Virool (YC S12) Brings Viral Video Views to the Cash Carrying Masses - <AUTHOR> http://pandodaily.com/2012/08/15/virool-brings-viral-video-views-to-the-cash-carrying-masses/

<comment><USER3> As long as the content is authentic and high quality it seems like a win for marketers, publishers, and consumers. However, if the videos end up just being straight up commercials that the user has to sit through it's going super annoying. Is Virool vetting the quality of the content? What prevents marketers from just using commercials?

Concerns aside, I love the idea. Organic content distribution is super hard. For every video that goes viral, hundreds of thousands of videos of similar quality flop. Even ad agencies struggle with getting distribution for content, so this seems like a really useful tool that I would have loved to have had when I was working in the interactive agency world.

</comment><comment><USER4> Wow, tried this out on a noodle pulling video I filmed in 2006 that went semi- viral over time ( <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6rfu1ZHiMP8> ). In 3 mins, my campaign had 258 impressions and 112 views for a conversion rate of 43.41%. Exhausted my bid/cost per day at 12 cents/$10 a day using the coupon.

</comment><comment><USER5> Can someone describe better (than pando) how this is different than a traditional video advertising platform?

If I am reading correctly, Virool is trying to tie into existing, engaged user bases and publishing there? Are there any requirements for becoming a publisher?

<comment><AUTHOR> simply put. We don't do pre-rolls (traditional online video advertising).

Instead, we do in-app video advertising on Facebook and Mobile. So next time you play Farmville, you might see our videos when the game loads, in-between levels or in exchange for virtual currency.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Hot damn.

I love the in-context video ads instead of pre-rolls, so this could be a great solution for our needs.

<comment><USER7> Exactly. Pre-rolls and banners suck (since they are coming from traditional newspapers/web page/TV era), so we are building video ad network for developers so they can plug to our APIs and grab our videos to place them in their APPs(streams etc), facebook apps, mobile etc the way they want it.

You can check our API here: <http://www.virool.com/blog/index.php/developers/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Thanks for upvotes! Here is HN special - use coupon code 'pando2012' for $50 credit. Good for the first 50 claims.

<comment><USER8> Thanks! The coupon code worked.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> How would you handle the case of longer videos, eg musicians who want to promote a new track?

</comment><comment><USER8> Great service! One of the easiest to signup and start. I started using it just today. Be careful with keywords and locations, or else your entire $10 campaign will take only a few minutes to exhaust.

<comment><USER7> Be careful with your targeting and keywords - since many publishers use our real-time API they can deliver your campaigns very quickly. Shoot me email and I can look into your account and give you some tips and $10 credit.

<comment><USER10> We exhausted our $50 credit in minutes so probably doing something wrong - <USER2> tips appreciated :)

Very cool idea by the way! Congrats on the traction...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Virool is freaking AWESOME! Use it if you have a video and want your target audience to see it asap :)

</comment><comment><USER12> As an investor we are proud to be partnering with the Virool Team.

We tested out the product extensively and were about to get 5,364 views, 29 likes, and 10 comments. Check these guys out!</comment>


Xkcd - I'm An Idiot (or the KISS principle) - <AUTHOR> http://xkcd.com/530/ <comment><USER2> Talking mac mini in real life, streamed to the internet: <http://coworkthailand.com/say/>

unfortunately 4chan already picked it up.</comment>


Why is HTML5 "not good enough for desktop apps"? - <AUTHOR>

Some people say that HTML5 is not suitable for developing desktop applications, since it's "too low level" and leaves you "on your own".
However, the Windows API is even more low-level, more developer unfriendly, does even less for you, and yet many great desktop applications have been developed with it.
So where does this argument stem from? <comment><USER2> The way I understand it, the problem is a lack of proper hardware access APIs. Most critically, Disk and Filesystem access.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hmm. HTML5 has some File/Blob APIs. You can certainly load and save files.</comment></comment>


Why it's better to be a generalist than a specialist - <AUTHOR> http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog/2007/09/14/the-top-5-reasons-to-be-a-jack-of-all-trades/

<comment><USER2> After reading the article, I am not sure if I should agree or not because sometimes I think the people who are specialists are the one more successful. But then, as I evaluate myself, I found out that I am a generalist because aside from my offline job, I have my online job. Then I am pursuing my masteral degree. Then, I am a wedding coordinator and a travel specialist. Thank you for this article. It gives me time to reflect. I know generalist can be successful also, not only in one field but in all aspect.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is off the cuff and without reading through the article: I'm increasingly persuaded, in my own mind, to _be_ a generalist while _marketing_ oneself as a specialist.

Most specialists I've met aren't all that special. I suppose my comment is targeted at relatively high performers, but within that context I don't see maintaining such a commercial specialty as demanding all of one's available work effort (where one defines what is "available" versus other/personal endeavors including family, hobbies, rest and relaxation, etc.).

With a more general interest and experience, one is often able to conceive of and introduce solutions that lie in part or entirely outside of the typical domain knowledge of the specialty. One can solve problems that others can't, or solve them in a better fashion.

Just ascribe this, in appropriate marketing contexts, to your mastery of the specialty. That one "won the game" by being a generalist, one keeps to oneself when that is the favorable choice.

Plus, it's just more interesting -- for me, at least -- at a personal level.

I've been a generalist who excelled in specialist roles. But when I was seen as a generalist, this tended to mean I got the short end of the stick, despite that success. (Amongst other things, bureaucracies love labels and categories; if you don't fit into the right one, you face enormous cognitive dissonance.)</comment>


How to Save A Life - <AUTHOR> http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/savealife <comment><USER2> "But how did medieval Europe stop being medieval Europe? The answer is through protectionism"

That is false. Protectionism may (or may not) have helped specific industries in individual countries, but it was net harmful for medieval Europe, because nearly all international trade in medieval Europe was with other European countries.

It's a very interesting question how medieval Europe stopped being medieval. The short version is peace and trade. When society is dominated by local warlords, you tend to have neither. Europe's rise out of medievalness was basically achieved by an alliance between medieval kings and a growing merchant class. The kings used the wealth of the merchants to increase the power of the central goverment, which then protected the merchants from the random exactions of over-powerful nobles.

<comment><USER3> You might be interested in Mancur Olson's Stationary Bandits hypothesis which he expounds in Power and Prosperity.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The article starts off well, but then veers off into Bizarro world.

The assertion that some countries are poor because their labor or natural resources are somehow being exploited is ridiculous. Countries like Sudan or Haiti are poor because of the bad choices and corruption committed by their governments, not because rich people in New York or London are doing dastardly deeds. The trade with Africa, say, is but a tiny drop in the bucket compared to the business we do with China or Canada.

Swartz's contention that protectionism will help these countries climb out of poverty is equally ludicrous. The example he cites of Britain becoming a wealthy nation because if protectionism isn't really true. Britain became wealthy because it was the first country to industrialize on a large scale, which made its workforce much more productive. There were efforts by the British government to prevent its methods of industrialization from spreading to other countries, with mixed results. The attempts to prevent the American colonies from manufacturing goods was one of the causes of the Revolution; this policy was also resented in India and other parts of the Empire. The Continent industrialized, in varying degrees, over the course of the 19th century, with Britain staying at the head of the pack by continuously innovating. (These innovations ended up making everyone, not just Britons, wealthier.)

If anything is going to alleviate the suffering of the poorest of the nations, it will be efforts to reduce official corruption and to eliminate tariffs.</comment>


My Family's Experiment in Extreme Schooling - <AUTHOR> http://nytimes.com/2011/09/18/magazine/my-familys-experiment-in-extreme-schooling.html <comment><USER2> As a Russian immigrant to the US, I went through something very similar, but in reverse. A few thoughts:

* I am very glad I came from Russia (well, USSR at that time) to the accepting, everyone-is-a-winner US and not the other way around. It would have been _much_ harder for me the other way around, especially if I had to attend public school.

* I really appreciate the forging of one's sense of self that such an experience brings. I vividly remember going back and forth between viewing myself as an American and as a Russian during my teen years. I believe my identity eventually transcended either American or Russian; I view myself as an Earthian, a world citizen now, one who can become more Russian or more American depending on the circumstances.

<comment><USER3> Have 3 different experiences:

1\. We immigrated from Russia when I was 9- didn't speak a word of English (didn't know what "who are you?" meant on the first day of class). Spent the first year in an ESL class, within a year I was speaking English freely, all my classmates were also recent immigrants from former Soviet republics so there was very little culture shock (at least in school). But because the class focused on English and little else, I lost the great math skills I had when I came from the Russian system. Took me a few years to get completely comfortable with my new language but by the 9th grade I was one of the top students in all my classes (except math, that skill or rather the interest in the subject never recovered).

2\. My cousin's son was born in the US. The parents wanted to make sure his first language was Russian- they only spoke to him in Russian, he went to a Russian day-care, watched only Russian cartoons, had only Russian friends. Then for kindergarden (around the age of 4 or 5) he got sent to a normal American school. The first month or so he experienced what the writer's kids experienced- complete cultural shock, he spent the evenings at home crying that he didn't want to go to school because he couldn't understand anything, but little by little he adjusted and is now comfortable in his new environment.

3\. My wife and I met in Moscow last year, she moved to the US six months ago. She's in her early 20s, very smart (finished her university with straight As), had a good job in Moscow and is used to always being the best at whatever she tries. She's studying English full time, but is having trouble adjusting to an environment where she is not independent and has to rely on me not only financially but at least initially on simple things such as grocery shopping or explaining to the women at the nail salon how she wanted her nails done. She's picking up English quickly but the first few months she was afraid of sounding dumb and refused to speak English with anyone outside of a classroom environment. I won't even go into the cultural shock and how difficult the transition has been for her from a popular, successful woman to one with no job or friends in a new country (that's a topic for another post).

<comment><USER2> Yup, I and those around me experienced very similar things.

1\. I was also 9 when we arrived here, but we ended up in a rural area that did not have ESL classes, and for the longest time, we were the only Russian- speaking students in our school (long enough that I didn't feel the urge to communicate with them once they arrived, on a regular basis). My math also fell to an above-average level, but I never really cared for it beyond thinking it was nifty.

2\. My brother (19 years my junior) experienced something very similar to your nephew, but we took it in stride and he adjusted very quickly.

3\. My wife also came from Russia only 5 years ago, she experienced the same feelings as your wife did.

4\. We also are experiencing a fourth experience: our oldest speaks Russian fluently for her age. In order for her not to experience shock when she went to kindergarten, we started speaking English with her for about half the day about six months before she started kindergarten (and really, we intentionally exposed her to English all along, but focused on Russian at first). Now that she's in kindergarten, she understands almost everything, and can communicate well enough that she doesn't need to attend ESL, although she still doesn't know all the words in English that she does in Russian.

By the way, where are you located?

<comment><USER3> I'm in San Francisco.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I experienced something like this as a child, but it didn't seem very extreme to me at all. I started younger than eight, so that probably helped.

My parents were living in Germany when I was born. My mother flew back to California for my birth, but I never really lived there. I grew up in an American household in Germany. My parents spoke just enough German to get by, and my older sisters spoke German quite fluently because they attended German public schools. However, English was the only language spoken at home. My mother taught me to read English at home, to the point where I could read age- appropriate children's books on my own by the time I was four, but she didn't teach me to read or write German.

In Germany, what we call "Pre-school" is called "Kindergarten," and what we call "Kindergarten" is called "Vor-schule," which literally translates as "Pre-school." My parents never put me in Kindergarten, so my first day of school was the first day of Vor-schule. They enrolled me at a German public school. As you might expect, all instruction was in German. _Most_ , but not all, of the teachers spoke fluent English, but none of the other children spoke any English. The teachers would not speak English to me as part of instruction, but would for other issues (e.g. going to the bathroom). I remember it being difficult and bewildering at first, but I picked up the German quickly and spoke it as well as I spoke English by the end of that first year. In subsequent years, I remember acting as translator between my parents and teachers.

I think that a big key to all of this is starting young, when the child is still in the process of learning language anyway. I think that 2nd or 3rd grade is probably about as far as you could push it without adding some supplemental language tutoring.

</comment><comment><USER5> It was wonderful that it eventually worked out, but for some children such an experience could be devastating.

One other thing that I wonder about this example is it includes three Caucasian American kids in what I believe is a mostly Caucasian school. There were also three of them, instead of just one, which I think made the adjustment easier. It's comforting knowing a sibling is nearby -- my own kids had this experience when attending a summer school in Asia in 2008 and 2009 -- it was very reassuring for the younger one, knowing his sister was in a classroom upstairs.

Another situation I was wondering about: If African or Asian children were enrolled in the Russian School, would they have been able to find their place as quickly as the NYT correspondent's family?

</comment><comment><USER6> I've experienced something similar as a child by doing an exchange with an English family who had a kid my age when I was ten. I went 6 month in England in that family and went to school with the kid and he then came to France for 6 months. The first few weeks were hard of course, I was alone in a family where no one could really speak French and I could hardly speak English but I quickly learned the language and at the end of the 6 months, it was harder for me to speak French than English and I spoke both languages with a british accent (which I've lost since then unfortunately)...

I enjoyed the experience so much that I did the same in Germany and in Spain (I wanted to go on and do the same in Japan during high school but my parents nixed that). Kids are really adaptable and even if it is a bit hard at the beginning I truly believe that it's broadens the mind.

So, to answer some of the comments who mention it's child abuse, well from the perspective of someone who was put into a foreign environment as a child I think children are more resilient and more happy to learn and discover news culture, languages and things than you imagine.

</comment><comment><USER7> In case you're wondering, the video is well worth watching in this case. Very well produced and about 10 minutes long.

</comment><comment><USER8> Amazing experience. The administrator of the school, Bogin, sounds like a jewel. The way he thinks reminds me of the things I hear about the way Larry and Sergei approach problem solving.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Read through the whole article, very much worth reading! It's interesting how well this whole immersive education seems to work, but it sounds like the school employs some techniques of teaching, reviewing and involving students and teachers that mainstream schools should really look into.

Although I think the thought of video taping classes would not go down well in the western world.

</comment><comment><USER9> christ. i moved to a foreign country when i was an adult. reading that article brought tears to my eyes. it's fucking hard and i wouldn't do that to a child. they are amazing for coping so well.

<comment><USER10> As a 6 year old Dutch boy I was dumped in a British classroom. I survived am lots of years later live to tell the tale. To be honest, international schools are not always a great alternative: it's very much like living in two worlds.

<comment><USER9> sure; i don't have any alternative to offer and i don't know much about children. i just felt sorry for them...

(but anyway, don't you find that you end up living in a middle-world that is not as comfortable as either? this seems to be common amongst ex-pat adults)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Fantastic article and video. It made me reflect on the experiences I had with education at that age look, well, mundane and archaic. While immersion schools look to be a viable gap filler in today's educational system - there is, with even more prevalence today, the complex of "everyone's a winner". I'm looking forward to having kids and more importantly being tasked with trying to guide them through the fine line of winners, losers, diversity in culture and finding those "extreme schooling" that make sense.

Again, great piece!

</comment><comment> mkr-hn I don't see anything extreme, but there's probably something I'm not picking up. It's articles like this that make me think about subscribing to the NYT.

</comment><comment><USER12> Wasn't this posted the other day?

<comment><USER13> Several points, no discussion. I wasn't going to say anything, but since you ask ...

Yesterday: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3002586>

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, it got to 6 when I posted this, and I decided to give it one more chance, as I honestly think it deserves a front page chance. My apologies for resubmitting.

<comment><USER13> <shrug>

HN is now so overloaded with so much that's not truly of "deep interest" that contentful items fall quickly off the "newest" page and don't get a chance. I think that some items genuinely do deserve a second chance.

My views have been well-documented elsewhere, and having been hammered karma- wise before now, I won't clutter HN with them again.

<comment><USER12> Yes it's an interesting piece which deserves to be on the homepage.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Such a nice read, thanks for sharing

</comment><comment><USER15> _That's the one problem with living abroad. You end up getting those weird feelings like, Oh, I can't leave; I can't stay._

Amen.

</comment><comment><USER16> Anyone know of institutions/teachers/administrators who are doing this kind of style in the US? It's completely intriguing.

<comment><USER17> Every school in America does this, but in English of course. I came to Canada at the age of four and enrolled in kindergarden without knowing a word of English. I don't remember much but I know I was able to assimilate fairly well and able to pass without being held back. At that age, the mind is an amazing thing and children just soak everything up.

<comment><USER18> Did you read the article? It's as much, if not more, about the style of teaching than it is about the fact that it's a foreign language to them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Sounds so much like child abuse I couldn't get very far.

<comment><USER20> It's really too bad you didn't. You might have learned something. The parents, whose "inclination as parents had been to intervene to protect our children" Learned that "maybe it was better that they had to win these battles by themselves". When the family left Russia, "Danya, now nearly 14, was ambivalent about leaving, drawn toward being a teenager in New York City. But Arden and Emmett would have gladly stayed." There was no abuse, but it was hard work for the kids, and maybe that's the point.

"Life at New Humanitarian was full of academic Olympiads, poetry-reciting contests and quiz bowls. The school stressed oral exams, even in math, where children had to solve an equation at the blackboard and explain methodology. Children were graded and ranked, with results posted. We were not accustomed to this: in Brooklyn, the school instilled an everyone's-a-winner ethos. At New Humanitarian, Danya says, "they send an entirely different message to the kids: 'Learning is hard, but you have to do it. You have to get good grades.' "

<comment><USER21> Even though I consider US public schools borderline child abuse for holding kids back to keep up with the slowest kids, and for excessive to meaningless praise, I don't think reading the rest of the article and discovering that the kids did in fact overcome the challenges will make me feel it's EVER OK to dump a kid into a situation like that.

Kids are resilient. If it doesn't kill them, it can make them stronger. That doesn't mean that I believe it's OK to torture them in order to make them stronger. The ends don't justify the means.

It frankly ISN'T the competitiveness that troubles me. Not in the slightest. It's dropping the kids into a school where they can't understand ANYTHING, nor can they be understood, that strikes me as cruel and unusual. It's one thing to do that to someone who WANTS it. Kids have very little control over their lives, though, and forcing that on a kid (except when there is really no choice) is just wrong.

Especially since the PREMISE is wrong: Kids simply don't learn foreign languages faster and easier than adults. They learn them at a deeper level (different brain structures), so that they can eventually learn to speak a language as a native, but it takes as long or longer than an adult learning the same language for them to become proficient.

<comment><USER21> Wow, downvotes with no response? In what way was this message not adding to the conversation?

Not that I didn't expect it, since so many HN readers seem to disagree.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I think this was a patently awful idea, and I think that a close reading of the article supports this.

Consider the situation: A person with some underlying psychiatric disorder decides to steal a car. They are arrested, trialled, and ordered to receive counseling at a mental health institution. As a result of the counseling, they are able to cope with their disability and become a more successful member of society.

Does this mean that stealing a car is a good idea? _No!_

The kids were not successful because they were forced to learn Russian. They were successful because they entered an innovative and expensive (USD 10000!) private school which made special exceptions and put in extra effort to bring the kids up to speed. This sort of extra effort is not the sort of treatment one should come to expect and rely on. It is what humans do in order to take care of others who have made grave errors; it is an outgrowth of compassion for the foolish. The bit about a teacher running a class in English should really drive this point home.

I am happy to hear that the kids were able to succeed. However, the author is a chode.</comment>


Is Bill Gates a "philanthropist, and Humanitarian"? - <AUTHOR> what has been windows o.s. for the world?  "philanthropist, and humanitarian"? <comment><AUTHOR> the Fundation, the "giving pledge", the "benefactors" crew, donations, "Dementia Discovery Fund", "Reinvent the Toilet Challenge", and his books: you can try to fix it, but to me it all sounds a way to hide your original sin and the embarrassment you feel realizing that with some simple tricks you made tons of $$$: how can you stand it compared to the effort your maid is doing everyday to please you? I do _not_ like it, and it feels sick.

<comment><USER2> In the grand stream of entropy we call computing, the Gates age of Microsoft was bunnies and cuddles compared to the Apple/Google/FB clstrfck of platform restrictions, police-state tattling, and info-rape.

In the current age, Obama got a peace prize for killing fewer Brown people than the last guy. In the current age, Bill is a saint.

<comment><AUTHOR> yes, I understand the hyperbole: there's always somebody who's got it way, way worse...</comment></comment></comment>


CIA Director John Brennan Pretends Foreign Cryptography Doesn't Exist - <AUTHOR> https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2016/06/cia_director_jo.html <comment><USER2> As commented somewhere in the Schneier thread:

Presumably Brennan refers to the big players, Apple, Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Intel (ME) et al. These companies are delivering crypto and/or hardware for the masses and could be subverted maybe with small short term effect.

Of course, the terrorists will switch. And Mr. Brennan knows that. This is the revealing part: It's about mass surveillance of people who are _not_ terrorists by any means.

<comment><USER3> What's the motivation for mass surveillance of people who aren't terrorists in the US?

<comment><USER4> Money. It's all subcontracted out. It costs tons to do a full nation the size of the US and it's dramatically cheaper than a foreign nation.

There are also the conspiracy type reasons but I think it's just a jobs program for white upper middle class men.

<comment><USER5> The commercial surveillance complex is just a special case of the military industrial complex. No conspiracy is necessary to explain the greed in traditional defense contracting; surveillance tech is just the latest variation.

Also, the current obsession with machine learning is amplifying the problem. It's easy to misuse data analysis (e.g. overfitting the model until it says what you want it to say). Data is seen as valuable on it's own even if it isn't useful "now". This produces an effect similar to tulip-mania where everybody wants as much data as possible even if it isn't currently useful.

Finally, add in bad incentives where failure is rewarded with more contracts. As Mudge (Peiter Zatko) gave a very good description[1] of this problem which he called "game theory is a bitch". The solution is to make retaining data toxic with liability.

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h9wXq6oRBnI#t=1173](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h9wXq6oRBnI#t=1173)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Interestingly it seems that GPG is originally from Germany [0] (a headline act from the first crypto war, I expect there are many other examples!)

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

<comment><USER7> Practically all public visible encryption had to come from overseas during the crypto wars, because US crypto was not allowed to be exported. So everybody used european or australian crypto, and we still do. gpg, openssl, gnutls, truecrypt, ssleay, ...

<comment><USER8> Calling it a "crypto war" is missing the point - and the solution for that matter.

<comment><USER9> "Crypto Wars" is a historical term, not slang or embellishment: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crypto_Wars](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crypto_Wars)

<comment><USER8> Yes, I know, and it is an embellishment if you believe crypto was/is the solution.

Calling it a crypto war is missing the point and the solution; in fact, the link you provide shows that the focus on crypto was a mistake.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> He is not dumb, he is deliberately lying.

<comment><USER8> Always possible that he is dumb and deliberately lying.

<comment><USER11> "Never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity"?

<comment><USER12> Sounds like a quote from someone who is engaged in malicious activity.

<comment><USER8> Sounds like a something said by someone that understands people, that being "misunderstandings and neglect create more confusion in this world than trickery and malice. At any rate, the last two are certainly much less frequent."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> > US companies dominate the international market as far as encryption > technologies

When do people turn to "companies" for encryption instead of using publicly available libraries or applications?

<comment><USER14> -Most people(tm) probably couldn't care less and definitely wouldn't be willing to put up with the hassle of making their friends switch from iMessage, Google Talk, Skype, Facebook Messenger or whatever it is called - in order to use an encrypted solution.

If end-to-end crypto is going to become the norm, it needs to be supported by the clients people have chosen to use - not by some obscure (to Joe Q. Average) app.

Brennan obviously knows this - it doesn't matter all that much if .01% of the web population use a client outside US control if the remaining 99.99% do use crippled, US-controlled apps.

Heck, it would probably save them lots of time, as being among the .01% would immediately flag you as a crank, terrorist or both.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> At this point, Brennan knows that there are no consequences to lying to Congress, so why wouldn't he do it?

</comment><comment><USER16> Really strange. Surely Keccack (SHA-3, among other things) is "foreign" encryption? Although, I suppose it might be a bit theoretical in the sense that no one yet has a _product_ that uses it in a configuration for encryption, rather than just hashing?

I suppose SSH doesn't exist, and isn't from Finland either.

[http://keccak.noekeon.org/](http://keccak.noekeon.org/)

</comment><comment><USER8> Really depends on the requirements for encryption. Unbreakable encryption is easy to do with basic math.

<comment><USER14> Surprisingly tough to get a good implementation of basic math going, though.

It is irrelevant if your cipher is sound and for all intents and purposes unbreakable if you, say, leave the key vulnerable to some side-channel attack.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Well, if he's talking about consumer products, he's absolutely right — Telegram is about the only widely popular non-US consumer product offering encrypted communication I know.

<comment><USER18> Isn't Open Whisper Systems Signal open to foreigners as well?

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> This is SOP for this administration. If you deny a problem exists it does not exist. The same state of denial exists when they refuse to use the words Islamic terrorists.

<comment><USER20> The limited use of the words Islamic Terrorism is more of Obama walking a tight-rope than denial. It may be futile, but it's not malicious.

> Obama and his secretary of state, John Kerry, have said that they don't use > terms like "Islamic extremism" or "radical Islam" because they believe doing > so would grant undeserved religious legitimacy to terrorist movements such > as the Islamic State. Citing Islam as a factor risks framing > counterterrorism as a war between the West and Islam, they have said.

> "They are not religious leaders -- they're terrorists," Obama said in > February. "And we are not at war with Islam. We are at war with people who > have perverted Islam."

[http://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/orlando-nightclub- massacre/...](http://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/orlando-nightclub-massacre/why- won-t-obama-say-radical-islam-n591196)

<comment><USER21> This hysteria about Obama not saying the correct incantation to defeat terrorism is pretty amusing coming from the anti-PC crowd.. Or don't they realize that forcing someone to say a certain phrase is a perfect mirror image of forcing people to avoid certain phrases?

<comment><USER20> Yep. That and the willingness of some people to abandon parts of the Bill of Rights to 'solve' this problem is frightening. Not subtle, mass surveillance, arguably constitutional things, but massive profiling and harassment.

"The government is totally inept and can't be trusted, but if we granted it all these absurd powers to interpose it between a man and his religious beliefs, it won't at all be abused."</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Early Uber investor says the troubled company should merge with Tesla - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnbc.com/2017/08/21/uber-investor-jason-calacanis-says-the-company-should-merge-with-tesla.html <comment><USER2> If you can build cars and have the technology to run them autonomously, you don't really need someone else's rideshare service, that's the easy part.</comment>


Effective Code Reviews – A Primer - <AUTHOR> https://deepsource.io/blog/code-review-best-practices/ <comment><USER2> Whoever OKs a code review can be called upon at any moment to explain the logic of the change in front of the team. If you OKed it, you must understand it, right?

If no one is willing to accept a PR with that provision, the author needs to make their code clearer.

In my experience, people doing a code review don't want to bruise their egos by saying "I don't understand this.". So they superficially check the code and OK it.

<comment><USER3> There are also places where the incentives just are not there for in depth code reviewing. You could work in a culture where you are literally hurting a junior's chances of promotion by being tough on their code and asking for changes, because their peer on another team is getting twice as many tickets "done" because his team just "rubber stamps" LGTM on everything.

Many teams would never actually put in the effort to trace issues back to individual failures in a code review process, when they could be spending the time just fixing the problem and moving forward.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> What is completely missing, and IMO more important, is how to be the _reviewer_.

Most reviewers have a tendency to go the Socratic approach: Asking questions to lead to an answer. In my opinion, and consistent with recommendations from books on general communication: Don't ask questions _without_ expressing your concern.

Example:

Q: Why did you do X here?

Completely valid and sincere response:

A: It solved the problem.

The coder at this stage has no idea why the reviewer is asking, and there could be many possible answers depending on his concern, but since the reviewer did not state his concern, we are reduced to the simplest, noncontroversial answer.

Instead, the question should be:

Q: I'm concerned that doing X here has the following drawbacks: A, B and C. Was there a particular reason you chose to do X here?

Or even better:

Q: I'm concerned that doing X here has the following drawbacks: A, B and C. If you do Y instead, you don't have these drawbacks. Was there a particular reason you chose to do X here?

A: Yes, because although X has drawbacks A, B and C, Y has drawbacks D and E.

(And the conversation can continue).

<comment><USER5> I recommend not using words like "you" and "your". It can make people defensive. Try to only talk about the code and changes. Not the person who wrote the change.

Q. Why is X done here?

Q. What is the reason to do X here.

<comment><USER6> I also love the wording "Can you help me understand the reasons behind X?" because it shows that you're a) just trying to understand/learn and b) you respect the other person, because you're asking for their help.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I've found reviewing the code together face to face (or video call) with author is very effective. It allows you to discuss why they made certain decisions, why you recommend different choices, and the relative benefits of each option.

It also the best forum to remind them that my code isn't perfect either, that this is a process to help make us both better developers.

<comment><USER8> Online code review puts pressure on the reviewer to find the problems quickly so as not to take the other engineer's time. Usually I want to take my sweet time, look at the surrounding code, figure out things for myself. Sometimes I just want to stare at the screen for five minutes to think about it. That's really uncomfortable when there is another person on the other end of the line.

If something is so unclear that I cannot figure it out on my own, the code / commit message / cover letter likely need to be improved.

Nothing like git-blaming your way to a two-year old commit and get a commit message that actually explains the whys and trade-offs.

I agree that some things do need discussion, but code review tools typically have some sort of chat interface for that purpose. I am doing open source work and most of the time just do code review over the e-mail, which obviously works well for this purpose. [Edit: and of course the calls work as well here! In any case, the result of the discussion should make its way to the code / commit messages / cover letter.]

<comment><USER9> > Online code review puts pressure on the reviewer to find the problems > quickly so as not to take the other engineer's time. Usually I want to take > my sweet time, look at the surrounding code, figure out things for myself. > Sometimes I just want to stare at the screen for five minutes to think about > it. That's really uncomfortable when there is another person on the other > end of the line.

Yes, absolutely this.

I think it's essential that the reviewer takes their time to inspect the code without distractions and without being rushed.

If you want to have a face-to-face code review, in my experience it works better to have that meeting after finishing the code review, so you can go over your review and discuss each point in greater detail.

<comment><USER7> These are both good points that I neglected. In fact that's actually what I do, I never do a face to face unprepared, I always have a list of things I've found that I want to review.

Another thing that I maybe didn't make clear enough was it's important to be emphatic, and treat them as equal team-members, even in a Sr to Jr review. Give them an opportunity to weigh in on why they made certain choices and discuss all the pros/cons. Sometimes I even change my mind and agree with their choices when it's clearer what their objectives were.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Exceedingly superficial, unfortunately, as it seems all the content marketing on this blog is.

</comment><comment><USER11> No real insight is offered here, just a list of "givens":

      1. Keep the changes small and focused
      2. Ensure logical coherence of changes
      3. Have automated tests, and track coverage
      4. Self-review changes before submitting for peer review
      5. Automate what can be automated
      6. Be positive, polite and respectful

Who could argue with these?

I've always believed there are 2 levels of code review, defined by their deltas:

1\. Review against standards, defined by the delta between the code and shop standards, which should be well defined for everyone ahead of time. Things like formatting, white space, variable naming, conditionals, iterations, standard modules, etc. Every shop has (or should have) a standard way of doing a lot of these things. Much of this level of code review can be automated.

2\. Review against expectations, defined by the delta between the code and the technical specs. Of course this requires technical specs which many shops don't do. If you write technical specs, and _peer review the specs_ , agreeing that _this_ is what is expected, then this level of code review becomes much more straight forward. This includes things like business rules, logic, data base updates, UX, interfaces and APIs with other apps, etc. This is much harder to automate, but offers a checklist to streamline the review and keep it objective. It also makes User Acceptance Testing easier down the line because code review has already eliminated a large subset of potential UAT rejections.

I'd love to hear how others handle these 2 levels of code review. Now _that_ would be much more valuable than this list of feel good platitudes offered by the OP.

<comment><USER12> > Who could argue with these?

Maybe not argue, but I still find this link useful. I will link it to more junior engineers in my team. Believe it or not, not everybody does self-review before they ask for peer review.

<comment><USER13> >> Believe it or not, not everybody does self-review

That's not hard to believe given the stream of shit that comes out of a feed, any feed.

But I'm appalled by y'all's assumption that #3 is a given. Why do you all believe that?

To me, including a test suite in your code base is a code smell.

<comment><USER12> Well depends, having 0 testing sucks too. I would argue 100% TDD can be a code smell, especially if you try to unit test everything. Use testing where it makes sense. Got some complex business logic in some function with several different edge cases? Cover them in test cases, it will also serve as documentation.

If you have a problem with #3 you might as well have the problem with #5. You don't want to automate everything, only where it makes sense.

<comment><USER13> >> Use testing where it makes sense.

I agree!

>> Got some complex business logic

So complex the only one who understands it is...who? A test?

<comment><USER14> i'm not sure what you're arguing here. if you have a complicated codebase you write tests so that when you add other code, you have a bit more confidence that you're not breaking things. furthermore, if a new person joins a team, they can use old tests to understand what the hell is happening in the code otherwise you just have an unadulterated mess of code to read through.

you're dealing with humans on a day to day basis that err very easily. the dumb mistakes i've made because there was a lack of tests are countless.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> In my experience code reviews need to be a conversation. I'm on a small scrum of 3 developers and we all review each other's code. The major thing I've learned is that you need to depersonalize the code. Don't ask "why did you do this", or "you did it this way two weeks ago and now it's failing in production". It's all about the we. I say we so much in my code reviews you'd think I was French. Also, I really try to make my tone seem more of someone who wants to learn vs. someone who is criticizing.

</comment><comment><USER16> Honest question: A couple of years ago I worked for a startup. They used Agile, which mandates code reviews. "Brilliant", I thought, "that can only be good." I'd never really had code reviews before even though I've got decades in industry. I like the idea.

However there was no written (or often, even oral) statement of what it was supposed to do so all I could do was spot syntactic cruft and offer cleaner code, and... that was about it.

To me, without clear statement of code's intent it must be impossible to review that code meaningfully, but I've never come across this most basic requirement in Agile that the code must have a spec of some sort to review against.

What am I missing, or was their Agile practice simply wrong, or what? Genuine question.

<comment><USER3> Was this someone on your direct team? Were you not part of the spec- review/sprint planning/etc meeting(s) where the project goals for the code you're now reviewing was discussed? If someone just dumped a PR in your lap with no context and said "do a code review," then this sounds like just a really terrible process/implementation.

The idea, imho, is that you are supposed to be intimately familiar with all the projects on your team, while only coding for your own. If you each follow each other's tech doc/spec, and actually put real, professional effort into good technical writing and understanding of your team members' communication styles, you can all have a shared understanding of the problem and the solution architecture/idea, and then after the code is written, code review becomes a process of aligning on what the "right" solution is for the team, given hyper specific context of the one PR/feature/project/bug fix/whatever. Did it turn out like everyone expected? Why or why not? Does this align with the maintainability goals of our team? What will ongoing support for this look like? Does it move the needle for (any) clients? Does it unblock other projects/tickets? etc...

I don't really agree with the type of code review where you nit pick about adherence to arbitrary "style guides," read the code line by line to "try and find bugs," or asking for changes because you think something could be "cleaner" or whatever. The only code reviews that have real impact in my mind are the ones focused on how the code maps to real business goals.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> For a team that has low code quality - here's how I like to start my code review process. not everyone will like it, but I find it effective at growing people's skills: [https://www.5whys.com/articles/step-4-start-doing-code- revie...](https://www.5whys.com/articles/step-4-start-doing-code-reviews- seriously.html)

</comment><comment><USER18> If you're working in a language like Java or C++ which has good static analysis tools available then the developer should be required to resolve all static analysis issues _first_ before submitting code for review. That way the human reviewers don't have to waste time manually marking simple issues.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Any idea how to do code review, when you are solo-founder?

<comment><USER19> You could switch to working on some other component and then come back after a few days - I find that length of time often makes me fairly critical of my own code!

<comment><USER20> Unrelated to the original topic but whenever I can, I'd try to work on 3-4 distinct work items in parallel in a sprint... typically doing a context switch once in a day. I've found that it really helps in letting ideas and solutions brew up and mature over time against trying to 'close' a single item quickly. the context switch can be quite useful if you have hit a roadblock or even just to break monotony.</comment></comment></comment>


Chinese Infinite Magical Hard-Drive - <AUTHOR> http://blog.jitbit.com/2011/04/chinese-magic-drive.html <comment><USER2> Here's my sad Chinese sd card experience. The state of things there depresses me:

When I was in Beijing I went to a regular store to buy an SD card for my camera. I asked them to let me try the cards in my camera before purchasing, so I did that. As I put a card in, all looked well, however when I proceeded to format the card, the issues arose. Regardless of the size of the card, 2, 4, or 8gb, the card would then instead read as 128mb. I mentioned this fact to them and they said sorry and let me try a new card. About 4 cards later the owner was nearly in tears and I was very frustrated. At that point the owner went to the back stockroom and gave me yet another card. This time it formatted fine and I purchased that one.

It was such a sad experience. I felt very embarrassed and sorry for this owner. I don't know if the owner knew that they were scamming people, or if they were just being scammed themselves.

<comment><USER3> That's really sad. Yet, it's probably mostly because all of the other stores are doing it and he/she can't compete without also selling the fake products. With no consumer protection or standards, this is what happens.

<comment><USER4> _With no consumer protection or standards, this is what happens._

Not always, some times a wild market eventually results in some of the strictest standards which also happen to be self enforced.

I say sometimes but some economists believe, in the long term, this will always happen. I think reality is a bit more complicated, and in the very long term we're all dead. So for the duration of any one human life time, amazing self enforced standards sometimes arise form chaos. Those send to be far superior to anything government can do. But government is often quicker to come up with enforced standards.

<comment><USER5> > some times a wild market eventually results in some of the strictest > standards which also happen to be self enforced.

I've seen that in works of fiction, where it seems to function pretty well.

I have yet to come up with any real-life example that stands up to scrutiny.

<comment><USER6> When I was growing up in Taiwan, there was a private consumer-protection agency that actually seemed to work. It all came about after a rash of food poisonings, and a private organization came up with a certification stamp, and _somehow_ (I'm not sure how) convinced most consumers to look for and demand the stamp on packages.

All in all, not at all unlike how government protection agencies work, but in this case entirely private and independent. The neat part is that, IIRC, their safety standards were mostly stricter than the US.

Probably the exception to the rule though.

<comment><USER7> I believe Underwriters Laboratories and the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety would be US examples of similar private agencies.

<comment><USER8> Funny, I haven't thought about UL since I was a kid. Do many consumers look for a UL stamp, or is it used more for legal defense if the device actually does malfunction?

The American Dental Association is another example. I _do_ look for ADA- approved toothpastes.

<comment><USER7> I believe it ends up getting enforced at the retailer level; most major chains will refuse to purchase Christmas lights that are not UL listed, so you can be reasonably sure that the cheaply manufactured lights you purchase at Walmart don't burn your house down. They also seem to be providing education [1] and revising their standards [2] to discourage particularly ill-advised appliances such as electric turkey fryers.

[1]: [http://www.ul.com/global/eng/pages/offerings/perspectives/co...](http://www.ul.com/global/eng/pages/offerings/perspectives/consumer/productsafety/turkeys/) [2]: <http://ulstandardsinfonet.ul.com/scopes/1083.html>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> While I know these fake drives exist - wouldn't running the last 5 minutes of a video file utterly fail as it wouldn't have any of the header/codec/video envelope data since that's at the beginning? Have a feeling the story is more anecdotal than anything...

<comment><USER10> Depends...

AVI: Index is at the end, so it might play fine in a tolerant enough player.

MPEG-TS: Headerless. Will play fine in any player.

MP4/MOV: Index is sometimes at the end; if so, it might play fine in a tolerant enough player.

MKV: Has a header and index, usually at the start. Probably won't play.

Ogg: Has a header, but is indexless; might play fine in a tolerant enough player. Probably not though, as both Vorbis and Theora (the only things Ogg supports that are ever used) both rely on custom Huffman tables in the headers.

<comment><USER9> Good to know - haven't kept up to date with the envelopes of current formats as it's been a long time since I have dealt with the nitty gritty of video formats. I believe WMV for example would fail.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> A couple of years ago, some USB sticks with a similar "flaw" made it onto the European market. The capacity difference wasn't quite as drastic as this example, which almost makes matters worse: you have to fill it with e.g. 1GB of data and read it back before you notice anything.

 _My friend said they're still trying to figure out how did the Chinese do that. Because the drive reports "correct" file sizes and disk-capacity. And the "overwriting" doe not touch the other files present on the drive._

I suspect they treat the first N megabytes correctly to preserve file system data structures. For anything above that (the remaining "capacity"), they just let it loop by cutting off the top bits of the offset.

<comment><USER12> In 2005 a friend brought me a USB thumbdrive he had just bought for a few hundred RMB. It had apparently 10GB on it.

He couldn't figure out why his files were not opening after saving them to the drive. The entire space on the drive was about 100MB but as with this article reported 10GB.

As always, China is great at faking stuff....I loved the line from Kung fu panda, I've only seen paintings of that painting....

<comment><USER13> I bought one of these in Shanghai last year! Sadly I only realised it was acting strange when I got back from vacation (It had a perfect plastic casing, labels, little paper manual; we even tested it in store!). From my googling at the time, what they did was something like take a standard 128mb stick and flash it with some interesting firmware - there's even a utility out there which can help you figure out how big your flash drive _really_ is.

For the price of the drive I thought it was a good business lesson. It implies the existence of an entire supply chain - crooked engineers/programmers, distributers, retailers, and maybe even government, manufacturers, building managers, etc. All to satisfy the market's "need" for the product to appear to work for longer than someone's visit lasts. An interesting/scary demonstration of total free-market capitalism.

<comment><USER14> "Look there's a guy selling heroin over there! An interesting/scary demonstration of total free-market capitalism!"

/rollseyes

<comment><USER15> I don't get your sarcasm. Selling heroin is a very good example of how unfettered free market capitalism leads to circumstances where people sell things that are harmful to their customers. Likewise tobacco. Likewise unsafe cars, Baby clothes made out of plastic that sticks to the skin when exposed to flame, and many other things that we have deemed enough of a harm to society that we attempt to fetter at least part of the free market.

So yes, obviously, heroin is a good example of places where we have decided that the free market is a bit too free. This is another example of a place where the free market might be a bit too free. Is there anything wrong with that?

<comment><USER16> And oddly enough,

 _Recreational_ drugs are a place where I'd say attempts at regulation have extremely counter-productive. IE, look at the massive drug war in Mexico.

That could you buy tobacco/heroin/alcohol if you wanted it is the worst argument against a pure libertarian society.

The better argument against a pure libertarian society is that you might find heroin in your soup and your cough medicine even if you didn't want it.

<comment><USER15> Sorry, I am not going to be dragged into an argument about recreational drug use in a thread about bogus USB drives. Nor am I going to argue the truth of an argument about bogus USB drives being a necessary side effect of this wonderful free market capitalism the US claims to enjoy.

What I claim is that making arguments about free market capitalism in light of behaviour around selling bogus USB drives is reasonable enough that it contributes positively to HN, and that while you or anyone else might disagree, such an argument does not deserve scorn.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> IIRC from my time playing with Norton Utilities back when it was a real hacker tool, you only need to format the disk as usual then hand-modify the disk size in the MSDOS (2nd, logical drive's) boot sector. The FAT will contain all the entries needed for keeping parts of the file in correct order, and Windows will happily report the drive size from that field. Assuming the flash drive's firmware/circuit doesn't report errors but rather uses the low bits to address the sectors (laziest way to build a flash controller), explains how "only the last part of the file" gets preserved (i.e. not overwritten).

For the FAT to stay non-corrupt I would assume that Windows writes a full copy from its cache right after writing the file, that would not be an unreasonable assumption.

All in all: extremely easy to reproduce, no special controller needed. Probably just a guy that realized how Windows behaves after changing a couple bytes on the disk, and another that said "hey, we can make money off that!"

<comment><USER18> The FAT is many sectors long, I'm not sure why Windows would re-write the entire thing.

Now, OTOH, you could just mark the areas the FAT uses, and all their aliases as in-use in the bitmap, that'd prevent them from being overwritten (but chkdisk would notice). You could additionally put a file on all those sectors, then chkdisk would pass, but you'd show a fairly large amount used (for your large file).

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> This is an old trick. Ebay is flooded with 16gb and 32gb flash sticks, SD, microSD chips that are only a few gb in reality. Complaints and warnings in the feedback forum go back for years.

They seem to format correctly but you have to copy that much in content to prove it's real.

Stick to newegg, etc. for that kind of purchase.

</comment><comment><USER20> Anyone have experience writing or know the source of the software (firmware) that does this? If not just for the hax, it would make an epic April fools joke.

<comment><USER21> If you have a device running linux with a usb device controller, you can easily create such a fake.

Linux has an implementation for a 'disk-on-key' (mass storage device). /usr/src/linux- __*/kernel/drivers/usb/gadget/f_mass_storage.c

The sample can use both memory and a file as storage. You can easily make it fake the size and rotate around, skipping the first.. 64K or so (forgot the exact number) to prevent your FAT16 from spoiling.

Had my <http://www.gumstix.com/> doing that for a while..not intentionally. (PS. I don't recommend that board !)

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I love the extra hardware glued inside to give it some weight. Nice attention to detail!

<comment><USER23> I wish more legitimate gadgets had that. I've taken to gluing some junk into new remotes, mice, etc. so that it doesn't feel like I'm using a toy.

<comment><USER24> A couple of years ago I opened up a basic "Trimline" style corded phone, and found that there was a decent sized chunk of cast iron in the base to weigh it down.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I love the inclusion of the two end nuts. How do you know if something is expensive and built well? It feels heavy/and or dense. You definitely get that feeling when you pick up something like an iPad or a good digital SLR.

<comment><USER26> After using Samsung Galaxy S for few months and recently playing with my friends iPhone I was under impression that I'm holding a brick. I also played with iPad 2 at the store recently and concluded that I really don't have strong enough writsts to own it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> I have seen a USB flash drive with only a USB connector on it... inside is empty, and yes, I'm Chinese. I don't know I should laugh or not.

</comment><comment><USER28> Lots of fake 32GB microSDs are also on the eBay market, and function in a similar fashion. I've bought a fake hard drive, I know a few others who have bought hard drives or microSDs... someone musta written a how-to! They're getting tricky with pulling eBay/PayPal accounts and setting up Dutch auctions to throw wrenches in the system to slow it down before the money transfers are reversed/released.

</comment><comment><USER29> When I was still in college a few years ago, I fell for this on a trip to Guangzhou. I believe those were supposedly 8GB flash drives with 32MB of real memory, selling for less than 5 bucks each. Being the immaculate hustler I am, I bought a sackful of those to haul back home to sell, only to learn that if it's too good to be true...

</comment><comment><USER30> At Least you get a WORKING hard drive check this <http://www.walyou.com/img/fake-usb-flash-drive.jpg>

<comment><USER31> Evolutionary pressure. Tourists now know about the fake USB drive problem, and test-drive hardware in the store. This sort of fakery is much harder to detect, and unless there are _easy_ tools to detect wrongly-sized USB drives, these are going to be the dominant type of forgeries.

Knowing nothing about how USB drive hardware/firmware works, I'm guessing we'll see mainstream Windows software for detecting real drive sizes soon (if not already), and then it'll be a back-and-forth between the two sides.

Ultimately (I hope), the costs of the forgeries and the time needed to verify drive size is going to even out, and you can be assured that even though you're buying a knock-off, it'll very likely have a certain amount of space on it and a certain minimum life span.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> The best part about the article was the really racist comments at the bottom. People don't like Chinese business practices, I guess.

</comment><comment><USER33> >he had bought in a Chinese store across the river, for an insanely low price.

and who would say after that that there is no venture investors in Russia? The guy took the risk and it just didn't pan out. :)

</comment><comment><USER34> Something about this story doesn't seem to add up. An SSD's firmware presents the raw flash to the OS as a block device. The filesystem is at a higher level of abstraction, above that block device. If the device is handling data that doesn't fit by wrapping back around to the beginning of the file, how is it figuring out where that file begins when all it sees is a bunch AHCI requests?

<comment><USER35> It wraps it around to the beginning of the data area past a reserved MFT zone. It doesn't do it per-file unless it's both very clever and dependent on a certain file system.

<comment><USER34> Thanks, that makes more sense.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Not as extreme, but when I bought my 1.5 terabyte hard drive, I thought that I would be seeing 1.5TB when viewing its properties. I saw 1.36TB instead. So where did the other 0.14TB go? I thought I got scammed.

Then I looked at the number of bytes on the hard drive, and it listed as exactly 1,500,299,264,000 bytes, and I realized that computers and manufacturers use different metrics.

</comment><comment><USER37> It's just like spam: it's not the one who asks but he who pays...

It's not about the Chinese magically managing to screw everyone: it's about enough people buying these fakes and _not coming back_ with an angry look on their face and a pickaxe in their hands. That's what keeps this scheme profitable.

</comment><comment><USER38> How could a program work that can detect such scam-drives? As long as we don't care about crashing the formatting, at least.

It could work by writing a specific pattern in the first few bytes of the device and then reading/writing in 2^n steps to check if the pattern cycles.

I think I have some counterfeit thumb-drives lying around. Maybe I will try writing something like that..

<comment><USER39> Select a random number known only to you(r program). Seed your generator with it. Start randomly selecting sectors to write to (directly as a block device), writing a psuedorandom sequence based on your first number and the block identifier. Store a set of what sectors you've written to. (You can bundle them into arbitrarily-large contiguous chunks if this gets too large.) As you write, periodically randomly select a sector you already wrote to and verify that when read it returns the same psuedorandom sequence. I don't just read them back in order to prevent the "save the first few chunks" attack. This will slow down detection a bit, but if I'm working my intuition math correctly it doesn't actually slow it down very much, at the gain of making it impossible for a hostile firmware to know which sectors you're going to ask for.

Using this approach, you can write arbitrarily large of data to a drive with very minimal storage requirements on your end (well within even modern-day embedded RAM availability), while still being able to demand any sector back at any moment and verifying it is correct. Theoretically your psuedorandom number generator ought to by cryptographically secure, and given that you're probably IO bound here and they aren't hard to come by, there's probably no reason to use anything less.

I'm pretty sure the only effective defense against that is to actually store all the data. If you issue a predictable read pattern, you open an attack. If linearly-sampling your previously written blocks turns out to be undesirable you could tweak the sampling distribution, but I bet you wouldn't get much improvement.

Also, come to think of it, if the drive is honest this could be done non- destructively (assuming the undo process is allowed to run to completion) by reading the sector and XOR'ing it, so you could then undo it by a second XOR operation. Further cleverness could even make this reasonably safe to half- complete the undo, then finish later, if you work at it.

<comment><USER40> It's really much simpler than that:

      cd
      head --bytes=your_card_size /dev/random > tmp
      sha1sum tmp
      cp tmp /media/your_card
      sha1sum /media/your_card/tmp

<comment><USER41> Never considered using head to get a bytestream from /dev/random. I've always used dd. Thanks for the tip!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> What if (this sort of) Chinese electronics designers spent their (obviously impressive) technical skills on _not_ ripping people off?

<comment><USER43> I don't think that's a viable strategy for people who rip people off.

Also I'm sure this was a day's worth of work for one dude, and super cheap production. You can't build real hardware on those terms.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> so whats the most efficient way to detect such 'infinite' storage drives programmatically ?! :)

</comment><comment><USER45> This just made my day. Thank you.

</comment><comment><USER46> "He works at a hard-drive repair center". Ah? A hard-drive repair center yes? What do they do there? Take the drives apart, polish the platters and bolt them back together? Must be a Russian thing no?

<comment><USER47> The actual hard drive is inside the enclosure (assuming it was real). It's totally normal to open the enclosure to look at the drive inside.

Sometimes the enclosure (SATA to USB converter) fails, while the drive is fine.

<comment><USER46> That is correct. However, to the best of my knowledge this activity does not take place in a "hard-drive repair center". In fact, there's no such thing as a "hard-drive repair center", with the exception perhaps of an RMA department of a hard drive manufacturing company. That gave me the impression that the story was either made up or badly translated.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Why arent there any mobile browsers with payment gateways built in? - <AUTHOR>

Part of the edge that native apps have over browser apps are the easy payment gateway (itunes or Android), which means good developers/content people can monetize via native much more simply than over the mobile web. Isn't a payment enabled browser necessary for mobile web apps to reach parity? <comment><USER2> Why restrict it to mobile? Why didn't we have payment in the browser in 1997?

More practically, I think "open web" advocates would have a fit when they saw the 30% fees.

<comment><AUTHOR> I dont think you need to restrict it into mobile. Its appalling to me that Apple hasnt released Safari with payments in it (or Google/Chrome). This is arguably the biggest barrier to microtransactions on the web/mobile web IMO.

Doesnt have to be at 30% fees either . . . thats completely artificial (and hopefully will come down over time)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Andressen said this during startup school... he wished that he had created a payment infrastructure in his browser.</comment>


A Ponzi scheme that works - <AUTHOR> http://www.economist.com/world/unitedstates/PrinterFriendly.cfm?story_id=15108634

<comment><USER2> _Almost nobody in Japan thinks that anyone can become Japanese, yet Japan is rated more "tolerant" than America. This is absurd._

I always joke ( _mostly_ good naturedly) that when my best Japanese friend visited me at home he had people assuming he was American literally 20 feet past immigration, and when I visit him at home I get people who have known me for _seven years_ saying "Wow, its so _amazing_ you can use chopsticks, for an American I mean."

</comment><comment><USER3> "If you like low taxes and the death penalty, try Texas. For good public schools and subsidised cycle paths, try Portland, Oregon. Even within states, the rules vary widely. Bath County, Kentucky is dry. Next-door Bourbon County, as the name implies, is not."

That's one of the secrets of the United States. Federalism allows citizens lots of lifestyle choices, while still building a great deal of national cohesion. And that variety state by state is what produces a uniform attractiveness to immigrants (the main point of the submitted article) that keeps the United States growing and innovating.

<comment><USER4> Which state can I move to to opt out of the national debt?

<comment><USER5> Sidestepping the question, let's ask:

1\. If the US defaults, what country can I move to that will substantially increase my odds of success?

2\. If fiat currencies hyperinflate, [same question]?

There's a very, very short list to answer those questions.

<comment><USER6> Hmm. A country that:

1) doesn't hold US debt and does not do substantial trade with the US (sorry Canada, Japan, Mexico, et al)

2) Has large reserves of gold, petroleum or industrial minerals.

3) wants skilled English-speaking immigrants

... that leaves South Africa, Brazil, and... maybe AU?

<comment><USER5> If you have 2, then you need 1. I'm thinking about Brazil's offshore reserves.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I've always considered myself a 'global citizen' after living in the US for 15 years. During a 10 day trip to Germany. I was thrown out of a bar for asking directions in english, yelled at by some crazy dude in a train station for stealing their jobs and people crossed streets just to avoid a dark guy.

When I landed in Los Angeles, the minute I saw a mexican american immigration officer, I almost cried. I was home. No one will question me why I am here. The mexicans, the chinese, the Indians, the whites and the blacks. They are all my people.

I might have my curry everyday but my spirit is american.

<comment><USER8> Yeah welcome to America, where if you don't fit in -- you fit in. :) We're the pound-puppies, mongrels, and half-breeds of the planet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> 'Listening to her Dutch friends, she assumed that Americans were fat, loutish, naive and sexually repressed. "But then I came here and found it was all false," she smiles.'

So very true. The same would apply to British attitudes towards the US. Spending a short time travelling around the US cleared away all my misconceptions, thankfully.

As a side note, I suspect that attitudes might be equally uninformed the other way around, that is about Europe from the US. Europe is incredibly diverse yet I often read opinions from the US treating the continent as a whole.

</comment><comment><USER10> Duplicate clicky: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1006556>

</comment><comment><USER11> Somehow I expected a new Scheme implementation, called Ponzi Scheme.

</comment><comment><USER12> "If you like low taxes and the death penalty, try Texas. For good public schools and subsidised cycle paths, try Portland, Oregon. Even within states, the rules vary widely. Bath County, Kentucky is dry. Next-door Bourbon County, as the name implies, is not."

I like dope and I don't like going to jail, so thanks but no thanks.

<comment><USER13> Possession of less than 2 ounces of marijuana in Ann Arbor, Michigan is a civil infraction with a $25 fine, like a parking ticket.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cannabis_laws_in_Ann_Arbor,_Mic...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cannabis_laws_in_Ann_Arbor,_Michigan)

<comment><USER14> Massachusetts approved decriminalization - $100 fine for an ounce or less: [http://www.boston.com/news/local/breaking_news/2008/11/quest...](http://www.boston.com/news/local/breaking_news/2008/11/question_2_setu.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> What makes the Ponzi scheme work is strong property rights supported by a large middle class.

</comment><comment><USER16> I would prefer if people would link to the normal article, not the printable page. If I want that version I can click the print link myself. If I don't want that version, I have to go search for the original location of the article.

<comment><USER17> This was posted a few days ago. Using the normal link would flag it as a duplicate.

However, I think in most cases I'd prefer the printable version. Some articles are split up into multiple pages, and the printable version combines them and is often cleaner and faster to load.

<comment><USER18> For readability, you can always use... well... Readability: <http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability>

<comment><USER19> People often link to the print view because the normal view is paginated. Readability won't solve pagination.

<comment><USER20> And having articles split in multiple pages with just a little text on each is more and more common (because ad revenue depends on CPM, of course). Someone should augment Readability to combine multiple pages into one.

<comment><USER17> Consider PageZipper ( <http://www.printwhatyoulike.com/pagezipper> ) or AutoPager ( <https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4925> ).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Hmm,

"A Ponzi scheme that works" set off bell in my mind.

It seems like this article rolls two different questions together. One is whether immigration is good. The other is whether the US can continue to grow economically based only on "Three hundred million" niche markets.

Putting aside the former question, I'd say the answer to the latter question is no. Housing bubbles, health care and state spending have not always America's number one industries. Too many of the "hundred million niche markets" that can be touted have really been just support services for the aforementioned sustainable schemes. The US may be able to keep it's "service economy" afloat for another few years but the crisis of 2008 should have been wake-up call announcing unsustainability of this course. Naturally it wasn't, but there you are.</comment>


Controlling a Quantum Computer with Code [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lL1SIYBomTw <comment><USER2> The audio gets fixed at 1:30 in case you were thinking of bailing the video because it's so hard to hear.

</comment><comment><USER3> Fantastic talk, the best explanation of Quantum Computers I've seen to date.</comment>


Announcing Rust 1.22 - <AUTHOR> https://blog.rust-lang.org/2017/11/22/Rust-1.22.html <comment><USER2> Reminder that Rust's year-end sprint has one more month to go, and even though we've gotten tons done there's still plenty of work to go around to anyone with motivation and idle hands. :) See here for an overview: [https://blog.rust-lang.org/2017/09/18/impl-future-for- rust.h...](https://blog.rust-lang.org/2017/09/18/impl-future-for-rust.html) and here for the most recent checkpoint summary: [https://internals.rust- lang.org/t/impl-period-newsletter-3/6...](https://internals.rust- lang.org/t/impl-period-newsletter-3/6185) We'd love your help!

</comment><comment><USER3> Hey, is there any plan to add FP programming (functors, mondads, free monad, etc.) to Rust as part of the language or some officialy supported library?

Also - any plans for Streaming?

I'm a big Scala user and fan (Haskell of course too) and would like to try out Rust but I really don't see myself going back to structural/object oriented- programming

<comment><USER4> There are already FP features and monads in Rust. What exactly do you want?

It is unlikely you will ever see non-zero cost abstractions in idiomatic Rust.

<comment><USER5> Can you link to some documentation about how monads work in rust? Based on the sibling comment rust doesn't support higher-kinded types yet, so I'm interested in how you would encode this in rust.

<comment><AUTHOR> Rust does not have HKT, and so we cannot write a generic Monad. Rust has many _instances_ of Monad, though.

That said, at some point, we'll be getting ATC, which is equivalent to HKT in many cases, but feels more Rusty.

<comment><USER6> Thanks :) . Nit: less TLAs, please.

\- HKT: Higher-Kinded Types

\- ATC: Alternative Type Constructors

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, sorry. It's "Associated" not "Alternative" by the way. A good reason to spell them out ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> There was a PR recently which support wasm compilation without emcc. Does anyone know when it is expected in stable?

[https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/pull/45905](https://github.com/rust- lang/rust/pull/45905)

<comment><USER8> Good question! It was merged quite close to the release, so it's hard to guess if it landed in beta already. So, let's have a look at [1]! And yep, it's in the beta branch.

This means it's in 1.23, which'll be released in 6 weeks.

[1]: [https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/commits/beta](https://github.com/rust- lang/rust/commits/beta)

<comment><USER9> Does that mean I will be able to compile to wasm via a simple cargo parameter? If so - wow!

<comment><USER8> Yes, once [1] lands, you can add it with `rustup target add wasm32-unknown- unknown` and then you can `cargo build --target=wasm32-unknown-unknown`.

You should note that it's not as simple as that, though. Depending on the context you want to run WASM you might need to do additional steps. E.g., when running this in a browser, you might not be able to use the std lib to spawn threads just yet.

[1]: [https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/pull/46115](https://github.com/rust- lang/rust/pull/46115)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10>
      let mut x = 2;
      let y = &8;

      // this didn't work, but now does
      x += y;

Why is it desirable that that work? It seems like it will mask mistakes and make types more confusing.

<comment><USER11> I agree. Some of the things done in the name of ergonomics just strike me as wrong and/or possibly misleading for learners.

People who say Rust is hard to learn have always confused me. I learned programming in this order: scheme, C, C++, Haskell, Rust. I believe that if you go in another order it may make things more difficult, but some of these difficulties are inherent. To me, a reference to a thing is inherently different from the thing, and a systems language should make that clear. I didn't even like auto-deref, I felt like there should be an operator similar to

      thing->method()

in C++ that can be chained so that references and indirection would always be syntactically clear and distinct, but the ergonomics on that won out.

<comment><USER12> "People who say Rust is hard to learn have always confused me. I learned programming in this order: (...)"

(proceeds to list a quite rare and outlier-ish learning sequence, and all in non-scripting languages to boot).

Well, of course those people confused you. What you, who learned Scheme, C++ and Haskell before going to Rust, have in common with someone who only knows C or Java or only got his start in some scripting languages, so as to be able to relate with their "Rust is hard" experience?

<comment><USER13> I personally went from Go (slightly mingling with it) -> Rust 1.0 (wrote my first applications with it) and found it to be incredibly easy to learn in comparison to C, C++, Java, and even Python and JavaScript. Everything's pretty explicit and straightforward, and the API documentation and associated resources are stellar.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I have no idea what that ? operator does from the summary or staring at the usage example... Was more boilerplate necessary in the example before?

<comment><USER15> It skips a block you'd need otherwise. Without it, you'd have to do something like:

        fn try_option_some() -> Option<u8> {
          if let val = Some(1) {
            Some(val)
          } else {
            None
          }
        }

It's an early exit if the expression before is None/Error

<comment><USER16> There should really be a more real-world example, the current code (and your alternative version) is just redundant and equivalent to

      fn try_option_some() -> Option<u8> {
          Some(1)
      }

<comment><USER17> Suppose you have two functions

        fn f() -> Result<A, E>
        fn g() -> Result<B, E>

Then you can write

         fn h() -> Result<(A,B), E> {
            let x = f()?;
            let y = g()?;
            Ok((x, y))
         }

rather than having to do something like

        fn h() -> Result<(A,B), E> {
           match f() {
               Ok(x)  => {
                 match g() {
                   Ok(y)  => Ok((x,y)),
                   Err(e) => Err(e)
                 }
               },
               Err(e) => Err(e),
           }
         }

(written from memory, please excuse syntax errors)

What's new is that this also works with Option<A> now.

<comment><USER18> As others mentioned, it looks equivalent to using the try! macro (which I'm not sure this is supposed to replace?)

Another sane alternative here is using _and_then_ , _map_ , etc.

Writing from memory too:

      fn h() -> Result<(A, B), E> {
        f().and_then(|x| g().map(|y| (x, y)))
      }

..which seems to be a different style of control flow to choose from. On one hand, I suppose one may avoid using _and_then_ with code dealing with side effects. On another hand, _?_ seems restricted to being used inside functions that have to return a a single type (like Result) they operate on.

<comment><AUTHOR> ? is explicitly a replacement for try!, yes.

> functions that have to return a single type

Well, all functions have to return a single type, though that type may be a composite type, like a tuple.

Less pedantically, `?` lets you (well, will let you) unwrap values and convert their error cases between each other. So once the next round of stabilization happens, if you have a function that returns Results, you can mix ? on Options and Results in the body, and vice versa. And it can be extended for other types too. Basically, it's an early return "protocol" if you will.

<comment><USER18> By single type, I meant to hint not being able to mix ? on Options and Results in the body, but good to know that's soon possible! Though you still can't, eg, use `?` in _main()_

<comment><AUTHOR> That's coming as well!

<comment><USER18> Interesting. Looking at the proposal it seems specific to main() and not any void returning function, by automatically picking an exit status. I suppose I worry the construct has a lack of control (log diagnostics, exit status, cleaning, etc) when bailing and can't handle eg continue, break too.

<comment><AUTHOR> exit status and cleaning should be just fine, logging or something else would need to not do it, yeah. continue and break would be weird outside of loops.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Does anyone know why the last two lines in main() fail? AFAICS, v has the same type as both functions.

        fn try_option_some() -> Option<u8> {
            let val = Some(1)?;
            Some(val)
        }

        fn try_option_none() -> Option<u8> {
            let val = None?;
            Some(val)
        }

        fn main() {
          assert_eq!(try_option_some(), Some(1));
          assert_eq!(try_option_none(), None);

          let v: Option<u8> = None;
          assert_eq!(v, Some(None));
        }

One other thing troubling me here - shouldn't try_option_none() return `None` and not `Some(None)`?

Looking at the diff for the commit, there's now a NoneError? Is there any documentation updates to look at how this works? Because AFAIK, now all matches will have to explicitly be updated to check for NoneError, otherwise they won't compile (since matches are not complete)?

<comment><AUTHOR> As the error says,

      = note: expected type `std::option::Option<u8>`
                 found type `std::option::Option<std::option::Option<_>>`

The return types of those functions are Option<u8>, but Some(None) is an Option<Option<_>>.

> there's now a NoneError?

It's not stable yet.

> now all matches will have to explicitly be updated to check for NoneError

NoneError only comes into play when you have a function that returns Result, but uses ? on an Option in the body. That code never compiled (and still doesn't on stable until Try is stabilized, _and_ only if you have Result<T, NoneError> as your return type _or_ some Err type that implements From<NoneError>, which you also can't write until it's stable.

Does that help?

<comment><USER19> Ah, awesome. Makes total sense now. Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> As these announcements get a lot of attention from non-rust devs it might be worth linking to what ? Actually does somewhere in that.

<comment><USER21> "About a year ago, in Rust 1.13, we introduced the ?"

And that includes a link to the 1.13 announcement with a detailed explanation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> "Two recent compiler changes should speed up compiles in debug mode. We don't have any specific numbers to commit to with these changes, but as always, compile times are very important to us, and we're continuing to work on improving them."

Can't imagine why compile times haven't been good in the past with this level of detailed analysis.

<comment><AUTHOR> To be clear, I wrote the announcement, but don't work on compiler optimizations. Those that do tend to have a better idea than me.

But beyond that, it's ultimately about what you promise. Say something sped up compilation times 2x for most people, but slowed them 10x in a corner case. If you promise the 2x, the people for who it slowed down will be (rightfully) pretty mad.

None of these changes are as drastic as that, but still.</comment></comment>


XKCD Substitutions Plus - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/idoco/xkcd_substitutions_plus

<comment><AUTHOR> I have written yet another chrome extension inspired by xkcd.com/1288 [xkcd:Substitutions] - [http://goo.gl/pp9oj2](http://goo.gl/pp9oj2) . I did this since I couldn't find one that let you to edit the list of substitutions.

Since I'm a Java developer I'm aware to the fact that my js code have no style and is most probably bad :) , I'll be glad hear constructive comments!</comment>


Jane Austen's First Buyer Was Probably a Prince She Hated - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/24/books/jane-austen-prince-regent.html <comment><USER2> I was hoping the article would have answered how the Prince (or his buyer) even heard about the book? I wonder if it was recommended by the shopkeeper, or if the fact that it was written "By A Lady" was enough to pique his interest, in the hope that it would be more salacious?

<comment><USER3> They seem to imply that he had buyers who would have sourced the book for him. I'm guessing that the buyers had contacts at the various publishers so they knew in advance when interesting new books were coming out.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is an interesting article, but to be clear: this is about Sense and Sensibility, which isn't her first novel, so "First Buyer" seems a bit of a reach.

Getting a book before publication definitely sounds like the kind of thing you'd expect the rich to do, however.</comment>


Equifax Has Been Sending Consumers to a Fake Phishing Site for Almost Two Weeks - <AUTHOR> https://gizmodo.com/equifax-has-been-sending-consumers-to-a-fake-phishing-s-1818588764 <comment><USER2> Also [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15295146](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15295146)

</comment><comment><USER3> Can we finally regulate the crap out of these companies? I mean, for one, why on earth do I not get constant, real time access to my credit report, for free? It's data about me; there's no reason I should ever have to pay to access it.

</comment><comment><USER4> I've never understood how people say it's hard to copy a website and expect fake ones to look crappy and full of typos. You can just type a simple command or use your browser to copy a login page so it looks exactly the same.</comment>


ConvNetJS: Deep Learning in your browser - <AUTHOR> http://cs.stanford.edu/people/karpathy/convnetjs

<comment><USER2> In my experience this is an extremely capable NN library. It is much faster than previous NN libraries I have used in JS, and it is stable, featured and capable. It took approximately an hour to hack/glue together a test to see how well it could learn to play the game snake [1].

[1] [http://smartsnake.azurewebsites.net/](http://smartsnake.azurewebsites.net/) (Let it run for approximately a day for best results)</comment>


Show HN: Mapping Tornadoes w/ D3 - <AUTHOR> http://roadtolarissa.com/twisters/

<comment><USER2> This is beautiful!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks!

<comment><USER2> Are these custom d3.js controls that you built? Would be interested in hearing about the process in building this out.</comment></comment></comment>


Disneyland, Theaters, Casinos Exempted from Coronavirus Ban on Large Gatherings - <AUTHOR> https://losangeles.cbslocal.com/2020/03/12/coronavirus-california-disneyland-closures-governor-newsom-covid/ <comment><USER2> As usual, big money talks and gets special treatment. Obviously, Newsom is not really that concerned about California's residents health if he called out those exemptions.</comment>


Amazon Drops the Price of the Fire Phone to 99 Cents - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2014/09/08/amazon-dumps-the-fire-phone-down-to-99-cents/?ncid=twittersocialshare

<comment><USER2> And that's what we call a Fire Sale.</comment>


Hyundai and Uber Unveil Autonomous Pods, EVTOL Aircraft, & Hub Ecosystem at CES - <AUTHOR> https://cleantechnica.com/2020/01/14/hyundai-uber-elevate-unveil-autonomous-pods-evtol-aircraft-hub-ecosystem-at-ces/ <comment><USER2> The more I read these articles, the more I want to start some kind of citizen regulatory or acceptance body. I'd develop environmental conditions, failure modes and noise sensitivity tests for all of these air taxis to abide by.

As a manned aviator and after having spent 10+ years now playing with drones and working with drones, I am very skeptical of these safety claims and noise promises.

<comment><USER3> You want to recreate the FAA? They already regulate and sign off on most of the things you mentioned before aircraft carrying passengers can fly.

<comment><USER2> I think what I want is something like the AOPA or AMA, but for consumers / citizens.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> It's funny this news just came out.

In my part of Brooklyn, loud low flying helicopters from Blade and Uber have been a complete nuisance all through the holidays. People have been taking them from south Manhattan to JFK.

They're not supposed to fly lower than 1000 feet but I can read the numbers on the bottom these things so clearly they're flying lower than that to save fuel, maybe around 500 feet.

<comment><USER5> Check the ADS-B historical data to see if they're sub 1000 feet AGL, if so, report to NYC and FAA authorities.

<comment><USER6> Does ADS-B report AGL, MSL, or pressure altitude? I thought it was the latter (like the transponder), but I might well be wrong.

<comment><USER5> Reports both geometric and barometric/pressure altitudes. You can work back to AGL from geometric and GPS coordinates.

[https://www.faa.gov/nextgen/programs/adsb/faq/#g7](https://www.faa.gov/nextgen/programs/adsb/faq/#g7)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Wouldn't it make more sense for Uber to try to achieve profitability instead of chasing pipe dreams, which will never fly?

Sure, you can employ dirty tactics to fight regulations, government agencies and cities. But I don't think you can do that when it comes to (ab-)using air space.

Even drones are about to be regulated. This will be shot down, not literally, in a jiffy.

<comment><USER8> Uber is aiming to be a big player in the future autonomous space, but seeing how difficult a problem level 5 autonomy is proving for cars, they are looking at the sky taxi thing instead because autonomy is going to be actually achievable in that space.

<comment><USER7> I don't know about the US, but herearound the sky and what flies there is _massively_ regulated.

And those are regulations you don't want to fuck around with.

You may be, for example, flying over military controlled airspace. I don't see it that anybody can just jump into his flying car and just fuzz around at her or his discretion.

There's a reason why flight plans are filed for _every_ flight.

<comment><USER8> Regulation is something autonomous vehicles will deal with a lot better than human pilots.

<comment><USER9> That is Uber's secret sauce - they defeat regulation better than anyone

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> It looks like it is more marketing than reality :). The keywords from their description "piloted initially and eventually autonomous"

<comment><USER11> An electric aircraft is still a big deal.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> 4 passengers at 180 miles/hr for 60 minutes.

For that, I'd guess they'd need upwards of 200 kW of battery, no?

Not gonna happen until batteries give us 1000 Wh/kg or so. In year 2030, maybe.

<comment><USER13> They are doing the design and engineering work of the craft itself, as a separate thing from the batteries. I think a big assumption on the part of a lot of these is that the battery Wh/kg and Wh/litre ratio will dramatically improve in the future, and they'll be able to take those new batteries from their manufacturers and integrate it into their ready-to-go aircraft.

Lots of other mechanical and airframe engineering work to do in the meantime while waiting for better batteries. Software/automation controls related to operating in busy air space. Stuff like the tilt rotor mechanism, avionics and radio systems, automated navigation, soundproofing, seats and interior, airframe carbon fiber layup, etc. They can create a finished and highly tested craft with all of the engineering problems solved for various subsystems _except_ the batteries.

I don't see any problem with designing something that currently only has 20 minutes of flight time with a battery that is X watt-hours capacity, N size, Y dimensions and Z weight.

An aircraft manufacturer as we know it today doesn't manufacture a lot of the very complex and most costly subsystems of their craft. Best example would be small jet turbines, or petrol powered engines. They rely on engine manufacturing specialists for that. My theory is that it's unlikely a VTOL- air-taxi-manufacturer will become so vertically integrated that it manufactures its own special batteries. Similar to how a small business jet manufacturer today buys turbofan engines from engine-manufacturing- specialists, they'll be buying batteries from companies dedicated to the sole purpose of manufacturing high Wh/kg aircraft batteries.

Provided that the new magical future battery can be similarly cooled and managed and will fit into the available specifications of "X times 5 watt hours", N, Y and Z, they can do all of the R&D _except_ for the battery, and hope that the market and technology catch up with them to create a 80 minute flight time craft.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Top speed is 180 mph, range 60 mi. For comparison, a carbon Cabri G2 helo cruises at 100 mph with a range of over 400 miles.

<comment><USER15> 60 mi range is pretty good for lots of use cases.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> >5 to 7 minutes for recharging

The article is light on specifics but this stood out to me, most Tesla's take longer to charge. I'd imagine an aircraft would need more power than a Tesla, so how are they transferring energy so fast that automobiles can't do it but aircraft can?

<comment><USER17> It may not be a particularly large battery, as it's got to take off vertically. It's not a very long range either, just short hops.

<comment><USER18> Seems like not having enough range is a much bigger problem than for a car.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Drones are loud, because they have to move a lot of air in order to stay in the air. There is no way around that noise. Flying taxis and the like are only good for the few people sitting in one. They are very bad for everybody else.</comment>