Fuck 'em - <AUTHOR> http://www.deliberatism.com/editorial/fuck-em/

<comment><USER3> It's a very careless thing to say "Fuck'em" to all the people that care about you enough to take an interest in how your life turns out. For the most part they aren't trying to box you into some mindless, slave-like existence, but really just want you to have a plan-B in case your rockstar/pro- snowboarder/billionaire-entrepreneur career doesn't work out.

I think many people who advise us in our young age grew up in a time when "travelling & writing" just wasn't a conceivable reality because there wasn't a market for any of that "finding yourself" bullshit. They were part of a society that was too busy putting a car in every garage and a chicken dinner in every dining room (and eventually sending kids to college and on Euro- trips).

I'm not saying you shouldn't go couch surfing across Eastern Europe if that's really what makes you feel alive, but don't dismiss an entire cultural mindset that made it possible for you to do so with a passport that will allow you across nearly every border in the world. "Travelling", for many non- westerners, means waiting for 2 years and checking with an embassy every single day to see if your Visa has been approved so your family can board a plane that allows you to leave your country for more than 6 months.

<comment><USER4> I couldn't have said it better myself.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I personally found the correspondence in the comments between Adrian and Eric (the author) more interesting than the article itself.

It kinda highlights the contradiction between what people say, and what people do. Fuck 'em? Sounds bold! But "driving a minivan with two baby seats in the back" well, that sounds...like me in five years.

Stated alternately, there's an awful lot of people online with regularly updated blogs, twitter accounts and other social profiles who seem particularly compelled to tell me how amazing their lives are.

<comment><USER6> For the record, I was careful about what I wrote back in response to Adrian. He and I were good friends in college; since then he's been a little _too_ interested in my life.

I don't really see my kids or car as signs of a less adventurous life. My kids are remarkable and have changed how I look at the world. Meanwhile, my car is just a car. It doesn't define me, nor do I get excited about new models. It's simply a means of getting places.

What Adrian doesn't know--and I feel little need to point out to him--is that I've done some pretty interesting things over the years. I quit a job that paid well, and then lived on almost nothing ($6,000 in the first year). Doing so was tough, but as a result we've been able to do a lot of new things.

We wrote a book; built some interesting sites, communities, tools; met a bunch of neat people; rallied some folks around a cause; yadda yadda yadda. Next year, we're going to try our hand at making a film. I've never done that, but I really want to try it out.

We've continually pushed our company in new directions, and out of our comfort zones. Along the way, we've succeeded a bit, and failed a bit. For some people, this wouldn't be interesting. For me, though, it's a kick. We come up with an idea; we act on it. As a result, I mostly get to do what I want, when I want.

I don't think my life is amazing, but I do generally feel pretty good about it. Additionally, I'm not asking others to live the same was as me. I just think these are discussions worth having (particularly when folks tell me how much they hate their jobs).

<comment><USER5> "For some people, this wouldn't be interesting. For me, though, it's a kick"

In a nutshell, this is why I find your assertion that most people live "lame ass lives" quite callous. A lot of the things you've listed as "interesting" things you've done in your life sound to me kinda dull and pointless. But that's fine - it's your life and if there is anyone to say "Fuck Em" to, it's people who pass judgement on your life.

For the record, I ran a successful company at 22, made a lot of money and have traveled extensively. But those experiences I've had are no more valuable than your experiences with your kids on the My Life Is Amazing, Look At Me Index (MLIALAMI). I know one guy who is ridiculously thrilled with his life as a professional Starcraft II player. And another who is an amazing mathematician who loves his work and who probably wouldn't trade places with any of us.

Happiness and satisfaction in life isn't defined along a one dimensional axis or measured by variation from the beaten path. Want to travel the beaten path? Loving it? Keep doing it, and fuck anyone who says your life is lame.

<comment><USER6> It isn't so much that I'm calling certain lifestyles lame, it's just that I've met so many folks who are very unhappy with the choices they've made--and paradoxically offended by those who don't choose the same path.

Whether you love a life of Starcraft II, travelling the world, or living in the suburbs, is of little difference to me. My point is simply that folks shouldn't feel obliged to follow the same path as the status quo.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This came off offensive to me. Kids and a house may not be your ideal life, but many people have that life and don't consider it "lame ass". Some people are actually happy and not constantly regretting roads they didn't take in life. I'm wondering if you're the one who is insecure and depressed.

<comment><USER8> Not sure why you'd find this offensive.

"Fuck 'em" just means "Question everything and don't let others dictate your values". The author is thinking out loud about something that we all know but are uncomfortable thinking about: The idea that we are not living to our utmost.

It's all relative and subjective though. Case in point, I'm sitting at my desk at work when I'd rather be having a picnic with my family and relieving the burn out I have after a long week. I'll be sitting here day in and day out until I retire so I consider this a bit "lame ass" to be honest. But it could be worse. At least I'm not scouring a mountain of trash for scrap metals in a 3rd world country.

We should all be insecure and depressed from time to time. It jars that thing in us that helps us grow.

<comment><USER9> > _We should all be insecure and depressed from time to time. It jars that > thing in us that helps us grow._

Well said!!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> It's a good thing we exist in the top percentile of the world's population that affords us even the luxury to consider this sort of thing.

<comment><USER11> And the luxury to post it online.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I think the advice I would give is, before settling into a course in life, go out and meet as many people you can. Try to just observe and see outcomes. That way you have an idea of what lives are like along certain paths (in general).

Myself, I really only had the example of my parents and some relatives. I don't regret this, because I really like my path in life. It is not easy, but it is driving.

However, if I could give myself advice, it would be to mingle more with more people from more diverse lifestyles, just to see outcomes, attitudes and daily lives.

</comment><comment><USER13> > _What if you volunteered some time in a developing country and met someone > who'd never spent a moment thinking about Chandler and Monica?_

Most organizations that send volunteers to developing countries are either evangelical or are looking for educated people with skills, both of which require the kind of conformism that this piece rallies against.

BTW, in all seriousness, who are Chandler and Monica?

<comment><USER14> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friends> (or was this a woosh?)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I want to shout it from the rooftops: Dear Internet, stop telling me to make stuff! Stop telling me to do things!

This whole "cog in the machine" notion is a myth. The world is fascinating, people are fascinating. Always has been, always will be.

I would counter this entire article with one of my favorite quotes, from the movie Adaptation:

"Nothing happens in the world? Are you out of your fucking mind? People are murdered every day. There's genocide, war, corruption. Every fucking day, somewhere in the world, somebody sacrifices his life to save someone else. Every fucking day, someone, somewhere takes a conscious decision to destroy someone else. People find love, people lose it. For Christ's sake, a child watches her mother beaten to death on the steps of a church. Someone goes hungry. Somebody else betrays his best friend for a woman. If you can't find that stuff in life, then you, my friend, don't know crap about life!"

</comment><comment><USER16> I hate to be the downer, but this "fuck 'em" attitude doesn't work for most people. Sure, society is mean-spirited, limiting, imbecilic, and cutthroat. The ratrace literally serves no purpose (it's a sterilized, time-consuming social-climbing circus that has almost nothing to do with work, and is not necessary to get done the work society actually needs, more often getting in the way of actual work) but one cannot just take 5 years out of it and get back into the game with the same status. Ageism is _huge_ in the business world (you lose opportunities as you get older and less "shiny") and even one year is a massive, often intolerable loss.

The "fuck 'em" attitude would be great if it were sustainable, but it's not. You can't keep living like a teenager when you're in your 40s. Want to have kids? Then, you need to own your house (it's good for their self-esteem and has measurable effects on their social and academic success to own the house they live in) and get them into good schools and make sure they have the opportunities (intellectual, athletic, creative, occupational) that will socialize them well and provide them with the connections to have a decent shot of actually achieving something instead of just being some entitled guy's pawn. Otherwise, you're just generating middle-grade meat for society to munch on. So kids are super-expensive, but you can't really have them at age 60, and you better have laid your groundwork (career-wise) for many years before you make that decision.

It makes me sick to read this bad advice that tells people they can just do what they want and that society will accept them for being unique, wonderful snowflakes. Or "do what you love and the money will follow". It's total bullshit. People generally suck and are mean-spirited and vindictive, and this idea that society will catch and nurture those who indulge themselves in a gap or two is ridiculous. You know what happens (if you're not rich and well- connected) to your career if you travel for 2 years after school? People resent the fuck out of you (because they didn't have or take that opportunity) and ding you for that alone. Six months of leisure travel when young is, for this reason, somewhat more of a liability than that amount of regular unemployment (which, post-2008, makes you look more _unlucky_ than incompetent).

What you actually need to do is figure out what matters, what to care about, and how much. For example, you should care about your job well enough to do it well and get promotions. You should not care about it so much that you get into conflicts that damage your career. You should care about your success in the company (and in your career) but not about big-picture company-wide issues over which you have no influence. (Pay attention to these, because they may be relevant to your career, but don't get emotionally involved or take stupid risks, even when those risks benefit the company, because you won't give a shit about "good for the company" if you get fired.) You can't take a "fuck 'em" attitude or get a chip on your shoulder, but blind obedience to managerial authority is going to lead to mediocrity and misery and, in the long run, anomie. Somewhere between "yes, sir" douchebaggery and "fuck 'em" is the right attitude-- the "middle path".

<comment><USER17> You managed to, in more words than the original article, completely miss the point of the original article...

None of what you assume a "fuck 'em" mentality means is suggested in this article. It doesn't say that you should go out and walk across the country, it simply asks "what if?". It tells you to consider other options, to do much of what you suggest in the last paragraph of your response, except in your response you still have the assumption that to be successful in life, one must "care about your success in the company (and in your career)".

This article to me is a reminder that I don't need to do what everyone else is doing, or expects me to do, in order to be happy. I need to do what makes me happy, in order to be happy. Sometimes those values align, sometimes they don't. And in the instances that they don't, if someone else has a problem with that - Fuck 'em!

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Boiled down it's just saying "Don't be a sheep" (Perfect Circle's "Counting Bodies Like Sheep" music video popped in my head).

I've read a lot of the posts on that site and it always amazes me how people's knee jerk reaction is "you don't know me - don't tell me how to live".

Geezuz Jump-roping Christ - panties have never been bunched up so quickly by so many by so few words.

</comment><comment><USER19> Hey, someone has to work at <insert your favorite low-wage-but-I-saw-the- world-and-write-poetry employer 'cause I don't want to offend anyone>.

Seriously now. The path characterized in the article as "the plan" is not for everyone. And that's fine. I wish I were an America's Cup competitor. I am not. I am a pretty good recreational sailor. And that's OK. I chose to follow a path that led me to engineering and serial entrepreneurship. We don't all have to follow the same path.

So long as the focus is positive there's value in every path.

A better title for the post might have been "...and that's OK".

</comment><comment><USER20> Summary:

Fuck everything.

Or not.

I don't know man, do whatever.

</comment><comment><USER8> Every tiger mom should read this.

</comment><comment><USER21> A thoughtless sentiment. I can't imagine anyone reading (or writing) a post like this and being inspired for longer than 10 minutes. There are many such sentiments on the web and in books, of course.

Imagine, if you will, this sentiment applied to the art of computer programming. "Fuck 'em" you say one day. "I don't need to listen to the hoary old bastards of CS - I can do things _my way_." This lasts exactly as long as it takes you to run into the exact same issues as the "hoary old bastards of CS" - and what do you know, you find yourself unable to even begin coming up with novel solutions.

This is not to say that it isn't useful to revisit the origins of the art - <USER2> is. And it's not to say that some people do precisely this, to some extent, and come back with something useful. Rich Hickey and Clojure are one example, and Bret Victor and his (sadly proprietary) prototypes another. There are more, of course, and they tend to be the stars of the industry.

There are not that many successful rebels. Many more attempt to buck the trend, and simply fail to produce anything that even works, and if they do, then it's usually just not that useful to people. A failed rebel, you come back to the traditional ways, tail between your legs, and build software like anyone else, contenting yourself with flourishes and, perhaps, being an early adopter (because if you can't design something novel and useful, you might as well be an early advocate for something novel and useful.)

The tradeoffs, risks, and odds are basically the same for life. You can indeed say "Fuck 'em" but chances are you'll end up a failed rebel. There is a non- zero chance you'll succeed wildly, and find a life that is novel and successful. But you'll be the exception, not the rule.</comment>


Every Finite Automaton Has a Corresponding Regular Expression - <AUTHOR> https://semantic-domain.blogspot.com/2019/10/every-finite-automaton-has.html <comment><USER2> The first chapter of Berstel and Reutenauer's "Noncommutative Rational Series with Applications" presents Schützenberger's theorem that every noncommuting rational power series is representable, and conversely. The idea is NOT painfully abstract, but makes twenty minutes work of a semester of undergraduate automata theory (an assertion I've tested multiple times in my math office hours).

They work with coefficients in an arbitrary semiring, which can be like watching paint dry. However, boolean true/false, and probabilities, make two great examples. The idea that hidden Markov chains is exactly the same theory as CS automata theory is mind-blowing.

Once one absorbs this, there's an interesting wrinkle worked out in the 1960's that is still poorly understood. If the outputs are probabilities, do the internal coefficients of the matrices need to be probabilities? Why yes, if we are so enamored with fulfilling our expectations that we can simply draw graphs and label them in understandable ways for people who aren't willing to work very hard or defy expectations. Why no, if one chases the actual math. There are examples that can require arbitrarily many matrix dimensions to model using probabilities, that can be modeled in few dimensions using real numbers outside the [0,1] range.

This has a simple explanation. There's a pattern one sees twice, a linear combination with coefficients in [0,1] that sum to one: A probability distribution, and barycentric coordinates. One can have a point cloud of small dimension, whose convex hull requires arbitrarily many vertices. Restricting the coefficients to the [0,1] range means working with these vertices as separate matrix dimensions. Leaving the coefficients unrestricted means working with the raw dimension.

<comment><USER3> This perspective is excellent. Besides the book reference, any papers in this area that are relevant?

<comment><USER4> Not direct answer to your question, but Berstel's publications:

[http://www-igm.univ-mlv.fr/~berstel/PubsJeanBerstel.html](http://www- igm.univ-mlv.fr/~berstel/PubsJeanBerstel.html)

You can try to contact him, he might be able to help you.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I worked on a tool that infers a regex from sample strings, by building and then reducing an NDFA.

The NDFA->regex construction worked by "collapsing" a node in the NDFA. Choose a victim node. Construct a Kleene star for all "self loops." Lastly, form all triples of (incoming, self-loop, outgoing) edges; these become the labels of new edges. Now you can discard the victim node. Repeat until you're down to a single start -> goal node, and you're done (the edges just become alternations).

Surprisingly the length of a regex would vary dramatically by the choice of nodes to collapse. Finding the _minimum_ regex was an unexpected challenge. Has anyone explored regexp minimization?

Incidentally it's not the case that Thompson and subset construction "are the basis of every lexer and regexp engine there is." It's not even true of the regexp engine inside the browser you're using now!

<comment><USER6> Very cool, do you know of any tool that does something similar (provide examples, get regex)?

<comment><USER7> I am not sure this is what you are looking for, but I have been working on Aude (AUtomata DEmystifier), an open source pedagogical application targeted at CS teachers and students that works in browsers without installation (but one can download and run it offline too).

The aim is to visualise and manipulate automata, including conversions between them and regular expressions. Happy to take feedback!

[https://aude.imag.fr](https://aude.imag.fr)

<comment><USER8> That's a neat project! What inspired you to start it?

<comment><USER7> Thanks for the kind words.

Well, I was a student and needed to practice the related lesson, "Languages and Automata", before the final exam. So I implemented the algorithms of the lesson and used Graphviz to render the result. The thing worked in a browser but ran on the server (using D!). I figured my fellow students or the teacher may find it useful, so I sent the link to the teacher (in a post-scriptum of a very long mail in which I was asking for help, ah ah).

"Your tool seems really interesting, what about you continue developing this during an internship this summer?"

Hell, yes. And Aude started.

Since then, I was lucky to mentor several interns to work on Aude with this teacher.

<comment><USER8> That is very cool and I'll bet having a steady flow of later cohorts of students helped a ton!

<comment><USER7> I would not say a steady flow, there were two to three students two months per summer these last three years, but they helped a lot anyway indeed :-)

And it was fun to work with them. The first "cohort" of three students called themselves the Aude Team and they put that in their internship report.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is an example of an important piece of knowledge that typically only programmers with a formal education in computer science are taught. This theorem is taught in all formal language courses.

<comment><USER10> _This is an example of an important piece of knowledge that typically only programmers with a formal education in computer science are taught._

This is the 21st Century. Why aren't we teaching stuff like this in Middle School? It wouldn't require an entire course. Just cover FSM and stack machines, then letting people know that there's stuff beyond that. This would get people a basic level of the "mental furnishings" to deal with notions of computational complexity, beyond the level of total fuzzy "woo." In 2019, ordinary people need to know something about this stuff to make decisions at work and to vote!

Yes, just the most basic, minimally concrete idea of how this stuff works would be valuable for society. When Ford automobiles were new, some new car owners would try to "fix" their cars by hanging bulbs of garlic under the hood. Today, we find this quaint, magical thinking, because everyone has the barest, minimally concrete, idea of how a car engine works. Are you annoyed at the general ignorance of politicians around technical issues? Well, it's just analogous to politicians with the above level of automotive ignorance passing motor vehicle laws.

<comment><USER11> I agree in general but I find this piece of knowledge to be too theoretical and specific (the equivalence of regex & finite automata).

I find it much more important to know how networking and the Internet works and basic client-server architecture. And maybe some things about authentication. These topics seem much more tangible and important to non- technical people than CS theory.

<comment><USER12> Pretty sure this equivalence was more or less the first sentence in the regex tutorial I read during high school...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> That's a very cool construction of regular expressions, just using matrices and semirings. I loved the explanation of why F and G were as they were as well. I had two comments:

> Assume we have a regular language (R, 1, ., 0, +, * )

Shouldn't this data (a semiring with * -operation or "closure") not be one regular language, but _all_ regular languages? A single regular language should be an element of R.

I also think that the power series A* = 1 + A + A^2 + ... looks more like 1/(1-A) rather than e^A, which makes sense given the defining equation A* = 1 + A(A*), but that's not much of an issue since neither of these properly make sense in this semiring.

</comment><comment><USER14> What is the regex for a given state of Game of Life?

<comment><USER15> Game of Life isn't a finite automata. It has an infinite number of states (and is turing complete, too).

<comment><USER14> Is that why my neural network can't make any sense of GoL progression? 2^512 possible rules...</comment></comment></comment>


The Making of Darius - <AUTHOR> http://shmuplations.com/darius/ <comment><USER2> All that discussion of screen layouts and no actual pictures to show the effect?

Video of in-cabinet gameplay: [https://youtu.be/NOAliCg0WcM](https://youtu.be/NOAliCg0WcM)

More gameplay, screen-capped: [https://youtu.be/arXkcI- FgS4](https://youtu.be/arXkcI-FgS4)

</comment><comment><USER3> The music on this video game is my favorite of all time in any game, I'm actually somewhat obsessed with this particular ditty from a later level: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aIhRPpWDa88](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aIhRPpWDa88)

Very reminiscent of one of my favorite EDM artists, Boy-8-Bit, but predating him by decades.

Also, anyone living near Illinois should treat themselves to Galloping Ghost arcade, where you can play Darius on an original cabinet.

<comment><USER4> I loved this quote about the music: _I had wanted to sample the sound of an industrial piston in a factory, but was unable to get it, so instead I just sampled it off a YMO song. (laughs) That happened numerous times, actually._

I'm assuming YMO is referring to the Japanese electronica outfit Yellow Magic Orchestra.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> A recent Twitter thread about this game, which goes into a little more detail on a couple points: [https://twitter.com/Foone/status/1054907948852342784](https://twitter.com/Foone/status/1054907948852342784)

Something that stuck out to me as cool:

> It used a dual-processor system using 8mhz 68000s, and for graphics it used > a custom Taito tile-mapping chip, the PC080SN. They just used three of them, > in fact, one for each screen. These were all mapped into the same memory > space, so the three-screen display "just worked".

First of all, it's curious that it was cost-effective at all to invest in all this custom hardware for one game. But thanks to this hardware mapping, on the programming side, they could mostly treat the three CRTs as a single large display.

<comment><USER6> 1) Hardware magic was often how you could distinguish yourself.

2) General purpose CPUs were very weak.

3) An arcade machine could easily cost 5-figure amounts of money. Suddenly, custom hardware is possible.

4) The PC080SN was custom, but not just for one game. E.g. Rainbow Island used it as well. (I think Bubble Bobble did, too, but memory is weak)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Fascinating that the inclusion of a headphone port was considered a key feature and drew people to the platform, rather than repelled them...</comment>


Show HN: Read RFCs from your command line with rfc - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/bfontaine/rfc#readme

<comment><USER2> Very nice ... though the RFC I'm currently working on is a draft version and it would be cool to be able to type something like:

~/bin/rfc draft-ietf-scim-api-01

As an aside, I had to replace sh with bash to get the installer to work.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for your feedback, I updated the readme.

<comment><USER3> $ checkbashisms ./rfc possible bashism in ./rfc line 74 (should be 'b = a'): if [ "$COMMIT" == "$new_commit" ]; then

$ checkbashisms install.sh possible bashism in install.sh line 3 ('function' is useless): function __install_rfc() { possible bashism in install.sh line 49 (unsafe echo with backslash): echo "\n# Added by 'rfc' installer\nexport PATH=\$PATH:\$HOME/bin" \

but above and beyond that, it requires GNU grep (uses GNU extension --excludes) to run the script itself</comment></comment></comment>


A simple explanation of how the 2 through sqrt of n prime number test works - <AUTHOR> http://hardforkit.com/2016/01/14/How-The-Two-Through-Square-Root-Of-N-Prime-Number-Test-Works.html <comment><USER2> Here's how I would think about it:

If a number N is composite, then it is a product of two numbers smaller than N. Let's call them n1 and n2.

If both n1 and n2 are greater than sqrt(N), then their product would exceed N, violating the assumption above that they equal N:

N= sqrt(N) x sqrt(N) < n1 x n2

A similar argument applies if both n1 and n2 are smaller than sqrt(N): n1 x n2 is less than N, violating the assumption.

So the only other possibilities are:

a) n1 and n2 are exactly equal to sqrt(N)

b) one of the factors is less than sqrt(N) and the other is greater than sqrt(N)

So if either n1 or n2 are not exactly equal to sqrt(N), then a composite number N must have at least one factor less than sqrt(N).</comment>


Ask HN: Have drones made infantry obsolete? - <AUTHOR> Imagine 1,000 drones flying at an equivalent number of infantry, each drone with a mounted gun.
Or small numbers of armed drones flying into buildings containing known enemies.
Seems infantry is at a distinct disadvantage, to the point of no longer being even relevant for actual combat situations.
What do you think? <comment><USER2> You can not win war without winning the people over to your side. You can not win people over to your side using drones. Soldiers are more than just a device able to handle a weapon.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'd think they can supplement them, but not overtake them.</comment>


Amazon and Microsoft staff used company emails to buy sex - <AUTHOR> http://www.newsweek.com/metoo-microsoft-amazon-trafficking-prostitution-sex-silicon-valley-755611 <comment><USER2> For balance, it's worth pointing out that many law-enforcement agencies now use the term "sex trafficking" to describe cases that are merely prostitution. This case appears to be no exception. Further reading about this case by Elizabeth Nolan Brown in Reason Magazine:

[http://reason.com/archives/2016/09/09/the-truth-about-us- sex...](http://reason.com/archives/2016/09/09/the-truth-about-us-sex- trafficking)

</comment><comment><USER3> Can't you simply spoof your email account?</comment>


Researchers Found They Could Hack Wind Farms - <AUTHOR> https://www.wired.com/story/wind-turbine-hack <comment><USER2> I'm close enough to the industry that I can see the root cause.

There's a huge cultural difference between Telecom and Power.

When AT&T started out, they hired telegraph boys to operate the switches, and then after getting tired of their antics, fired them en masse and replaced them with young women. That sparked the first wave of people tampering with telecom wires to pull pranks, and the telecom sector has been familiar with that issue ever since. Phone phreaking, as in tampering with crossbar switches remotely, is at least as old as the Arab Israeli war of 1948.

Power utilities, meanwhile, have had some protection from the simple fact that even sociopaths don't like to risk their own lights going out. Even during civil wars, militias will spare the other side's power because they want to use it when they conquer the other side's territory. Power utilities have to worry about copper thieves, squirrels, and tree branches. Getting bits diddled remotely by bad actors is not something they've had to think about as long.

<comment><USER3> "Getting bits diddled remotely by bad actors is not something they've had to think about as long."

They should never have to worry about this.

Power plant equipment, etc., should not have networking capability. Not just no Internet, but no _networking_.

<comment><USER4> You might be surprised to learn that all power plants have some sort of primitive "networking" capability, albeit something that looks more like a direct point-to-point phone line between plants and the grid operator (see DNP3.) As you can imagine these are relatively expensive to install, but part of the bring-up of a new power plant.

All of these plants also have some sort of SCADA system internally and turbine fields need the same (the turbines need to be connected to each other, and the operator needs to be able to control the turbines in some way: e.g. turning them off when there is an excess of power, reading power output, faults, etc.) So one way or another, communication needs to occur whether it's over an IP network or a dedicated PTP line.

If someone gets physical access it's mostly game-over unless you've got builtin hardware-level encryption between all of the internal components of the facility. If there wasn't an ethernet port in the server cabinet the hacker could just connect an RS-485 line and start sending MODBUS commands or whatever protocol the SCADA system is using.

But the article does a good job pointing out that the assumption that "the facility/network is secure" does not hold as well in distributed generation as it did for traditional power generation.

Edit: see also [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNP3](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNP3)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The article isn't _wrong_ wrong, as the core of this security issue is right, but it's also not really right either. Wind Farm SCADA is generally well protected from internet attacks by design, but it is based on a fiber ring ethernet network that does indeed tend to treat internal nodes on the network as trusted. The article's notes on physical security make sense. And operators generally expect to be able to control the system from any machine, not just the central server. But it seems like much of the solution is better locks.

And I don't know who the author got this idea from: "The equipment is designed for lightness and efficiency, and is often fragile as a result.", but it's not accurate. It's designed for a balance of performance, robustness, and cost. Just because the machines are not designed for repeated emergency braking or doesn't make them fragile.

Bigger picture though, next time you're out and about take a good look at your surroundings. The U.S. is huge, and much of our grid infrastructure is remote. Forget the nuclear power plant example in the article. It wouldn't be stupendously difficult to take down a major transmission line or switchyard if you were determined. Much of the world operates because people generally leave well enough alone, for better or worse.

<comment><USER6> It's a bit like the people raving that the sky will fall when cars are all internet connected because they will vulnerable to hacking but completely ignoring that you could cause far more damage with a pallet of bricks being thrown off a motorway bridge, which generally doesn't ever happen.

<comment><USER7> To be fair, throwing a pallet of bricks off a bridge _wouldn 't_ cause as much damage as causing 1% of an area's cars to crash, and it's a crime you actually have to be on site for.

People are quite reasonably more afraid of attack vectors that can affect huge numbers of people all at once, especially when the attacker could be anywhere in the world.

One obvious example of why that's reasonable is the recent ransomware – sure, you've always been able to easily extort $300 from someone, but now you can take money from a lot of people, and not get caught.

<comment><USER8> Hacking, witchcraft, radioactivity. They all have in common that they are something you can't see, hear, or smell coming at you. Thus they are anxiety inducing...

<comment><USER9> In two of those cases, some level of anxiety is justifiable.

<comment><USER10> Witchcraft and Radioactivity right?

<comment><USER11> Well, probably. Unless you are stupid enough to plug your car to the internet.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This whole article seems to basically boil down to this:

>And in the meantime, a few stronger locks, fences, and security cameras on the doors of the turbines themselves would make physical attacks far more difficult.

I mean, any time someone has physical access to your machines, you're going to lose the security fight. Full stop.

At that point, if the goal is damage or extortion, and you've walked into an unguarded and poorly secured building (or turbine), a little bit of dynamite is a WAY better bet than a network compromise.

<comment><USER13> Maybe?

I mean if I wanted to blow up 1000 turbines with dynamite, I would need:

* Physically drive to 1000 turbines

* Purchases 1000 sticks of dynamite

* Physically walk up to 1000 turbines

* Set up some kind of ransom remote detonator that I could set off

* Somehow monitor all 1000 turbines to see no one could defuse my bomb

* Not blow up myself while setting up the bombs

Vs if you could send 1 packet from Russia that told the turbine to go "full speed reverse" that could shred the device?

You are going to argue that those two things are the same level of effort, and we shouldn't guard against the second due to how easy the first is?

<comment><USER14> >Vs if you could send 1 packet from Russia that told the turbine to go "full speed reverse" that could shred the device?

Just want to point out that there's no such thing as turning on a wind turbine at full speed reverse. It's not a fan.

Potential mechanisms for damaging one include mucking with the brakes (as in the article), changing blade pitch, disabling some kind of cooling system, etc.

<comment><USER15> > Just want to point out that there's no such thing as turning on a wind > turbine at full speed reverse. It's not a fan.

Big AC windmills actually are started up as fans with their blades set to 'coarse' for maximum torque. What happens is that the grid is used to get them up to speed, they become sync-locked to the grid (same frequency) and then any excess power the wind imparts to the machine will be passed off to the grid.

If the machine would drop slightly below the 0 line of power produced the power company would still operate it as a fan until this situation persists for too long and the losses accumulate, then the mill is set to 'coarse' if the pitch is variable and allowed to coast to a stop or some low RPM waiting for the wind to pick up again.

All kinds of trickery (variable pitch, DC systems, maximum-power-point- tracking) and so on is used to expand the useful envelope.

So yes, they're also fans. But mechanical safety is a big thing in windmill design and most likely some FPGA or other hardware lock-out would stop you from being able to command a typical windmill from becoming an 8 MW desk fan.

Hurricane on demand, the evil part of me now wants to know what would happen. At a guess it wouldn't do much because the mechanism is rated to produce an X amount of power so it likely can handle sourcing it as well as long as enough air flows over the coils of the generator. As soon as those get too hot the failsafe will kick in again and the mill goes flat (totally neutral blade setting, the machine won't be moved by the wind like that) and stops.

<comment><USER14> Oh interesting...thanks for the info!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I'm constantly (and serially) amazed at the lack of lessons learned in other fields of security in new areas. It's as if every new area where computers are used erases the minds of the people who make the systems, and then researchers find the issues and expose them; only then will something be done about it - if, indeed, something is done. I'm not a security expert by any stretch of the imagination, but I'm staggered at how easy it seems to be to gain access and control to these kinds of systems, as if them being air gapped (if indeed, they are) is enough to ensure they can't be compromised. I appreciate that no system is truly secure, but the example given here seemed trivially easy in terms of both physical and electronic access.

I do wonder if the lack of security is because of budget constraints (i.e. it was proposed by engineers but rejected by management as a needless cost), or if everyone didn't even think that there would be the potential of a breach and the possibility of exploitation?

<comment><USER17> getting it working > having it secure

then its taken out of the hands of those that want to secure it. If you take two companies one developing a secure and working product and the other just developing a working product capitalism will weed out the secure product and pass the insecure one. This is because it is cheaper to create, will get to market more quickly and be easier to configure.

As these sorts of attacks are rare and there is no established and straight forward legal framework to economically punish those without security; the company with least security almost always wins. Then when someone does show the security holes the tendency is just to arrest them in order to keep this awful system going. :D

I'm not entirely sure how we start to fix this.

<comment><USER18> > _I 'm not entirely sure how we start to fix this._

This needs to be solved at regulatory level. High computer security standards need to become part of whatever work and product safety rules companies already have to follow. But that doesn't look like is going to happen soon, so as an alternative...

Did Maersk recover from that ransomware attack two days ago?

I sincerely hope they didn't. We need an economically meaningful clusterfuck to get people to pay attention.

Related: I think the only way for security to get taken seriously, by both companies and governments alike, is to have someone do some high-profile, damaging hacks "pro bono". Now I would hope such actors stay away from power systems due to risk of loss of life (don't want to disrupt traffic, or hospitals). But this was yesterday on Morning Paper:

[https://blog.acolyer.org/2017/06/28/an-experimental- security...](https://blog.acolyer.org/2017/06/28/an-experimental-security- analysis-of-an-industrial-robot-controller/)

I'd say industrial robots could be a good target. If someone started shutting down the plants of some prominent manufacturers of non-life-critical products, maybe enough people would lose money for someone to start treating it seriously...

<comment><USER19> Isn't the problem in part that some people see "we done been hacked in our car making doohickey" (/cletus) and respond "backdoor all the things" thinking that allowing tougher security just let's the crackers hide whilst backdoors let the "feds" catch them.

I'm not even sure they're wrong _per se_. In theory (!!) a benevolent watchful government can promote liberty and protect its citizens (or in my case The Queen's subjects).

<comment><USER20> that is definitely a problem. But wouldn't backdoors only allow feds to catch cybercriminals after the act? Better security would prevent disasters in the first place. This seems to me a much better way of thinking about the issue

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> All of Amsterdam's power charging station network for cars is accessible via a very similar method. Unauthenticated Telnet just a serial connection away, allowing you city wide access from any charging point. It's frightening especially combined with the amount of data access charging points have to cars plugged into them.

</comment><comment><USER22> So the significance here is that if you had remote access to a single wind turbine, you can control the others? Implying, if there were a vulnerability in the control system of one turbine, the rest of them are exposed? Rather than showing that you can stop wind turbines from spinning, if you had physical access to the turbines.

Their "hack", which requires physical access, is about as practical as throwing a physical spanner in the mechanics.

EDIT: I'd like to point out, there are reasons why you might want to be able to access the SCADA system of other wind turbines, from the network access of one wind turbine, which would be to allow wind-yaw optimising wind lidar systems to optimise the yaw of other, local, turbines.

<comment><USER12> I agree, the issue here is physical security. That's it.

Now, there are some great arguments to be made that software security in those buildings should also be improved, but that literally doesn't matter if someone has physical access. At best you're delaying.

Physical access trumps everything. There is no software on the planet that can prevent a determined attacker with physical access.

<comment><USER13> And as mentioned above, this is silly to ignore software security.

Software attacks are often far far amplified and harder to trace than their in person counterpart.

<comment><USER12> No one is ignoring it...

The whole freaking article is about companies paying specialists to see how secure their farms are.

My issue is that the article glides past the "physical access" part to focus on the "scary cyber weapons" part.

That's bullshit. If it was a remote exploit from an internet connected machine, sure: that's scary.

This wasn't that.

<comment><USER23> The point is that things are connected. By physically accessing one machine you bring down not just one machine but the entire network. The importance of physical security just went up by a factor of the number of machines on the network.

At some point you are going to have to focus on the network part of security. Getting physical access to one Google server shouldn't allow you to bring down all of Google.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> This is a hype article. Wind farms and their equipment could be hacked for years. Just subscribe to the ISC-CERT RSS feed and you'll see they were hackable going back years. Nobody discovered anything new.

<comment><USER25> _Nobody discovered anything new._

They seem to have discovered a conference that will give them a platform to promote themselves by banging on about known security problems while providing zero actionable advice towards finding more weaknesses or preventing future weaknesses.

Nah, I guess you're right. Those aren't a novel discovery either.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> there is actually a funny way to shut down windfarms near forests (although that would probably only work at night/dusk/dawn).

Just blast with full power a recording of ultrasonic bat noises to the turbines.

But as others pointed out, if you have physical access, of course you'll be able to do something nefarious.

Then, wind farms are offline all the time, for all different reasons, so this would actually not that big a deal (apart from the owner of course). And that you are able to hack into the protocols, it is not really surprising, since most of the stuff has no authentication at all. You could of course filter for the MAC addresses of the devices, but this is so much hassle for any maintenance personnel that I doubt that it is in place in that many places.

Additionally, at least in Europe, most of the wind farms are rather small, so we are talking about a few turbines at once. The large ones have actually often enough dedicated staff which will look after them.

<comment><USER27> > You could of course filter for the MAC addresses of the devices

That would not help security wise.

<comment><USER28> I'm not in the security field but it still surprises me how many people don't realize how easy MAC address spoofing actually is.

I generally describe it as the digital equivalent of swapping the plates on your car.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Wonder if the article author had bothered highlighting the model of laptop if it was anything other than a Macbook. Hell, going by the image used it was wrapped in a non-descriptive case (not even a window for the logo).

</comment><comment><USER29> "Windworm, another piece of malicious software, went further: It used telnet and FTP to spread from one programmable automation controller to another, until it infected all of a wind farm's computers."

What year is this?

</comment><comment><USER30> make it work, make it secure, make it cheap.

Pick two.

<comment><USER31> Secure and cheap please!

What you should be saying is that secure software isn't cheap, and management doesn't see a point in spending extra money

<comment><USER28> Secure and cheap means it doesn't work, if not working is the criteria I can paint a brick black and call it the control computer if you'd like.</comment></comment></comment>


Water found on a potentially life-friendly alien planet - <AUTHOR> https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/2019/09/first-water-found-in-habitable-exoplanets-atmosphere-hubble-kepler-k2-18b/ <comment><USER2> I got into the Wait Calculation[1] a few weeks back and made a Jupyter notebook out of it.

At our current max speed (692,000 km/hr, stated max speed of Parker Space Probe), it would take about 173,000 years to get to that planet.

We could instead choose to Wait and grow our tech. By picking a constant annual growth rate and then doing some calculus to find the minimum, we can calculate the shortest possible time it will take for us to arrive there.

One common recommendation for annual energy growth rate is 1.4%, and then taking the square root to get velocity growth rate since velocity has a square root relationship with energy.

By plugging that in, we can minimize our time by growing for 1020 years, and then traveling for 144 years, for a total time-from-now at 1164 years.

Another paper[2] estimated an annual velocity growth rate of 4.72%, quite a bit faster. Plugging that in, it says we should wait 195 years for a travel time of about 21 years, or 216 years overall. This is of course incorrect since it assumes being able to travel FTL. So if you instead look at how long it would take to get to light speed travel at that rate, you're looking about about 159 years, or arriving at the planet at a time-from-now of about 270 years.

Of course, if you're seeking to minimize time-from-now from the perspective of a _traveler_ , maybe you'd take off sooner. Kind of a tradeoff - less time to wait for the traveler, more time to wait for the home planet. I haven't figured out that part of the math yet.

[1] [https://ipfs.io/ipfs/QmXoypizjW3WknFiJnKLwHCnL72vedxjQkDDP1m...](https://ipfs.io/ipfs/QmXoypizjW3WknFiJnKLwHCnL72vedxjQkDDP1mXWo6uco/wiki/Wait_Calculation.html) [2] [https://arxiv.org/abs/1705.01481](https://arxiv.org/abs/1705.01481)

<comment><USER3> Progress in physics was much faster in the early 20th century when it wasn't so fascinated with deep space. Yes, you needed to observe eclipses to verify relativity, but that was a tool, not the end in itself.

Cosmology involves distances that are so great that it seems like it's pouring a whole bunch of smart people's efforts down the drain in an ultimately futile waste of brain power that will never amount to anything much at all. Besides, when we get faster than light travel we can just pick up exoplanet research where we left off and it will actually be practical and probably far more efficient with the computers and such we will have developed by then.

<comment><USER4> > when we get faster than light travel

FTL requires numerous things to be true about our universe, that all signs say are not.

<comment><USER5> The speed of light is just a compute constraint imposed on the physics simulation that is our universe. If we can just get the gods who are running that simulation to give us a little extra compute time in our neck of to woods then we can all be galactic explorers.

<comment><USER4> Just for the sake of argument, let's run with that.

If we're in a physics simulation, we don't experience at the rate that the simulation is processed. One "tick" of the simulation could be processed in one second of the host universe, or one hour: and we wouldn't feel the difference. We are processed at the same tickrate as the rest of the universe, so we experience the passage of time at the same rate that the simulation flows.

The speed of light isn't just the speed of light, it's the speed of causality. It just so happens that light moves pretty well at that "speed limit" (in a vacuum). We could ask our computational hosts to increase or decrease _c_ , and we still wouldn't be able to travel any faster than it.

<comment><USER6> We could ask the host to update their algorithm to let c be a property of objects and then just do spaceship.c = 1000 * c.

Would probably be a heck of a refactor to get it working without bugs though.

<comment><USER7> Just leave the bugs in for the speedrunners to use.

<comment><USER8> speedrunners can restart the game if they crash it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Some caveats per Marina Koren [https://twitter.com/marinakoren/status/1171873631808438273](https://twitter.com/marinakoren/status/1171873631808438273)

1\. This planet probably doesn't have a solid surface

2\. Being in the "habitable zone" doesn't mean a planet is habitable

3\. The detection is of water molecules, chances are the water only exists as vapour in the atmosphere of this small gas giant.

4\. If you ask 10 astronomers about this you will get 11 opinions

<comment><USER10> > Being in the "habitable zone" doesn't mean a planet is habitable

True. Being a spooky near twin of Earth isn't necessarily enough.

The air inside popcorn factories is basically identical to the Earth's atmosphere, but breathing in diacetyl, a butter flavor you'll find in that air, will kill you a few months or years later.

Popcorn lung really undermined my naive view that we would one day be able to run a scan or a sniff test on a planet and then just breathe without assistance.

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

You have an identical twin to Earth with slightly different dust composition and it could shred our lungs. We are highly, highly tuned to our home.

Which doesn't mean we can't go anywhere. But it won't just be advances in travel speed that will get us off world. It may also require drastic modifications to the human organism.

<comment><USER8> That'd be something, people travel for 30 years to a distant planet, die four days later because something in the atmosphere we didn't account for and did not filter properly, or a crystalline fungus that eats away our suits.

<comment><USER11> Happens a lot in (bad) science fiction, and parody thereof.

People land on a planet, go "I wonder if the atmosphere is breathable?", then open their helmet and take a deep breath.

But I think by the time anyone is arriving on a planet around another star, it will be with biotechnology that allows adaptation to a rather wide variety of environments.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> With a planet this large, visiting it would be a one way trip due to the "The Tyranny of the Rocket Equation" [0]. I'm looking forward to the day we start finding exo-planets that are closer to Earth in size and which could potentially have space-faring races (and which we could leave if we were ever to visit them).

[0] - [https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/expeditions/exped...](https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/expeditions/expedition30/tryanny.html)

<comment><USER13> It's 111 light years away. For all intents and purposes, that's a one way trip right there; irregardless of the rocket equation. Even at relativistic speeds, you can't come home anymore.

<comment><USER14> Theoretically, you can. At 0.99c 111 light years take about 15 years of ship time to travel.

<comment><USER15> So you can survive the trip but even if you come back home, it's not home anymore? Imagine leaving 222 years ago and coming back now ...

<comment><USER16> Many european cities would still exist and the mountains I grew up in front of too.

But granted, all people I know would be dead and some I could find in the history books maybe..

<comment><USER17> _> and some I could find in the history books maybe.. _

Where you would also be, at that stage.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> A very quick search suggests that earth will become uninhabitable somewhere between 500 million and 2 billion years from now. If we shot a probe to this life-friendly alien planet with some sort of primordial soup, even traveling at the speed of light it would take 4 billion earth years to get there. Do I have that right? Basically we'll never even come close to being around when it finally arrives, if it ever arrives. Has anyone ever thought about doing this? We've shot gold records out into space for aliens with turn-tables. Why haven't we tried this?

<comment><USER19> It seems like it would be much easier to terraform the real estate around us than try to opt for something 100 light years away.

Mars has a leaky atmosphere - sure it's a real fixer upper. But we have a better chance of fixing it, or even correcting the orbit of our planet so that in 500 million years it's still livable.

<comment><USER20> Or sending a HUGE human civilization spaceship somewhere.. maybe it will outlast the earth?

<comment><USER21> In a lot of ways, living on spaceships/space stations/other artificial constructions is likely a better path forward than looking to colonize new planets in general. O'Neill cylinders are quite practical, and with advances in technology that seem likely to occur, even larger projects like Bishop rings should be doable. They can be linked together to form constellations, and have enough free floating resources within the solar system to be able to build enough of them to support populations in the trillions.

It probably sounds less than ideal to you and me, vs. living on a planet, but it probably wouldn't be so bad to someone born in that sort of environment and is used to it.

With that in mind, I don't know if it makes sense to try and find human habitable planets, vs. just places with lots of raw material we can use. Unless there's alien life we want to go meet up with, at any rate.

<comment><USER19> O'Neill cylinders are so practical that most of this stuff we have no idea how to practically accomplish.

Edit: The sizes involved for launch would present no less than a hundred trillion budget at the moment.

<comment><USER21> I mean practical in that there's no exotic science required. Everything required we have ideas on how to accomplish now, and the big issues are making it cost effective.

And as for the 100 trillion budget, if you're launching from the earth, sure. Geologists are pretty sure the moon has plenty of materials useful for building stuff. We've already built mass drivers, and the physics for building one that could launch raw materials from the moon are perfectly sound.

Yes, we need to figure out mining materials and building stuff in space. But we're going to have to figure that out anyway if we want to survive as a species in the long term, and there's plenty of advantages in starting to figure that out now, especially since we're staring down the barrel of a gun vis-a-vis climate change.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Lots of discussion on the possibility of going or communicating, but for me the excitement is the narrowing of uncertainties in the Drake equation and the focusing of discovery of alien life, intelligent or otherwise.

Discoveries like this improve our understanding of likelihood of extraterrestrial life, which has direct Earthly implications. It also enables better estimates and searches for planets that are closer, say ~4 to 20 lightyears away, for those super interested in the traveling & communicating possibilities.

<comment><USER23> After reading Liu Cixin's Three body Problem, let's just say I'm less super interested in communicating :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Isn't it odd to think that one day, there will be a top post on Hacker News: "Alien Life Discovered on Nearby Planet (430 points)".

<comment> DC-3 One would like to think that it would get more points than that :-)

<comment><USER25> But if it gets more than 430, it will have 430 at some point.

<comment><USER24> Peak pedantry - I love it

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Reading about that led me to this article about a water world that was discovered:

'A giant waterworld that is wet to its core has been spotted in orbit around a dim but not too distant star'

With oceans 9000 miles deep (15000 km). For context the Earth's diameter is 7900 miles (12700 km).

The imagination really does boggle at the thought. I think science fiction is going to have a hard time keeping up with the incredible science fact we are observing in our lifetimes.

[https://www.theguardian.com/science/2009/dec/16/waterworld-p...](https://www.theguardian.com/science/2009/dec/16/waterworld- planet-earth-life)

</comment><comment> lachlan-sneff There are lots of people in the comments here talking about how long it would take to send a probe, or how many generations a generation ship would have, but it seems clear to me that that's not how humans are going to go to other solar systems.

Once we solve mind uploading (assuming that it's possible), we can send a blob of grey goo on a solar sail at a very high acceleration to another solar system. It can shed half of the sail and bounce the laser back to decelerate.

The grey goo would go and convert part of asteroid or something to computronium, and then we'd upload a bunch of humans over to the other solar system.

<comment><USER27> If we can simulate wetware perfectly, we would also be able to solve any health condition.

This is all presumptive of the preferences of individual humans. It may be that the giant extrasolar Earth-type planets could be dismantled and rebuilt into smaller Earths located at various Lagrange points.

<comment> lachlan-sneff For sure, maybe future humans won't want to do that. The important takeaway is that they'll have the opportunity to do so if they wish.

They could even clone them back on the other end and install the preexisting mind, basically teleportation.

<comment><USER28> You're assuming that we'll have a means to send data across Galaxy faster than the speed of light. If not then it'll take 111 years to upload your mind.

<comment> lachlan-sneff Nah, I was assuming it'd take 111 years to send the minds there. It's really not a very long time when we have digital immortality.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> So they finally got there. Detecting atmospheric water vapor on a planet 110 light years away. amazing.

</comment><comment><USER30> Serious question - Do we have the capability to send human life there now?

Obviously its going to be a one way trip. And it would require a generational ship.

So could we build a ship that held 12 people initially, 6 couples, all who were allowed to have 2 children, so 24 people max, and could we load it with enough supplies to last over 100 years?

Even if the group that eventually arrived had no way to sustain life, and they just went there for a quick swim before dying... is it possible?

<comment><USER31> We don't have the capability to send _anything_ there now. Sending even a tiny probe that is capable of communicating back to Earth from our closest stellar neighbor is beyond our current technology. People are actively working on it, but it's unlikely that we will have the technology to even send an unmanned probe to this star within our lifetimes. We might send a probe to Alpha Centauri, but it's even questionable whether it will be fast enough to arrive within our lifetimes.

<comment><USER32> Project Orion - riding nuke explosions - using existing tech/materials and those 100K nukes that both sides had at the peak of the Cold War would bring a 30K ton ship to the 5-10% of c. Curiously, getting all that 100K+ ton of hardware to LEO where one can finally start exploding the nukes seems to be more complicated task right now.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> What makes a planet an "alien" planet?

<comment><USER34> It is part of a different solar system: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exoplanet](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exoplanet)

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> This reminds me of a sci-fi book I read when I was a kid called Rocheworld by Robert Forward.

They were going to the Barnard Star, but it had binary planets where one was all water.

Good book (if I recall)..

</comment><comment><USER36> That's the kind of news that makes me smile and worry at the same time

All my life I wait for the moment we will find life

I just afraid if it will really happen from everyone reactins

</comment><comment><USER37> I think we would have to manage to extend human lives to ~10,000 years or more to be spacefaring.

</comment><comment><USER38> Correction, water "was" found. This water was there 111 years ago.

</comment><comment><USER39> If water is found can we assume fish like life in that planet?

</comment><comment><USER40> Thought this was found multiple years ago?

</comment><comment><USER41> Sorry if it's been mentioned in the threads before - Here is Phil Plait's (@badastronomer on twitter) practical explanation of this finding - [https://www.syfy.com/syfywire/water-vapor-detected-in-the- at...](https://www.syfy.com/syfywire/water-vapor-detected-in-the-atmosphere- of-a-temperate-mini-neptune-exoplanet) TLDR - "NO, THIS DOES NOT MEAN THE PLANET IS EITHER EARTH-LIKE OR HABITABLE."

</comment><comment><USER42> that title should read "Water found on a potentially life-friendly _exo_ planet"

</comment><comment><USER43> Only 1,050,000,000,000,000 kilometers away...

</comment><comment><USER44> It's depressing to think that if there is intelligent life on that planet, we won't be able to communicate with them in any way in our lifetime, yet it's so close. Unless they started sending communications our way over a century ago.

<comment><USER45> If it is depressing to think about it, then why think about it? Does it have any real implications for significant outcomes about your life or is it in a way some type of FOMO?

<comment><USER44> Well, I suppose I'm using a bit of hyperbole. Maybe I should say sad. And don't worry, I won't think about it very long.

<comment><USER46> Why is it sad at all? What would it do for you? It would be about as relevant as being able to communicate in some way with people in the past. Would be interesting and entertaining but a leap to imagine it would yield some kind of better quality of life in the current day.

<comment><USER47> I feel like the ideal of life existing on another planet _would_ improve my quality of life. The additional potential would do wonders for my everyday narrative.

<comment><USER45> I feel like the idea of time travel, teleportation, and eternal youth would improve my quality of life as well, but they are just as likely at this point as living on another planet. I certainly don't let the fact that I won't ever have any of those things get me down.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> > potentially life-friendly

Spoiler: it's not

<comment><USER31> Life friendly != human friendly.

<comment><USER48> I understand that. This planet is far more likely to not be habitable, period. We might as well consider Neptune to be "potentially life-friendly".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> Calling it "alien planet" has a negative warmongering tone.

</comment><comment><USER50> So tired of hearing about "habitable" planets that would take millennia to get to. Call me when the space elevator has been commissioned.

<comment><USER31> If it makes you feel any better, virtually all of them are uninhabitable to humans. The excitement comes from the idea that they could be locations of alien life that we would easily recognize. In other words, we need better communications tools, not better space travel.

<comment><USER51> Or even just better observation tools, that would be amazing already. Sadly, at the scales we are talking here, even "just" getting those tools seems very improbable, at least...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> Someone please correct me, because with a planet that is at 111 light years away aren't we technically looking back in time?

Any type of observation was only a period Of time and any type of life used to be there, but may not be there presently?

<comment><USER53> Everything you look at is looking back in time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> I am thinking to get a not very expensive refraktor (120 mm) with Azimutal mounting, for deep space and terrestrial observations. Just interested in Astronomy, but have no idea what level of details can be seen with that kind. I am fascinated by Orion Nebula and Andromeda which I can see with simple 8x42 ED binoculars. Now thinking about telescope. Dobsonians look pretty heavy, I want something portable and inexpensive. Do you have any suggestion? Are refractors good for that?</comment>


Aussie Dollar is officially above the Greenback - <AUTHOR> http://www.xe.com

<comment><USER2> it's been above the Greenback three times now in the last few weeks. wait til it gets above and stays above parity for at least a day before it becomes real news.

</comment><comment><USER3> I need this go way down, so I can buy lots of Aussie FJ60 parts :D</comment>


Ceefax service to end after 38 years on BBC - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-20032882

<comment><USER2> The initial path part of BBC urls (<http://bbc.co.uk/this-bit/etc/etc>) weren't allowed to contain an underscore, because they can't be displayed on Ceefax.

Lovely bit of legacy.

</comment><comment><USER3> For those interested, Prestel was a great service too. Early days of investing and retriving historical data on companies via 4tel's Shares 3000 pages was the only way for private investors to get data freely. Investing could be done by dial-up using the prestel platform.

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rmjKAM1NVWE>

</comment><comment><USER4> I will wonder what happens with subtitles. Watching shows on the beeb with subtitles on was a lifesaver for me when learning English.

<comment><USER5> Subtitles continue to be available as part of the new digital TV service and the BBC continues to aim to subtitle all its output: [http://faq.external.bbc.co.uk/questions/help_receiving/TV_su...](http://faq.external.bbc.co.uk/questions/help_receiving/TV_subtitles)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> One of the nice things about Ceefax was that it managed to combine instant and delayed gratification. You knew you could get certain information by punching in the page number but at the same time you had to wait a short while for it to appear as the pages (and sub-pages) were transmitted in a certain order. I think it was this combination of access to information and a small price to pay in getting it that made it so addictive.

And the limited screen real-estate meant that the writing had to be short, simple and clear. The screen format was 24 x 40 and once headers and footers are taking into account a typical story might have 17 x 40 = 680 characters. Assuming an average English word length of 5 characters that's roughly 110 words. Add in blank lines for paragraph breaks and the format is very constrained.

</comment><comment><USER6> You can actually consult ceefax online :

[http://www.ceefax.tv/txtmaster.php?page=199&channel=bbc1...](http://www.ceefax.tv/txtmaster.php?page=199&channel=bbc1&search_string=&all_subs=off&textmode=&fontsize=2)

<comment><USER7> Bit out of date that though (i.e. Sport on 302 has RVP still playing for Arsenal.)

I'll miss it, I used to watch football scores updating on Teletext for many many years...

And this reminds me of Mikefax on the BBC Micro that could be used to make your own teletext style pages. Control code 141 for double height Mode 7 chars?

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Here's a lovely audio slideshow that captures the essence of Ceefax, complete with that cheesy music that accompanied everything: <http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-19996372>

<comment><USER9> When I was young, I would sneak downstairs in the early morning on weekends to watch cartoons. If I was too early, nothing would be on apart from ceefax. I must have listened to that music for hundreds of hours.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> The Ceefax-like service in the Netherlands is actually a much-installed iPhone/Android app. The limitation in information you can provide provides for a short, to the point, "curated" overview of things happening.

</comment><comment><USER11> Teletext (Ceefax on Channel 4) had some games you could play 'through your TV!' :)

Bamboozle was a general knowledge, multiple choice quiz. A hacker at heart I noticed the correct choice (red/green/yellow/blue) went to a different page number to the rest. So if you quickly flicked through all the colours until you found the different one you could blaze through with 100% correct.

My sister was amazed when I could get every question right first time.

<comment><USER12> > Teletext (Ceefax on Channel 4) had some games you could play 'through your > TV!' :)

Some broadcasters even had "apps" that you could "run" through an assigned Teletext page and your phone (using DTMF), including home banking and silly games.

If you picked up a random page in a certain interval you would actually see anonymized account data being broadcast around...

(also check ETS 300 706 and 708 for more fun stuff about teletext)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> BBC has been an underrated vanguard in advancing communications technology.</comment>


Bill Browder on 'Red Notice', Death Threats from the Kremlin (audio) - <AUTHOR> http://www.cbc.ca/thecurrent/episode/2015/02/11/bill-browder-on-red-notice-death-threats-from-the-kremlin/

<comment><AUTHOR> "Businessman Bill Browder knew a thing or two about how to make millions in Vladimir Putin's Russia. But even he didn't know just how brutal the price of business could be amongst the Kremlin's cronies. Bill Browder recounts the brutal tale of his own lawyer's torture and death and his quest to bring justice to bear on the new Russian bear.

"The 2013 trial of Sergei Magnitsky in Russia was such an example of the theatre of the absurd, that it's since been turned into theatre itself.

"Mr. Magnitsky, a lawyer who worked for a Western businessman, was imprisoned by Russian authorities - and was tortured to death. Only then - after his demise - was he put on trial.

"The co-defendant in that trial is still very much alive today. He's businessman Bill Browder, and Sergei Magnitsky was his lawyer.

"The story is all told in his new book, 'Red Notice: A True Story of High Finance, Murder and One Man's Fight for Justice.'"</comment>


Elsevier acquires online community SSRN - <AUTHOR> http://www.thebookseller.com/news/elsevier-acquires-online-community-ssrn-329824 <comment><USER2> SSRN - a repository for papers that are seldom read and probably of dubious quality</comment>


Ask HN: Should I go back to school? - <AUTHOR>

I've been working as a front-end developer professionally for the last 4 years doing mostly HTML, CSS, and JavaScript and I'm looking to make a change. I feel like I'm not growing intellectually; I'd rather be doing back-end or mobile development. The solution may be as simple as switching jobs, but I think there's an elephant in the room: I think I lack a grasp of the fundamental principles that would make me not only a good coder, but a good thinker. I've worked really hard at learning some of these myself, but I think I've hit a wall. In my spare time I do Python and have begun dipping my toes in Clojure, and I find I really enjoy both, but I think the ability to build and reason about large and scalable applications seems out of reach at the moment.<p>I have a BA in Econ but I'm thinking of going back to school for CS. Returning to my alma mater would cost me no more than $30k in total and would take no more than 2 years. Is it worth it, or should I continue working and invest my time in self-education? I feel like credentials can be overrated, but I see a real value in pursuing a CS education. <comment><USER2> If you do better in a classroom setting, pursuing the CS degree is probably worth it. Check with the school and see if you can pursue the CS as a MS rather than a BS, this may require a number of undergraduate classes to fulfill delinquencies. With an Econ degree, I expect you are already good at research and analysis.

I went back to school for an EE degree (and it has been worth it) since credentials are needed in certain areas of the EE realm. And the credential is definitely a benefit that trumped the costs associated with pursuing another UG degree.

An e-book that may be of interest is "How to Think Like a Computer Scientist."

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> If it were only for the credentials, I would say no. It if were only for the education, I think you can get the same topics (and maybe more in deep) from articles, books, papers and more.

Anyway, I say yes: a CS education in college will provide you with an environment full of people who will pursue the same and think alike, and that's one of the most important things I am getting in college.</comment>


Show HN: API to easily gift Apple Store content via SMS - <AUTHOR>

http://app.given.to is the only API that automates the process of buying iPhone/iPad apps, iTunes music  , movies, books,   and anything else in the app store individually or in bulk . Then those digital goods can be distribute through email, text message, Facebook, Twitter, QR codes, physical cards with branding, or any other way someone care to distribute them.<p>The links Given create allow for a digital item to be downloaded in one click without going through the hassles of the app store. These links have been used for marketing campaigns, incentives, rewards, contest and more. <comment><USER2> Seems like a super useful API. I don't know a much about the space, but I can't believe something like this doesn't exist.

I wanted to see a dead-simple demonstration on the website, couldn't find one. Perhaps it would be effective to demonstrate the API by sending a free app link via email. Just have a "Try it now! We'll show you how simple it can be by sending you a free app link to your email on signing up! ~ or something (reduce the copy language)

Keep it up!

PS - Is there potential for a referral/affiliate angle on this API? Apple's TOS probably prohibits that, but if it could somehow be managed--I see massive value there.

<comment><AUTHOR> @spenvo I think you went to the wrong site. It's [http://app.given.to](http://app.given.to) not given.to . On there there are 4 screenshots showing the entire end user experience. But yes anyone who wants an example please let me know and I can send you an app or song in a email,txt, or twitter dm

<comment><USER2> Cool - send a song to @spencenow

I'm not sure how I ended up at the vanity URL. I think I saw your email email@example.com and typed it in manually. Commented-out the FB Connect feedback

<comment><AUTHOR> Check your twitter. Once you follow me back I have the perfect song for you

<comment><USER2> Haha, ok, I have a feeling I'm going to get rick-rolled. :)

<comment><AUTHOR> I promise you it's a real song. No tricks here . I would love feedback as well!

<comment><USER2> Confirmed: this is a fantastic end-user experience. Clicked the link on my Mac - it opened iTunes and autofilled the Redeem code, no clicks necessary (aside from providing my passcode). Excellent execution!

Again, my feedback for your landing page is to let people try it, and the concept will sell itself. I'll definitely think of ways to incorporate this into projects moving forward. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Looks really useful.

Some Feedback : I think that a free app sent as a demo would be a great idea, so we can see what it would be like. One other thing, where in the world is this available? I didn't see that listed on the site.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback osxrand

We need to really promote the free demos. Currently if you send us a message through our contact form and use the word demo anywhere in the message you will get a free demo. But, if you would like a Demo osxrand just send your email to mac(at)given.to and I'll send you a great song.

At the moment we only offer items from the US Apple App store but will add new countries based on demand.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Quick clarification about how it works: so the end-user doesn't get a random gift code for manual input and instead can just redeem the app after clicking on the url?

<comment><AUTHOR> Exactly. They click the link sent to them and the app store opens up on their computer or mobile device ready to just redeem the code for whatever item they were sent

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I was checking this out, but I think the API doc is very light on the authentication part. Can you share specifics about the OAuth part?

<comment><AUTHOR> @ismaelc Our authentication process is fairly simple in the fact when you sign up for an account you are given a auth_key and auth_secret which then gives you access to make a call request. Very similar to other API's. Our API was built by developers for developers to be very easy to implement and use for a wide range of products.

<comment><USER5> Is this OAuth? URL parameter keys? etc

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes it OAuth

<comment><USER5> Added this to Mashape (left the OAuth part as manual entry). Would you like me to transfer it to you so you can make changes to it in the future? [https://www.mashape.com/community/given- to](https://www.mashape.com/community/given-to)

(Disclosure: I work for Mashape)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>