutions in higher dimensions - the trivial answer is that there are infinitely many. The less trivial answer is to find all the _families_ of solutions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Have to admit I would have missed the kite, literally did not think outside the box.

</comment><comment><USER11> an equilateral triangle with a dot in the center?

Edit:

Note to self: read articles before commenting

<comment><AUTHOR> That is one of them, yes. The challenge is to find _all_ possible configurations.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I found a number of them.

Here's how I would go about systematically trying to find them one by one. I suppose this method could be built up to a proof.

First consider the shape of the outside points: point - no straight line segment - no, after a little work triangle - maybe quadrialteral - <USER2> pentagon and up - <USER3>

For the case of 4 outside points, consider the possible lengths. aaaa - Yes. Square. Other angles - maybe aaab, b is longer - Maybe aaab, b is shorter - Maybe aabb - Maybe abab - <USER4>

For the case of 3 outside points, consider the possible lengths. aaa - <USER6> aab, b is shorter - maybe aab, b is longer - <USER6>

<comment><USER9> This is not even close.

Obviously you missed a crossed circle and every tesselation of regular polygon has at least one of those. And that's just a start. Metric spaces are a huge area of mathematics.

1) Question did not mention distinct points. Two joined equal length segments with overlapping points qualify.

2) Question did not mention metric used, you assumed euclidean distance.

3) There are many more solutions in multidimensional spaces even just for euclidean metric. Question did not specify 2D euclidean (but explanation sort of assumed that) nor even planar. Have fun finding these in hyperbolic geometry - current model of reality due to General Relativity. Or in quantized space.

4) Do infinite distances count as distinct? Zero distances are more obvious, but what about zero limits with different signs?

Mainly etc. Never ask a general question about geometry. ;)

<comment><USER13> 1) is answered in the article

Clarifications: The four points must be distinct. That is, no point is allowed to be superimposed on another point.</comment></comment></comment>