Show HN: Live Stand-Up Comedy from Home - <AUTHOR> https://www.comedyfromhome.com/ <comment><USER2> Warning for plug below my main comment :) Not trying to piggyback this post, but share my experiences doing something in the same area.

We've been doing something similar to support comics who lost some or all of their paying gigs; but using the alternate model of free-to-watch, donations- welcomed. We're also still working through the best format; some performers work great in a "vacuum" (and/or create new styles for the medium). Interaction through the chat is also fun, but as mentioned, not suited for real time.

We've also got some other ideas to increase the interaction being tinkered with. We've been able to really help some folks, whether through monetary means or just to give them a place to perform they wouldn't otherwise have. (Honestly, the most feedback we get from performers is how thankful they were to just get to _perform_ again, a feeling of normalcy, such as we have these days.)

Second warning, plug below :) This is completely a labor of love, so feel free to drop by, or not. Even if you just watch clips and have suggestions, we'd appreciate it. All proceeds go directly to the performers, this not a business venture in anyway. Up/downvote away, no hard feelings!

[https://twitch.tv/comedywham](https://twitch.tv/comedywham) (or isolationcomedyshow.com will redirect there)

</comment><comment><USER3> I love stand-up and this is a great idea. One feature that I'd love is to have 1-2 embedded "highlight" clips on each performer's ticket page. Otherwise it's hard to know what kind of comedy they do.

</comment><comment><USER4> I actually just attended a remote standup comedy show last Friday. Its tough for the comedian but it can work if:

1\. The audience is encouraged to turn on video (so the comedian and others can see them) Unmuted if possible (but most wont its like giving everyone in the audience a live mic)

2\. For those not willing, encourage them to use chat. Emoji, me-too, reactions

3\. The comedian should keep bringing the audience in. Read off chat, talk about people with cameras on, etc

4\. Dont just use your regular material, lean into the current situation, use the audience and tech.

<comment><USER2> Agreed. It's most fun when someone explores something that they couldn't normally pull off on stage. We've had spouses, pets, elaborate visual aids. I look forward to being surprised each time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> My brother's a professional comedian, and he's been doing shows from home now. That said, he's not performing his regular sets, both because they can be recorded, and because the interaction with the crowds is no longer the same. However, he's doing more streaming improv now, where the crowd can give input through chat. It's working pretty well for him, but also isn't bringing in much money yet.

</comment><comment><USER6> I haven't been to a comedy club in 15 years but in my opinion a large part of the fun is actually being at the club. (And the over priced, 2 drink minimums)

I do applaud these performers trying to find a alternative in these trying times.

</comment><comment><USER7> Love standup comedy! $10 for a 30m is really expensive. Stanard shows I've gone to were like $15 for ~3 comedians for a show lasting about an hr.

What about lineups? (3 comedians for $10)

Also does the comedians interact with watchers? Can I leave a comment and chat with other people (not sure if this will distract the comedian or not)

<comment><USER8> From what I've seen of comedians, they don't appreciate someone talking throughout their set. It is distracting, and it is also insulting to them. (They are paid to perform, and they want to perform.)

With that said, some handle it with grace, and some not.

<comment><USER9> "Talking throughout their set" is just rude, that's not even heckling, which I don't support/appreciate, but is considered "part of the experience" by some. "Crowd work" however is a very normal part of lots of stand up acts. I could imagine comedians wanting some way to do that in a digital setting and I suspect that's what is being referred to here.

If anyone haven't seen it done or don't know what I'm talking about Todd Barry has a whole special where it's all he does - appropriately titled "Crowd Work"! :-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is cool. I might try one, even at the $10 price point. Although, that's the price of one drink at a real comedy club, so it is kind of a bargain. I would love to see something like this on Oculus.

</comment><comment><USER11> I just sent this to my friend who is a professional comedian. She's been doing a weekly "pay what you want" show the last few Saturdays.

I'd love to see this take off because I don't want stand up comedy to go away.

Thanks for making this!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for sharing!

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Good idea.

Maybe put a Youtube video of the comedian's performance on the detail page, so we get a little preview?

</comment><comment><USER13> Let's be honest, this isn't even close to stand-up. If there isn't a live crowd, it's not stand-up. You need that feedback and the regular drilling to find your voice. Stand-up comedians find their "voice" by doing the same set, same jokes as often as they can get up on stage. If you're serious about this as a career, you're getting up on stage multiple times a day if you can figure out a way to do it. You're constantly working and re-working your set to a different crowd.

There's no way you're going to get high-end comedians on this platform, which means you're going to get people who are relatively new. Doug Stanhope (greatest comedian alive today IMHO) said that you don't want to be putting videos of your earliest crap performances on the web. You also don't want to be putting video of your best jokes on the internet because you get more exposure for people stealing them with little return.

Stand-up comedians have already had an alternative for getting up on stage for a long time. It's called podcasting, and many of the greatest comedians do podcasts.

<comment><USER14> > you don't want to be putting videos of your earliest crap performances on > the web. You also don't want to be putting video of your best jokes on the > internet because you get more exposure for people stealing them with little > return.

> Stand-up comedians have already had an alternative for getting up on stage > for a long time. It's called podcasting

I'm not seeing the crucial distinction between putting up video of yourself doing jokes, and putting up audio of yourself doing jokes. The value isn't coming from the visual part of the video.

<comment><USER15> Podcasts are not standup, they are ways to riff and show you are funny in a different way - akin to radio spots back in the day.

<comment><USER14> A podcast is a prerecorded album. These are common in standup. I have comedy tapes and comedy CDs; a podcast is not different in any way. If you ripped a CD and concatenated all the tracks, you'd have a "podcast".

<comment><USER15> A podcast is generally a discussion between 2 or more people - not a comedy album.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I hate to be the complainer for the Show HN projects, but all I can see is white screen regardless of what browser I use. Why can't websites fail gracefully?

edit: It worked on browser with no extensions installed so I guess one of the extension in other browsers broke it. I like the idea since it seems timely. People do need real entertainment now and it might fit that niche nicely.

<comment><USER17> Loads for me, try again?

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Shared in a couple private Facebook groups with a few hundred comedians.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! Much appreciated

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Goodstuff, thanks for sharing! Humor and laughter are very important elements to life. I do Love the choice of stock photography and the premise here, but unsure about the pricing I see there ($10?). probably some room for pricing model experimentation and innovation. Godspeed!

</comment><comment><USER20> My concern is that a lot of stand-up comedy is really "blue" and NSFW. Are there warnings or ratings for each set (I don't see any).

Do you provide clean content?

</comment><comment><USER21> This, but it should be interactive, like a twitch stream.

<comment><USER22> Life streams are usually delayed by half a minute. So it spoils the interaction.

<comment><USER23> On Twitch normal latency is ~10 seconds and with their low latency modes it can be 2s or less.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Cheap, hackable e-reader? - <AUTHOR> I would like to buy a cheap e-reader where I can replace the software with my own (or at least be able to write my own software that I can launch and stay in, with minimal UI chrome around it). Preferably about $50 or under. I would like to have a touch screen or to be able to use most of the buttons.<p>What are some good options for this? <comment><USER3> If you just want to modify the existing OS and write apps for it the look at the kindle hacking community on the mobileread forums. The best devices are probably up to and including 5th generation kindles since I believe they are the latest to still have working soft-jailbreaks (but that could have changed since last I checked). I believe all kindle models are trivially rootable if you are willing to buy a 1.8v usb to serial adapter, open the kindle up and solder on three wires. If you want a 100% FOSS distro on your device and you're not afraid of soldering, cross-compiling and super-pre-alpha code then read on.

I've been working on a linux distro for i.MX based e-paper readers (kindle, kobo, etc.) for a while and just had two other hackers join me on the project. Currently we are furthest along with the Kindle 4th generation non-touch with a slightly modified super minimal Debian booting and basic graphics support (Xorg works but no window manager and no screen auto-update yet. e-ink is weird). I believe we've managed to strip out all binary blobs so it's really all open source now. This system is still using an ancient kernel (a slight variation on the one used by the stock OS). We just got the latest stable kernel booting a few days ago but only barely (not even mmc support yet). There's just three of us for now, and we hang out in #fread.ink on freenode and our code is up on [https://github.com/fread-ink](https://github.com/fread- ink)

You should look at the repo [https://github.com/fread-ink/fread- vagrant](https://github.com/fread-ink/fread-vagrant) to get started.

<comment><USER4> All e-ink Kindles _prior to firmware 5.8.8_ can be jailbroken without hardware modifications.

[https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=275877](https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=275877)

The Kindle hacking community believed they had a permanent solution prior to the release of the latest firmware version; unfortunately, Amazon seems to have finally found a way around it.

<comment><USER5> I don't think anyone with experience hacking kindles believed it was a permanent solution. Unfortunately, most of the technical expertise in that area is fleeting.

I'd recommend an older Kindle if you want to get root easier. 5th generation Paperwhite and older models should be cheap and have various exploits.

Probably would recommend a Kobo or something else though. Kindles are awesome pieces of hardware but they do try to keep them secure. Not the best choice for an open platform.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Kobos are quite hackable [1], to the extent that their Linux operating system is on a removable internal SD card, and you can run Debian on them [2].

[1] [https://wiki.mobileread.com/wiki/Kobo_Touch_Hacking](https://wiki.mobileread.com/wiki/Kobo_Touch_Hacking)

[2] [https://wiki.mobileread.com/wiki/Debian_Linux_on_a_Kobo](https://wiki.mobileread.com/wiki/Debian_Linux_on_a_Kobo)

<comment><USER7> Kobos require nothing more than a 2 line shell script on an SD card to get telnet, after which, they publish their modified Qt sources, so you can even rebuild the UI framework without much effort, although I don't know much about keeping their proprietary display and touch driver blobs in place.

Back in time they had some kind of third party development support, so you could plug addons into the existing UI. AFAIK the framework hasn't changed much to prevent that kind of dev, and there example addons built around it

But in terms of a random stable embedded environment that is quite transparent, with an awesome out of box hardware/software experience, Kobo are not to be beaten

<comment><USER8> > they publish their modified Qt sources, so you can even rebuild the UI > framework without much effort

Really? AFAIK, only parts of the distro are liberated, here:

[https://github.com/kobolabs/Kobo-Reader](https://github.com/kobolabs/Kobo- Reader)

Most notably, the user interface itself ("Nickel") is completely missing from there: this makes it _really_ hard to develop extensions for it. Some people have gone through great lengths to try and improve the firmware image, see for example this guy who went as far as writing his own QT plugin for the UI, basically bruteforcing his way through undocumented APIs and missing source code:

[http://blog.ringerc.id.au/search/label/kobo](http://blog.ringerc.id.au/search/label/kobo)

He gave up in 2011.

I did my own share of fooling around with the Kobo. It's true that it's very easy to hack: just drop a `KoboRoot.tgz` tarball in the `.kobo` directory, and you basically overwrite any part of the filesystem, which gives you a lot of freedom. I wrote a tool to sync my Kobo with Wallabag here called Wallabako:

[https://gitlab.com/anarcat/wallabako/](https://gitlab.com/anarcat/wallabako/)

But there's no APK, far from it: the Kobo suite is developped in typical proprietary fashion of keeping the secret sauce to themselves, not a collaborative way. And even though they are less hostile than Amazon in trying to keep people out, nothing says they will keep on being nice like this.

What we really need is a liberated hardware e-reader. There are some examples elsewhere in this thread that are interesting...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Kobos are extremely easy to modify and completely not "protected". I highly recommend them. Many of them have touch screens and wifi too if that's of any benefit to you.

There's a pretty decent dev community that has Qt fully working too which could offer you a good starting point. There are already full UI replacements going on in the community, like KoboStartMenu and KoReader.

<comment><USER3> Completely agree that Kobos are better than Kindles for hacking purposes. Generally not as easy to find cheap used though.

<comment><USER9> Depends on your country, in Canada at least they're stocked by our largest chain bookstore. They're quite readily available online just about anywhere though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The bq cervantes[1] is open source[2] but isn't so cheap.

[1]: [https://www.bq.com/es/cervantes-3-bq](https://www.bq.com/es/cervantes-3-bq) [2]: [https://github.com/bq/cervantes](https://github.com/bq/cervantes)

I'm planning on picking one up soon (or, hopefully, a Cervantes 4 if it comes out...). I'm (fortunately in a position where I can be) willing to pay the extra to support F/OSS out of the box :).

<comment><USER3> Cool! I did not know this existed!

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Just wrote this, let me know if I can be of any help!

[https://medium.com/@kylesf/my-experience-in-creating-the- wor...](https://medium.com/@kylesf/my-experience-in-creating-the-worlds-first- low-power-animated-picture-frame-ee24877a4b46)

<comment><USER12> That looks really neat. If you ever decide to make a 2nd version, making the bezel about 500% smaller would look a _lot_ more attractive.

Also, the C code you listed was very cute. :3

<comment><USER13> i like the bezel

<comment><USER12> I don't mind it myself, but I kind of can't unsee the fact that it looks like it's dwarfing the tiny screen. Most picture frames have a 1 inch or so bezel, and I guess if I was trying to emulate a physical device I'd want to copy it as accurately as possible to maximize the surprise factor.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> The Nook Simple Touch can be rooted. I found it to be a little bit unstable, but YMMV.

[http://nooktalk.net/blog/reliable-way-to-root-nook-simple- to...](http://nooktalk.net/blog/reliable-way-to-root-nook-simple-touch)

Simple Touch readers should be dirt-cheap.

<comment><USER15> I rooted mine back in 2014 and found it useful and quite stable. I haven't investigated the scene since so it may have progressed significantly.

You can configure it such that the Nook would boot and appear as normal, but holding down a key took you to the android launcher, and you would give up the use of two (redundant) buttons of your choice to control android-specific actions like <back>, etc.

This system was limited -- at the time -- to an older version of Android with limited app support, but if your purpose is to create your own apps this shouldn't pose any problem.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Anyone know anything about this: [https://getremarkable.com](https://getremarkable.com)

It's been advertised pretty heavily, and on the face of it looks like everything I want in an e-ink sketchbook/reader.

I have a suspicion that it will disappoint, however.

<comment><USER17> Doesn't even seem to be available yet (website still offering preorder && no Amazon listing as far as I checked).

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I'm currently looking at a simple 7th-gen Kindle. ( [https://www.amazon.com/Amazon-Kindle-6-Inch-Previous- Generat...](https://www.amazon.com/Amazon-Kindle-6-Inch-Previous- Generation-7th/dp/B00I15SB16?th=1) ), for $35. I've done some research, and it seems that it is possible to jailbreak it, but I would like to be sure I can really write software for it before I buy.

<comment><USER18> It's possible to jailbreak any Kindle as you can preform a downgrade to a vulnerable firmware version.

<comment><USER12> I am extremely interested to hear how I could do this on a 7th gen/2014 model Kindle Touch.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> PocketBook, I guess. I never tried programming it myself, only installed some plugins, but it's basically a Linux underneath, so, I guess, a lot can be done. And unlike all these shady Kindle/Kobo/Nook/whatever they don't have any notion of DRM, they are just a _device_.

My own is quite old and the screen is not top-notch, I don't know how advanced and expensive they come right now. But give it a look.

</comment><comment><USER20> I like this idea, and I'd like to take the question one step further: are there any affordable development platforms which can work with eink screens? I've read that the screens themselves are pricey due to EInk's de-facto monopoly on supply, and difficult to work with due to the need for things like manual temperature compensation just to drive the display.

But surely there must be breakout boards by now, right? Or a raspberry module that's larger than 3"? Can you effectively source raw screens through the usual hobby suppliers like digikey, mouser, jameco?

<comment> TD-Linux You can, I've used Pervasive Displays (I bought them from Digikey, they also have breakout boards): [http://www.pervasivedisplays.com/](http://www.pervasivedisplays.com/)

But yeah they are kind of complicated to drive. I've only used the small ones, but you do the refresh pattern manually - you also need to compensate for the temperature, and the pixel layout is a bit funky. Luckily there's already software for this at repaper.org, so you don't have to worry about it. The complicated logic being in software opens the doors for more complex refresh logic as well. Just keep in mind if you do this you can burn in the display, so buy a couple if you plan to experiment :)

<comment><USER12> Huh. I thought controllers were insanely complicated or used proprietary technology. This is interesting to hear!

What exactly _is_ temperature compensation? I'm aware that it's a thing, but I haven't yet figured out what it is. Do you have to alter the drive voltage or current or something?

Also, I'm not currently aware of any open e-ink driver designs. A few people might be interested in the one you built, regardless of how simple it is. Of course standard disclaimers would apply.

<comment> TD-Linux It's way simpler than that, you just write the displayed image more times based on temperature. If you don't do it your display will just have less contrast in the code.

The chip-on-glass has tons of registers to set drive voltages and the like, but the datasheet just gives you values to write to all of them.

What do you mean by e-ink driver? If you mean the software, check out the Arduino and Raspberry Pi librares on the repaper site. If you mean the hardware, just follow the schematics in the datasheet and repaper.org.

<comment><USER12> > _It 's way simpler than that, you just write the displayed image more times > based on temperature._

Oh! Nice.

> If you don't do it your display will just have less contrast in the code.

That's a really great failure mode for debugging/development :) you can just use a single repaint count until you have temperature sensing wired up.

> The chip-on-glass has tons of registers to set drive voltages and the like, > but the datasheet just gives you values to write to all of them.

Oh okay - so there _is_ a controller. (I didn't know; totally ignorant about the subject.)

> What do you mean by e-ink driver?

Ah; I've just done some poking around, and I just realized I misunderstood things a bit when I last did some research (way too quickly, apparently) - <USER2> saw [http://www.pervasivedisplays.com/images/Kits/Extension%20boa...](http://www.pervasivedisplays.com/images/Kits/Extension%20board/Eink%20epaper%20Extension%20kit%20by%20Pervasive.jpg) and thought I'd need to cram everything on that board onto the final design. I didn't realize the displays were more or less self-contained (with a builtin/COG controller) and could be driven directly like LCDs or VFDs etc and that that board was the "kitchen sink" test/dev breakout kit.

<comment> TD-Linux You do need part of that - a lot of it is capacitors wired directly to the ribbon cable, for the COG's charge pump. There's also a temperature sensing chip and a couple of external mosfets, one of which is to fix a bug on older COGs. On my own layout I was able to shrink it quite a bit by using 0603 parts. Still expect to burn 300mm^2 on the passives. [https://0x0.st/tqo.png](https://0x0.st/tqo.png)

<comment><USER12> Ah, I see. Thanks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Inkbook looks pretty hackable: [https://inkbook.eu/shop/inkbook- classic-2/](https://inkbook.eu/shop/inkbook-classic-2/)

</comment><comment><USER22> Has anyone hacked the boogie board? It is extremely cheap.

Edit: Googling this seems to be a good resource [1] and it looks like it is using an msp430 so should be hackable. But I don't actually know much about this stuff, so if someone does hack it I'd love to know how

[1] [http://forums.hackaday.com/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=846](http://forums.hackaday.com/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=846)

<comment><USER23> Information in that thread and elsewhere suggests that the MSP430 doesn't have the ability to display information on the screen. Drawing on the screen is a purely mechanical effect, and the microcontroller is only used to clear the screen.

More information on the technology:

[http://kentdisplays.com/technology/ewriters](http://kentdisplays.com/technology/ewriters)

<comment><USER12> What's particularly interesting about these displays is that it does seem possible to read the image from the LCD (particularly the Jot 8.5 and the Sync; the others don't explicitly say). I'm trying to figure out whether the display device itself integrates memory cells or whether there's a tablet sensor overlaid on top. The website doesn't seem to want to explain much.

<comment><USER22> I'm under the impression the sync can be used to read the image, since it does have a save feature. I'm wondering if the reverse can be done too? Could you make the display show an image that was previously saved?

I'm curious why you think the jot 8.5 can save. I do know the earlier models were using an msp430, which others are suggesting cannot save the image. I actually have one of these Jots, but I don't know anything about hardware hacking so I'm not going to tear it apart (unless people just want pictures of the guts and possibly what chips are in there)

<comment><USER12> Other commentators have mentioned that the display in other devices cannot be read, and from the website it's clear to see the company focuses solely on ChLCD (cholesteric LCD) technology.

This would depend on whether the "read from LCD" capability is an intrinsic part of the ChLCD itself or a manufacture-time option, or if it's a separate capacitative or optical-barrier touch layer.

I just did a bit of digging, and I found some info on repairing the Boogie Board Rip on iFixit: [https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/Boogie+Board+Rip+Internal+Anten...](https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/Boogie+Board+Rip+Internal+Antenna+Replacement/30235) \- this shows what looks like some kind of touch layer, along with a bunch of extra electronics.

There's also a smartphone showing a 1:1 copy of what's on the Jot on the fourth image as you scroll down at [https://myboogieboard.com/ewriters/jot-8.5](https://myboogieboard.com/ewriters/jot-8.5).

<comment><USER22> The jot uses a phone app and the phone's camera to get the picture. So I don't think there is any way to read the screen on that device.

However the sync has a button which you can save the screen image and later upload it to your computer. What I'm wondering is on this device if you could do the reverse. I know being able to record the screen's state doesn't mean you can reproduce it. Just wondering if you can in this case.

I know nothing about ChLCD and that type of stuff. So this isn't really clear to me.

<comment><USER12> Oooooh. Thanks for that information about the Jot. That's remarkably good advertising showing the smartphone on the webpage like that, I have to admit.

Regarding the Sync, I suspect it contains the same electronics as the Rip in order to do the sync thing, and a touch panel.

Based on the other comments I've read in this thread that explain how "writing" on screen (and "ink" showing up) is entirely mechanically driven, ie, the pressure on the surface of the display displaces the crystals and makes whatever you draw stay on the screen. Applying a voltage for a short moment somehow causes the crystals to reset.

I'm not sure why the display itself wasn't made writable. It's entirely possible Kent Displays simply couldn't find a viable way to market a (MCU-)writable version of this technology, and so they went in this direction instead; it's also possible that ChLCD (developed up to the point Kent have it at) doesn't have the capability to be addressed reliably. I have no idea.

I based my hunches above about how the Boogie Board resets on something I saw on TV a while ago, which I just determined is classified variously as "switchable privacy glass", "electrified privacy glass" or "intelligent glass". I learned (from the house-construction TV show) that it's essentially a single, gigantic (!) LCD "pixel", and I saw (in one of the construction stages) how simply plugging it into the wall and turning the wall switch on was what made it go from opaque to transparent. Obviously it's a fair jump from this to the Boogie Board reset mechanism, but it seems reasonable that some of the same ideas are used in both.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I've been doing a lot of research on this recently including contacting Chinese wholesellers to see what individual parts would cost.

Essentially all I'm after is a Linux (not android) based 7-12" eink tablet with touch screen, a decent resolution / PPI for the size and at least say 2-4GB of ram at a minimum although if it was cheap enough I'd drop as far as 1GB if I really had to.

I have a Dasung E-Ink monitor and it's dreadful, lots of ghosting, very slow refresh, have to have some 'interesting' software running to make it work, hard to work with multi-desktops etc.... and very, VERY expensive: [https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/paperlike-world-s- first-e...](https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/paperlike-world-s-first-e-ink- monitor-13-3#/) otherwise I'd attach that to a Pi or Cubox and live without the touch screen.

<comment><USER12> What sorts of price ranges did the wholesalers provide, and for what? (I don't need exact values, just a rough idea.)

Thanks for the info about the Dasung. A video showing the screen at its absolute worst might be very useful - but to be fair, showing what things the screen _does_ do well would be very interesting to know as well.

<comment><USER24> For anything even slightly useful with a half decent display I was still looking at USD $200+ per unit and many wouldn't supply just one.

<comment><USER12> Oh wow :/ that's quite a shame.

On the other hand, this means that the Chinese "photocopying industry" doesn't realize people want (decent!) e-ink readers. Window of opportunity, anybody?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I have a generation 2 kindle and I would trade it for nothing, I miss having the backlight so I actually need to have a light in the room but other than that the amount of "hacking" I did on it is extremely impressive - oh and if you ever read this, thank you twobob for all your hard work on the kindle

</comment><comment><USER26> If you're willing to take it a step further and have some experience with hardware (or you are willing to learn), you can even buy a bare e-ink screen and interface with it. For example, the ED060SC4 is cheap. The datasheet is not very helpful, but if you look carefully, you can find some drivers on github, or more generic tutorials on e-ink drivers.

[http://essentialscrap.com/eink/](http://essentialscrap.com/eink/) is probably one of the most helpful resources out there if you want to do this.

<comment><USER27> Oh man someone could easily buy these at scale, 3d print some casing, and sell them as e-ink raspberry pi screens. Good demand and no reasonably priced supply.

<comment><USER28> Buying e-ink screens for _e-reader_ might be a problem. During the last project with e-ink screens, we had an explicit clause with supplier implying that these screens will not be used for e-readers. That was 3 years ago though, things might have changed since.</comment></comment></comment>


One man's quest to purge horrific pictures from his Google results - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2012/03/algorithms-can-have-errors-one-mans-quest-to-purge-horrific-pictures-from-his-google-results.ars

<comment><USER2> I completely sympathize -- this is the first time I've heard of a truly good rationale for search-result modification.

BUT a slippery slope is a slippery slope, and Google would be opening itself up to hundreds of thousands of suits if this one succeeded.

HOWEVER, there are still two options open to him:

1) Embark on an aggressive SEO campaign to link his guesthouse/campsite's name to nice images (though this may be exceedingly difficult)

2) Change the name of his guesthouse/campsite (very annoying, but certainly feasable)

If I were him, I'd change the name.

<comment><USER3> I can tell you of a public figure's kid in another country whose camera was stolen and nude pictures were put up of him in another country. Nobody knows who did it but the pictures are hosted outside the country on a provider who doesn't care. They do know that considerable black hat SEO was put into making this a #1 result for the public figure. (I apologize for being intentionally vague but this is a source of embarrassment to the family.)

Trolls can be assholes. Google seems to favor the troll.

<comment><USER4> Many systems do. In the US, people advocating for mandatory sentencing say the same thing about the justice system, and the RIAA and the MPAA say the same thing about the DMCA safe harbor and takedown notice provisions.

Outside of getting google to enforce sanctions against whatever "black hat SEO" methods were used, asking Google to act in that case would appear to be asking Google to settle on a single notion of the limits of free speech and defamation when entire countries of people clearly cannot. I'm not sure putting Google in charge of that is a good idea.

(With this sort of thing you start to see why country-specific censorship occurs and may be the best of a set of terrible solutions. See also "the right to forget" vs US court decisions on free speech that is only going to come up more and more)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> You can turn his argument around. Why should the needs of a business search be more important than historical search or journalism search? Maybe, on average, users more often want to learn about the historical accident than the resort. Or maybe Bing and Google are providing a better information service by showing those images.

I'm not sure this is necessarily the case, but the normative standards are much less clear than is depicted in this article.

<comment><USER6> That argument would hold a lot more water if searching for "accidente" with the camp name didn't remove all the pictures of the accident. The pictures of charred human remains only appear when you search for the name itself.

<comment><USER7> I am just speculating but may be the choice whether the thumbnails are shown or not depends on empirical data of now many people have chosen to go to images.google.com (by clicking "images" link) after making a web search.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'm not sure I'm 100% articulate here, but feel that it's imprecise to call what Google to doing to produce search results an "algorithm".

quicksort is an algorithm: the input and output are well-specified, and the algorithm is provably correct.

Google's search engine uses 100's to 1000's of heuristics _created by humans_ to generate the results. Is it really an algorithm? Yes, _pagerank_ is an algorithm like quicksort.

But the Google search engine uses pagerank as one among the 1000's of "signals" during result generation. Maybe people think Google uses only pagerank and that's why they keep saying that Google uses an algorithm.

</comment><comment><USER9> Am I the only one who thinks that Google results are actually _relevant_? Resort's own website does not say a single word about the disaster. Justified or not, I can imagine lots of campers who would't want to pitch their tent and spend their vacation at the spot where hundreds of people died a horrible death. Don't they have a right to know?

Was it even a good idea to renovate that campground? Wouldn't some sort of memorial make more sense?

<comment><USER10> The cynic in me thinks that the site was cheap to buy because of the tradedgy - and Hes trying to pull a fast one.

<comment><USER11> Since his family has run the campground since the 1950s that was obviously not the case.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> All that guy needs is to spend his money on some serious Reputation Management instead of lawyers. For a fraction of the cost he can get other content pushed ahead of it, no one is building new links to that content, so it is stale. It's a little harder to do with images but it can still be done with 6 months to a year of progressive work. On multiple occasions I've buried a story that was the top result, to the second page. Instead of regular SEO where you bring one result to the top, this involved bringing 15 other results ahead of it.

<comment><USER13> There are a lot of shady players in SEO. Any recommendations for good ones?

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Seems like a very hard fight and a slippery slope. This time it's personal and seemingly one sided. What happens when it's competing commercial interests that sue for a change?

<comment><USER15> It seems reasonable that Google's algorithm is listing those photos because it's finding that a number of people searching for "Camping Alfaques" are looking for photos of the explosion. So it's just giving those users what they are looking for.

<comment><USER16> That's one thing I never understood about Google: just how does it decide that something I clicked on was really what I was looking for?

For every person who was looking for photos of the explosion, there are most likely many more who were looking for general information about "Camping Alfaques" but clicked on the thumbnails out of arguably morbid interest. I know I wouldn't resist clicking on that stuff to see what it's about, it seems to be human nature.

So, in the end, how does Google distinguish people's objectives from their curiosity?

<comment><USER17> If you see someone on the train reading Twilight, how do you distinguish between someone who likes Twilight and someone who is taking seriously the idea "don't judge a book by it's cover" and giving it a fair reading before deciding?

<comment><USER18> No matter the reason, reading the entire book is a fair endorsement of prominent twilight placement in the bookstore. It doesn't matter if you hate it, you wanted to _read_ it. But picking it up, looking at the description in the back jacket, and putting it back down is most definitely not.

Going to a site for 10 seconds is not an endorsement.

<comment><USER19> I believe Google does track "click through - click back" timing, specifically to limit the impact of this effect. Whether or not it's effective is another question.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Change the name of the resort. Seriously, fastest and easiest way to beat a computer/algorithm.

<comment><USER21> True, but if they have many years of reputation established, they may not want to throw that all away because of Google.

<comment><USER22> On the other hand if you have a reputation, the search results don't matter that much. People already know that it's a nice resort and not a disaster.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> The owner of the camp needs to take all his energy away from these lawsuits and focus religiously on SEO and do so on a daily basis!

He needs to create quality sites with tons of images about the camp itself, the area surrounding and others positive things related to the camp to purge/eliminate the problem. After he's created these quality sites he needs to go and do SEO tirelessly everyday until the problem is gone.

It's obvious per Google's in-action re: changing search result for the word, "jew," that he doesn't need a lawyer but a professional SEO(er).

Now if others in present day (like this Ars article) keep writing and blogging about the incident then SEO(ing) to the hilt might be a losing battle.

<comment><USER24> I agree. Clicking on the website for the organization in question only reveals a handful of low-quality, low-resolution pictures.

In general the best way to deal with a "problem" like this is to drown out the noise with quality content. He should be flooding the web with quality pictures of what he has, not trying to get Google to change an algorithm.

<comment><USER23> thanks .. though i wonder why this comment was downvoted?

I'm not saying spam the Internet with junk, but promoting the owner create quality sites about the topic and others similar topics and then go do SEO.

Google's Panda update notes that quality content will rise to the top. Thus create quality sites and SEO everyday for months, maybe years to resolve the issue.

I am sure some entrepreneurial SEOs have reached out to him. Either he pays them or learns himself. The latter would be best as he's already devoted much of his life in various ways to solving the issue. THough the article never notes he's turned to SEO.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> This guy is in a shit situation but when I google "World Trade Center" and "Oklahoma City", the images of the terror attacks are among the first thumbnails in the general search.

Yes, of course they were both bigger events, but not so much in relative terms. This truck explosion led to the deaths of nearly 500 people, in one of the most gruesome ways possible. His resort is just a small resort...no number of decades is going to ever obscure such a horrific catastrophe.

That said, why didn't they change the name of the place? I suppose as late as last decade, Google results were not a big factor for most resorts. But better late than never, since presumably their brand and reputation won't get much better.

<comment><USER26> I repeated the same experiment with different results. Searching "World Trade Center" in either personal or general results show no thumbnail links to the image search. There was one thumbnail linking to the news search, but it was a memorial picture. Searching "Oklahoma City" did list the image search thumbnails. The thumbnails were followed after six entries, if you include the Google Maps link. Only one of the four was related to the bombing, and that one picture was a distance shot of the build, not of human remains.

<comment><USER25> Hmmm, interesting that my personal results would get that and not you.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Please Google, when we search; avoid all tragedies through history unless we write the word "tragedy" on the search box... oh! and make sure that no search result for a business name returns sad search results; is your duty to help us believe that the whole world is a big happy shopping mall. </rant>

Yep, my blood is boiling...

<comment><USER28> Did you read a different article than I did? Did you read the whole article? Aside from one Nanny Net spokesman, nobody was asking for anything to be hidden. I think it is perfectly reasonable to ask why "accident camp abc" doesn't show grisly pictures, but a more generic "camp abc" does show them, especially when it only started a couple years ago (was somebody hiding that information for Google's first ten years?).

If it were my business that were being torpedoed by search engine capriciousness, I'd raise a stink about it, too, it for no other reason than in hopes it would push the stuff lower in the result stack.

<comment><USER27> Clearly this guy is someone trying to rationalize an argument against the fact that the search results for his business name can produce negative connotations.

The search engine is not a human being, it haves not capriciousness, and its not capriciousness from their creators neither; they just created an algorithm to give you the most relevant results.

<comment><USER29> This guy has a rational argument: the algorithm does not show the most relevant results for this search term [1]. Tuning a complex, heuristics-based algorithm by hand is possible. We also know Google does this for specific terms [2]. This guy is asking for such tuning for this specific search term. That's an entirely reasonable request. You may equally reasonably argue that Google should not grant him this request. If this discussion makes 'your blood boil', you may need to take some anger management classes. This is not an issue that should make your blood boil.

[1] Assuming that most people searching for this camping actually want to go camping, which sounds plausible to me. [2] For instance, the term 'suicide' was rigged to return results preventing suicide.

<comment><USER27> The term suicide is the worst possible example; suicide is not a business, is a mental issue.

They are not searching for "camping in abc", they are searching for "camp abc"</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Why not "Why not WireGuard?" - <AUTHOR> https://tailscale.com/blog/why-not-why-not-wireguard/ <comment><USER2> > This section of the article is confusing at first because it talks about > "road warrior" users (who generally have dynamic IP addresses) not being > supported by WireGuard. But this is not true; standard WireGuard happily > works as long as as least one end (usually the central VPN concentrator) has > a static IP address.

Maybe I don't understand the issue to be solved (I was unfamiliar with the 'road warrior' term so I looked it up [1]), but I think both Avery Pennarun and Michael Tremer misunderstood what WireGuard is capable of. WireGuard works just fine when the _physical_ network interfaces have dynamic IPs (on both ends even). You can use the basic _wg_ or _wg-quick_ tools to create a VPN server on a server with a dynamic IP and have clients connect from dynamic IPs. However, all the _tunnel_ IPs must be static unlike e.g. OpenVPN where the server gives the client a tunnel IP during authentication.

> (for example, so you can get to an office network whose home connection uses > dynamic DNS). It's true that plain WireGuard does not support this > configuration out of the box.

I have done literally that for over a year now. I cannot think of a way to interpret this that would make Avery's claims true.

> Someday, WireGuard will need to be upgraded to support a second cipher > suite. When this happens, users will be able to configure it peer-by-peer to > allow one cipher suite or the other, or both, exactly as they would with any > other VPN.

That is not how I interpret what Donenfeld has said [2] about the future of WireGuard. I believe the software will get a v2 without backwards compatibility. However, even that is a non-issue because sysadmins can run both protocols in parallel during the transition.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Road_warrior_%28computing%29](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Road_warrior_%28computing%29)

[2] Page 3 of [https://www.wireguard.com/papers/wireguard.pdf](https://www.wireguard.com/papers/wireguard.pdf)

<comment><USER3> Yes, it seemed to me that Donenfeld was pretty opinionated about 'updating breaks compatibility'. Donenfeld is the anti-Torvalds: we _will_ break user space. This is the closest quote I could find.

      If holes are found in the underlying primitives,
      all endpoints will be required to update.

Unlike IP packets, _struct message_header_ doesn't even have a version number. I suppose _type_ could be used for that since it's 32b.

An interesting question is how will this play out with Wireguard going into the Linux kernel itself.

<comment><USER2> Breaking user space might not be popular with users, but it makes sense for security. Besides, anyone could build protocol negotiation on top of WireGuard v1/v2 if they wanted to.

I'm not a kernel dev, but WireGuard v2 will probably be implemented as a separate kernel module so they can coexist. It makes sense to do it that way since they're practically entirely separate protocols.

<comment><USER3> I'm not sure that coexistence works without a version number going over the wire.

<comment><USER2> Sure it does. They are two separate packages, run on two separate network ports and completely incompatible. Just pretend that WireGuard v2 is unrelated to WireGuard. "OpenVPN and WireGuard coexistence doesn't work without a version number going over the wire" would be an absurd statement and the same applies to WireGuard and WireGuard's descendants.

<comment><USER3> I suppose you're right. It is left to the user to not try to connect v1 to v2. Not sure what happens if on Tuesday morning I connect my v1 client to what was on Monday night a v1 server.

That said, I admire opinionated design.

<comment><USER2> The two versions can run in parallel so you will never be in a situation where the sysadmin is forced to take down the v1 server to set up a v2 server. It's the sysadmins responsibility not to put users in that situation. Users might try to use the wrong version at first, but there's no reason for an admin to break the working VPN before the transition is complete.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Glad someone did a rebuttal of that article. I came across it a few days ago and was shocked to discover it was by the guy behind ipfire, which I had previously heard good things about.

<comment><USER5> Yes, agree - the original article displays such a bad understanding of security that customers should avoid taking any operational advice, security- related or not, from the person who wrote it.

The author of the original article seems to be making the following assumptions:

\- "Secure" is only about what protocols you support, and not about the quality of implementation, whether the protocols are implemented accurately, etc. In the author's world, Heartbleed (which was introduced as part of DTLS, part of Cisco's VPN implementation) doesn't exist, the Pulse Secure vulnerability that left Travelex completely non-operational doesn't exist, etc.

\- That said, "3DES with MD5" is a good cryptographic protocol to use, and you should avoid fancier things like "AES-256 with SHA1."

\- You should only consider using black boxes from companies like Cisco and Juniper (authors of Pulse Secure). If it's not compatible with those appliances, it's not worth using.

\- You can't ever upgrade software in a reliable fashion. Everyone is running old, unpatched versions of software, and it's better for that unpatched software with all the well-known zero-days to connect to your corporate network than to be blocked from connecting.

\- You should directly connect your internal network to "third parties that you do not control," and you should let those third parties dictate your software choices instead of vice versa.

In this world, you have nothing other than constant disasters. I guess it's good for job security, especially for someone whose job is professional support for IPsec.

It's a shame it needed debunking, but I'm glad someone did.

<comment><USER6> I agree the original article was really dumb, and sounded like it was written by an enterprise network guy who has only worked with and been trained by big vendors.

That said, the fatal flaw of Wireguard is the crypto model. Nobody who interacts with the US government, regulated US industries, or some F500 will be able to use it because of the fixed algorithm choice, which isn't possibly FIPS 140-2 validatable. You'll always need that Cisco/Pulse/whatever box.

That may be a feature for some, but it kneecaps the possibility of it being as ubiquitous as it might be otherwise.

<comment><USER7> It's a trap, because your options boil down to:

(a) Using FIPS cryptography, which is inferior, to placate the USG.

(b) Using best-practices cryptography, and being incompatible with some places that mandate FIPS.

(c) Supporting both FIPS and non-FIPS cryptography, which creates handshake bugs and gives you lowest-common-denominator security.

I think you can reasonable argue that (a) and (b) are both superior to (c); I think WireGuard made the right choice here.

In the long run, for enterprise environments, I don't think this much matters. Even with FIPS cryptography, stodgy enterprises won't adopt WireGuard until it becomes so prevalent elsewhere that they have to, simply because IPSEC has more standardization. So the WireGuard task is simply to make it so prevalent everywhere else that stodgy enterprises no long have a vote.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I can't wait for the tailscale app for Android.

If I die from covid before I get it I'll be very upset.

<comment><USER9> (Co-founder here). It's coming, I promise. I'm as excited as you are. We wanted to iron out the kinks on mobile (i.e. iOS) before duplicating them on another platform. Thankfully, we're past that point now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Finally, I've been waiting for someone to write a proper response debunking that original article. I was surprised when it got as much attention as it did, since it clearly seemed out of date.

</comment><comment><USER11> I just wish the wireguard folks did IP6v2 :)

Kidding (kind of)!

<comment><USER12> I quite like Yggdrasil's [1] approach, and there are other alternatives. Of course, it doesn't fix everything, but with many project working on different aspects of networking, we might get back to an "internet" that's closer to a mesh between non-interoperable networks (GNU net, cjdns, private VPN-backed LANs, zigbee, etc).

Because, on your local network, you can run whatever you want (but it better be ipv6-aware software using DNS, it's easier to fool like NAT64 or yggdrasil do).

[1]: [https://yggdrasil-network.github.io/](https://yggdrasil- network.github.io/)

<comment><USER11> Thanks for this - I'm not an expert at all in the networking space side of things, but even dabbling with ipsec / ipv6 combos made my head spin coming from an ipv4 background.

Basically I was left with the idea - how in the world is the gigantic set of interlocking RFCs (at least to me IPv6 seems to involve a lot of complex stuff) the best way to network these days.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> >In contrast, a hypothetical WireGuard protocol v2 can offer just two suites, the old one and the new one, with simple advice: use the new one if you can, and allow the old one for old nodes until they're upgraded. There's nothing unusual about this, except you don't need to be a cryptography expert to configure it.

I don't think this is going to be as simple as the author thinks. Look at Git's migration away from SHA1. There was no designed mechanism for switching hash functions, and lots of code assumed 20-byte hashes. Three years after the first SHA1 collision was discovered, Git has not switched to a new hash function. I don't mean to be alarmist - no one has created a practical attack on Git objects, but the time to switch cryptographic primitives is when they start showing weakness, not after they are definitely broken.

IPSec has a standard method for supporting multiple cipher suites, and negotiating a common suite. It might be very complicated, but we have no way of comparing it to WireGuard, because WireGuard doesn't implement the same feature.

<comment><USER14> SHA1 was already found to be weak when git was made. Linus would have done better to use a strong hashing algorithm to begin with than to try to incorporate cryptographic agility. It was only found to be weak a few months before git's release though.

Regardless, I think cryptographic agility makes a lot more sense for a storage format like git than it does for a wire format. A shared repo being upgraded from gitv1 to an incompatible gitv2 would need everyone to switch versions at once. With WireGuard, a server could offer support for both v1 and v2 clients, then both v1 and v2 clients can connect to it at the same time, and clients can upgrade on their own schedule. The protocol doesn't have to make any special allowances, like making any data structures interpretable by both, besides to have both v1 and v2 on different ports or have different initial connection messages.

WireGuard was developed in response to protocols like IPSec, OpenVPN, and TLS, which emphasized configurability and cryptographic agility to a fault. Not only were they hard to use and easy to misconfigure, but each one of them were at times vulnerable to downgrade attacks because of subtle bugs in their ability to be configured. It's better to be able to have few code paths and verify they all work as expected, than it is to have many code paths, only verify the happy path, and hope that there's no way for users to fall down an unstudied insecure path by their own fault or because of attackers.

<comment><USER7> Doesn't agility make _even less_ sense in a file format? Browsers, for instance, don't need format agility to tell a PNG from a JPG. Meanwhile, PDF tried to provide exactly that capability, and it is a world-historic security disaster. The cryptographic equivalent is PGP, and... I rest my case.

<comment><USER14> In git's case, by cryptographic agility I was imagining a Gitv2 which would produce SHA-256 hashes by default on new commits, and was able to still understand SHA-1 hashes on old commits so it could continue to read data produced by Gitv1 clients or Gitv2 clients in SHA-1 mode without needing an upfront convert-the-whole-repo step. Definitely less preferable than the alternative of just supporting SHA-256 from the very start though. May be less preferable to making git auto-convert repos forward to a new SHA-256-only version.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Reversing a real-world 249 bytes backdoor - <AUTHOR> https://anee.me/reversing-a-real-world-249-bytes-backdoor-aadd876c0a32 <comment><USER2> I'll not too advanced in reversing, but how was gdb not able to find the entry point? Is finding the entry point that difficult?

<comment><USER3> Hey I am the author of the blogpost. I have been reversing for a couple of years.

Usually, GDB just parses the ELF header to get the entry point. $ info file; in gdb should give you entrypoint of the binary almost always. In this case however the program has a corrupted section header, due to which gdb is not able to recognize the entry point. I dont exactly know which bytes in the header was corrupted, but apparently radare2 is able to get the entrypoint without much work. Should be fun to investigate more.

<comment><USER4> When you say it was undetected on VirusTotal, I suspect you really mean it was unknown, i.e. hadn't been submitted. Currently it has 3 scans and detections from the first.

2019-12-22T12:41:28 11/59

2019-12-22T19:19:28 13/60

2019-12-23T14:37:22 16/60</comment></comment></comment>


Why the Best Days of Open Hardware are Yet to Come - <AUTHOR> http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=1863 <comment><USER2> I am somewhat annoyed by the author's portrayal of individuals or small companies as the innovators, and large companies as the converse. Who do you think drives Moore's Law? It's not some force of nature. The material properties of silicon are not changing every 18 months. Do you think it will not take innovation to produce a viable 14nm production line?

Additionally, even if we hit hard limits in transistor gate size, do not expect progress to stop. There are alternative technologies aplenty that put silicon to shame, that are only avoided because of how cheap manufacturing is with silicon.

<comment><USER2> One more thing. The reason early computers and radios shipped with manuals and lists of replacement parts is because the technology was young, and things broke. As the technology has matured, it has integrated into our lives and failure rates have gone down. As a consequence, fewer and fewer people are interested in the guts, and people expect it to "just work". They have no interest or use for a repair manual with their Macbook Pro.

It is much the same as with the juvenille stages of any technology. Automobiles were once notoriously unreliable; old British cars were said to require work every weekend to keep running. Next, American cars had 5-digit odometers, because cars didn't last beyond 100,000 miles. Today, cars routinely go 200,000 miles or more. There is talk that soon engine wear will cease to be the limiting factor in a cars' life. As a result, your average citizen has never seen the inside of their engine bay, and could care less about how to fix their car- they expect it to just work.

<comment><USER3> The fail rates may have reduced some interest, but I believe there's other bigger reasons:

\+ Students are increasingly brought up to do memorisation over creativity.

\+ It's hard to hack integrated microchips. Especially with proprietary software. Want to repair your own car? Need to take it to a Brand(tm) Certified car repair service to even get the proprietary diagnostic. Even then, they may refuse to give the logs to you.

\+ Loss of ownership with IP laws. Try to break open Wii? You're a pirate! Jailbreaking? Bad! Also run the risk of being sued for talking about breaking open hardware despite owning it.

<comment><USER4> It's largely a myth that you need proprietary scans. OBDII/III are standards that give instructive error codes - it's actually pretty easy with them and a good multimeter. The manuals are step by step - I'd say parts monopolies in German cars, etc. hurt worse.

<comment><USER3> Was talking about stuff like this: <https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2009/05/right-repair-law-pro>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm not sure if all of these assumptions follow. Marketers are in the business of finding reasons to compel you to buy new stuff, and marketers are the ones making products.

In the past, people held on to things longer, not because they lasted longer or were viable longer, but because they didn't have the resources to buy new stuff. In order for "repair culture" to set-in in any significant way, consumption culture would need to be displaced. The factors that would drive that are largely unrelated to technology. For example, a global economic depression would result in people keeping their possessions longer simply because they don't have the money to buy new.

Look at the many other products in our lives that people regularly replace before their usefulness has expired. Cars are probably the best example. When the economy is booming, people replace their cars rapidly. As it slows down, they hold on to them longer. I can't find any long term data, but the graph and caption on this page imply that the two are correlated: "The Changing U.S. Auto Industry Series: Consumer Sentiment During Challenging Times."

[http://www1.eere.energy.gov/vehiclesandfuels/facts/2010_fotw...](http://www1.eere.energy.gov/vehiclesandfuels/facts/2010_fotw622.html)

I don't see any reason computers will be different. "Hackers" will remain a niche community, but I still think the many other reasons cited by the author will result in better tools for us to play with. For example, development of reasonably priced and performant FPGAs would be huge. Look at the Arduino line of products.

The future is still a bright one. I just don't see "heirloom laptops" in our future.

<comment><USER6> > For example, a global economic depression would result in people keeping > their possessions longer simply because they don't have the money to buy > new.

That would seriously suck then because the stuff that we've got today for the most part was built with a very definite life-cycle in mind. So when you are dumped in that global recession you need the quality stuff that wasn't produced when the recession wasn't on yet and you can no longer afford its creation.

<comment><USER2> That's what repairs and maintenance is about. Religiously upkeeping something you can't possibly afford to replace is how it was done for ages.

<comment><USER7> I feel that personal goods like clothing, shoes, hand tools, etc... were made with more durability in mind until the mid 60's or so.

<comment><USER6> Absolutely, on top of that the stuff that is made today is not even meant to be repaired at all. It's all about the cost to the manufacturer and not falling apart until the day after the warranty expires.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Although I do agree that Open Hardware has a bright future, I'd just like to point out that people have been calling the end of transistor size scaling for a few decades, and technology keeps finding ways to get around the limitations (strained silicon, high-k metal gates, finFETs, etc.).

<comment><USER9> From the article:

      > 5 nm is about the space between 100 silicon atoms, so even if this
      > guess is wrong, it can be wrong by no more than a few technology
      > generations.

<comment><USER8> My point is that, even in that case (current silicon scaling stopping at 5nm), there are a lot of potential technologies that could allow Moore's law to continue (nanowires, III-V materials, etc.).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> My money is on massive FPGAs, think a whole wafer of silicon with just a bunch of general purpose IO and power.

Once stuff like that becomes available at a reasonable price (a big FPGA will cost you a _lot_ of money at the moment) open hardware will be as simple as downloading a bitstream on to your 'general purpose' rig.

</comment><comment><USER10> I like where this is going, ie. Hardware becomes just another software component.

The key item thats left is some sort of standard interface to port programs to a FPGA style processor, i.e. a way of interfacing between a language compiler and HDL.

I like the look of the Reduceron (<http://www.cs.york.ac.uk/fp/reduceron/>) which looks to be funded by Xilinx and Lava( by Satnam Singh, who works for Microsoft Research), purely because I think its easier to visualise a functional language translating into circuitry.

Although I do wonder whether it will take a start-up to be able to successfully merge both the software and the hardware components into a workable model.

<comment><USER2> _I like where this is going, ie. Hardware becomes just another software component._

Unlikely. You can't run software without hardware. Even if the computers of tomorrow are a mess of FPGA's that can be reconfigured on the fly, somebody's got to make the FPGA's.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Its a great insight. What happens when your laptop is 'fast enough' for the forseeable future?

<comment><USER12> Then you start running into failure. Modern electronics isn't really built to last, so having a laptop that will last you more than 10 years is extremely unlikely.

Until market demand changes to quality, long-lived electronics, you will still be rolling over your computing device every couple of years. And then there's always the trends and cycles of fashion...

<comment><USER13> Yeah, but 10 years is still a lot longer than the 3-year upgrade cycle many people are on today.</comment></comment></comment>


Bitcoin Exchange CEO Pleads Guilty to Enabling Silk Road Drug Deals - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/2014/09/bitcoin-exchange-ceo-pleads-guilty-in-silk-road-case/ <comment><USER2> I'd argue that Bitcoin owns it's meteoric rise to SilkRoad and drugs in general. Many people 'got into' bitcoin in order to be able to purchase stuff on SilkRoad or similar. I know I'm one of them and I'm really thankful for those 3 hits of acid which cost me 3.3 BTC at the time. The transaction worked so I've decided to invest a lot more in Bitcoin. Up to this day I'm living off that investment and able to work on my dream projects. And the acid was very good as well ;).

<comment><USER3> It's hard to say yet how much of an effect MtGox price manipulation had too. Have you seen this report?

[http://willyreport.wordpress.com/2014/05/25/the-willy- report...](http://willyreport.wordpress.com/2014/05/25/the-willy-report-proof- of-massive-fraudulent-trading-activity-at-mt-gox-and-how-it-has-affected-the- price-of-bitcoin/)

<comment><USER4> It's a very contested report, see for example a post in a broader discussion on it here:

[http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/26g46e/the_willy_re...](http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/26g46e/the_willy_report_proof_of_massive_fraudulent/chqs6ef)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> _To make matters worse, while Shrem was CEO he was simultaneously BitInstant's compliance officer, responsible for ensuring that his company followed the law._

Impressive amount of hubris there.

<comment><USER6> With respect: I know you're a professional at this, but I work with many startups who need named compliance officers for HIPAA or AML purposes, and it is the CEO virtually everywhere. This decision is generally made less out of hubris and more because a) the position has a very high ratio of requiredness to actual duties and b) legal advisors recommended that naming the CEO as opposed to a summer intern would suggest enthusiastic compliance.

Who gets tapped for this sort of thing in your world?

<comment><USER5> Oh, I didn't mean it was hubristic being the compliance officer! I meant shoveling all the BTC around while knowing he didn't have even a figleaf of deniability (eg blaming an internal miscommunication with someone else who was in charge of compliance). He had to know it was enormously risky.

<comment><USER6> Oh, my bad. Yep, total agreement. Did you read the complaint? Comedy gold abounded.

<comment><USER5> Not yet but I will now :D

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> When will the law stop violating the rights of free men?

<comment><USER8> When people decide to change the law.

If you think drugs should be illegal, then justice was served here. If you don't think drugs should be illegal, then it wasn't.

Either way, Shrem's behavior seems pretty idiotic to me, from start to finish.

<comment><USER9> There is no provision in the constitution for the federal government to regulate money exchange. Thus the law he was convicted under is itself a criminal act (and under USC 18-242 everyone enforcing it is a felon).

The constitution is the highest law of the land. If you think this guy belongs in jail, then you need to amend it.

The supreme court has already ruled that unconstitutional laws are null and void the moment they are passed. They do not need to be struck down by the supreme court.

Remember the legislature, executive and judicial branches all derive their power from the constitution, thus none of them have the power to exceed the power it gives them, by definition.

The real problem here is not that people haven't changed the law (which they can't since the people are not in power).

The problem is we have a criminal syndicate for a government.

This is why there are no prosecutions for spying on the NSA's part, despite breaking the law. This is why the TSA violates the fourth amendment with impunity (again, a violation of USC 18-242) without ever there being charges filed.

Hell, the TSA is violating state criminal statutes in most states when they molest minors who opt out of having their nude photos taken (which itself is child pornography).

No charges have been filed. Why is that?

So, we can't really say we have the "rule of law" here.

The law only is used against people like Charlie, never against the rulers.

<comment><USER10> The Constitution granted the Federal Government limited powers. But included in those powers is the power to self-define and self-regulate.

Thus, should the legislature pass a law, and should the Supreme Court uphold that law, it is deemed Constitutional by the body specifically-empowered to make that determination.

The Money Laundering Control Act made the laundering of money a crime. It was passed by the Legislative branch of the Federal Government as prescribed by the Constitution.

The MLCA has been upheld by the Supreme Court, or rather, cases have been brought before in which the government's prosecution has rested on enforcement of the law, and the Justices have upheld it by interpreting the law, as written, without deeming it unconstitutional (Santos, Schueller, etc.)

Thus, the law is Constitutional pending some future case.

Thus everything you just said is nonsense words.

<comment><USER9> In order to rebut what I said, you would need to show where the federal government is given this power in the enumerated powers clause. You have not.

What you have merely done is engage, effectively in ad hominem along with a string of irrelevant assertions that to an in unformed, or unthinking reader might sound like an argument.

And of course, in grand hacker news tradition, downvote me so that people cannot see my comment, for the "crime" of making an argument that undermines your political ideology.

<comment><USER10> I think you got down voted because what you said is provably idiotic.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> It's interesting that Bitcoin is not classified as a currency by some parts of the government but it was considered a money-transmitting business.

<comment><USER12> Why should courts and IRS share the same definition of "currency"?

<comment><USER4> Well imagine the police arrests you because it says drugs are illegal, but the courts say they're not. But you still go to jail, because the police says it's illegal. That would be pretty strange.

Similarly, it's strange for the IRS to say you need to pay X taxes because the IRS says it's not a currency, but the courts say it is. But you still need to pay the taxes.

There are reasons for why this might make sense, sure, but it's also easy to see why some people find it strange or confusing.

<comment><USER12> Sure, but you can use anything a currency. And being able to avoid the laws just by using something that isn't officially recognized would be rather dumb.

You might as well be using cows as a currency, it'd be no different from bitcoins.

<comment><USER4> _You might as well be using cows as a currency, it 'd be no different from bitcoins._

Characteristics are much more important than arbitrary definitions because what we want to call something is mostly subjective, characteristics aren't so much. i.e. a fork can be called a utensil or a weapon, but its characteristics are the same: sharp, pointy, rigid etc.

For example, you could say 'anything is a weapon', and thereby we're not allowed to bring clothing on to an airplane, because someone could use a tshirt to strangle a person. That would be completely true, and there certainly will have been people who've been strangled by a tshirt in the past 20 years. But that doesn't mean we should ban it and call it a weapon, because it doesn't have the characteristics or use of a weapon ordinarily and is barely a weapon.

Same for cows. Yes you could use it as a currency, but it doesn't have the characteristics of a currency (fungible? no, divisible? no, portable? no, long term store of value? no, precise unit of account? no) while bitcoins are divisible (up to 100 millionth of a bitcoin), portable (obviously), precise unit of account (yes), store of value (possibly, in my opinion probably but time will have to tell). So indeed cows are treated very differently for the right reasons, as it's not a good form of money and thereby isn't used as money generally. If cows had good characteristics as money, it'd be used a lot, and we'd see people try to use cows to launder money on a massive scale naturally (because any legal money will be used illegally too, and that must find its way back into the system at some point), and then you'd see money transmission laws include cows as a 'money-substitute' just like bitcoin. But they aren't, because they aren't actually a money-substitute, because cows suck as money.

 _Sure, but you can use anything a currency. And being able to avoid the laws just by using something that isn 't officially recognized would be rather dumb._

I agree which is why US institutions have moved to officially recognize bitcoin as a certain thing, so the laws that apply to those things apply to bitcoin, too. For the IRS that's taxation law on property, for Fincen that's money-like products.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Learn computer science for free from the best universities in the World - <AUTHOR> https://www.priyanshujain.me/edu/ <comment><USER2> "Learn computer science youlself"

I'm skeptical about taking advice from someone who doesn't know how to use a spell checker.

<comment><AUTHOR> I am sorry about that and thanks for correcting me.

<comment><USER2> My apologies for being disrespectful. I should have said "neglected to use" rather than "doesn't know how to use".</comment></comment></comment>


Rich-nation education splurge fails to deliver results - <AUTHOR> https://www.ft.com/content/6e9e0534-129d-11ea-a7e6-62bf4f9e548a <comment><USER2> My local not us-based university did invest heavily in a new building from a star architect. I don't even want to know how expensive that has been. Just saying that it may be wise to look into how the funds were used.</comment>


Web Bloat Score Calculator - <AUTHOR> http://www.webbloatscore.com <comment><USER2> I found an interesting case where WebBS does not seem to reflect my understanding of "bloat". A very long page with

Page size: 3,672 kB and 219 requests

Image size: 11,390 kB ([http://www.webbloatscore.com/Screenshots/58b58030-6807-4638-...](http://www.webbloatscore.com/Screenshots/58b58030-6807-4638-b8f2-c6a7fba5eac9.png))

WebBS score: 0.322

It's apparently easy to obtain a good WebBS score by including lots of JPEG images. The PNG used for the image size calculation is typically much larger for the same bitmap, so every JPEG reduces the WebBS score.

<comment><USER3> Hi, author here.

I wanted to measure visual information content of a page, and yes, PNG is maybe not the best to do that. JPEGs are smaller, but it introduces another problem of visible artifacts around text.

If anybody knows a better way to measure visual information content, please suggest.

<comment><USER4> I don't have a suggestion, but I wanted to congratulate you on a wonderful idea, really nicely executed.

<comment><USER3> Thanks Maciej, your obesity article was a one of the sources of inspiration :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> _Look at the homepages of Tim Berners-Lee, Bjarne Stroustrup, and Donald Knuth. All three together have 235 kB, less than one Google SERP. Images are optimized, most of the content is above the fold, and their pages were "responsive" two decades before responsive design became a thing. But they are all ugly._

"Ugly" is subjective. Personally, I like that minimal information-rich style instead of the _over_ -designed monstrosities I come across so often which are glittery and trendy on first glance, yet quite vapid in terms of content. They also tend to be annoyingly distracting to actually try reading, due to all the extra crap. The former feels like reading a book, the latter a tabloid.

<comment><USER6> 1/3 of KB of CSS can convert any of them from ugly into really nice.

<comment><USER7> How? They aren't ugly in the first place. In fact they're eminently readable and navigable.

<comment><USER8> My biggest complaint on most of those sorts of sites are:

        * Tight line spacing
        * Full window width lines
        * Small fonts
        * Sometimes, font choice

When I'm reading something lengthy on a site like those named, I'll usually set a max-width on the body, give it auto margins, and play with line-height, font-size, and usually set it to Arial. Takes me 30 seconds on pages that aren't terrible and makes it much easier to read.

<comment><USER9> How? By changing those things in the browser's console, or some other way? And if in console, do you have to do it each time, or can you save it somehow?

<comment><USER10> You can use a Bookmarklet to inject/change styles. I have one that toggles CSS on/off:

        javascript:(function(){function d(a,b){a.setAttribute("data-css-storage",b)}function e(a){var b=a.getAttribute("data-css-storage");a.removeAttribute("data-css-storage");return b}var c=[];(function(){var a=document.body,b=a.hasAttribute("data-css-disabled");b?a.removeAttribute("data-css-disabled"):a.setAttribute("data-css-disabled","");return b})()?(c=document.querySelectorAll("[data-css-storage]"),[].slice.call(c).forEach(function(a){"STYLE"===a.tagName?a.innerHTML=e(a):"LINK"===a.tagName?a.disabled=!1:a.style.cssText=e(a)})):(c=document.querySelectorAll("[style], link, style"),[].slice.call(c).forEach(function(a){"STYLE"===a.tagName?(d(a,a.innerHTML),a.innerHTML=""):"LINK"===a.tagName?(d(a,""),a.disabled=!0):(d(a,a.style.cssText),a.style.cssText="")}))})();

I also use Stylish and Greasemonkey to style and script any sites I visit frequently to match my personal tastes and add missing functionality or helpful features.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I find "The long tale of two tribes" at the bottom of the page far more interesting than the score calculator itself. We should discuss this and not nitpick on WebBS gaming. It would be better for discussion to have article at the beginning of the page and later on introduce the score calculator.

I would not say that it is easy to pick one particular side. It is true however that web feels too bloated. It is funny how simple static page with everything embedded can be faster than whatever fancy web framework. Look how quick St4k [1] is.

Computing on server may be fast and energy efficient. It also hides complexity. But then we end up in proprietary walled garden. There must be some middle ground. I am hopping that Sandstorm project [2] will bring democratization of the server space.

Lately I think that our technology meets the ceiling. In the past we imagined that everyone would have their personal flying car or that we would have a space plane. Now we have subsonic jets and maybe electric self-driving cars behind the corner. We have a promise of reusable rockets with stages landing separately like some kind of elevator. Everything is smoke and mirrors. We will not have thin clients with low latency links to servers everywhere just like we will never have independent and fully distributed thick clients. We will fake it until we make it. There may be Netflix cache [3] near you to simulate that network is fast in both senses.

[1] [http://danlec.com/st4k#](http://danlec.com/st4k#)

[2] [https://sandstorm.io/](https://sandstorm.io/)

[3] [https://openconnect.netflix.com/en/delivery- options/](https://openconnect.netflix.com/en/delivery-options/)

[EDIT] I worded it poorly. St4k was not meant to be an example of fully static page, but rather general trend. Yes, St4k is SPA, but after one request you have whole application. Next requests bring content only.

<comment><USER5> st4k is very much not a "simple static page"; it's a tiny SPA which requires JS.

<comment><USER12> What's on it? It doesn't render for me with NoScript enabled. :)

<comment><USER11> It's Stackoverflow in 4kB. Here is the explanation: [http://danlec.com/blog/stackoverflow- in-4096-bytes](http://danlec.com/blog/stackoverflow-in-4096-bytes)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Quite funny. My blog page (with text only) has score 4.06. Converting it to image is stupid. Btw. I've been working with a Korean company on a couple of Korean websites. What they provided was ONLY IMAGES. All the texts were images, new content was in images, all the changes were just image changes. It was a nightmare.

<comment><USER14> A lot of Japanese websites are the same. All the navigation buttons are images for example, I found that quite a bad experience over slow wifi!

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Calling the metric "WebBS" was fantastic, it had me continually reading it as "Web Bulls!@#"

<comment><USER16> I would be surprised if it wasn't author's exact intent.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> This is like a poster child for a bad metric. It's bad because it's possible for a team to do a good job and have the metric look bad, it's possible for a team to do a bad job And have the metric look good. Are we sure that this metric is measuring something that we care about?

This metric is interesting to me, but it's an esoteric thing compared to practical issues of how well a site achieves its goals. This metric reminds me of tongue and groove house design: It's wonderful, but only matters to artisans.

<comment><USER18> To some extent this is true of many metrics.

The real question is whether the metric motivates people to do the right thing. Is this something people should optimize for to the exclusion of other goals? Probably not. But bloat is a serious problem, and this metric just shines the light of recognition on that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> While the phrasing seems problematic, as HTML has value even if larger than the equivalent image (selectable text, clickable links, interactive elements, etc), the metric seems vaguely reasonable. In particular, if you compare to the _compressed_ screenshot size, then you've incorporated a very simplistic complexity metric beyond just the dimensions of the page.

</comment><comment><USER20> Minor bug report: I was testing a page that was using SVG Stacks[1], where multiple icons are encapsulated in a single SVG image and the individual icons are referenced via fragment identifiers. This caused the WebBS calculator to count the SVG image multiple times (once for each fragment reference), resulting in a score that was significantly worse than it should have been.

[1] [http://simurai.com/blog/2012/04/02/svg- stacks](http://simurai.com/blog/2012/04/02/svg-stacks)

</comment><comment><USER21> It makes me glad to see that HN scores well, as presumed:

Page size: 10.4 kB and 6 requests

Image size: 59 kB

Web-BS: 0.176

</comment><comment><USER22> Seems WebBS is not accurate to measure information density of: pages with lots of images, video streaming and text rendered as images. It seems it aims to measure bloat for information delivered as text (layout, colors, etc also convey information but for simplicity let's avoid trying to measure them).

So, in essence WebBS aims to measure rendered html without tags (like using the text() function of jQuery to get contents of a div tag). In that case, why no traversing the DOM, get clean text content, measure it (count bytes) and divide by request size. In this case, WebBS will always be below 1 and a value closer to 1 is better. Also, some punishment points should be considered for number of request (or maybe define another rate since that is not bloat per- se).

</comment><comment><USER23> Why don't you cache the results for your proposed websites (or at least just your own's ? )

<comment><USER24> +1, that should take quite some load off. Some kind of retest link would be helpful though, to clear the cache and test a page again.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> A job well done, congratulations! The idea is fantastic and your implementation, including the choice of non-lossy reference image, has a sound design. The purpose and intent is obvious.

And please ignore the complaining bunch! Any metric can of course be misused (think unit test coverage, linting, soft coding, etc.) but writing software is craftsmanship. We're half-way to art. To even be _able_ to measure is an achievement, and what gets measured gets better. Me and my senior colleagues immediately took it to heart and will use it as objectively as language shootout. Many thanks for planting an industry standard seed!

</comment><comment><USER26> Tried to run it on boston.com, and I got a "Calculator stopped measuring after ~20 sec timeout." error. When the bloat tool can't even fully measure your bloat, you might have a problem.

</comment><comment><USER27> While the implementation is not optimal (favors photograph content as PNG is not going to win JPEG here; overall favors pages of few colors) the idea is actually quite decent.

</comment><comment><USER28> I'd very much prefer script bloat calculator.

<comment><USER29> 1.Open dev tools

2.run a JS CPU profile.

3\. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> The score is a bit flawed as it assumes pertinent information can only be contained in text, not in images.

</comment><comment><USER31> Is there a site or software that allows you to really convert your site to an image map?

</comment><comment><USER32> They can't process requests now. Hug of death already?

<comment><USER33> Whoa. Your last comment before this one was 6.2 years ago.

You seem to be banned, by the way. I had to vouch this comment, and your previous comment ([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1525566](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1525566)) is dead too. Since that was long before the new mod team, you may want to email email@example.com to discuss the possibility of getting yourself unbanned.

Welcome back to HN.

<comment><USER34> Unbanned already as far as I can tell.

<comment><USER33> The comment I replied to was marked [dead], which usually indicates a ban. It's alive now since I vouched it. Is there another way to know?

<comment><USER35> Despite having used HN for several years now, I've never really understood [dead] etc. The FAQ says it's anything that has been flagged as such by mods or the software itself. So does the original author of the comment see "[dead]"? Does it happen automatically if the author is banned/shadow banned? Why/how are so many 'New' submissions 'DOA'? Is there anywhere that explains this so I never have to ask these questions - and others - again?

<comment><USER36> The first HN moderation rule is "don't talk about HN moderation rules". The goal is maturity through obscurity.

<comment><USER37> How does a lack of transparency help?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> google cache: [http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:VB9qf1V...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:VB9qf1VIk- EJ:www.webbloatscore.com/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us)

</comment><comment><USER39> Timeout when checking vwo.com

</comment><comment><USER40> Not loading at all.

</comment><comment><USER41> It's certainly a lean web site. Or rather, the 503 is lean.

</comment><comment><USER42> It would kind-of-make sense but only for static pages. Pages are now an interactive applications so comparing them to size of visual representation of their initial state is not a best metric.

<comment><USER43> Almost all pages I regularly visit are not interactive applications. HN is one of the most interactive sites.

News websites in particular are guilty of downloading Megabytes upon Megabytes of who knows what to display the five paragraphs of text and the image that I actually want to see.</comment></comment>


Why Facebook made a smart buy with Parse - <AUTHOR> http://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/news/2013/04/25/why-facebook-made-a-smart-buy-with-parse.html?page=all <comment><USER2> Is it because they spent less then a billion dollars?</comment>


SR-71 Disintegrates Around Pilot During Flight Test (in 1966) - <AUTHOR> http://www.alexisparkinn.com/sr-71_break-up.htm

<comment><USER2> Amazing story.

Read the story carefully. Note the incredible details of what that aircraft could do. Now read this line again:

 _By far, the most memorable flight occurred on Jan. 25, 1966._

This was more than four _decades_ ago. Can you imagine what they're doing today? In some ways, it makes me angry, because I suspect that the military solved some engineering challenges decades ago that scientists are still wrestling with today.

<comment><USER3> If you like that sentiment, you will probably like Burt Rutan's talk at Ted ( [http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/burt_rutan_sees_the_futur...](http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/burt_rutan_sees_the_future_of_space.html) ). The theme is a lack of progress in aerospace and how to resolve it.

<comment><USER4> Seconded. That's one of my favorite TED talks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The SR-71 was an amazing piece of engineering.

The panels actually didn't line up - as they expanded when it got warm. So basically at take off the aerodynamics of the plane were shot - you had to fly for a bit for it to hit normal performance (it also meant it literally leaked until it got hot enough and sealed).

<comment><USER6> Which is why they took off with a minimum of fuel, flew around to heat up, and then refueled in mid-air.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> From the SR-71 wikipedia entry:

"A defensive feature of the aircraft was its high speed and operating altitude, whereby, if a surface-to-air missile launch were detected, standard evasive action was simply to accelerate."

<comment><USER8> There is a rumor going around in the South African Air Force that the South Africans with the help of the Israeli Air Force (who had big ties in the bad old days) figured out a way to shoot the SR71s down. It had to do with a technique called storm-climbing (which was novelized by Wilbur Smith in 'Eagle in the Sky') where a normal fighter aircraft would go full-tilt with maximum weight in a downward trajectory, flatten out the dive, dump excess weight, and start climbing vertically. This way the pilots would get to an altitude where the missiles could get a successful lock, which in this case was far higher than the 'normal' ceiling for these aircraft. From this height they could then fire off the missiles. I'm not at all sure if they ever attempted it, but I'm pretty sure they didn't succeed. Still in interesting thing to hear :)

<comment><USER9> That _storm-climbing_ maneuver sounds really cool!!! Do you have more detailed info on that? Other than Wilbur Smith's novel, that is.

It reminds me of that classical optimal control problem in the 1960s: the U.S. Air Force wanted to find the fastest climb for its F-4 Phantoms (so they could reach their operational ceiling ASAP to intercept Soviet bombers). The optimal path was counter-intuitive: first climb, then dive, reach supersonic, climb again. Sounds crazy, but they could reduce the climbing time dramatically that way!

<comment><USER10> I've actually noticed that behavior myself when screwing around in X-Plane with the F-4E; I take off at low-speed, high AOA to gain a few thousand feet, and then drop the nose at full afterburner to use both the engines and gravity to go transsonic, at which point the F-4 can accelerate faster, and maintain a higher angle of climb without losing velocity, due to the "lower" drag at supersonic speeds.

I had figured it was perhaps a weird characteristic of the simulation's breakdown of airframe components, but if that's how things worked in the real F-4's, that just gives me that much more respect for the physics simulation in X-Plane. No wonder it's FAA certified :)

<comment><USER9> The seminal paper in which these findings were published:

 _BRYSON, A.E. and DENHAM, W.F., "A steepest-ascent method for solving optimum programming problems," Trans. ASME. J. Appl. Mechanics, June 1962, pp. 247-257._

I can't find a PDF copy anywhere. It sucks. If you want to read a non- technical paper on it, try this one: <http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?arnumber=00506395>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This has been posted regularly to Digg, Reddit, etc for years. Guess it's HN's turn - though I'm surprised it hasn't come up already.

<comment><USER12> _ahem_

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=133282>

<comment><USER13> Thanks for digging, I knew I had seen this before. Amazing story anyway.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> ... in 1966.

Perhaps there should be an HN rule about dating articles not from this year in their titles? That said, this is a great story.

<comment><USER15> I've noticed a number of people following the convention of putting the year in parenthesis at the end of a dated article. It would be great if everyone followed this. (Edit: just noticed this article follows the convention; I assume that the title was edited after your comment)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Also take a look at "Skunk Works: A Personal Memoir of My Years of Lockheed" by Ben Rich (manager at Lockheed after Kelly Johnson). Despite the title, he also talks extensively about the U2 and SR-71 projects - Amazing pieces of engineering all.

[http://www.amazon.com/Skunk-Works-Personal-Memoir- Lockheed/d...](http://www.amazon.com/Skunk-Works-Personal-Memoir- Lockheed/dp/0316743003)

</comment><comment><USER17> I always thought it would be safer to stick the pilot in the center of the plane, using periscopes or (now) video to fly. But I guess you're more likely to be thrown free of a disintegrating plane if you're in the usual pilot position.

<comment><USER18> Like the pilot said, though, it was only incredible luck that left him alive. I doubt that your odds are significantly improved or decreased by where you're sitting if your supersonic airplane falls apart around you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Awesome! I loved the SR-71 as a kid and have been wondering what the replacement (Aurora) can do. I'm sure my son (now 3) will be fascinated!

</comment><comment><USER20> Simply awe inspiring. Bookmarked for sure.

I've recently started assembling an SR-71 kit (with an f-117 to go) because I've always wanted the models sitting on my bookshelf.</comment>


UK Most Internet Based Economy - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-17405016

<comment><USER2> The small size of the UK gives online retail here an advantage over the US: cost-effective next day delivery to (almost) anywhere in the UK is possible from a single fulfilment centre.

<comment><USER3> It's one of my favourite things about the UK. I can order from ebuyer.com who do next day delivery up until 11pm and have it in my hand 8am the next day. From order to me in 9 hours is amazing, _so_ convenient.

<comment><USER4> I agree and yet I eagerly anticipate automated freight tubes which will deliver my order within an hour. (Groceries aside, think what that will do for manufacturing!)

<comment><USER5> I have a dream. A dream of automated freight running under or besides the consumer roads of the future. A dream of roads not being dug up every other week to repair XYZ Utilities dodgy handy work.

<comment><USER6> How would your dream compare and contrast to an efficient freight rail system?

<comment><USER5> I may not have thought this dream through that thoroughly... Off the cuff...

\- Both could be railed options... Mine smaller and cheaper 100% autonomous units. \- Mine distributed. The units could _live_ in garages under peoples homes when not needed. \- Mine expensive - rail already exists.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Sex is a vice?

It's interesting how much Victorian baggage people carry around... even in articles on the Internet and the economy!

<comment><USER8> On the Anglophone Internet for sure, dominated as it is by the US and UK. But what ever Scandinavian or Dutch written parts of the Internet there might be, small as they are, should be refreshingly free of Victorian baggage.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> "While only a quarter of those surveyed said they would consider giving up sex for a year in order to maintain their broadband connection..."

Go back 10 years and the response to that question would have been very very different.

</comment><comment><USER5> Given this, why do we have substandard broadband?

</comment><comment><USER10> It would probably be 20% if we didn't sit at our desks all day looking at Hackernews.

</comment><comment><USER11> Is it really fruitful for the country?And also how long it will be safe?</comment>