The Maginot Line - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2013/08/25/the-maginot-line/

<comment><USER3> The image of the Maginot Line article in full resolution:

[http://tctechcrunch2011.files.wordpress.com/2013/08/maginotl...](http://tctechcrunch2011.files.wordpress.com/2013/08/maginotlinearticle.jpg)

Its better reading than all of techcrunch, so..

<comment><USER4> Interesting that they originally planned to have it cover Belgium too - <USER2> they'd actually finished it Germany would not have been able to go through Belgium after all. I wonder why they didn't finish it?

<comment><USER5> As I recall there were a few reasons. The two biggest ones:

1) The Belgians threw a shitfit over the French wanting to build a wall to seal in France with them on the wring side of it. They offered instead to allow the French to connect French eastern border defenses to Belgium's eastern border defenses, promising that if the Germans did decide to invade Belgium again that their line would hold.

2) The portion that was completed cost over twice what was projected. The Franco-Belgian border would have been harder to fortify than the Franco-German border, and considering the cost overruns on the latter portion the former started to look infeasible.

<comment><USER6> Also worth noting: Belgium was traditionally neutral, having been set up as effectively a buffer state in the wake of the Napoleonic wars. The bloody quagmire First World War was in no small part precipitated by Germany's violation of Belgian neutrality, which brought Great Britain into the war on the Franco-Russian side -- the UK had committed as a guarantor of Belgian neutrality. So despite strong misgivings about German revanchism during the 1920s and 1930s, Belgium was also historically somewhat ambivalent about joint defense projects with foreigners.

<comment><USER7> But if they had allowed the British and French to advance to the defense line before the Germans invaded ww2 would have turned out very different.

Part of the reason that the German blitzkrieg worked so well is the french and British forces where out of position.

<comment><USER6> Yes, absolutely. And I note that these days Belgium is home to NATO's Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE). They might not have worked it out after WW1, but after WW2 ...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Strawman recapitulation of PHKs thoughts. Unfortunately, the conclusions are both wrong, and naïve at worst.

Crypto that gets used has to be easy-to-use, MySQL style. I think a project like tcpcrypt is great example, in theory. Simple is good because the pain of setup has to be least. (Tcpcrypt is opportunistic encryption that needs no additional setup and is different from SSL.)

Crypto does work. Snowden admitted as such.

"Encryption works. Properly implemented strong crypto systems are one of the few things that you can rely on. Unfortunately, endpoint security is so terrifically weak that NSA can frequently find ways around it."

[http://m.techcrunch.com/2013/06/17/encrypting-your-email- wor...](http://m.techcrunch.com/2013/06/17/encrypting-your-email-works-says- nsa-whistleblower-edward-snowden/)

(The last point is another form of the ancient security problem of taking steps to minimize chances of plaintext disclosure.)

The cost to capture or recover plaintext should be much greater to the proportion of the potential value of the PT over the time it could cause damage.

Just giving up is defeatist and expects that some future government made of fallible people would suddenly get enlightenment and act benignly. Never going to happen, there is too much money and power at stake. (USG fears its citizens but abuses power to crucify dissenters.)

Encrypting almost everything is one immediate way to forcibly remove the possibility of abuse. Remember that even if (and that's a big "if") political sands were shifted one way, they would certainly shift back to a culture of secrecy and expedient Machevellianism. If you don't take reasonable measures to protect yourself, you don't understand what's going on or what works. There are no easy fixes, only defense-in- __depth __. Security is fundamentally an unending competition of gambits and countermeasures that will continue so long as people have secrets or desire freedom from intrusion.

<comment><USER9> > Crypto that gets used has to be easy-to-use, MySQL style. I think a project > like tcpcrypt is great example, in theory. Simple is good because the pain > of setup has to be least. (Tcpcrypt is opportunistic encryption that needs > no additional setup and is different from SSL.)

The off-the-record (OTR) plugins for various IM clients spring to mind as easy to use.

<comment><USER10> Except that a lot of people never care about validating the peers fingerprint. "Hey, I am A, I am at another computer at the moment, hence then new keys."

(I know this is somehow mitigated by SMP in libotr, but some clients have not implemented it yet, e.g.: [https://trac.adium.im/ticket/9768](https://trac.adium.im/ticket/9768))

<comment><USER9> I found OTR's handling of that via shared common knowledge (e.g. Socialist Millionaire Protocol) quite pleasant.

<comment><USER10> Hence the reference that not all clients provide an interface to SMP, including very popular ones.

<comment><USER9> Sorry, my reading comprehension failed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I think what we can achieve with cryptography is to force the government to use proper courts and due process instead of mass surveillance.

I don't know why war metaphors are used for everything since 9/11\. The Maginot Line is completely irrelevant, because this is not a war where one party wins and one loses. It's a complex and ongoing political and social process.

We can use technology to make long standing legal principles more effective and their violation more visible.

</comment><comment><USER12> I read somewhere recently that the Maginot line has been unfairly maligned and that it actually did its job pretty well.

Edit: this is the piece I was thinking of: [http://ericmargolis.com/2013/06/on-ne-passe-pas-the- unknown-...](http://ericmargolis.com/2013/06/on-ne-passe-pas-the-unknown- victory-of-the-southern-maginot-line/)

<comment><USER13> Yeah, my understanding is that the French knew very well that the Germans would go around; the Line was only meant to force them to detour through rough country and slow them down long enough for the French Army to mobilize. It failed because the Nazis used unprecedented tactics and technology to storm through Belgium and the Netherlands faster than anyone thought they could; the French Army still knew they were coming, but weren't able to mobilize fast enough to stop them.

<comment><USER14> Also, the British forces that were supposed to be guarding the Western route into France folded quickly and retreated. "Blood, Tears, and Folly" contains exceprts from contemporary sources noting that the British determination to retreat was such that they prevented French troops from redeploying to their Western flank so as to avoid the French defence impeding the British retreat.

<comment><USER5> Additionally, the Belgian fortifications were not nearly up to the level of the Maginot Line, nor the level the Belgians boasted. They proved to be little more than a speedbump for the Wehrmacht.

<comment><USER15> The Germans also devised novel tactics to overcome the Belgian fortifications. In the initial attack on Eben-Emael [0], for example, commandos descended on the fort in gliders in the black of night and used newly devised shaped charges to destroy the heavily bunkered Belgian guns.

Blitzkrieg itself was a new tactic, but its success depended on surprise, which the Germans achieved by sending their main mechanized force through the rough, wooded terrain of the Ardennes while feinting an attack to the north, through the plain of Flanders, where the Belgians and French expected them. That was a hugely risky endeavor, and the offensive would probably have failed if the German movements had been discovered during the several days it took to cross the Ardennes Wood.

0\. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fort_Eben- Emael](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fort_Eben-Emael)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> The article mentions " I was told yesterday (by Bruce Schneier, so I trust it) that the noise pattern from a device's antenna can be used to fingerprint it, a side effect of high-precision wireless transceivers."

My quick attempts with Google did not provide any good results. Does anybody have pointers to research about how feasible this fingerprinting is for example against modern cellphones?

<comment><USER17> Modern cellphones have many, many other ways to fingerprint them that are more economic. I doubt what Schneier suggests would ever be used in anything other than military applications for the next 10 years.

<comment><USER18> It's more of an issue for something like wifi, where you can trivially change MAC (and do host-level stuff to change the fingerprint of the rest of the stack).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> This is perhaps off topic but my cousin is a tour guide in one of the villages close to the border with the Germans. Thanks to this I had the opportunity to visit some of the Maginot bunkers where the French troops waited anxiously for the invasion to come to their doorstep. A few rooms had their walls entirely covered in miniature Mickeys, giving the place an eerie and deeply melancholic atmosphere.

The point of my post is that it feels really great that France and Germany are now allies, maybe even friends. You can criticize Europe a lot but at least we aren't fighting each other and hopefully won't do so for another century. Whenever I see Americans complaining about their country turning to shit I want to tell them to focus on the fact that it could have been so much worse.

</comment><comment><USER20> I actually appreciate that article. Yes, it is written a little heavy handedly, but the point is sound. Sure, there are some smart/informed people who knew the actual power of the gov't to snoop, but by and large the "carbon copy" metaphor is dead on.

Even here on Hacker News recently, there was an article about how the entire US nuclear armament is run through ancient computers and we chuckle. "Ha ha, you gov't people are stuck in the stone ages".

Of course, they let us laugh.

</comment><comment><USER21> "when a burglar comes through the window, do you put more locks on the door? Better to just acknowledge that we chose to live in a dangerous neighborhood."

So they start keeping both the door _and_ the window unlocked? If that happened to me, I would 1) get better at keeping my windows closed/locked/barred 2) consider moving to a better neighbourhood.

"People can barely manage the privacy settings on Facebook" – Citation Missing. [http://www.pewinternet.org/Reports/2013/Where-Teens-Seek- Pri...](http://www.pewinternet.org/Reports/2013/Where-Teens-Seek-Privacy- Advice.aspx) suggests the opposite.

"in violation of the 5th amendment, likely, but how long until a friendly precedent on that account?" – so vote, speak out, do something instead of accepting the status quo.

Who wrote this, Keith Alexander?

</comment><comment><USER22> I was amused to learn the Germans had built a similar line on THEIR side of the river, called the Siegfried line.

<comment><USER23> Defence of their Western border was very important when the Wehrmacht was active in the East - early in the war they really didn't have the men to attack in the East _and_ defend in the West so having fixed defences there was seen as very important.

<comment><USER22> By the time they were active in the east, their western border was "The English Channel". This was the one they built before the outbreak of WWII.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> It's written to be over-the-top, but I agree with the sentiment that we cannot fight government eavesdropping with "even better" technology.

The only thing that limits the law is the law; the solution to our problems, at least in the U.S., must in the end be political not technological IMO.

<comment><USER21> The fact that law must limit law does not make "privacy technology" pointless.

E.g. the dragnet would capture a whole lot more if no web sites used TLS at all, and three-letter agencies would have a lot easier time of it.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Top PDFs Posted to Hacker News in 2019 Computed from Internet Archive - <AUTHOR> https://getpolarized.io/2020/01/19/over-500-top-pdf-posted-to-hacker-news-2019.html <comment><AUTHOR> I computed this list of top PDFs using the Internet Archive data.

Basically it crawls the front page of HN and finds any .pdf link, records the number of upvotes, then sorts by score.

I did the same thing last year and it was a great way to find awesome/unique PDFs.

Ironically, the first post was about web scraping being legal and here I am computing the list via web scraping!

<comment><USER2> > _it crawls the front page of HN and finds any .pdf link, records the number > of upvotes, then sorts by score_

How do you deal with the numbers changing over time?

<comment><AUTHOR> I take the max in a 24 hour period.

I don't always have snapshots for all hours though so there might be some skew

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> There's also [http://www.hackernewspapers.com/](http://www.hackernewspapers.com/)

</comment><comment><USER4> @dang: please note this user is constantly spamming self-promotion links to his site.

<comment><USER5> Fellow user here. Is it forbidden? This user submits mostly content from his blog (sometimes twice), but I can't find anything against self-promotion in the guidelines.

This is the closest guideline:

> Don't solicit upvotes, comments, or submissions. Users should do those > things when they run across something they personally find interesting, not > because someone has content to promote.</comment></comment>


Oracle discontinues Ruby/Rails support for NetBeans - <AUTHOR> http://wiki.netbeans.org/RubySupport <comment><USER2> You know between Java, Hudson and moves like this it feels like we're ripe for an Onion-style article about Oracle execs running out of ideas for pissing off the OSS community and so doing a road-trip around the country to individually insult every OSS developer and user in the most graphic and personal way they can think of.

<comment><USER3> I don't understand why this move should piss off anybody in the OSS community. Oracle is a private company and as such has only obligations to its shareholders. They may or may not support and/or promote OSS projects as they see fit, same as every one of us. It's their free choice.

<comment><USER4> Look at what kind of headway corporations like google have made in the mind of consumers when they go above and beyond the shareholder mantra. Oracle might make short term gains on their terms but they have started to poison a whole new generation of developers.

<comment><USER3> Oracle is not a person to make such a decision; it is its shareholders who should decide how they want to spend their money. I wouldn't want to have a tax (as an Oracle investor or a private citizen) to support OSS. I may want to contribute my money and/or code as a _donation_ , but that will be my own choice.

<comment><USER5> I don't want to support Oracle's sailboat racing. So, I don't own any Oracle shares. Pretty simple, isn't it?

<comment><USER6> Larry Ellison pays for that out of pocket.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The most important parts are:

> To maintain that objective and capitalize on the JDK 7 release themes [...] > it is necessary that our engineering resources are committed to [...] > NetBeans IDE 7.0. (from <http://netbeans.org/community/news/show/1507.html> > )

and

>However, we strongly encourage our community of NetBeans Ruby users and developers to volunteer to take on development of Ruby on Rails support for the NetBeans IDE. (from <http://wiki.netbeans.org/RubySupport> )

So it's just a matter of not having enough resources to support everything.

Ruby and RoR is done basically entirely in-house by NetBeans/Oracle so it seems odd that people are enraged that something they provided for free isn't supported any longer due to normal restrictions.

I'm curious if:

1\. People outside Oracle will take over RoR development (the community seems too small) OR

2\. People will pledge money to keep the plugin maintained (I somehow doubt this but I would _like_ to see it happen).

<comment><USER8> I think you're right. The intersection of interested Ruby developers + with Java experience + knowledge of the Netbeans platform + and motivation/time to maintain the plugin seems vanishingly small.

<comment><USER9> The only thing is that Ruby is still growing, and so represents possible future revenue. But Oracle aims for short-term profitability now... which you have to admit, has worked out pretty well for them.

Taking a wider view, I love the work to make things better (such as at Xerox PARC), but it hasn't made money for those companies. Which is partly why Sun no longer has any say in Java, or in general research, or indeed in anything at all.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Nooooo....

I've gradually moved away from NetBeans as a general Ruby/Rails editor but I often came back for the great debugging support.

Any suggestion for alternative Rails debuggers?

<comment><USER10> <https://github.com/astashov/vim-ruby-debugger>

Works really well once you've sorted a few quirks - it's what finally allowed me to fully switch from NetBeans to Vim about a month ago.

Hint: add the following to your .vimrc if using MacVim:

        let g:ruby_debugger_progname = 'mvim'

<comment><USER11> Thanks for the tip - will be checking this out tonight. Double thanks for the MacVim tip - I'm sure I would have been tripped up and off to Google without it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> RubyMine just tweeted: "We welcome all NetBeans users to start evaluating RubyMine as your new Ruby/Rails IDE! Expect some great news very soon on our pricing page!"

It is a good product and superior to NetBeans in many ways. The price was a little on the higher side though (but worth it anyways). If it comes down, I expect RubyMine to become the de-facto IDE for Ruby/Rails.

<comment><USER12> Yep, I think consolidation in the Ruby IDE space will be a good thing. All the super elite people are using VIM / Emacs, and all the lazy people like me are still using Textmate. If RubyMine can develop a decent size community around it (with plugins, snippets, colors, etc), I'd definitely use it.

They really have to speed it up though. Feels like slogging through mud when compared to TextMate. Not sure if its possible given their java codebase.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I've only found NetBeans useful under Windows. I've had a number of interface problems on Linux and OSX that make it unusable. (Dialogs showing up blank all the time and other problems)

<comment><USER14> Those blank dialog issues are caused by Compiz, not Linux. You can either turn Compiz off, or try setting this in your profile:

export AWT_Toolkit=MToolkit

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Is anybody actually using NetBeans for Ruby? I tried it very early in my exploration of Ruby, but quickly switched to gedit, and eventually emacs (using technomancy's emacs starter kit). Now that I use emacs, any other editor (particularly one that requires a hand on the mouse) feels like an RSI producing nightmare.

<comment><USER16> I use it daily at CarWoo.com

IDE's still have a few killer features over text editors that I miss when I don't have them.

<comment><USER17> You should seriously give Vim a try; I bet you would never go back to any IDE afterwards.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Now more than ever, give vim + rails.vim a try. You won't bother with bloated IDE's anymore.

</comment><comment><USER19> well, there goes the only reason I ever used NetBeans.

</comment><comment><USER20> Honestly, I feel like the title here is a little misleading.

The message from the netbeans team is that they just didn't have enough resources to support both Rails and upcoming Java 7 and so they had to drop development. They also are encouraging the community to pick up and continue development of Rails support for the IDE.

I guess it's possible that a lack of resources is just an excuse to remove that support, but to me this seems like a genuine reason. I don't get the sense that Oracle just pulled the plug for political reasons.

</comment><comment><USER21> I use Netbeans for java and used it when I started working with Ruby. But I switched to RubyMine and really enjoy it. It took me a while to convince myself to pay for an IDE after previously using Netbeans and Eclipse, but the cost isn't high and it has really made me speed up my ruby work.

</comment><comment><USER22> use mvim + NERDtree

<comment><USER23> This morning I went looking for a new IDE to replace Netbeans/Aptana and found VIM + Janus (<https://github.com/carlhuda/janus>). Janus is a collection of customizations and plugins that make VIM look & feel almost like a GUI IDE.

Highly recommended!

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Any suggestions on an alternative IDE?

<comment><USER25> Emacs + various extensions and goodies.

<comment><USER26> This is _the_ killer feature of tools like emacs and vi: Your vendor cannot abandon you and the code has a well-proven capability to be ported to just about any platform.

<comment><USER27> The cross-platform aspects of these tools is way undersold. I have all my config checked in at BitBucket. I can sit down at a new machine, check out my emacs configuration, tweak a couple variables if things are non-standard on the box (paths and the like), and I've got my environment completely set up, whether Mac, Windows, Linux, or something else.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I'm sure there's much more to it, but my initial reaction was to think it was oracle snubbing salesforce in their acquisition of heroku. In the enterprise (which sf targets) oracle is revered, and a robust oracle IDE does help give credibility to ruby/rails. Aptana and ruby mine are the only other ruby/rails IDE's that your run of the mill IT manager would consider full-featured im aware of, and neither of them are backed by a brand as respected in the enterprise as oracle.

</comment><comment><USER29> This is an unfortunate move, though I expect that the community will do what it can to pick up the pieces here (which Oracle seems to state openly that they want to see happen). NetBeans has improved so much over the years, I hate to see "official" features like this get tossed out.

</comment><comment><USER30> "Second: Although our Ruby support has historically been well received, based on existing low usage trends we are unable to justify the continued allocation of resources to support the feature."

That is really all they needed to point out (for me).

</comment><comment><USER31> It looks like it's time to start learning vim or another alternative.

</comment><comment><USER32> NetBeans is open source. At least OpenOffice and Hudson have already been forked. Are there any obstacles (name has to be changed of course) for forking this project as well?

<comment><USER7> No need:

>>However, we strongly encourage our community of NetBeans Ruby users and developers to volunteer to take on development of Ruby on Rails support for the NetBeans IDE.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Reasons:

1.) To focus more on Java

2.) Because the low usage of the RoR NetBeans functionality didn't warrant the effort the team put into it.

</comment><comment><USER34> Ugh, I had a feeling this was coming.

<comment><USER30> According to the NB guys it was "low usage". It makes sense to spin it out for the community to maintain if they want it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Why do people use NetBeans for Rails?

<comment><USER36> I started out with textmate way back when. I actually started using NetBeans in hope that it would have decent support for Actionscript 3. I happened to find out about the Rails support later on & was very happy I did.

Here's some of the reasons I switched:

1) inline syntax checking

2) ability to click through to called method (command + click in os x)

3) ability to have multiple views of the same file (clone window)

4) ability to have split screen editing.

5) debugging

6) inline documentation instantly available for any built in, plugin or internal class (ctrl + space).

7) code completion / suggestion (this is not a lazy thing -- it's helpful for discovering what's available in any given class)

8) indenting in textmate was never fun. In NetBeans just command + shift + f and the whole file is properly indented.

Those are some of my reasons. Hopefully there's something else out there that can replace NetBeans for me. I've been extremely grateful for it -- especially at its price.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Who cares? Nobody used it anyway!!

</comment><comment><USER37> Well, it's probably just me but Netbeans support for Ruby was as good as Eclipse(PyDev) support for Python i.e it kinda worked but it left a little to be desired, I for one am not gonna miss it.

</comment><comment><USER38> who cares? I use emacs+rinari

</comment><comment><USER39> as long as it isn't Python :p

</comment><comment><USER40> This is actually good news. The company I work at would never hire a Rails developer that uses ANY sort of IDE. Learn to use a good text editor and learn the Rails CLI.

<comment><USER14> What about those who know a good text editor, know the Rails CLI, and _still_ prefer an IDE? There are worthwhile features that an IDE can do that a text editor can't (easily).

If I were running your company, I'd focus more on the individual I was hiring and what they bring to the table, and less on if they're using the hippest tools.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What is an old feature you miss? - <AUTHOR> What is an old quality or feature in a program that you don't see in any existing software or app? <comment><USER2> Hardbound printed manuals.</comment>


Git humiliate - to be used with caution ;) - <AUTHOR> https://gist.github.com/pferreir/5048143

<comment><USER2> This is beyond amazing!</comment>


Anker Powerline: Kevlar fiber reinforced MicroUSB cables - <AUTHOR> http://www.ianker.com/product/A8131011 <comment><USER2> So the cable is kevlar reinforced, but the connector is still thin sheet iron and tears apart once you bump against it?

I've never had an USB cable "break" in the cable portion. It's always the connectors that fail.

<comment><USER3> You beat me to it. I remember we decided against USB for security products because connector failure was so high for routine use. Product is fine if disposable but not long term. I'd rather see them improve what was actually the oroblem: the darned connectors.

<comment><USER4> When you say connectors do you mean the shields, or the termination of the wires to the connector?

I've only had the shield break twice, and that was from my dropping a laptop with a stick inserted, and from me treading on another stick.

I've had loads of cables get broken where they join the connector. Maybe I'm just too rough.

<comment><USER5> That's the reason why I wanted a laptop with a cellular modem _inside_ the case (these are getting harder to find by the way, no idea why). I don't want anything sticking out of the machine while I'm on the move and may have to use it. 99% of the time it is on my desk and plugged in but as soon as I start moving around with it I want it to be free from protrusions because it is only a matter of time before I bump it into something and that will most likely shear the connector straight of the motherboard. So I don't think you're too rough, laptops in transit are simply fragile.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Had a few items from the Anker brand, and always been very impressed with their product quality and the 'clean' nature of their packaging. Utilised their external batteries, replacement iPhone batteries, as well as their 'hardened glass screen covers' for an accident prone partner.

</comment><comment><USER4> I think the kevlar is being used as a strain relief rather than "BULLET PROOF". That's not particularly clear from the page.

So it fixes one problem - people pull the cords out by the cable not by the connector, and that puts strain on the joints, which eventually fail.

</comment><comment><USER7> I've got a few of these Anker Kevlar cables. I purchased them because my USB cables most frequently fail by the cable fraying where it enters the USB port connector, and I was hoping these would protect that connection more.

The cables do seem to be significantly less bendable than your standard Apple, or Amazon Basic cables which impedes high angle exits from the port they are plugged into, and that gives me hope that these cables actually will have a longer mean time to failure for me. We'll see.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I wish I could find a better link for this, but Anker _needs_ to build themselves a corporate blog to put their PR stuff on.</comment>


The Factoring Cryptopocalypse - <AUTHOR> http://www.daemonology.net/blog/2013-08-10-the-factoring-cryptopocalypse.html

<comment><USER2> I think Colin's bang on here. Now is the time for cryptographers and software developers to act to implement a mature alternative to RSA, but it's not the point for your average joe to switch to an as yet relatively untested/unproven ECC implementation.

For what it's worth, Tom Ritter recently posted his notes on de-anonymizing alt.anonymous.messages[1], something widely believed to be very anonymous and very secure. It's an interesting read and shows why you not only need the crypto to be sound, but the implementation and _your own use of it_ to be right too.

[1] - [http://ritter.vg/blog-deanonymizing_amm.html](http://ritter.vg/blog- deanonymizing_amm.html)

<comment><USER3> How is EC "relatively untested/unproven"? It's been in OpenSSL for ages (by internet norms), is the subject of numerous national standards. It secures a billion dollar bitcoin economy.

<comment><USER4> He said it's not time for the average programmer to switch to a new and untested ECC _implementation_ , not that ECC itself is new and untested. By the standards of any of the common RSA libraries out there, their ECC counterparts _would_ be relatively untested given how much comparative use each has seen.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Out of curiosity: If you were to design Tarsnap from scratch in 2013, would you still use RSA?

<comment><AUTHOR> I think so.

<comment><USER5> Am I right to guess its because you're more worried about what people get wrong about ECC imementations in 2013, perhaps that we don't even really know about in 2013, than about anything fundamental about ECC or RSA?

<comment><AUTHOR> Pretty much. RSA is the devil we know.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Previous discussions on the presentation:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6191171](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6191171)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6155502](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6155502)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, I missed the first discussion and was inspired to write only by the second discussion.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> For someone who is somewhat unfamiliar with cryptography, what is the obstacle in creating cryptography that is provably secure: in other words, cryptography that can be absolutely trusted within certain provided parameters.

<comment><USER8> Usability. One time pads have been around forever, are provably secure, but a pain in the ass.

Modern symmetric ciphers solve the "you need to securely exchange as much key material as you wish to send data" using mathematical formulas to stretch key material. Asymmetric ciphers use mathematical formulas to fix "you need a secure way to exchange keys."

Unfortunately, the math can't be probably secure, only believed secure and proved insecure.

<comment><USER9> > _Usability. One time pads have been around forever, are provably secure, but > a pain in the ass._

With cell phones so widespread, I wondered why someone doesn't write a one time pad app. People could share gigabyte-sized pads via trusted wireless or a cable if they prefer.

[http://softthere.com/projects/otp/](http://softthere.com/projects/otp/)

<comment><USER10> The only reason to use one-time pads is an extraordinary level of paranoia. If you are paranoid enough to need a one-time pad then it makes little sense for you as a private citizen to trust that hardware you take into public places hasn't been compromised. Manual creation and transmission of the encrypted message is the only approach that makes sense.

If lots of people adopted one-time pads it might hinder NSA et al but this would be akin to trying to convince people to wear masks whenever they are in public to hinder monitoring with CCTV.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> ECC means "Elliptic curve cryptography" here, it is not about something with "ECC memory". I've been so confused with all the discussion so far because of this. Dear masters of your domain, if there are acronyms that are not unique, please try not to use them or at least introduce them!

<comment><USER12> Alternatively, when trying to follow a conversation in a domain specific context, learn the terms.</comment></comment>


What has the Higgs boson done for us? - <AUTHOR> http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21929351.000-what-has-the-higgs-boson-done-for-us.html#.Uua4AmTTlok <comment><USER2> The physics in the press article is wrong:

> _Mass, in a nutshell, is not what you think it is. Not by a long > chalk.According to Lederman and Hill, a subatomic particle such as a muon, > which feels the weak nuclear force, flickers back and forth between a right > and a left corkscrewing form (the flicker is known as Zitterbewegung)._

This is not Zitterbewegung, it's a change of Chirality.

Zitterbewegung: For technical reasons, too long to explain, the velocity of the subatomic particles can be constant, the best next thing is to have particles that travel with a constat average velocity, but have an aditional oscilation, like x(t) = x_0 + v_0 * t + a * cos(w * t), (more details, about a and w in wikipedia.) The important thing is that it is an oscillation in the real xyz space, very small, but it'd be possible to see it with a magical microscopy, because the particle is moving ( [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zitterbewegung](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zitterbewegung) )

Chirality / (very similar to Helicity): There are two tipe of muons the left- handed muons and the right-handed muons. They look similar and have the same mass (whatever that means), but they are very different, for example only the left-handed muons feel the weak force. Using the magic microscopy, we would not see that the particle is oscilatiog, we would see that the particle is spinning ( [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chirality_(physics)](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chirality_\(physics\)) )

Really, the left-handed muons are constantly transforming into right-handed muons, and the right-handed muons are constantly transforming into left-handed muons. This transformation is related to the vacuum expectation value of the Higgs field, that is very related to the Higgs boson, but to explaining the differences I need to write a long and technical explanation.

> _If, however, the muon could be boosted to the speed of light, its time > would slow to a standstill, as predicted by Einstein 's special theory of > relativity. A particle that experiences no passage of time is a photon, so > the muon would appear like a photon. Since a photon has no rest mass, > running with the photon analogy, neither would the superfast muon. Its mass > would have been "switched off". But all that has happened to it is that the > flickering between left and right forms has stopped. The inference is that > this oscillation is what gives a muon its mass._

Simply wrong! Just for an example, it this idea where correct, when the muon is traveling at half the light speed, it would have less mass than a static moun.</comment>


Arrows in Javascript - <AUTHOR> http://notes-on-haskell.blogspot.com/2008/08/arrows-in-javascript.html <comment><USER2> I'm a category theory novice, but isn't their arrow definition a category that looks suspiciously like a monoid? And isn't an actual arrow a morphism, which is this case would just be a function?</comment>


Instagram is listening to you: a scary experiment - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@damln/instagram-is-listening-to-you-97e8f2c53023?source=linkShare-5d6156d23ff8-1503717481 <comment><USER2> There is literally no way for a non-active app on iOS to record without a red bar at the top of the screen. The only way that IG could possible get away with this is by somehow detecting that the phone screen was not visible and only recording then, but even then that recording would be imperfect, and somebody would have noticed. There is no way for the app to do what the author is describing.

<comment><USER3> I believe the battery drain would be an even better indicator. I'm sure if an app would constantly do audio processing in the background it would dramatically lower the battery life.

<comment><USER4> It would not need audio processing in real time; using voice oriented codecs realtime transmission is totally possible without any detectable impact on data throughput. Take a look at Codec2's required bandwidth compared to the fidelity it offers. [http://www.rowetel.com/?page_id=452](http://www.rowetel.com/?page_id=452)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Classic case of a frequency illusion.

[https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Frequency_illusion](https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Frequency_illusion)

</comment><comment><USER6> A couple weeks ago, a friend sent me a screenshot, via Whatsapp, of a dating app profile for a girl named "Bilar." The following day, Facebook showed me a friend suggestion for a girl named Bilar. I've never met anyone by that name. I could be wrong but my immediate conclusion is that Facebook recognizes text in Whatsapp-sent images and feeds it into the social network's friend suggestion engine.

<comment><USER2> Could your friend have friended Bilar on FB, causing you to have a mutual friend with her?

<comment><USER6> The girl who was suggested was not the same one with whom he had matched. It was a girl in Latin America.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The author says the conversation was "total random discussion" but that seems rather unlikely. I think we all know how uncommon randomness is.

This discussion about listening came up a few years ago but about Facebook, who owns Instagram.

Previous Discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10360761](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10360761)

<comment><USER8> If his friend or whoever he was talking about this product, most likely it's in their tracking cookies from them googling it. This is especially true since they are familiar with the product.

</comment></comment><comment> a-dub i wonder how often people think about and subsequently search the internet about consumer electronics after leisure hikes? i wonder what the top 5 consumer electronics items are in q3 2017.</comment>


The language of Vim - <AUTHOR> http://stackoverflow.com/a/1220118 <comment><USER2> It's odd how often a SO link comes up here where the question is locked for being off-topic, not constructive, etc.

I still think to some degree SE shoots themselves in the foot with the strict enforcement of their rules every time this occurs.

<comment><USER3> > I still think to some degree SE shoots themselves in the foot

Do they? The reality is that SO and SE sites are optimized as a _business_ , not so much as a _community_ : short, common and quickly answerable questions generate much bigger traffic from search engines, and hence more ad revenue. I can imagine Joel and Jeff realized this very early on, and thus set themselves in a mission to encourage the questions that generated the most traffic and punish the ones that fall in the opposite end of the spectrum. It's really a pity, but SE is not a non-profit organization.

I'm still hoping someday someone will come up with an alternative that gathers the people and the quality of SO where lengthy and thoughtful discussions are welcome. Some argue that's Reddit, but I'm not entirely convinced.

<comment><USER4> I think the common view of looking at great answers like this and thinking, "wouldn't SO be great if discussion was allowed" is similar to looking at a great work of graffiti art and thinking, "wouldn't be great if every kid with a spray can could paint all over the city".

These answers are outliers, special snowflakes among a sea of crud that fills the programming PHPBB boards out there. Joel and Jeff were trying to solve the bigger problem - having a decent Q&A system -, and that can only be done by looking at the average case and not the exceptions.

<comment><USER3> > "wouldn't be great if every kid with a spray can could paint all over the > city".

The thing is that, unlike in other places, people can upvote/downvote stuff on SO/SE sites, and just like crappy questions and answers are quickly buried by the community the same could happen to subpar discussions, so I don't really think that's a valid excuse.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Well, Vim is 21 years old already and it still has a strong base of fan users. Good example on how good software live long

<comment><USER6> +Well maintained and supported, good software.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I've never understood the appeal of vi(m). Programming is a thoughtful, creative, deliberate process. I'm never in a situation where I've got so much to type that my productivity would drop if my fingers stopped touching the keys. Rather the opposite in fact.

<comment><USER8> I think people overestimate how much time they spend doing repetitive tasks like copying and pasting with definable patterns. I'm a Java programmer, and I certainly do this, but I can almost always use a simple search and replace to make it work in IntelliJ. But, for the sake of argument, let's say that if I were to do this once a week, maybe for five minutes, copying and pasting manually with a mouse, that five minutes might feel like an eternity. Vim would do this quickly, but it would also slow me down when I do project-level refactoring, like renaming a method, which IntelliJ does globally in a matter of seconds. Sure, you can configure Vim to do this kind of stuff, and you can combine it with other tools... but at what point are you getting diminishing returns?

On top of it, as a web developer, I already need to know so much, from front end with HTML, CSS, JavaScript, jQuery, to Servlets and Spring MVC, to SQL and all of the glue that binds all of this mess together like XML and supporting tools like SCMs. My head is absolutely full of information. In this environment, I am convinced that Vim is a complete waste of my time. A good IDE is ten times better at handling the vast majority of tasks I encounter day-to-day.

If anything, I think Vim is like truck nutz for programmers. It's all about projecting an image of competence and bravado.

<comment><USER9> A few examples of why vim has some non-obvious power:

* html you can change inside of a text object. If you are say anywhere inside of a link  you can ci< and you have deleted the whole thing and are left with <|> (where the cursor is denoted by |) If instead you typed ci" you would be left with  this is a very powerful pattern * you can script little macros that do text editing on a macro scale very efficiently. This is more useful than a simple find and replace. you want to make a list that starts with a number, has that number in it and is incremented by one(or two or...) every time. Type the first sentence 1, xv001, "", more stuff. exit out of insert mode. jj or esc start recording the macro into register r: qr yank the line and paste it yyp go to the beginning of the line 0 or ^ increment by one and move one word right and increment the next number: ctrl-a w ctrl-a move down one line, j exit recording q run macro r 100 times 100@r

The nice thing is that if you mess something up you can paste whatever is in register r, edit it, yank it back into register r and run it. It sounds like it's slow but it's all real time editing and you are doing it interactive so you don't have to do it blind.

There are many more things that make vim style interactions a boon to your productivity but I don't have a lot of time to comment on it. hopefully I touched on enough that it piques your interest to at least give it a shot.

Vim is so popular that you can get pretty good emulation in a lot of IDEs so you can have the best of both worlds. vimemu for Visual studio is supposed to be very good. eclipse has eclim, hell even emacs has evil mode.

<comment><USER9> Well the formatting got messed up and it's too late to edit it:

* html you can change inside of a text object. If you are say anywhere inside of a link  you can ci< and you have deleted the whole thing and are left with <|> (where the cursor is denoted by |) If instead you typed ci" you would be left with  this is a very powerful pattern

* you can script little macros that do text editing on a macro scale very efficiently. This is more useful than a simple find and replace. you want to make a list that starts with a number, has that number in it and is incremented by one(or two or...) every time.

Type the first sentence 1, xv001, "", more stuff.

exit out of insert mode: jj or esc

start recording the macro into register r: qr

yank the line and paste it: yyp

go to the beginning of the line: 0 or ^

increment by one and move one word right and increment the next number: ctrl-a w ctrl-a

move down one line: j

exit recording: q

run macro r 100 times: 100@r

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Who needs bookmarks when the worthwhile posts keep turning up again and again!

I'm not complaining though. Learning Vim beyond the surface level is fun and the more you know the more fun working with Vim becomes.

</comment><comment><USER11> I always kept switching from Vim to Sublime text until I found this:

<http://vim.spf13.com/> The Ultimate Vim Distribution It's a collection of plugins and common shortcuts such as :W becomes :w, :w!! for saving as root, etc...

In the beginning it was mostly the file-drawler that make me want to leave Vim but that was easy solved by using this version: <https://github.com/alloy/macvim>

In combination with iTerm on mac it's my preferred way to develop, the only thing I miss is an easy way to reload, visit pages etc in the chrome-window on my second screen without having to lift my hands from my keyboard, but cmd+tab and Vimium help me with that.

</comment><comment><USER12> Learning to code with vim is much easier than learning to code without vim once you've learned vim.

</comment><comment><USER13> I wish vim was a little bit more "international" because some commands that involves {,^,[ combined with ctrl are tricky to trigger on non-us keymaps and don't feel as natural as `yy`. Some obvious keys that only need 1 keystroke for an US user requires a combination of alt-gr or something for french users. Soon I'll be remapping my keyboard for coding but I also need those é,à,ç,è :)

<comment><USER14> You can always switch to a US keyboard layout when coding, that's what I do and it makes me faster.

<comment><USER15> For a time, I was working on gathering some good data on keyboard layouts. I wanted to work out which keys were commonly available, which weren't, and so on. I wanted to work out which characters were the most "i18n-friendly" for developers worldwide.

One day, I happened to take a programming class in Brazil. I noticed that a lot of students were simply switching their keyboard layout to US English in order to write code. I ditched that project.

<comment><USER16> That's a shame. I think your project still has a lot of value, even if the results are used more for software that's end-user focussed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> It seems as though the asker doesn't know about mapping, which wasn't really addressed and would answer the implied "I don't like how this feature works and it's slowing me down" question. It only takes a few lines to work around vim's "horrible" copying and pasting:

        let mapleader = ","
        let g:mapleader = ","
        noremap <leader>a ggVG
        noremap <leader>c "+y
        noremap <leader>v "+gP
        noremap <leader>x "+x

</comment><comment><USER18> I love Vim. I understand the 'Vim is a language' concept, and use it every day.

But I have to wonder: is this the best that Vim can do? Vim as a language is a great concept. But IMHO, the execution sort of sucks. Twenty years have gone by, and 'Vim as a language' is still a big mystery that takes a long long time to understand...

Someone should take that concept and run with it. Surely 'editor as a language' can be done better.

<comment><USER19> The idea that really excites me is 'STRUCTURE editor as a language' - that is, the same sort of grammar as Vim, but manipulating semantically meaningful structures like expressions or functions instead of text. I'd love to see an editor reenvisioned completely around that concept, with "normal" text editing only as a fallback.

(Of course, Vim does have text objects, which are fantastic - one of the chief reasons I use Vim. But they have limitations; I think you can go a lot further.)

<comment><USER20> so have I got a deal for you :) Anyway, my recently published "nestgrid" framework is precisely that (among other possible uses). A mix of xml editor, spreadsheet, direct manipulation of objects ui, and all around cool thing; flash demo included. See <http://nestgrid.wordpress.com/nestgrid-paper/>

EDIT: fixed url as per @nocman's advice.

<comment><USER21> You muffed the URL -- here's the one that works

<http://nestgrid.wordpress.com/nestgrid-paper/>

:-D</comment></comment></comment></comment>


OpenHeatMap launches - <AUTHOR> http://petewarden.typepad.com/searchbrowser/2010/07/openheatmap-launches.html

<comment><AUTHOR> yet another neat product from pete warden. the unemployment map is a really nice example of the value of this type of visualization:

<http://www.openheatmap.com/examples/us_unemployment_county/>

</comment><comment><USER2> Related: <http://github.com/amccollum/pyheat></comment>


Solar Just Hit a Record Low Price in the U.S - <AUTHOR> https://earther.com/solar-just-hit-a-record-low-price-in-the-u-s-1826830592 <comment><USER3> The true price of solar is the price to produce reliable, continuous energy. That requires something to smooth out the signal and store the energy, most probably a battery.

The solar + battery price is also going down, though not as fast as the solar only piece. But that's the metric we should be following. When that hits $30 per MWh, it'll be game over.

<comment><USER4> This comment gets made in every single solar article put on HN. The true price of solar is what the market is willing to pay for it. If the solar was ruining the grid or was way more expensive than what it seems, we would not keep seeing solar installed at this pace and at these costs.

We need to get out of the mindset that all power generators need to produce a steady amount of power 24/7\. A flexible grid made of many power sources that can be ramped up and down can just as easily meet demand and may even be best since it is resilient when any one power source goes down for an extended period of time.

You can't just say that solar should be more expensive because it only works half the day. You could just as easily turn that argument around and say that nuclear and coal plants should be more expensive since they are only economical if run at a constant load and require long shutdowns every year for maintenance. There needs to be extra capacity on the grid to meet demand during nuclear/coal shutdowns, but no one states that nuclear and coal should be more expensive as a result.

<comment><USER3> You misunderstand the sense of "true" here.

The point is not that the "true" price in the sense of what it ought to be. It is the "true" price in the sense of what the market is actually paying for the service.

When people put out the number $23, they compare it with the cost of power and wonder why, if it is so much lower, it doesn't already swamp the current solution.

So the purpose of the comment is to explain that it is not a complete solution, and not reflective of the total ("true") bill.

<comment><USER5> I've thought about adding solar to my home and can't see any reason why I should even consider a battery for storage. I'm in Texas and so I get plenty of sun and my peak energy demand happens to coincide with that sunlight (due to HVAC).

Why should I worry about a complete solution?

<comment><USER6> The main reason I would consider a battery is for disaster recovery purposes. Being from the suburban NYC metro area, we've had multiple, multi-week power outages in the past decade.

We have a moderate sized portable generator, but running off that for weeks becomes a very unpleasant experience. Certainly far better than not having power, but unpleasant.

Driving 2 hours away to the nearest place we knew had unlimited fuel, turning my car into a rolling bomb on the trip back with dozens of gallons of fuel in gas cans, etc. And the endless droning of the thing running.

If those sorts of disasters are not a major concern for you, I don't think a battery makes much sense.

<comment><USER7> > we've had multiple, multi-week power outages in the past decade

That's a crass state, what causes these outages? Is it a investment backlog of the power grid?

<comment><USER8> Might have something to do with being in a very dense area with some very old infrastructure.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'm mostly gratified by what a "Dog bites man" story this is. Solar prices have been decreasing steadily for a long time so we should expect to see a story like this every few months until the adoption curve flattens out - <USER2> hopefully won't be for a while.

<comment><USER10> The bit about storage becoming a routine part of bids was an interesting piece of information.

<comment><USER11> I was thinking the same thing. The gigafactory isn't mention in this, but could there be synergies with Tesla's (somewhat shady... pun intended) acquisition of SolarCity?

These sorts of installs aren't exactly the same thing, but maybe SolarCity needs to pivot to from distributed consumer to large scale utility.

<comment><USER12> Tesla has already deployed utility-scale storage in Australia and has contracts to build more for California utilities. Those are just the ones I know of.

<comment><USER13> Puerto Rico too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Slightly off topic... Interesting thing about solar in Utah (maybe everywhere? Not sure about the specifics): Utah gives every land owner pollution credits. They're allowed to pollute X units worth per year or something like that. Depending on certain criteria you're allotted a certain amount of credits. The problem is, these credits are transferable. So if I, for example, don't pollute, I can sell my credits off to someone who wants to pollute more than average.

Something (I think is shady) some companies are doing is selling solar for really cheap in dollars, but they subsidize the cost by selling it for credits. Average Joe is going to think he's polluting less, however since he sold off his pollution credits, his solar purchase has authorized someone else to pollute for him. Netting us nothing in the end.

(not an expert, so I may have misunderstandings and be oversimplifying things, but the point should be easy to understand)

<comment><USER15> I'd suspect that if the actual net is anywhere close to even, then that scheme having the side-effect of further building up the solar industry, is a massive long-term win for renewable energy and the environment.

<comment><USER14> That's a good point. I didn't really think of that. It still feels a bit off, but that does help return some of the feel-goods back into buying solar :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> As a person who's built PV systems: The problem of generating enough kWh in a month is _solved_. In pallet load and container load quantities, good quality PV panels are now very affordable. Roof and ground mounting systems, DC power wiring and interconnect systems are highly developed, modular and easy to build with relatively unskilled labor.

The problem to be solved now is economical, reliable, long-lasting (in number of cycles) battery storage. Or some other form of storage to draw those kWh back from when the sun is down.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Relevant bits:

> "On their face, they're less than a third the price of building a new coal > or natural gas power plant," Ramez Naam, an energy expert and lecturer at > Singularity University, told Earther in an email. _"In fact, building these > plants is cheaper than just operating an existing coal or natural gas > plant."_

> There's a 30 percent federal investment tax credit for solar projects that > helps drive down the cost of this and other solar projects. But Naam said > even if you take away that credit, _"these bids, un-subsidized, are still > cheaper than any new coal or gas plants, and possibly cheaper than operating > existing plants."_

(emphasis mine)

<comment><USER17> >It will operate at a flat rate of $23.76 per megawatt-hour over the course of a 25-year power purchasing agreement

Does anyone have data on typical wholesale power costs?

<comment><USER18> Various data here: [https://www.eia.gov/electricity/wholesale/](https://www.eia.gov/electricity/wholesale/)

From my brief browsing, $23.76 is <70% of the average $/MWh price across the available data.

<comment><USER19> That's mind boggling. This is absolutely incredible. Our country has so000 much hot, sunny unused land in the west. Let's cover it up with solar panels and make use of the free sunshine.

<comment><USER20> Storage and transmission are the ongoing problems here. Also applies to wind on the Great Plains.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Interesting headlines from the "Presentation PDF" found at [1].

> Installed prices are higher for systems at tax-exempt customer sites than at > for-profit commercial sites

> Residential new construction offers significant installed price advantages > compared to retrofits

> No clear relationship between installer-level pricing and installer volume

> Prices vary considerably across installers

> Installed prices in the United States are higher than in other national PV > markets

> Installed price declines have been partially offset by falling state and > utility incentives

> Installed prices continued to fall in 2016, _albeit at the slowest rate > since 2009_ [emphasis mine]

> Module-level power electronics have a seemingly small effect on installed > prices

> Ground-mounted non-residential systems are generally higher priced than > rooftop systems

[1] [https://emp.lbl.gov/publications/tracking- sun-10-installed-p...](https://emp.lbl.gov/publications/tracking- sun-10-installed-price/)

</comment><comment><USER22> There is an interesting part about solar generating electricity when its sunny - it will help population move to warmer climes. If you live in Ohio heating in winter is a problem, solar isn't going to keep you warm on a cold night (ok batteries can help but they're expensive). If you live in the South West though its perfect as Winter nights dont require much heat and the biggest loads are AC at the times when there is lots of sun.

Perhaps this will mean living in Southern California, Arizona etc will be increasingly popular as energy costs will be much more affordable. Of course water is the next problem, but cheap electricity can help that too.

<comment><USER23> _If you live in Ohio that is a problem, solar isn 't going to keep you warm on a cold night_

Houses built to the German Passivhaus standard would do just fine in Ohio. I used to live in Ohio and Western Pennsylvania, so I should know. There was one Minnesota church built with polystyrene panels that had to start running air conditioning in the middle of winter, the insulation was so good.

 _If you live in the South West though its perfect as Winter nights dont require much heat and the biggest loads are AC at the times when there is lots of sun._

It can get pretty darn cold at night in the desert southwest. Again, insulation is the key.

 _Of course water is the next problem, but cheap electricity can help that too._

It's 10X as expensive to use techniques like desalinization. It's so much more expensive, that lots of desal plants get built, then get mothballed because it's that much cheaper to get water by other means.

<comment><USER24> is the expense of desalinization the electricity? Which would go down with adoption of solar?

<comment><USER25> This is a decade old, but I think that the proportions are still about right: [https://desline.com/Geneva/Banat.pdf](https://desline.com/Geneva/Banat.pdf)

See the slide "Cost composition for a typical seawater RO (reverse osmosis) plant"

Fixed charges (primarily capital cost): 31%

Energy: 26%

Maintenance and parts: 14%

Membrane replacement: 13%

Supervision and labor: 9%

Chemicals: 7%

Really cheap solar electricity could reduce the second largest expense (energy costs), but right now that's just an improvement for daylight hours. Battery- stored solar electricity is getting cheaper but it's not cheap enough to actually _reduce_ nighttime desalination costs yet. And if you run the plant only during the day, you get less value out of the very largest expense (capital cost).

<comment><USER26> That's reverse osmosis. In a scenario where energy is very cheap (even if only for part of the day) there are other processes which require less maintenance, but more energy.

<comment><USER25> The previous slide in that presentation also shows a cost breakdown for a thermal process, multi-stage flash desalination.

Fixed charges (primarily capital cost) 42%

Energy 41%

Maintenance and parts 8%

Supervision and labor 7%

Chemicals 2%

Energy is nearly even with fixed costs for MSF, but fixed costs are even larger here. Leaving this type of plant idle between dusk and dawn would again raise per-unit costs a lot.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> My house faces south westish. I have a lot of roof on the back side that I think would be good for solar but all the automated online stuff seem to indicate it was be expensive and not pay off for a LONG while. At least around here in MN there's not a lot of residential push for it. Hopefully as prices drop it becomes more viable.

<comment><USER28> Online calculators over-estimate costs for large systems. You can find newer installers who are more willing to negotiate prices, and play them off each other. I negotiated one company down from ~$3.5/W to $2.30/W (before 30% credit) on my large residential system - and these weren't budget panels either (Sunpower E20).

If you do the discounted cash flow calculation of solar, at $2.3/W, electricity costs you around 5c/kWh: [http://databin.pudo.org/t/19ece6](http://databin.pudo.org/t/19ece6)

<comment><USER29> I think your numbers are pretty optimistic. You're neglecting depreciation for one. Panels have a lifetime in the range of 20-30 years, inverters have a lifetime in the range of 10 years. 4% is also an optimistic interest rate for a loan that lasts the lifetime of the system. You may be able to get that for a ~5 year loan, but then you need to include the higher opportunity cost of the money that was used to pay that loan off which will be tied up for 20+ years.

<comment><USER28> The cost of the system includes buying a new one in 30yr. I didn't include deprecation of the panel, but modern panels such as Sunpower or Panasonic degrade at around 8% over 25 years, so maybe add a multiplier if 1/.92 to the cost to fudge that in.

As for the 4% interest rate, which in this case is really a time value of money discount rate, I'm comparing it to mortgage loan amounts (which is pretty much the average consumer's risk free rate of return). I'm assuming the buyer can afford a cash system.

<comment><USER29> I don't se how it includes the cost of a new system in 30 years. 2.3 * 30,000 = $69,000 and your cost listed is only ~$59k. 8% over 25 years is much better than I thought for the panels, but you still need to include about 10%/year depreciation on the inverters since you'll need to replace them every 10 years or so (at least that was about their lifetime last time I checked in Arizona, it may be different in cooler climates)

<comment><USER28> I'm including the 30% tax rebate and assuming solar panel installations will be 50% cheaper in 30 years which is pretty conservative given their price history.

Microinverters last 25 years.

<comment><USER29> Still not seeing $59k.

2.3 * 30.000 * 0.7 = $48,300 (30% tax credit)

2.3 * 30.000 * 0.5 = $34,500 (50% cheaper)

Total = $82,800

Regardless, adding up the cost of the second one in 30 years doesn't make sense for calculating kWh prices, depreciation and cost of capital are the only factors that matter and you are only including one of those.

<comment><USER28> Sure, looking at my spreadsheet I also discounted the cost by the same interest rate after 30 years, (1/1.04)^30.

Agreed that including the second system doesn't really make much sense, but I wanted a quick-and-dirty estimate without having to individually discount each year's production (as you would if you had a finite time horizon).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> This is truly good news, but is it really worth calling out that a record was broken when it's been trending down regularly over time?

<comment><USER31> It's one of those rare feel good things that hasn't been yet flooded by negative view points that often follow a wave of positive news... there is probably a name for this?

<comment><USER32> Measurable technological advancement?

See also Moore's law.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Note the picture in the article is the Ivanpah concentrated solar thermal power facility in California (near Las Vegas, NV). The article concerns photovoltaic not concentrated solar. I drove by Ivanpah not long ago and it is a site to see, the towers look about as bright as the sun, but my understanding is concentrated solar is not as attractive economically as PV.

<comment><USER26> Probably not now, no (though it does have the interesting property that, with certain designs, it keeps producing power some time after the sun goes down). At the time solar power towers were developed, though, PV was rather expensive and inefficient; the dramatic advances of the last couple of decades weren't really expected.

<comment><USER33> Also, I believe they have to be pre-heated in the morning with natural gas diminishing the carbon advantage. Too bad, they really do look impressive.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Correct me if any of the maths below are wrong.

Eagle Solar Mountain Solar Farm ( 300 MW ) will have an annual production capacity of over 900 million kilowatt hours (kWh) once completed. The Moapa Band of Paiutes has become a national clean energy leader and will host in excess of 600 MW of solar on the 72,000-acre reservation. [1]

For example, the Topaz Solar Farm [3] has an annual production capacity of 1200 million kWh on 25km2. Around ~6200 acre.

This seems an awful a lot of space for low capacity generation? I know it is reserved, but that is like 10x the size difference, why aren't they building more?

US annual electricity consumption is 4,015 billion kilowatt hours in 2017, 60% coming from fossil fuel [2].

For solar energy to replace that 60% energy consumption; 2409 billion kWh, it would require 2000 Topaz Solar Farm, or 50,000 km2, or slightly less the fifth of Nevada area.

The cost of the 300MW Eagle Solar Mountain Solar Farm is roughly $2B, assuming it would cost $3.6B to build the size of Topaz Solar Farm which is 550MW, it would take $7.2 trillion to build a 60% US needed solar farm, ignoring the benefits of Economy of scale, and any improved efficacy of solar panel.

Given all the benefits of Solar, being cheaper then Coal, I am surprise it is still only 1.6% of US electricity generation. Why is that?

[1][https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20180531006155/en/8mi...](https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20180531006155/en/8minutenergy- NV-Energy-Announce-Largest-Solar-Project)

[2] [https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=427&t=3](https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=427&t=3)

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

<comment><USER25> The $2 billion in the article you linked seems to refer to NV Energy's "latest tranche of renewable projects totaling over 1 gigawatt." The cost of the Eagle Solar Mountain Solar Farm does not appear to be broken out specifically in that article.

The Moapa Band of Paiutes is presumably _not_ dedicating most of their reservation's land to solar generation. Most of the Topaz Solar Farm's land _is_ dedicated to solar generation. That's why you see a much lower energy density if you're calculating areal production using the entire land of the reservation as the denominator.

Solar has become cheaper than coal quite recently. It takes time to build new projects. The "cheaper than coal" qualifier is also so far true just in areas with reasonably good sun resources. Much of the US population lives in areas where there's not enough sun for PV to be cheaper than coal. New York and Pennsylvania aren't there yet, for example.

Finally, the US federal government is trying to prop up the coal industry. That includes invoking "national security" to keep uncompetitive coal plants running. The present administration has also raised the prices of solar equipment with a slew of tariffs. There's a risk for project developers that they could submit a bid for a new solar project, sign a contract, and then a year later see their costs rise above profits due to another round of tariff fights. There's a risk for project buyers that they'll lock in an agreement for a new "cheaper than coal" solar project but be forced to keep buying coal power anyway due to outside forces.

For example, Arizona's excellent sun resources now make PV generation significantly cheaper than running a 1970s-era coal plant in the state, but the federal government may try to force the coal plant's old customers to keep buying its electricity:

[https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-coal/us-interior- depa...](https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-coal/us-interior-department- weighs-plan-to-save-navajo-coal-plant-from-closing-idUSKCN1J22UC)

<comment><USER34> I see. Sorry I don't follow much US politics.

I know Nevada are basically a desert, which is perfect for Solar Panel and electricity, does the Federation nature, forbid a super scale Solar Farm in Nevada to power the rest of US? And who owns the grid in US? Government?

<comment><USER25> The United States has multiple regional grids, operated by organizations called RTOs or ISOs (Regional Transmission Operators, Independent System Operators). Components of the grid, including transmission lines, may be owned by government agencies or by private companies, though private companies are more common.

As I mentioned in another comment, the hardest part of building big interstate transmission projects in the US is getting approval from every state and land owner between two distant points. 4 out of 5 involved states can approve a plan quickly but then the plan can languish for years trying to get approval from the 5th state involved.

Long distance transmission projects _do_ get built, but they generally take a long and uncertain time to reach approval. That's one of the factors that prevents sunny states from just exporting solar power to less sunny, more densely populated states. The other big factor is that these big infrastructure projects are also expensive to construct, but in my opinion it's the delays and uncertainties that are the bigger obstacle.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> The internal combustion engine seems to have been milked for all the efficiency our current materials can get out of it, while new materials and economies of scale in solar tech keep pushing prices lower. However, material science could also revolutionize the efficiency of engines and make them cost competitive with solar again. Solar-ification seems to be the trend, but it is not guaranteed.

<comment><USER36> >However, material science could also revolutionize the efficiency of engines and make them cost competitive with solar again

I doubt it. We've passed peak oil and have resorted to expensive techniques like fracking to collect the scraps. Meanwhile, even if no advances in solar panels occur in the future, the price of power produced by solar will only go down as more panels are added to the grid.

The biggest hurdle now is getting cars with combustion engines off the road and replacing them with electric. I haven't seen much progress made on that front in the past few years.

<comment><USER35> I think a lot of people lack imagination here. What kinds of efficiencies could we create with room temp. super conductors? This is a good read for anyone interested in this trend [https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S136403211...](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1364032114001087?via%3Dihub)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> It is my understanding that we are already past or very near a point of no return w.r.t greenhouse gas emissions and global warming. Talk of peak power and renewable excess leads to discussion about the need to store that excess. Could we also expend that energy to do something like scrub CO2? Is this even feasible at a scale that could make a difference?

<comment><USER38> Direct air capture of CO2 is getting pretty good. Carbon Engineering [1] was in the news recently for demonstrating an efficient scheme at commercial scale. When I looked at the math, their technique would add about 8 cents/kWh to the price of fossil power assuming it was used to capture all the CO2. So if solar is coming in around 2 cents/kWh, you could have 10 cent electricity (competitive in many markets) that also captures as much CO2 as the average fossil unit currently creates. The progress is pretty heartening.

<comment><USER37> Yeah I think about this in the context of energy density in batteries. Liquid fuel like gasoline has huge benefits for personal transportation just because of the energy density. I wonder what amount of clean energy it would take to make some kind of synthetic/green(?) fuel similar to E85 (E100?). The cost of the fuel could include the carbon capture based on how the fuel is burned.

e: looks like you missed a link but I looked up Carbon Engineering and if what they say is true that is really exciting. Especially for airlines and shipping.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Q: Where one can check solar energy prices?

<comment><USER40> As far as I know, the industry standard is the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory's annual 'Tracking The Sun' report[0]. I recommend it as a great primary source - the measurements are well explained and accompanied by helpful charts and analysis of the year-to-year changes. LBNL also publishes other useful resources on energy production/consumption, so it's worth browsing around to see what they have if you're interested.

[0][https://emp.lbl.gov/publications/tracking- sun-10-installed-p...](https://emp.lbl.gov/publications/tracking- sun-10-installed-price/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> I'm of course a supporter of solar, and I don't want to be "that guy", but is there a strategy for handling solar power at night? In these areas that are mostly solar, how do they store the energy, or do they resort to natural gas or coal or something?

<comment><USER42> There are oh-so-many ways to address this and it's not clear what the market will pick.

First off, 100% solar is not likely to win out unless it's a small grid on an island. Any realistic grid will have wind and solar and hydro. New nuclear is already far more expensive than lithium ion batteries + solar, so that's out of contention for new builds unless a government is trying to subsidize the industries that are companions to fission power (nuclear submarines, etc.)

Among the ways to time shift electrical demand:

\- lithium ion batteries. These will likely be only 5-6 cents/kWh within five years.

\- thermal storage: cooling (making ice) or heat can be stored for these energy applications

\- demand response: EVs and many other large demand sources can respond to price signals or aggregated demand response to shift their consumption to the best times. Currently this is mostly used to shave the peaks off of demand but with critical mass of EV there will be huge amounts of valley filling too.

\- vehicle to grid: I'm somewhat skeptical this will win a cost battle, but it's being investigated: high penetrations of EVs mean that there will be a day or more of storage on wheels. This can be used in all sorts of ways, potentially.

\- flow batteries: I'm also skeptical that these will win on price, but they might.

\- concentrating solar power: this is solar power from heat, therma storage can be used in conjunction to deliver 24 hour power. Early pilots were super expensive but recent project have dropped drastically in price to the point where it has a chance of being competitive with other storage tech.

\- lots of others that I'm forgetting.

Basically solar is will probably get so cheap that we'll overbuild a ton of it and have more power than the inverters can handle, and size the installs for the winter lows, most likely. This means that there will likely be tons of extra unused DC power at solar sites for large chunks of the year. Could be an opportunity...

<comment><USER43> any curated list of place to follow to stay up to date ?

<comment><USER42> No curated places for the Bay efforts from each tech that I know of. However there are a few news outlets that are pretty solid:

[https://www.greentechmedia.com/](https://www.greentechmedia.com/)

[https://www.utilitydive.com](https://www.utilitydive.com)

<comment><USER43> appreciated

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> Given that solar auction minimum bids have dropped 470% in the last 4 years (in Mexico, [https://earther.com/mexico-just-auctioned-off-the- cheapest-s...](https://earther.com/mexico-just-auctioned-off-the-cheapest- solar-project-in-1820676364)), isn't it crazy to accept a 25 year flat rate contract?

<comment><USER45> I don't know if this is overly pendantic, but surely they mean prices dropped by 79%? Percentages in the hundreds would mean prices deep in the negatives.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> Every country should invest more into railway and subway infrastructure. Trains are vastly easier to automate, highly energy efficient and have run on electricity for at least a century.

Why even bother with electric self driving cars or trucks when the solution to this problem already exists?

</comment><comment><USER47> No mining, no drilling, no transportation, no wastes. Huh, I bet that's why solar and wind are cheap.

As a decades-long solar and wind advocate (the term 'renewable' has been spun too much to be useful) I'm sad to say... too bad they made it take so long. And there still isn't nearly enough of it.

As for storage, there are literally dozens of solutions. Yeah, they can be expensive. So's the alternative ... to everybody. (How'd that nuclear thing work out for the Japanese? ... who had centuries of quakes and tsunamis to learn from? ...who have a nearly limitless supply of offshore winds. Ooops.)

As for selling to the power company (they're resistant for multiple reasons ... can see the writing on the wall, and will find ways to cheat you ... sell to your neighbors at cost instead.

This HAS to be the future, kids. The sooner, and the cheaper, the bettter. Time to sell the buggy whips.

</comment><comment><USER48> Every time I see a headline like this it makes me think that I should work on some personal DIY projects related to solar to really appreciate the advances. Does anyone have experience or suggestions for cool projects to try?

</comment><comment><USER49> What happened to all the solar tariffs folks were stressing about?

<comment><USER50> It's in the article:

 _They also show that the efforts of the Trump administration to prop up fossil fuels at the expense of renewables aren't enough to push solar out to sea. The tariffs that Trump levied earlier this year against cheap solar panels imported from China could eventually dampen installations. Naam said they add roughly 10 percent to the price of utility-scale projects, but "at most, they move the price of solar back by about a year."_

It's still a significant cost added on and slows things down, but you can only do so much damage.

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> This gives me hope. We really do have both the technology, and the money, to cut our fossil fuel usage to almost zero, right now- and morally, there is no other choice.

<comment><USER52> That's just a part of electricity. We also need to tackle other major contributors like transportation, heating, concrete manufacturing and agriculture. And soon, for all of those.

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> In 2019 to reap the tax credit sunset every battery will fly off the shelf and get a few solar panels in front of it to qualify.

</comment><comment><USER54> If only we could do long transmission from one half of the earth and vice versa...

</comment><comment><USER55> This solution won't work if the sun ceases to emit light, therefore it's not fool proof.

I kid, but - why so much pessimistic "all or nothing" attitude on this?

</comment><comment><USER56> I sometimes wonder- if you have a superconducting "pipeline" along the earths rotation direction could those countrys where the sun is still "up" power those where the sun already has set?

<comment><USER57> China is doing something similar with its HVDC power lines.

</comment></comment><comment><USER58> Is Warren Buffett's Nevada holdings still thwarting progress of rooftop solar in the name of profits?

</comment><comment><USER59> Why is this a surprise? Solar costs have been falling for multiple decades.

NON-SURPRISING HEADLINE: "Falling Costs Are Actually Falling".

The important statistics to pay attention to are the implementations and if the components are recyclable not the cost per megawatt. Increasing renewable energy is important but not if you cannot recycle the components.

<comment><AUTHOR> Solar panels are easily recyclable. There is an operational pilot plant in France doing so.

[https://www.reuters.com/article/us-solar- recycling/europes-f...](https://www.reuters.com/article/us-solar- recycling/europes-first-solar-panel-recycling-plant-opens-in-france- idUSKBN1JL28Z)

Keep in mind, solar panels have a 25 year warranty, and after that will continue to produce power (at about 80% rates output). We have decades to get recycling infrastructure in place.

</comment></comment><comment><USER60> I would not trust a source called "earther.com" to tell me good news about solar because they're clearly going to be biased.

When power industry magazines talk about solar being cheap then i'll believe it

<comment><USER61> Is there anything specific about that source besides the name that increases your skepticism? By that logic, one could say that anyone posting under a pseudonym containing "sol" shouldn't be trusted when they comment on a solar topic either.

<comment><USER36> >Is there anything specific about that source besides the name that increases your skepticism?

1\. It's from the Gawker network, which is known for clickbait, yellow journalism, and half-truths.

2\. They don't cite their sources. All links (except 1) in the article just lead to past articles they've written. The only external link is about a report unrelated to the main article.

Here is a better article published a day before this one which gives more details and actually lists their sources.

[https://www.utilitydive.com/news/nv-energy-23-cent-solar- con...](https://www.utilitydive.com/news/nv-energy-23-cent-solar-contract- could-set-new-price-record/525610/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER62> The frustrating part about solar is that because the peak generation output doesn't line up with typical peak consumption ("the duck curve"), utilities need natgas peakers, which sit mostly idle, to fill in the gap. As solar installation grows, coal baseload falls behind due to cheap natgas, and nuclear languishes due to huge capex, established baseload capacity will decrease. From now on, new capacity will largely be a mix of natgas CC, natgas CT, solar, and wind. CCs (combined cycle) are most able to serve in baseload/load-following capacity, but if solar and wind are reliable for a particular interconnection, CTs (simple cycle) are cheaper to build, if less efficient to operate.

Much of the strategizing in the future will be about trying to find the right balance of CCs and CTs to complement intermittent and opportunistic (load- ignorant) renewables, while balancing an onslaught of new regulations and activists that will force battery storage as an issue. This is already happening now, well before battery storage is cost-competitive.

<comment><USER63> > The frustrating part about solar is that because the peak generation output > doesn't line up with typical peak consumption ("the duck curve"), utilities > need natgas peakers, which sit mostly idle, to fill in the gap.

Solar does line up with peak consumption. The duck curve is not a consumption curve, but a "Net Demand" curve -- the demand remaining after solar and generation is removed.

Peakers existed before solar. A typical load duration curve is a sideways "S" The peakers may run less than 5% of the year but are necessary to meet the hottest hours of the year.

<comment><USER21> > Solar does line up with peak consumption.

Not true according to [1], which shows peak consumption around 19:00, just as solar production drops to 0.

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

<comment><USER64> Looks like a fantastic opportunity to install a.c. which draws its energy in the middle of the day, hell you could probably just set the house to stay cold through the day and save.

<comment><USER65> If the cost of energy is free (PV source already paid for); there's no point in programmable thermostats.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: A search engine for jobs from lever.co - <AUTHOR> https://www.voorjob.com/ <comment><USER2> Interesting! How do you crawl the companies?

<comment><AUTHOR> I took most of the companies from the who is hiring thread, every four hours the app parses the landing page of each company and add new jobs.

So every day around 40 new jobs are added and a few that were closed by the companies get excluded

<comment><USER3> This is a cool idea. I've wondered when someone would come up with a way of scraping known remote companies career pages. Looks like it's pretty close to that.

Look forward to using in the future.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, I will keep improving it o/</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Porting Windows Dynamic Link Libraries to Linux - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/taviso/loadlibrary <comment><USER2> For context, this is used in the hardness for avscript, which is currently on the front page of Hacker News: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22544554](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22544554)

</comment><comment><USER3> A thread from 2017: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14405810](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14405810)

</comment><comment><USER4> Very nice. I wonder if rr can be used as well for reverse debugging a windows DLL on Linux.

</comment><comment><USER5> can this be used to run windows VSTs on Linux.

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

<comment><USER6> Programs like Airwave and Reaper can already be used to run Windows .DLL's on Linux without modification - or compilation. I've been using a few Windows- only VST Synth plugins on my Linux DAW for years ...</comment></comment>


Why Windows is not ready for general usage - <AUTHOR> http://grep.be/blog/en/computer/ui/windows_desktop

<comment><USER2> A lot of these complaints come from the perspective of a power linux user. 'General' is the wrong word to use.

</comment><comment><USER3> Very little of what the author describes is "general usage" IMO.</comment>