Ask HN: My Suspicion Regarding "M247 Ltd" - <AUTHOR> Around a year or two ago I noticed almost every single self-proclaimed No-logs VPN had started opening new servers with a provider called M247, which is based in Manchester, UK. At first it was nothing suspicious and maybe 20% of the VPN servers I used were operated by M247, and these were all servers in Europe, and there were no red flags or anything suspicious to me at the time.
However fast forward to the present day and I notice that M247 Ltd is operating an estimated 65-85% of these VPN servers, and 90% of the USA servers are operated by them. Now they have VPN exits everywhere. All over USA, all over Europe, they have some in Asia, even Australia. The fact that so many VPN servers are using their network concerns me for a number of reasons, the first being that with all the VPN traffic flowing through their network, there is now a target on their back by government organizations, etc, what's stopping them from putting DPI boxes on their upstream ISP, or forcing them to log all traffic?
The second is more concerning: What if M247 is just a front, not really a network provider at all but really an intelligence operation, created specifically so that VPN provider owners would rent servers with them so the traffic could be analyzed? I heard from some other sources that M247 has been known to conduct shady deals, etc. What if the government is offering up these servers for dirt cheap to VPN providers purposefully, and that is why they are all using them?
Another fishy thing that concerns me is the number of false names that M247 VPN IP addresses are registered with, previously I noticed they were all registered under the name "M247 Ltd" , "M247 Europe SRL" , "M247 Miami/Phoenix/etc Infrastructure" , but recently I notice they are registering their IP addresses under completely false names that don't turn up any results on google, such as "Ppman Services SRL" , "Secure Data Systems SRL" , "Venus Business Communications Limited" , "UK Web Solutions Limited" , "FirstClassIT Solutions" , and a few others that I can't remember at the time. These IPs all use the M247's ASN (AS9009) , and under "Organization" it does say "M247 Ltd" , but "ISP" says those false names.
Another strange thing I noticed was that they even used "Cogent Communications" as one of the false names attatched to some of their IP addresses (however just like usual Organization was M247 and AS was 9009). If they are a regular legal company, how can they possibly be making up ISP names out of thin air and using them, as well as using the name of an already existing network provier, Cogent.
All these signs point to M247 conducting some less than kosher business, whatever that may be. I'm now very suspicious of connecting to VPN servers where the ISP is M247, for fear that they are some kind of government front/data collection firm/etc. Has anyone other than myself felt suspicious of M247 and thinks they are up to something? Or better yet, is there anyone who knows more about them than I do who is willing to shed some light on them? <comment><USER2> I was an M247 colo customer in Manchester for approx 5 years. I went to their primary DC many times, interacted with their staff. They're a hosting company. The colo racks are full of servers with lots of little labels with different company names. The managed (and hence vps) racks are numerous and anonymous, which is what you'd expect. I'm not sure what you think is going on. They're cheap. They have excess capacity. So bottom-feeding race-to-the-bottom operators like VPN providers are buying from them. It doesn't seem too surprising.

</comment><comment><USER3> VPN organizations have a few characteristics i've noticed:

1) they're fairly cheap to run, so groups spin up from nowhere fast.

2) due to being cheap to run, they seem to gather industry newcomers with little experience who are seeking a low-hanging-fruit first project.

3) they have a quick business 'period'. They come fast and they go fast. Probably due to the low-experience and extreme competition in that sector.

4) they consolidate quickly into large groups, and those large groups are fairly fast to buy up smaller competition in an effort to control commodity price.

>What if the government is offering up these servers for dirt cheap to VPN providers purposefully, and that is why they are all using them?

I guess that's just dependent on the threat model you're abiding by. Most casual vpn-as-a-business isn't going to do much to protect from state level adversaries, anyway.

The same phenomenon has happened in the US on the vpn market a few times now. I haven't checked recently, but a good chunk of exit structure was owned by London Trust Media last time I checked, a group that's affiliated with PIA and KAPE.

I can appreciate the suspicion. I think that it's warranted; but personally i'm of the opinion that the market consolidation is more due to the nature of the product and the market that it exists within. Whether or not a state group is gaming that consolidation.. I would suspect yes, but hold no proof.

</comment><comment><USER4> I am a long-term customer (Colocation and dedicated servers) of M247.ro (I am from Germany) and I am more than happy with their service. They are super reliable, reputable, flexible and their support is fast, friendly and gets the job done.

I can vouch for them and don't think they have anything to do with what you accuse them of. They are just a big company with a lot of locations, which makes it fairly easy for VPN companies to get started.

Regarding the IP addresses... They announce IPs for free, which is a very nice service (some providers charge absurd amounts for it). They also do it for my company, so my IPs show up under their ASN, but this is nothing shady and just regular business.

</comment><comment><USER5> For the false names thing, are you by chance doing whois lookups on IP addresses? If so then that's just the messy nature of the beast. One issue is that WHOIS records don't get updated sometimes, but what you're seeing is most likely the legitimate owner of the IP. So, someone else (coge t in your example) may own the IP, but if they purchase transit from that IP owner, the IP will be delegated to them but still owned by Cogent.

As for the rest of your concerns. First, I would like to see some empirical data on your research. Second,what is your security model? VPNs are not that great at anonymity.

You're not trying to hide from a global adversary (like nsa,gru,gchq,etc..) Using VPNs right...because even slapping Tor on that won't help you there.

My theory is that they're cheap enough as a resellerand they target VPN providers as customers because there is a lot less support cost with them.

The thing about suspicions and conspiracies is that they mean little without independently corroborating evidence. Try to collect facts that prove your suspicion.

<comment><USER6> Do you think the nsa, gru, gchq have broken tor?

<comment><USER7> The Snowden leaks suggested that they had not broken Tor, at the time of the leaks. There are "global passive adversary" timing correlation attacks which have had papers written about them and could conceivably be performed by some large intelligence agencies, especially if they cooperated with each other to do so, by using their power to observe country-scale network traffic.

<comment><USER5> Too lazy to look up the source but part of the leaks (and a separate leak too I believe?) Was how they have been working on what you said along with basically running a lot of the relay's and combinig that with their existing internet traffic visibility. I don't so much think they've broken it,more like they can de-anonymize who is visiting hidden sites or going out of exits with good enough accuracy.

Oh,and after the raid in so many dark web markets,people now pretty much presume this is the case, they deanonymize and inform law enforcement so they can back track the evidence trail (parallel reconstruction). A lot of dark web trading has just moved to places like telegram

<comment><USER7> That doesn't sound right. I don't think they had much success. The presentation seemed largely resigned.

Every dark web arrest I've seen has been caused by terrible operational security (e.g. having a Gmail account traceable to the admin of the dark web site) rather than a break of Tor.

<comment><USER5> The snowden slides are from 2008 mostly right? I think the article I read was describing how around this time gchq started collaborating with the NSA and CIA because the Tor problem was growing bigger and bigger. Their current capabilities are unknown, but their last known public plan was to control more Tor nodes and retroactively deanonymize Tor flows iirc.

For the dark web stuff, the opsec failure is supposedly parallel reconstruction.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> For what it's worth you can find out a bit of background about UK companies - directors, submitted accounts etc - by using the website of Companies House. You can generally just search for "Company Name Companies House" and it'll bring up the company you're looking for.

Here's M247: [https://beta.companieshouse.gov.uk/company/04968341](https://beta.companieshouse.gov.uk/company/04968341)

There's a reasonable amount of information about the company in their full accounts from March 2018 (PDF, 650K): [https://beta.companieshouse.gov.uk/company/04968341/filing-h...](https://beta.companieshouse.gov.uk/company/04968341/filing- history/MzIyNTYyODczN2FkaXF6a2N4/document?format=pdf&download=0)

<comment><USER9> They're late on filing their current reports with Companies House.

<comment><USER10> That's absolutely normal for companies of all sizes, although it's often correlated with financial struggles.

Edit: they are not actually late, the deadline is the end of this month.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Absolutely nothing about the trustworthiness of a provider or of their upstreams prevents a national government from tapping the lines in and out.

Assume your VPN traffic is monitored, because it is, regardless of how much you trust or don't trust your provider or their network.

</comment><comment><USER12> M247 are a large UK DC/Network operator, grown through a number of acquisitions. All your seeing here is their large number of data center and connectivity customers, I don't see anything suspicious.

</comment><comment><USER13> Excellent observation and you are very correct, at least as much as I can tell.

If you look at my previous posts on HN I've written extensively about this topic.

Ignore some (but not all) of the dissenters on here. I don't mean to be rude, but these fake hosting companies are backed by quite the army of pr crisis tech support people, and they will dogpile on a thread like this quickly. You'll sometimes see them leave Yelp and Google Local reviews of their beloved friendly neighborhood data center too (which is preposterous no one does this in real life).

Anyway the clusters you are seeing do not appear to be about observation as much as destruction. From the analysis that I and others have done, our best guess is that someone is buying out hosting provider after hosting provider, and then peering at the 1 Gbs and 10 Gbs level as much as possible.

The purpose of this is two fold. First you are denying your enemy freedom of movement in that area. So think "squatting" or just taking up the board in monopoly.

The second more disturbing piece is that someone is building a kind of DDOS death star that will be unlike anything seen so far. From all the papers I've read, such an attack is likely to come through some novel IOT exploit and perhaps using one of the newer protocols like MQTT or COAP. But owning this much hosting space would be a terrific backup / serve as good defense for the expected counter attack.

This does not bode well at all for Europe. Even if the internet was off for months in the US the country could recover and rearm. All of Europe on the other hand, if stripped of the internet, could be overtaken in weeks if not days if Russia or China were so motivated.

The enormous capital expenditures that these IaaS providers have been sustaining points to China most certainly. Check out also Choopa, Tucows, Enom, Psychz, Shaw, Sharktech, Joe's Data Center, Hetzner, UnityMedia, Incapsula, and Mimecast.

This report is also very helpful : [https://transparencyreport.google.com/safe- browsing/malware](https://transparencyreport.google.com/safe-browsing/malware)

</comment><comment><USER10> I might be biased and paranoid because of where I live, but... to me, this post reads like trying to harm M247's reputation. I mean, the address stuff is pretty ridiculous for anyone who works in the business, and the market- strategy considerations are akin to me saying AWS targets the news market so that the US government can shut down all those sites when they feel like, just because a lot of news sites are hosted on AWS.

</comment><comment><USER14> Do you believe an intelligence agency that wants visibility into VPN traffic lacks the ability to cover their tracks?

</comment><comment><USER15> I am a customer of M247; I'm happy with their service and haven't noticed anything shady going on. "Venus Business Communications" seems to be their old company name (they've been through several acquisitions) and is still the billing name when paying them by bank transfer.

</comment><comment><USER16> I am a customer of M247. The reason I use them, and I imagine a lot of VPN provider use them, is because you can get a dozen points of presence all over Europe while only having to deal with one provider/invoice. I think you are just seeing market effects at work.

<comment><USER17> But when it comes to VPN providers, this is something to be concerned about. Data privacy laws in GB are questionable at best. After GB leaves the EU, even more so. I don't know enough about M247 to say this a conspiracy, but I wouldn't personally use any data privacy service based in GB.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Are you trying to hide from the NSA, FBI, China, or Disney?

If you're a pirate, I wouldn't worry. Likewise if you're a Chinese dissident or tax cheat. The NSA isn't going to blow its cover over Frozen 2 or your $3 million bitcoin wallet. Recent news accounts also suggest that the Feds are dismissing child porn cases rather than disclosing methods.

That leaves espionage and terrorism. If you're involved in those, maybe going cheap on a vpn isn't best practices to begin with.

<comment><USER19> > The NSA isn't going to blow its cover over Frozen 2 or your $3 million > bitcoin wallet.

Parallel construction means they don't have to.

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

<comment><USER10> Nobody is going to parallel-construct for a few movies, unless you make a business out of streaming pirate movies (in which case you kinda deserve it).</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Why is there so little programming related content on HN? - <AUTHOR> Is the profession getting stale or boring? <comment><USER2> As someone who browses here most days, it seems packed full of programming related content. Perhaps this is a matter of perspective dependent on your individual programming background?

Quick straw poll as of right now: 4 of the top 5 on the front page are programming related (the 5th is an Ars article about Donkey Kong).

Out of the entire front page 30, there's:

\- 13 programming related,

\- 5 about the use of software,

\- 1 about an arcade game (also software, I guess)

\- 2 about Google/Facebook as companies,

\- 2 about physics,

\- 1 about office space/working environments,

\- 1 about stock options (an unusually low number for a YC news site),

\- 1 about sewerage,

\- 3 about the history of spoken language,

\- and then this post.

<comment><USER3> Small nitpick: I'd relate "about office space/working environments," also to programming, because this is an important aspect of professional software development.

<comment><USER4> Yeah, and Trump's immigration policies impact the mood and even composition of your team, so that's also programming related.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> IMO, there was big churn 1990-2015 in people's attitudes about the right way to develop software. This manifested in lots of discussion about languages, platforms, program architectures, hardware, etc.

Since I started reading HN around 2010, I perceive that interest in these topics has decreased. There has been convergence/compromise: some static typing probably good, favor pure functions, C pointers too risky, pay attention to object layout in memory, comfort with phone apps, etc.

I think we are entering a new era when people are going to focus more on advanced applications of technology. Using technology to communicate and store/retrieve data is no longer novel. IMO, HN still has a lot of content from the previous era that feels boring. It's programming content, but not cutting edge.

Edit: not saying there is nothing interesting left to do in systems fields, but the next challenges will be things like formal verification, making massively parallel stuff easy, distributed systems as language primitives, etc.

Edit2: HN also has lots of good content in the latter category, just wish it were a larger percentage of the mix :)

<comment><USER6> From my point of view, we are still firmly in the "software crisis" era. We can build software with limited functionality in a reasonable time, but we are not able to grow it without hitting various kinds of complexity ceilings fairly quickly. Plenty of today's software development is just a succession of painful choices on what to leave behind in just another rewrite.

Formal verification is a way to go, but given how people struggle with application of the most elementary usages of types, I am not optimistic.

<comment><USER7> Formal verification and other protections resulting from strong static typing are less popular probably because of their delayed gratification effects - they're seen as unnecessarily constricting in small projects and their benefits are only seen as projects are grown and maintained over long periods of time, so it's difficult to justify their use early in the project when the decision is initially made.

I think that it's easier to justify rigor in traditional engineering projects (i.e. civil engineering) where project delivery dates are necessarily far off in the future - if you need to delay gratification anyway then you might as well adopt a more rigorous process. But in software engineering, where you can start delivering almost immediately, it's more difficult to get project owners and managers to see the value of rigor, especially if the project isn't yet known to have a long lifetime.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> HN suffers the same problems that almost all voting-to-rank-submissions based social media websites suffer.

Namely, because each user gets one vote, having 100 users want to give your post 1 point is more valuable than having 10 users want to give your post 10 points.

As long as you've got enough technical depth that people will give you 1 point, it's appealing to a broad audience, not catering better to a core audience, that will get you to the front page.

Hence, there's no room on the HN front page for an article that turns a 9/10 Whatever user into a 10/10 Whatever user - only for articles turning a non- user into a 2/10 user, with little to interest a 9/10 user.

<comment><USER9> Very often this is true for books as well. There is way more market for a book which starts you on an application or language. But if you are very deeply into a topic, getting to the next level won't be a book. It'll be blog posts, Stackoverflow, blood, sweat and tears. I haven't bought a book since the 3rd ed of Chris Date: SQL and Relational Theory (but that's a very useful book!).

<comment><USER10> Do conference presentations/papers help people who are deeply into a topic? F2F with mentors? Would you pay for expert/advanced content development, e.g. crowdfund in your niche? Alternately, would you contribute expert-level content to a crowdfunded book?

<comment><USER9> I would absolutely pay, through the nose, for a good treatise on more advanced SQL techniques like (recursive) CTEs.

And also, I would contribute in depth Drupal topics, I already wrote two chapters of Bookzilla (aka. The Definitive Guide to Drupal 7) and also wrote countless articles in the nineties, I've been a columnist later an editor of the biggest computer monthly in Hungary.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> _Why is there so little programming related content on HN?_

Most programming articles and blog posts have _extremely_ limited appeal. They generally need to be on a platform you use, with a language you know, and about an algorithm or tool you might find useful. Things that get up voted on HN also need to be new(ish) and broadly appealing to a group of people who are also interested in startups.

<comment><USER12> Further exacerbating that effect: for any particular silo or specific language any one programmer deals with there is already one or more dedicated language specific news hubs.

Those articles aren't just competing for attention here in a broader sense, HN is also competing for that kind of attention against core community sites.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> The submission guidelines recommend "Anything that good hackers would find interesting."

That's more than just programming and programming-related topics.

Has that really changed on HN? What was it like 5 or 10 years ago? Without that information, it's hard to tell if there is even a signal from which to draw an inference.

<comment><USER14> [http://www.waybackhn.com/?date=2007-02-19](http://www.waybackhn.com/?date=2007-02-19)

<comment><USER13> Next would be to gather statistics.

Here's one statistics. Fully 10 of the first 20 links have succumbed to linkrot.

<comment><USER15> A random fact, yet one that I still find really sad.

It's far too easy to believe that "research in history" would be so much easier in the internet age.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> It's there, lots of it:

[https://hn.algolia.com/?query=programming&sort=byDate&prefix...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=programming&sort=byDate&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=story)

Seeing nothing but posts like 'Ten functional programming secrets' and 'Why this framework is the new React' would become boring fast (although these submissions are cyclical).

It's called Hacker _News_ so what typically graces the front-page of this website is new content on topics that intersect with programming/technology. And I love it for that.

</comment><comment><USER17> I completely agree, I got downvoted to hell in another thread for implying this but I think its true - HN has grown/jumped ths shark, it used to be startups people and devs and the content reflected it, now HN audience seems to be anyone in a slightly technical role or industry. There was a sweet spot for a while where we had a lot of stimulatingand diverse comversation about good topics but now I find too much noise in the feed.

If Im right (the HN admins will know by checking the user counts), maybe HN should split up unto subboards, have dedicated web dev or ML sections etc.

<comment><USER18> Complaints about HN's quality declining are practically as old as the site itself[0, 1], as is the mistaken belief that HN is _intended_ to be exclusively about programming and technical content (leading to the mistaken conclusion that the presence of non-technical content is a sign of HN "turning into Reddit", which is common enough that there used to be an explicit rule about it[2].)

If you want to see better content, post better content, or put more effort into the quality of your comments.

[0][https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5781854](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5781854)

[1][https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1198041](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1198041)

[2][https://hn.algolia.com/?query=HN](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=HN) turning into reddit

<comment><USER19> HN had a major Eternal September crisis in 2011, which was widely acknowledged by many users, and Paul Graham himself. It got to the point where he experimented with the gamification aspects of the site in a token attempt to slow the decline. Naturally, at the time, many folks also made comments similar to yours. That was 7 years ago. The good ol' HN is never coming back, at least not here, but that's no justification for denying it ever existed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> What do you mean no programming? Almost everything here is about programming [https://i.imgur.com/8MqGba5.png](https://i.imgur.com/8MqGba5.png)

<comment><USER21> "Almost everything here" would be 9/21?

<comment><USER22> It's 11/21.

<comment><USER23> I found it..interesting that this very story isn't tagged as being about programming in the pic.

(disclosure: _Gödel, Escher, Bach_ was the first book I really loved.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> More like "software is eating the world" \- everything seems to be SW-related, drowning out content that's directly relevant to programming. OTOH, I've read many programming articles linked from HN in the past few days alone, so from my POV, there's only more other content, not less programming content.

<comment><AUTHOR> would there be a way to filter out this content? I know HN doesn't want to be as fragment as reddit, but I guess many of us don't have the time to sift through huge piles of submissions each day.

<comment><USER24> [https://hn.algolia.com/?query=hn%20filter&sort=byPopularity&...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=hn%20filter&sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=story)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I think this becomes true when any programming website becomes popular. Just look at reddit.

Highly technical programming articles can be hard to digest and don't appeal to a wide audience so they get less upvotes, especially if it's about a specialized language. If you really wanted to read those articles, you could still find them in abundance on other programming/hacking/specialized forums.

<comment><USER26> There was a noticeable drop in quality on HN after we started allowing political content. I think it's brought in a new crowd of HN users. I remember how in 2006 to 2010 Reddit changed from a place mostly frequented by programmers to a place filled with memes, trolling, and politics.

Edit: I generally hate the "the past was better" type of attitudes but I think in the case of HN and Reddit one just needs to look at the quality of 6 years ago to today.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Most of the content on HN appears to be about business, rather than about programming itself, or focuses on lucrative but technically-uninteresting corners of programming (like web design). This business focus makes sense, since HN is run by a VC firm and a lot of non-technical users who would like to run tech companies hang out here.

There's a related category: technically-uninteresting posts about technically- uninteresting projects that are essentially advertising for some small business. This is probably, again, related to HN being run by a VC firm.

(For context: I browse HN daily, but I never use the front page -- the values of the average HN user are far away from mine, so sorting by newest produces more interesting content. If you find the HN frontpage devoid of posts about programming, try sorting by newness rather than popularity, since technically- interesting stuff gets fewer upvotes here than wide-audience stuff about cryptocurrency or large corporations.)

</comment><comment><USER28> I think you've somehow misunderstood the purpose of this website.

The guidelines here describe desired content as: "anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."

Aside from the fact that most of the content here is programming related, if it's not enough for you, your best course of action is to seek out actual programming forums.

</comment><comment><USER29> Define 'boring'. Boring for me would be an homogeneous stream of code babble, possibly in mainstream languages that barely interest me.

Also worth noting that languages/ecosystems grow kind of slowly, HN couldn't be possibly entirely filled every day with quality programming content.

</comment><comment><USER30> The act of programming itself is surprisingly hard to talk about in a way that isn't boring. There are some people that livestream it and I find this incomprehensible.

Programming _languages_ are tremendously specific, have their own communities, and move slowly.

<comment><USER31> In the same way that architecture is more fun to talk about than bricklaying I imagine. One is open ended big picture stuff with interesting no real right answer, the other is the finer points of a specific implementation which depends on context.

Actual programming shop talk I normally reserve for work because it's going to be different for everyone and I want to think about fun stuff when I am not coding. It could still be about coding or what we can achieve with software, but the nitty gritty details of coding is just too context specific for general chatter and really works best between people working on similar projects.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Could some of the perception be because of time of day when reading HN? I feel there is some different content when I'm awake (EU), compared to next morning when US has been awake and voted on stuff.

</comment><comment><USER33> Hackers aren't only interested in programming.

</comment><comment><USER34> Perhaps you're referring to programming in the small. In which case reddit or a number of other websites would be more appropriate.

</comment><comment><USER35> Programming really is simulating the world, through code. If you don't understand the world well enough you can't be a good programmer.

Which is why programming is largely meta-math.

This also happens to make programmers some of the most awesome people. You have to use various mental models to view the world in a way that help you simulate it.

So we have to talk and discuss about everything here.

</comment><comment><USER36> Looking at the top ten just now, five of them are programming-related. (The others are social networking, UI, computer games, physics, and the London fatberg)

Of the next ten, another five are also programming-related. (The others are either business-related, about automation, or this post.)

So it looks rather like 50% of HN is programming-related. (From a tiny sample- size, admittedly.)

</comment><comment><USER37> It's easier to "engage" with non-prog stuff when you're sitting 9h/d coding. Balance and diversity.

</comment><comment><USER38> Not really what you're asking but I like lobste.rs for more tech-focus and less politics/startup/other related content. Posts are also tagged so it's easier to find something interesting.

<comment><USER39> Never heard of lobsters before. Thanks. I'm in the IRC channel hunting for an invite :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> Interesting,I have been asking myself something completely opposite to your question. Why is there so little of security news on HN.

I mean,I have nothing against using the word "hacker" to mean "someone who finds new and creative programming/CS solutions". But I find the obvious meaning of "someone who works for or against computer security" hard to avoid.

There is so much security news going around daily that I have to personally keep up with. I see little to none of that content on HN.

But I do quite often find useful programming and crypto articles,questions and discussions on here.

</comment><comment><USER41> might be that the average hacker simply isn't interesting only in programming.

</comment><comment><USER42> check 'show' tab for programming content

</comment><comment><USER43> If you are looking for more hardcore programming stuff take a look at lobste.rs

<comment><USER44> I read it a fair bit. Can you or anyone here invite me there? Been here for 10 years, largely reading/talking dev topics for the most part, but just never known anyone personally with an account there to get me in there. Thx =)

<comment><USER45> Done. Check your email.

<comment><USER46> Oooooooo! If you have a spare invite can you please send one to firstname.lastname@example.com ? :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> Are you joking?

</comment><comment><USER48> The profession was always stale and boring once you become aware of the meta cycles and boom-busts of concepts and buzzwords.

Real new concepts are rare under the sun by now. New Problems, are usually old problems rediscovered by new Programmers.</comment>


How Do We Achieve an Open, Secure, Trustworthy, and Inclusive Internet? - <AUTHOR> https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/06/how-do-we-achieve-open-secure-trustworthy-and-inclusive-internet <comment><USER2> You need peer-to-peer, fully encrypted applications. Sites are coordinated with a "publish-subscribe" mechanism. You put up a service on your local machine (chat, webserver, etc) You "publish" the IP address and public key your site. You "subscribe" to a site using the IP address and public key.

We used to run bulletin board systems (BBS) in this fashion. It worked rather well.

Peer-to-peer cuts out the big server guys (Google, Facebook, etc.) They can no longer gather your data. Encryption end-to-end makes it impossible to insert ads. It makes it hard to gather data.

We need more peer-to-peer, fully end-to-end encrypted publish/subscribe software.</comment>


President Trump suspends visas for tech workers. What may it cause? - <AUTHOR> President Trump's Administration suspends H-1B visas provided to foreign workers. Espesially it may affect tech-industry and outsourcing in general. As you can see from this article there're lots of activities outsourced nowadays in States. What do you think? Will that show up on the economy if somethimes we can say that foreign intellectual capital is basically the driving force of U.S. development? https://goo.gl/UEJ6zF <comment><USER2> [http://archive.is/intetics.com](http://archive.is/intetics.com)

maybe HN should have a bot that creates an archive.is dump for any submitted short-URL?</comment>


Silver: A free implementation of Swift for .NET, Java, Android, and Cocoa - <AUTHOR> http://elementscompiler.com/elements/silver/ <comment><USER2> I'm curious to know how well it performs. I spent the better part of this weekend rewriting 4k lines of Swift in Objective-C because I couldn't deal with the 60-90 second compile times.

<comment><USER3> Swift has some land mine issues where the compiler can hit snags handling certain snippets of code (e.g casting to/from Any/AnyObject, method overloading based on constraints, etc) which if you have enough of them will segfault the compiler with something along the lines of "expression too complicated, break it down".

I've had to rewrite my approach a few times because of this to avoid certain coding techniques, but once I've rewritten to avoid them, Swift can happily compile my 7-8k LOC code-base in ~6s.

<comment><USER4> Is there a list somewhere of Swift compiler issues to avoid? Seems like "avoiding certain coding techniques" is what is currently necessary until Apple gets back on top of things...

One other example FWIW: having a largish array of Int arrays causes the compiler to either go into an endless loop or simply take too long, UNLESS the type of the array is specified.

var data = [[1,2,3],[4,5,6], ... ] // > 20 elements -> compiler hangs

as opposed to:

var data:[[Int]] = [[1,2,3],[4,5,6], ... ] // compiles quickly

<comment><USER3> Finding Swift really buggy atm - where XCode, Swift Compiler and SourceCode service routinely crashes multiple times a day for me. A lot of my time is spent sympathizing with the compiler and getting hit with hard fought lessons on what things to avoid - basically don't step too far outside the Swift Programming Guide. Apple's also glacially slow at responding to bug reports - I'm keenly waiting on the next Q/A release of XCode/Swift.

There's a whole repo dedicated to Swift compiler crashes being maintained at: [https://github.com/practicalswift/swift-compiler- crashes](https://github.com/practicalswift/swift-compiler-crashes)

<comment><USER5> If only this had been a language that was dogfooded to the rest of the company, we might not be dealing with these beta-like issues.

<comment><USER6> I think it was - the first app written in Swift was Apple's WWDC app. Released before they announced Swift. Though it wasn't a hugely complex app.

<comment><USER7> Dogfooding usually implies that the technology is used in mainline business operations. It needs to be more than building a demo, it needs to provide sustenance.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Reading through the details dampened my excitement. It has proprietary extensions to the Swift language ([http://docs.elementscompiler.com/Silver/LanguageExtensions/](http://docs.elementscompiler.com/Silver/LanguageExtensions/)) and it has differences and limitations as well. ([http://docs.elementscompiler.com/Silver/DifferencesAndLimita...](http://docs.elementscompiler.com/Silver/DifferencesAndLimitations/)).

They do however state it is free for use.

<comment><USER9> I don't have time to look, but when I signed up, I was given the option for a free trial and the option to spend $500+ depending on the package. I'll have to look closer, but I suspect this is xaraminesque.

<comment><USER10> The Swift part of it is free. The C# and Oxygene parts cost, which aren't needed to develop in Swift.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Looks pretty shady. Proprietary code through-and-through, and it's "cross platform" because it compiles down to their own proprietary language. It's unclear how you deal with native libraries, if at all.

I'll pass, thanks.

<comment><USER12> Not only that, but good luck keeping up with Apple's developments once they start buckling down and updating the language.

<comment><USER13> We have a long history of doing more than "keeping up" ;)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Cool! But, is it possible that this violates Apple's TOS or any legal limitation on use of the Swift language? I remember there being a lot of heated discussion about making Swift officially open source back when it was announced, but I don't recall ever hearing anyone suggest a community project to make an OSS compiler for it. This is most interesting, but I'd love to know that Apple would be okay with this, or would have no recourse to shut it down, prior to putting in the time to pick it up.

<comment><USER15> Programming languages cannot be copyrighted. It doesn't look like they've reimplemented any Apple APIs, so there wouldn't appear to be any room for an Oracle-style lawsuit claiming that standard library code was copied.

I don't know what the trademark situation might be, though.

<comment><USER16> > Programming languages cannot be copyrighted

Are you sure? I'm genuinely curious to see a reference/precedent. Also, does that restrict patentability of programming language features? (I personally can see PLs not being copyrightable, but being patentable.)

<comment><USER15> For Europe, there's [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAS_Institute_Inc_v_World_Progr...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAS_Institute_Inc_v_World_Programming_Ltd).

There's not really any case law I'm aware of in the US, mostly because nobody's ever tried. Copyright doesn't cover "facts, ideas, systems, or methods of operation". You can trademark the name of a language, and its documentation and any distributed software are under copyright, but the process required to translate that language into machine code isn't eligible for copyright.

Parts of the implementation might be patentable, but I don't know of any cases of anyone successfully patenting a programming language.

The Oracle vs. Google lawsuit is still going back and forth in the courts. It's worth noting that even Oracle isn't claiming that the parts of Android that involve parsing and compiling Java code are infringing on their copyright. The matter of controversy is that they claim copyright on the design of the Java standard library.

Swift's standard library is pretty much Cocoa, which isn't being rewritten here.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> They should make it 100% free for students. Once they graduate and enter the workforce they will recommend this tool to employers.

<comment><USER18> I believe it's free for everyone.

> RemObjects Silver is absolutely free of charge to use, both during the > current beta period, and once we release the shipping version.

<comment><USER19> Silver itself might be free, but I think only if you bought the compiler already,

[http://elementscompiler.com/elements/pricing.aspx](http://elementscompiler.com/elements/pricing.aspx)

<comment><USER20> > Silver itself might be free, but I think only if you bought the compiler > already,

so it isn't free software at all.

<comment><USER13> We make three compilers. Oxygene, C# and Swift. The Swift compiler is/will be completely free use for everybody — no purchase required.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Genuinely curious.

Why Swift for multi-platform rather than C#, Clojure, JavaScript, or <insert other language here>?

<comment><USER15> Swift is statically typed, so it doesn't really compete with JS or Clojure. The company already has a C# implementation for sale.

Also, Swift was designed to compile to native code, unlike any of the other three languages.

<comment><USER21> .NET has NGEN since 1.0.

<comment><USER15> Sorry, I was imprecise.

Swift was designed for the iOS platform as a replacement for Apple's dialect of Objective C. This is an unmanaged environment. There's no VM or garbage collection, although both languages support automatic reference counting.

C# was designed for the CLR and has a large standard library that relies on garbage collection. It also has features permitting calls into unmanaged code, but the language was still designed for a VM.

<comment><USER21> Except there isn't any VM when the code is AOT compiled to native code with NGEN, MDIL in Windows Phone 8, .NET Native, or in iOS.

The presence of garbage collection has nothing to do with being native or not.

Besides a language runtime and VM aren't the same thing.

Actually Swift makes use of Objective-C runtime to achieve interoperability with Objective-C libraries.

Oberon, Oberon-2, Modula-3, Component Pascal, D, Spec#, Dafny are all examples of languages that compile to native code, were used to write operating systems and use garbage collection.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Anyone interested in building open source parser API for Swift? Join me here

[http://compilerjobs.com/db/jobs_view.php?editid1=984](http://compilerjobs.com/db/jobs_view.php?editid1=984)

If parser API succeeds, we will also target making a compiler.

<comment><USER12> What are the legalities?

<comment><USER22> Swift is just a language specification. It cannot be patented or copyright-ed. Anyone is free to make tools around the language specification. Just like there are many compilers for C/C++ on different platforms, we intend to make one for Swift on Linux/Windows.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> The fact that arrays and dictionaries are classes rather than structs is a major problem with this. That's a massive semantic difference between their implementation and Apple's, and it's one that won't show up as a compile-time error. Taking code written for Apple's implementation and using it on Silver is likely to result in a nightmare of crazy debugging trying to track down all the cases where you're now sharing arrays/dictionaries rather than copying them. This really needs to be fixed, and if it's truly impossible, IMO it's bad enough that the thing should be scrapped.

</comment><comment><USER24> This looks interesting, although adding language extensions makes me a bit nervous. What's the ABI compatibility story when targeting Cocoa? Can I mix and match with native Swift classes? Is the native Swift runtime used?

<comment><USER10> The language extensions are there to support concepts that don't exist in Swift, for example await and exception handling are pretty much a requirement when targetting .NET and Java/Android.

It's ABI compatible with Cocoa, all classes end up usable from Cocoa.

It does not use the swift runtime.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> I just want to write web apps in Swift. Any news on that front?

<comment><USER26> So much this. It'd be an excellent alternative to Go, with it's nice type system and pretty advanced PL features: I'd love to write web services in Swift, but that's contingent on being able to deploy it to Linux et al.

<comment><USER27> Maybe you should check out OCaml then. It can be deployed to Linux/Windows/Mac OS X without problems, ARM devices. Offers native compilation and can even be compiled to JavaScript. The compiler is fast and freely available.

The type systems is even better and more advanced. Coming from Swift I was kinda surprised that its pattern matching was a statement and not an expression, as typical functional languages do.

<comment><USER28> The state of OCaml documentation is not great... I have had such a pain finding documentation. Generally, the only source for it is the French university that created/promotes it [0]. But even their pages are often almost a decade old and I have frequently found errors in the documentation.

Overall, while OCaml is a truly beautiful language (and I do really enjoy writing in it[1]), it is really tough to get work done efficiently because so few resources seem to exist.

With that said, I discovered a mod_ocaml Apache module implementation[2] (that is really outdated and not very efficient) and moved it to github. (I am not the author, nor have I had time to work on it either.) But if there was any interest in reviving this, I'd certainly give it a go. This seems to be a potentially viable way to increase interest in server-side OCaml usage.

[0] [http://caml.inria.fr/resources/doc/index.en.html](http://caml.inria.fr/resources/doc/index.en.html)

[1] [https://github.com/eatonphil/owebl](https://github.com/eatonphil/owebl)

[2] [https://github.com/eatonphil/mod_ocaml](https://github.com/eatonphil/mod_ocaml)

<comment><USER27> > The state of OCaml documentation is not great... I have had such a pain > finding documentation. Generally, the only source for it is the French > university that created/promotes it.

That might have been true 5 years ago, but the OCaml Community site [0] is rather easy to find and links to many tutorials and books. Among these is the excellent Real World OCaml [1] book which is pretty great for experienced developers switching languages and available in print and freely online. Other resources for more beginning programmers exist as well. The INRIA resources are, indeed, rather poor and except fro the language reference, rather outdated.

Directly programming for Apache hasn't been popular for years now in any language I know (actually, only mod_php is popular, if at all, mod_python is completely dead and no idea about mod_perl). Usually languages have their own servers that get reverse-proxied by a frontend server like Apache or Nginx. And for this purpose Ocsigen [2] has been available (allowing an front-and- backend OCaml approach). If something simpler is desired, CoHTTP [3] exists, which is both a HTTP client and server. Reviving mod_ocaml is, in my opinion a waste of time and effort.

[0] [http://ocaml.org/](http://ocaml.org/)

[1] [https://realworldocaml.org/](https://realworldocaml.org/)

[2] [http://ocsigen.org/](http://ocsigen.org/)

[3] [https://github.com/mirage/ocaml-cohttp](https://github.com/mirage/ocaml- cohttp)

<comment><USER28> Great points. I was being too vague. My biggest gripe was that I could only learn more of the syntax from the INRIA documentation. The books and OCaml websites definitely covered a lot of general programming recipes and more common paradigms. Ultimately since there were still so few examples I always ended up having to look at the actual language reference for useful information. As we're aware though, it is outdated. In particular, I found really getting a handle on object-oriented OCaml was tough. Probably just because other aspects of OCaml could be guessed/inferred from SML/*ML documentation.

My comments on mod_ocaml were also a little vague. When I began server-side programming I loved mod_php because of how simple it was. I only brought up mod_ocaml because (if it worked) it is probably the single easiest way to start writing ocaml web pages. Given, it is absolutely not performant whatsoever. I just kinda saw it as a gateway from hobbyist-level interest.

Thanks for all your resources though!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> So does it mean I can finally develop apps in Swift language on Windows? Very cool!

</comment><comment><USER30> I hope this doesn't come across as rude, but I can't tell from the site: will this be "free" as in open source or "free" as in freeware?

<comment><USER15> This appears to be another language frontend for their existing proprietary compiler.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> "Anyways" is not standard, might want to change that on the landing page.

I would have just pinged privately but I don't see any contact link on the page.

</comment><comment><USER32> Why not create a Swift Compiler and Toolchain for LLVM?

<comment><USER19> Actually it's possible this compiler uses LLVM under the hood - many compilers do these days.

This particular one appears to not be open source, though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> So, is the Java version now a JVM language, like Scala and Groovy? Can I use it in IntelliJ or do I have to use this IDE they made?

<comment><USER34> > is the Java version now a JVM language, like Scala and Groovy

I guess so, ditto with .net and android -- that's what happens when a programming language creator, here Apple, specs out a language at the same time they implement it. Could be why Swift is getting many implementations whereas a language only paying lip service to the idea of a spec, say Groovy after Dec 1995, is still stuck on one impl.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Make a cross plattform game framework to this - as good as SpriteKit and I'm set. :)

Otherwise I have to go with HaXe

<comment><USER36> Actually I am really of the opposite opinion! Since I am not interested in developing games but rather in cross-platform support I think that Silver is what Haxe should have been!

<comment><USER35> We're not of the opposite opinion then ;-) I think Silver is also what HaXe should have been!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> These folks started out with a product to integrate Delphi with .Net.

</comment><comment><USER38> A closed-source compiler? In 2015?

<comment><USER13> People who want to make a living writing software? in 2015? I know, the idea seems quaint.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> It's not open source.

</comment><comment><USER40> Apple needs to buy this company in 3, 2, 1... This is an ideal start to countering the concepts from Xamarin out of the .net camp and I would love to see them build up some form of XAML-like UI tech and tooling for x-plat UI dev so you could push the envelope on code-reuse. That would take a big dump of capital.

It would also make for a push in the market for this style of x-plat dev. If you can get to the major and minor platforms with one code-base and a single- stack dev team, oh what a smooth world it could be.

Windows 10 on all devices, written in Swift to a universal in visual studio. Wonder if I'd get to see a macbook running windows with a dev writing swift in VS.

<comment><USER41> What possible reason would Apple have to buy this company?

<comment><USER42> Indeed, Swift is their way to keep developers building non-portable apps.</comment></comment></comment>


Covfefify a string - <AUTHOR> https://codegolf.stackexchange.com/questions/123685/covfefify-a-string <comment><USER2> The codegolf stackexchange site never seizes to amaze me.</comment>


Mensa Welcomes Its First Robo-Member - <AUTHOR> https://www.us.mensa.org/newsroom/press-releases/mensa-welcomes-its-first-robo-member/ <comment><USER2> About time! Mensa is for people who know how to memorize information and take tests. Basically, Mensa is for human robots.</comment>


The Aesthetics of Science Fiction Spaceship Design (2010) - <AUTHOR> https://uwspace.uwaterloo.ca/handle/10012/4935 <comment><USER2> This is a lovely paper. However, I was disappointed to not see any mentions of Iain M. Banks's Culture universe, which means it misses out on what I think is the most novel approach to spaceship design in literature.

First, The Culture's spaceships are enormous. The largest type we encounter, the General Systems Vehicle, is 200 km long and can house up to 6 billion people; while these serve as habitats for a civilian population, these are still spaceships, capable of moving at great speed.

Secondly, the ships have no physical hull. Instead, their structure is maintained by field manipulation. Banks doesn't go deeper into how this works, but it's clear The Culture has technology to manipulate physical reality similar to classic science fiction "force fields" that allows ships to maintain an atmosphere and protect against physical damage. Notably, in several books, the ships modify both their interior and exterior structure while traveling in order to optimize themselves for some purpose.

Thirdly, an important part of The Culture is that the ships are, in a sense, alive. The Minds, which are the AIs that control them are largely inseparable from the ships they inhabit. Clearly we've had AI-controlled ships before (HAL, Alien's Mother, and so on), but these have always been subservient to humans. With The Culture, a human boarding a ship is a guest of the Mind, and ships don't have captains or comamnders. The only other author I know about who has done anything similar is Anne Leckie.

<comment><USER3> In the Murderbot series the ships are similar in that the AI is apparently inseparable form the ship, although they are more like eager-to-please pets or children. IIRC The Minds have their own agendas and moral compass.

<comment><USER4> Is the Murderbot series worth reading?

<comment><USER3> I really enjoyed it! It is quite short. It's pretty funny.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> _The Fountain_ was really interesting in this regard, as it had the main character floating in a giant orb surrounding the Tree of Life. Completely different from the typical spaceship aesthetic. IIRC the space background was all microphotography, not CGI.

[https://duckduckgo.com/?q=the+fountain+movie+space+ship&t=os...](https://duckduckgo.com/?q=the+fountain+movie+space+ship&t=osx&iar=images&iax=images&ia=images)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sdmPrsKV0Kg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sdmPrsKV0Kg)

</comment><comment><USER6> This was written in 2010, so it's not including my favourite ship designs, those of _The Expanse_. Decks stacked one on top of each other, like floors in a skyscraper. Because gravity is provided by the drive acceleration.

[https://i.imgur.com/f6YGM8N.jpg](https://i.imgur.com/f6YGM8N.jpg)

<comment><USER7> The physical world building is so much better than everything else on TV that I almost hated the plot because I would have very much enjoyed ten seasons of just the Roci freelancing around in the solar system.

<comment><USER8> Same! Though I did love the plot too, but every scene with the Roci or other ships maneuvering, fighting or even in a tense standoff was simply superb.

The damage caused during ship combat was also pretty interesting. People die not in massive explosions (though there's that, too) but simply as fragments and projectiles perforate the ship's hull and their bodies. Instead of the usual "sparks flying from consoles" like in Star Trek, a hit in the Expanse means you have a kinetic projectile punching through the wall and taking someone's head off.

<comment><USER9> There is a trilogy of book scalled "The Nameless War" by Edmund Barrett ( [https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B074C8KG27?ref_=dbs_r_seri...](https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B074C8KG27?ref_=dbs_r_series&storeType=ebooks) ) which I highly recommend if you like "Expanse" style technology and combat.

Written by a naval historian and features no super-weapons or other deus ex machina. Just solid strategy and tactics of Naval Combat in Space. There are two accompanying "Janes Ships of the Fleet" style books which detail the ships in the story.

It is 4/4.5 on the Mohs scale of sci-fi hardness [https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MohsScaleOfScien...](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MohsScaleOfScienceFictionHardness) (Jump drives, _very_ limited FTL, and Plasma Cannons which are basically naval artillery in space)

<comment><USER10> Which, just to clarify, "The Nameless War" you are referring to is NOT the 1952 anti-Semitic screed by Archibald Maule Ramsay ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archibald_Maule_Ramsay](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archibald_Maule_Ramsay))

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I liked hearing George Lucas say that he wanted all the craft to look beaten up and used instead of shiny and new (long time ago far, far away) so as to focus on the human experience instead of the tech itself.

<comment><USER12> Science Fiction v. Space Opera (from Soap Opera)

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

Star Trek is science fiction. It is clean, high-minded and with a plot driven by futuristic technologies and what they _might_ mean for us. Science fiction is at least somewhat predictive. Star Wars is space opera, a soap opera set in space. The plot is driven by family squabbles and surprise revelations (ie Luke's sister/father etc). The standards of morality are subverted by the reality of the family drama. If one removes the special effects and fight scenes, Star Wars is almost daytime TV. All it needs is a good coma fantasy.

Another clue from Lucas: "A long time ago in a galaxy far far away." That is code for "This isn't science fiction. It isn't about a possible future. It isn't about what our children's lives might be like. Magic is possible. Just enjoy the show."

<comment><USER13> Ahem. Sorry Trekkies, but NO! Star Trek is different how exactly? Domestic problems, old enemies longing for revenge, _Tech the tech with the tech in order to tech the tech in the tech tech..._

For me it's [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindenstra%C3%9Fe](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindenstra%C3%9Fe) in space, or 'Raumschiff Entenscheiss' (Spaceship Duck Shit because Enterprise rhymes with Entenscheiss)

Doesn't matter which tv-series or theatrical movie, always the same, quack quack, tech the tech the with the tech to tech the tech tech bla bla bla.

edit: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lAUIHBAxbXY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lAUIHBAxbXY) courtesy of [https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinnlos_im_Weltraum](https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinnlos_im_Weltraum)

<comment><USER12> Ok, the very very simple version: Science fiction is set in the future. Star Trek is deliberately set in the future. Star Wars is deliberately set in the past ("A long time ago") and therefore is something other than science fiction.

<comment><USER7> Then 20000 Leagues Under The Sea is not science fiction? (the setting was contemporary art the time of writing)

<comment><USER12> Future technology. When they set foot on the nautilus they set foot into a possible future. 20,000 poses the question of what might happen should that sort of technology be developed. It was very predictive of the power that such technology would place on a single man. Nemo is latin for "no man", telling us that no man should have such power.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> As a kid I loved reading "Great Space Battles" and "Spacecraft, 2000-2100 A.D.: Terran Trade Authority Handbook", by Stewart Cowley, from the late 70s. My impression is that the art (very beautiful airbrush(?) space ship pictures) inspired the stories than the other way around.

<comment><USER15> I had lots of space books as a kid... there's a certain aesthetic from the late 1970ies that makes me nostalgic.

I wonder if there's a name for it or a collection of some of those book covers and art.

<comment><USER16> The art for the book OP mentioned was, IIRC, by a particular British artist. One sec... he was very prolific in the late 70s / 80s.

Chris Foss: [https://www.chrisfossart.com](https://www.chrisfossart.com)

<comment><USER15> Nice! Yeah, some of those are what I'm thinking of. Not cartoony, nor particularly 'dated' looking like some stuff from, say, the 50ies.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Too bad the starships of the Honorverse weren't included in this. They have... interesting designs.

<comment><USER18> Interesting. Link for the lazy: [https://www.google.com/search?q=Honorverse&client=firefox-b-...](https://www.google.com/search?q=Honorverse&client=firefox- b-d&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjZtbLSqOHpAhUjxosKHS- WBs4Q_AUoAXoECBUQAw&biw=1440&bih=803&dpr=2#imgrc=uH6PMv2ki7dAXM)

They look like merge between a capsule and a dumbbell. Could you describe which direction does they generally move. I see that the weapons array seem to be on a longer side. What function do the wider parts on ends are for, propulsion?

<comment><USER19> The ship moves to the left in this image, longways. The ghostly fields surrounding the ship both provide reactionless drive and protect the ship from most incoming laser and missile fire. Forcefields of course work by writers fiat, but in the stories it works out that a "down the throat" or "up the tailpipe" missile shot is a killshot.

This has the effect of making "crossing the T" as in olden sailing days (giving a broadside to the nose) is still effective in 3D space combat.

[https://images.app.goo.gl/PMn9wgpV682Xa3fM7](https://images.app.goo.gl/PMn9wgpV682Xa3fM7)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Fantastic work ! Too bad Stargates spaceship-designs were not reviewed

</comment><comment><USER21> I was surprised not to see any of Bonestell designs seen in the books by Willy Ley (with some ideas of von Braun). True, many were designed for landing on planets with atmospheres - a rather practical bent.

These illustrations helped fire imaginations that got us off this noble rock the first time. Here are several hundred of them (or like them) for anyone who might not have been exposed yet.

[https://www.flickr.com/groups/midcenturyspaceillustration/po...](https://www.flickr.com/groups/midcenturyspaceillustration/pool/)

</comment><comment><USER22> I really like the simple yet useful flowchart to estimate the origins of a given spaceship (figure 4.10 in the PDF).

</comment><comment><USER23> Wow, this is incredibly comprehensive! A great resource, should I ever need it. And even without any obvious present utility, the fact that someone did all this is just fascinating in its own right.

I can only imagine how this must be mandatory reading material for the Star Citizen devs.

</comment><comment><USER7> To readers who wonder how this could possibly be a thesis in computer science: I haven't checked, but it would perfectly make sense in the context of a larger project about generative design. You need to understand the cultural conventions before you can fulfill them in code. Understanding the application domain is a part of every software project.

Cultural research as part of a software project is no different from a physicist writing sensor readout code as their thesis as part of a larger experiment group (which, from what I have glimpsed, seems to be more norm than exception with physicists these days)

</comment><comment><USER24> Posting because I don't see the word Enterprise anywhere in this thread!

</comment><comment><USER25> See also from 2018: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17899458](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17899458)

</comment><comment><USER26> Figure A.96: Futurama's Planet Express has a simple, retro design. Note that the ship, like many of the 1999 show's characters, has a distinctive overbite.

</comment><comment><USER27> So Ms Kinnear convinced her supervisor that a masters thesis on science fiction spaceship design was a good idea, thats the most impressive part imho :-)

</comment><comment><USER28> I'll admit I didn't read the whole thing, but the flow chart on page 41 is fantastic. Worth skipping to.

</comment><comment><USER29> This was an interesting read. Are example results of the procedural generation posted somewhere?

<comment><USER30> You might like this link from yesterday. [https://github.com/a1studmuffin/SpaceshipGenerator](https://github.com/a1studmuffin/SpaceshipGenerator)

<comment><USER31> Those extreme examples have clearly adopted Shadow technology.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Ages ago my dad pointed out to me that spaceships will be spherical. ;-)

<comment><USER33> [https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Core_ship/Legends](https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Core_ship/Legends)

Wish wikia hadn't gone evilmode

<comment><USER34> Oh, the giant watermelon they cut up with ground-based lasers in Clone Wars! For some reason, it's one of the two scenes I most remember from there (the other one was this weird spinny droido-tank I can't find a screenshot of now).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Decision tree on 41 is great

</comment><comment><USER36> (2010)

<comment><USER25> Added. Thanks!</comment></comment>


CMOs Increasingly Optimistic About Economy, Consumer Spending - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.bnet.com/mba/?p=1143&tag=homeCar

<comment><AUTHOR> "They report plans to increase spending on social media efforts by more than 300 percent in the next five years, increasing their marketing budget allocations for social media from 3.5 percent to 13.7 percent." This is what I call incredible opportunity to have a profound impact in the world as long as all of us (entrepreneurs) deliver the services that will provide results. All that I can say is "what recession?" This is an exciting time to innovate!</comment>