The Steam Controller Configurator's Untapped Power - <AUTHOR> http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/LarsDoucet/20170125/289904/The_Steam_Controller_Configurators_Untapped_Power.php <comment><USER3> I'm still working my way through this article (after watching the video at the beginning) but one random comment about the Steam Controller I want to drop in:

I use the Steam Link + Steam Controller to play games from my PC in my home office on my TV in my living room, a lot. I would say in the last year I've spent at least 80-100 hours using my Steam Controller in different situations and games.

It's hit or miss in many games, the best experience I've had with it is in Civilization. In some games it's _so_ close to perfect but the game disables mouse-input if you are using a controller, which means you can't use the Steam Controller to its full capability.

All in all, I mostly use my Xbox controllers (connected to my PC via the Microsoft adapter) to play on my Steam Link, mainly because the Steam Controller just feels cheap.

When they first talked about open sourcing all the designs for it I was hoping someone would take the specs and make a all-metal version of the controller, with some more heft.

I love the Steam controller, but it just feels so cheap so that when any growing-pains pains get in my way, it's one more negative against it compared to just using my other controllers.

I may be part of a small niche market but I would gladly pay $150-$250 for a good feeling controller that does exactly what the Steam Controller does. I think if I paid a bit more for it and it felt more premium, I'd be more invested in taking the time to configure it just right.

<comment><AUTHOR> > but the game disables mouse-input if you are using a controller, which means > you can't use the Steam Controller to its full capability.

Yeah, the Valve team (and me, I'm the OP) are specifically pushing hard on this -- an emerging best practice is to always allow simultaneous mouse & gamepad input.

<comment><USER4> This can have some hilarious outcomes though.

Specifically, I'm thinking of how Call of Duty Black Ops III gives controllers a whole bunch of aim assist so they don't get dunked on by people using mouse+keyboard. Guess what used to happen if you plugged in a controller and played with the mouse?

In an ideal world, the fix would be to not give half your players an aimbot, but you just know the product manager wouldn't go for that. Looks like they ended up adding a patch that tries to figure out whether you're actually _using_ the controller.

[https://www.reddit.com/r/blackops3/comments/44yfri/pc_aim_as...](https://www.reddit.com/r/blackops3/comments/44yfri/pc_aim_assist_removed_for_controllers/)

<comment><USER5> > In an ideal world, the fix would be to not give half your players an aimbot, > but you just know the product manager wouldn't go for that. Looks like they > ended up adding a patch that tries to figure out whether you're actually > using the controller.

No, this is the ideal world. Mouse users have more manual accuracy, couch gamers can still have fun vs. mouse users. Combating fringe cases (how many people actually plug in a controller and a mouse at the same time..?) makes no sense. This 'divide' worked like a charm on Titanfall.

<comment><USER6> > how many people actually plug in a controller and a mouse at the same time?

How many people actually unplug things when they, uh, don't need them for a second or two?

I leave my monitor plugged. I leave my power cord plugged. I leave my keyboard and mouse plugged. I leave my headphones plugged. I leave my hard drive plugged. I leave my ethernet cable plugged. Why should I not leave my controller plugged?

<comment><USER7> Your controller will turn on and off to save battery and when batteries run dry and need to replace them.

There's nothing more frustrating than running out of batteries in a controller and the game just locks you into mouse input... on a living room PC.

<comment><USER8> Not all controllers run on batteries. You can get wired Xbox controllers for example.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The main concern raised, how can you use it without Steam?

This isn't very promising:

 _> Aside: my (personal!) hope is that the Steam Controller initiative will eventually become a new universal -- and open -- standard for PC gaming input. I'm definitely not speaking for Valve on this particular point as I have no idea what their long term plans are._

Tying hardware to a distributor is a nasty practice. While there is now a Steam-less driver for the controller[1], if developers will start using these new APIs, how is it supposed to work for games released through GOG for instance? Are Valve planning to release these APIs as FOSS and without tying them to Steam? I'd say developers should not fall for this lock-in, until it becomes truly open.

1\. [https://github.com/kozec/sc-controller](https://github.com/kozec/sc- controller)

</comment><comment><USER10> Interesting. Wonder if the PS3 controller will be supported at some point?

I have an old PS3 I've not used in years (stopped using anything Sony when they sued GeoHot). If the controllers for that work with Steam, it might be worth digging them out and putting them to use. :)

 __* Update: Doing some basic DDG searching shows that it should work. I might as well see if they still hold a charge. ;)

<comment> aaron-lebo If you have the money to spare, the PS4 controller is better in almost every way - triggers, concave sticks, etc.

<comment><USER11> The battery life of the DS3 was excellent, the ds4 is atrocious

<comment><USER12> Agreed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> With the not mentioned massive downside: it only works when you distribute your game through Steam.

<comment><USER14> I don't think that's accurate anymore. Here's a 4-month-old reddit thread helping someone get an Origin game working with the SC.

You may have to _launch_ the game through Steam on your PC, but not necessarily acquire it through the Steam distribution system.

edit: forgot the link: [https://www.reddit.com/r/SteamController/comments/53ftxp/sup...](https://www.reddit.com/r/SteamController/comments/53ftxp/support_steam_and_nonsteam_games/)

<comment><USER4> Another fun fact: you can set pretty much anything up as a non-steam game if you want, which is good for doing things that the Steam Link doesn't normally support. For example, you can set up VLC and use it to stream movies over to your TV. Or a web browser would probably work too.

I would think the only exception would be things that use HDCP protection, like maybe Netflix.

<comment><USER15> It's certainly not perfect, but I discovered just the other day that the "Big Picture" web browser (embedded chromium, IIRC) does work with Netflix. I think maybe you can't get 4k or 5.1 sound unless you're using Edge or the windows store app though.

<comment><USER16> You can test the video resolution you're getting from Netflix with this video: [http://www.netflix.com/WiMovie/70136810](http://www.netflix.com/WiMovie/70136810)

The resolution and bitrate is burned in for each quality level they stream. I'm topping out at 3000kbps/720p in Chrome. I don't have a Windows machine to test on, though.

<comment><USER17> This is neat. How did you find out about this video?

<comment><USER16> It's been around for a while. They actually have a whole slew of them, but most don't have burned-in bitrate info: [https://www.reddit.com/r/NetflixBestOf/comments/23m338/examp...](https://www.reddit.com/r/NetflixBestOf/comments/23m338/example_short_23976_2010_11m_test_your_netflix/cgyj6bx/)

<comment><USER17> Cool. Thanks for the link!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> > Aside: my (personal!) hope is that the Steam Controller initiative will > eventually become a new universal -- and open -- standard for PC gaming > input. I'm definitely not speaking for Valve on this particular point as I > have no idea what their long term plans are.

That is my hope as well, but for that to happen the configurator probably needs to become an independent application that's not tied to the Steam client.

</comment><comment><USER19> The article is excellent and I recommend it to anyone playing games on a PC.

I also love my Steam Controller. The software was a little and miss but less and less by the day. For example I had sometimes problems autoloading my configs, now I don't even have to play attention to it. It just works. My mind was blown when I configured the Steam controller to work as a Dolphin (Wii Emulator) controller: super accurate pointer controls through the trackpad. I mapped the motion controls to only work while holding the left hand pad; no more missed motions. I didn't like certain button mappings, so I switched them around: perfect. I wanted to use my PS3 controller instead and it worked out of the box with nearly the same config.

Endless possibilities for tinkering, but also (almost every time) works out of the box: just like good PC experience should be.

</comment><comment><USER20> I like the idea of the steam controller. However, I have a 21 month old and the Steam Controller survived for precisely two days before being broken. My Xbox one controller and PS4 controllers have endured months of baby shenanigans and are fine. It'll take them a few iterations before the can match the quality and durability of the big players in the controller field.

<comment><USER21> I have two Xbox One controllers that have developed such bad analog stick drift that they're unusable, and I know other people (IRL, not random folks I Googled) who have the same problem.

I also have a PS4 controller that completely stopped working because it fell four feet onto a carpet.

Given how many dead controllers I've seen without even any baby to blame, I'm not sure the Steam Controller necessarily that much worse.

<comment><USER22> That's incredibly bad luck. I've currently got 2 dualshock 4 controllers (the launch ones with the known fault of the dodgy analog grip), anxbox 360 controller and an Xbox one controller that are used regularly. (Xbox one controller used in work for ~4 hours a day maybe?) and the only issue aside from the known DS4 fault is that my Xbox 360 cable needed the removable connector replaced.

Mind you, I don't regularly drop my controllers from 4ft (1.3m) either, so I can't comment on that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> While i like the idea of the controller, i dislike how everything gaming has to be hogtied to the Steam client.

</comment><comment><USER24> I feel like the Steam Controller is destined to be the BetaMax of controllers. It may be magic. You may love it and hold on to the idea that it's going to win and take over the world.

I WANT to love my Steam Controller. I take it out weekly, try to configure stuff for Skyrim, or Civ, or even just Doom, and I fail.

It feels cheap. It's plasticy and cheap. Until there's a Steam "Elite" that doesn't feel like $10 of plastic, it's always gonna be Betamax - <USER2> superior, but losing the core market.

</comment><comment><USER25> Wow, all these issues and I have been loving my steam controller with no issues for a while now. I think expecting it to be a mouse or traditional gamepad is the problem. It is its own interface, and a good one at that. It is good enough to roughly approximate both, but isnt really either. Everyone looking for a familiar experince is obviously going to complain.

</comment><comment><USER6> Our input APIs are full of poor assumptions, lackluster abstractions and arbitrary boundaries. It could've been fixed decades ago, but nobody seems to have cared. Instead, we're retrofitting on top of retrofitting and it's not clear that we'll ever replace the lower layers with a sane API instead of just hiding the shit under yet another layer.

I should be able to bind any button that sends a signal my computer can understand -- to any application, any action. It should not matter whether it's a keyboard button, a mose button, a mose thumb button, a joystick button, or my belly button... as long as a driver can detect the signal, the code to make arbitrary buttons bindable is _trivial_ , yet people have just looked at the physical objects the buttons are placed on, and then draw an API for each object, with built in assumptions.

This is how we get mice that also report themselves as an USB keyboard, and half the thumb buttons do not work in most applications (becaues they're reported as mouse buttons by default and handling more than 3 or 5 mouse buttons seems to require higher intelligence) and, well, the other half overlap with keyboard keys I'd prefer to use for different functions.

It's nice that someone's working on this but I feel like this steam configurator is yet another proprietary layer, a hack on top of hacks, and so people just lazily depend on it.

<comment><USER26> I think you're oversimplifying things a bit. Yes, a lot of HID have a concept of a simple button press/click/action which you can abstract away, but there are many actions that don't directly map to that: function keys, lights, analog inputs (i.e. thumbstick), rumble. And then you have the devices which don't really map to buttons like trackpads, draw tablets, face/eye tracking and Wii Mote-like devices.

Your argument is a bit like saying it's stupid we have all these Graphics API's, it should be unified a long time ago since all they do is set pixels on a monitor to a certain color.

<comment><USER6> Function keys are still just keys, there is nothing special about them. If anything, the problems are caused precisely because of people thinking like you, thinking that some input is somehow very special when it really isn't. That's how we got where we are.

Yes, I focused on buttons only, because that is the lowest bar (and we've yet to cross that).

Yes, I am fully aware that there are other kinds of inputs. We've had "analog" inputs for decades. Sliders, joysticks, sensors, etcetra. There is nothing difficult about them. All we need is a driver to understand the inputs, optionally identify them with a name, symbol, intended purpose or default function and other metadata, and export through an API that allows applications to easily map things to arbitrary inputs. And allow the user to filter inputs at a lower level; for example, if he finds that input device 6 has a nice input 17 that takes values in the range [0 to 255] that he'd like to treat as a binary input that reads high in [0 to 126] range and otherwise low, that should again be possible and very easy to do as long as the underlying API is sane.

Rumble and force feedback, keyboard leds, gpios in output mode, etc. are outputs, which could be exposed through a similar, arbitrarily mappable mechanism.

We've had all these for decades, and we've yet to cross the lowest bar of making all _simple_ buttons bindable everywhere through a uniform API.

It is not hard, nobody just wants to do it (at a low level, USB HID comes surprisingly close! But then it has its struggles, what with the default keyboard mode that requires a bitfield for modifiers and bytes for other scancodes), and in the name of compatibility, we just keep piling hacks on top of legacy. And my mouse's thumb buttons are still useless most of the time.

<comment><USER27> The standard already exists in the pro audio world, and it's called MIDI. It supports on and off events with velocity, controllers with ranges, multiple channels, real-time synchronization, sequencing, daisy-chaining, full-duplex bidirectional behavior. And every once in a long while a game appears that supports MIDI input for whatever reason. I once made a Pong paddle prototype with my phone running a MIDI controller app, sending modulation wheel data to the computer to move the paddle around. As well, drivers can turn game controllers into MIDI devices.

The thing that's missing is that manufacturers and developers just aren't on the same page here - the protocols exist, and with pretty good software support, even(there's a Web MIDI, and MIDI for phones in various forms). The major modes of incompatibility - e.g. velocity ranges that are biased and need remapping, unconventional behaviors around SysEx messages - are well-known. It's just a little bit unaesthetic that a game controller would send a "Note On" to press a button when it isn't doing anything with notes, really. And it doesn't map to the tradition of arcade hardware being a simple memory-mapping of button state, but I doubt most game controllers now are doing that internally.

Regardless, game controllers don't send MIDI messages by default. And yeah, MIDI is old, and has a few hard design limits, and one could make a case for looking at another standard like Open Sound Control. But the basic problem of button mapping has been more than solved for a long time, so count me as one who is irritated at the idea that games are special here.

<comment><USER6> > And yeah, MIDI is old, and has a few hard design limits, and one could make > a case for looking at another standard like Open Sound Control.

Yeah, I was actually thinking of MIDI (and USB) when I wrote the above (I have a full size midi master keyboard next to my deskop). At a certain level, we have pretty much all we need, and if the limitations of MIDI were a problem for some input devices (and they arguably are), it'd still be quite easy to spec a system that allows just about any device imaginable. Again, USB HID spec comes really close.

The real problem is just the lack of good, widespread, cross-platform APIs that steer applications into doing the right thing. Now we have APIs that encourage the application to look for keyboard events, then mouse events, then joystick events, and what else (and they implementations may lack support for other devices even if the underlying OS-level API made support a no-brainer).

Instead, they should just look for events, any events that have an applicable type. (Whether implemented through callbacks or polling the state of interesting inputs is merely an implementation detail) Then the (optional) metadata can be used for establishing a default mapping. When the API is designed right, the user can always override any mapping with whatever he wants, or filter inputs to change the response of an analogue device, perhaps nonlinearizing it or coercing it to a binary input. And if the application provides its built-in input configurator, again using the well-designed API, the ability to bind anything to anything on anything just comes automatically. The application developer should never need to know that device 7 input 2 is actually wired to my belly button. :) And that the axes I use for aiming are actually sliders on my MIDI keyboard.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> man, the steam controllers shape, I just don't get it. I don't see how they landed on the shape of the handholds and all the angles in it. It's operation I'm happy with, though the dongle has proved to be easy to break.

I was bummed on the controller, till I saw you could aim by moving the entire controller around like an air mouse. That ended up being a fresh control scheme for me, though I know the PS4 controller can do it for on-screen keyboard use.

Would love to see some revised shapes to it. I really dig how it can move the mouse when the software is on even on the desktop. If you don't midn keeping steam running it's a fairly capable to surf with. Though admittedly I haven't done everything.

It took a long time for it to come out. I wonder if they are working on a new generation in secret because they know they might not sell as many right now.

I think it feels premium, but the shape is not ergonomic to me whatsoever.

</comment><comment><USER29> I'm typically a keyboard and mouse gamer but I do really like the steam controller. I played psychonauts with it all the way through (having used keyboard and mouse the first time I played it) and I loved it. I didn't do massive customization but I did play with it and I have so far been impressed how good a lot of the default configurations have been.

</comment><comment><USER30> I bought this controller but I haven't used it much because everything feels different. The buttons are small and the depth of travel is so deep compared to other common controllers.

</comment><comment><USER31> I feel like I need PhD for steam controller configuration.

There should be some companion AI app to speed out process of setting this up. ;)

<comment><USER32> > I feel like I need a PhD for steam controller configuration.

If you think that's bad, try using their map editor[0].

[0][https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Valve_Hammer_Editor](https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Valve_Hammer_Editor)

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> That is a very in depth article. Seems like everything you'd ever need to know is there.

</comment><comment><USER34> I was extremely excited to try out the Steam Controller. I've been a fan of Valve and Steam for a very, very long time. It was a hugely fantastic letdown on every single front.

I was hoping that purchasing a Steam Controller would let me play some of the games that were clearly controller-based like Rocket League, or other action- type games not particularly well-suited for keyboard and mouse.

The controller feels plasticky, poorly balanced, and fragile. Give it a gentle shake and you can actually hear the buttons moving around.

Every single game I wanted to play required configuration of some sort or simply didn't work. I even bought games like Rocket League specifically to make use of the controller.

Instead of just working. I had to unplug the USB dongle a couple of times, setup some manual configuration, only to have it still not work, have to be blown all away and reset back to default. It eventually worked... until the next time I went to play and sure as hell: I had to restart Steam a couple times, re-plug in the USB dongle a few times, and eventually the controller was properly identified and working.

The sheer number of _incorrect_ options available for this thing make it useless. Should it emulate keyboard? Is it a gamepad? Joystick? Mouse and gamepad? Mouse and joystick?

I lamented my purchase and wished I would've bought a more standard controller like an Xbox controller or a PlayStation controller as this was a nightmare.

The article appears to be heading down the right track, with trying to get developers on board with mapping actions instead of buttons, but I simply don't have the time to tinker with something like a controller. When I want to play a video game, I want to sit and play a video game.

I spoked to some of my game development friends about it and every one of them said that controller and device support was among one of the most mind- numbingly frustrating and difficult parts of cross-platform development.

The last time I tried the Steam Controller, I fired it up and none of it worked. I could see the controller was detected, but nothing worked. The mouse pad, buttons, controls, nothing. This had happened so many times before. I installed the beta version of Steam, browsed forums for fixes, and everything.

I tried very hard to like this peripheral but it was a complete failure. I'm very hesitant to try _even more_ configuration options considering how much time I sunk into it last time. I literally gave up on having a controller- based gaming experience with my computer, got a PS4 for the holidays, and haven't looked back.

I still play games on my computer, but I gave up on the dream of having a nice controller-based gaming experience on my computer.

<comment><USER35> I've had no such troubles. I play Rocket League with my steam controller regularly. Sounds like you might have gotten a bad one, did you contact support?

<comment><USER34> As I mentioned, once things were configured in _a_ game, it worked mostly. But for no good reason, would fail sometimes either at detection, or if I turned the controller on _before_ opening Steam in big picture mode, it would also often cause conflicts with it not knowing if it was a mouse, or a game pad, or a controller, or what it was supposed to be.

There were enough forum posts around with folks having similar issues, that I guess I just assumed you had to be willing to spend time tinkering a lot if you wanted it to work, and thought contacting support would end up being an even larger time sink.

Those are just a couple of examples. Attempting other games would end up with incorrect mappings, incorrect button listings, not working, and more.

Very inconsistent and unreliable.</comment></comment></comment>


Do JustHelpyn can serve people better than Google HelpOut? - <AUTHOR> http://www.justhelpy.com <comment><AUTHOR> Google HelpOut was intended to be platform letting people to get help online from professionals using video chat. But it was initially built to connect people with professionals and help was not free. Do platform, like JustHelpy connecting people with people for helping each other for free, can be better than was Google HelpOut ?</comment>


The OpsDev manifesto - <AUTHOR> https://gif.industries/technology/opsdev-manifesto.html <comment><USER2> they probably don't need my code, but their code.

I met many people 2001 in highschool who laughed at me, because I wanted to be a software engineer...

"what new do you want to develop anyway?!"

well, that was before things like Steam, AWS or Facebook.

Such people just fear to be automated away.</comment>


The day Fred Wilson dumped AAPL - <AUTHOR> http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2011/04/08/the-day-fred-wilson-dumped-aapl/

<comment><USER2> I don't like the tone of the article. They include a chart which seems to indicate "Fred Wilson is an idiot", but if you read Wilson's blog his decision had nothing to do with him being bearish on Apple's growth potential. It had nothing to do with iPhone vs. Android. It was because Apple was not being forward with investors about Jobs. That's a legit reason to pull out of company, regardless of how things have played out since. The article acknowledges this to a degree but has an overall tone of "Fred Wilson failed".

<comment><USER3> Fred Wilson is an investor and investors are expected to have at least somewhat of an understanding of a company's outlook and make investments accordingly (although Fred invests in private, not public, companies). As such, it's his job to invest based on fundamentals and deliver solid returns for his portfolio. Apple not being forward with investors about Jobs turned out to not be a good reason to dump the stock. Apple has never been very open about anything - that is the culture of the company and it's no secret (no pun). Twitter hasn't been very forthcoming with people who develop for it's platform - having abandoned a chunk of them recently. Not to mention there's been a lot of shuffling in management. Will Fred dump his holdings in Twitter?

<comment><USER4> Why would Fred dump his holding in Twitter? I'm sure Twitter are incredibly open with Fred about their financials and future plans. Fred's beef was with being a shareholder and not getting that information.

<comment><USER3> I don't buy it. Fred's a smart man - he knows with a company the size and scope of Apple releasing certain information will only feed competitors and fuel speculation. Steve Jobs said he was taking a medical leave of absence because his health issues are more complex than he thought. That's enough information. What is Fred looking for, biopsy reports?

<comment><USER5> The SEC rules are pretty vague, so it's hard to say how much is enough information. They did ask Apple for more information though, which lends me to believe that they're more on the "disclosure is better" side. Apple's board of directors was also not amused by Jobs' policy of not disclosing his medical issues (Jerry York told the WSJ that he almost resigned after hearing the news but didn't so as to not contribute to the media drama).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Context: John Gruber mentioned this in a tongue-in-cheek sidenote in The Talkshow podcast last night. (~"Take Wilson's Apple analyses with a grain of salt".)

This guy is just parroting the comment in the echochamber.

I don't really think the story has any merit on its own.</comment>


Show HN: Variant Symlink Filesystem for Linux - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/onslauth/varsymfs <comment><AUTHOR> This is a simple implementation of Variant Symlinks similar to the ones found on FreeBSD. It uses an environment variable, in this case PQ_CURRENT_CHASSIS, to resolve the symlink.

This allows for a single global symlink, that will resolve differently depending on the value of the environment variable set when the process starts.

At the moment the environment variable has been hard coded, as its for another project, but I do intend to update the code later to support custom environment variables in the symlink.

I would be glad to receive any feed back, anything at all. Thanks :)</comment>


Joke for hn:possible news headlines of year 2030? - <AUTHOR>

here are some:<p>"Samsung galaxy s50 released"<p>"I will colonize Jupiter in 20 years:elon musk"<p>lol...what else might you think of? <comment><USER2> President Sanchez Cuts Ribbon on Space Elevator

</comment><comment><USER3> Why Facebook Went Bankrupt 5 Years Ago (2025)</comment>


Do Psychedelic Drug Laws Violate Human Rights? - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2016/03/psychedelic-drugs/471603/?single_page=true <comment><USER3> > The individual shouldn't be required to prove that these substances are > risk-free, because few things in life are—rather it should be up to the > state to prove, with scientific evidence, that the risks justify the damage > to our civil liberties. In the absence of that, it is impossible that say > that this is truly a free society.

It's fascinating that the European Convention on Human Rights has a section on freedom of thought. That is such a radical idea, especially in the face of the strength of tradition in Western countries.

Looking at this problem from the 6-dimensional moral foundation theory ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_foundations_theory#The_s...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_foundations_theory#The_six_foundations)), I see the main factors holding these drugs hostage to be the particularly conservative values of deference to authority (they're bad because they're illegal) and the desire for group purity (only criminals and bums use drugs, not us good people). A good place to start is what Walsh outlines, scrutinizing the implications for liberty that these prohibitions have. I think wider public discourse would move us closer toward more rational laws. If people see that normal, well-adjusted, successful people (Silicon Valley kids, how's that microdosing going?) use drugs without problems, and also hear from people in authority that they are safer than believed to be in the past, we might make leeway. We have to figure out how to hit as many of those six dimensions as possible to move things forward.

<comment> awinter-py And you can't accurately perceive the problem in 6 dimensions without substantial help from LSD. So, QED.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> When an undergrad, I had access to a quite impressive religious library affiliated with a quite reputable protestant theology school. As part of the undergrad criteria, taking a religious course of some sort was mandatory to achieve graduation. I picked something along the lines of Chirstianity and Public Life, and eventually needed a topic for a research essay for the course.

Through my research, what I can definitively state is that numerous psychoactive substances - drugs, if you will - are mentioned by and incorporated into nearly every noteworthy world religion in some way, shape, or form. Yes, mostly for the use of the 'visionary' class like the priests and shamans, but it's all right there in the texts that such things had a legitimate role in the respective religious pursuits. I recall a couple cases regarding Native Tribal rights with psychoactives, but those were very limited in scope in the grand scheme of things.

Thus, overall I came to the conclusion that US drug laws are fundamentally at odds with the notion of religious freedom from persecution. I plan on doing nothing of importance with this perpsective however. It's just one of those situations that make me go pause and say "Huh, how about that."

</comment><comment><USER5> If you follow this train of thought, don't all drug laws (or really any laws that restrict what 2 consenting adults can trade with each other or put in their bodies) violate human rights?

I'm not taking either side - life's too complicated - it's interesting to watch.

<comment><USER6> It's interesting how so many people say "let individuals do what they want" without accepting the fact that society is made up of individuals who do not live in a vacuum. My wife always used to say that it should be, "your rights end where someone else's begin," but that's a difficult line to draw without risking incorrectly removing someone's legitimate rights.

<comment><USER7> I used to think you can draw sharp lines here, but not anymore.

Marijuana is demonstrably less harmful than alcohol. It being illegal is flat out insane and can have no explanation other than ignorance, stupidity, or malice.

I definitely think that non-addictive psychedelic drugs with no demonstrated human toxicity (or not exceeding OTC drug toxicity) should be legal. Perhaps there should be some restrictions. I would be in favor of some form of licensing or gating to set some minimum level of personal responsibility. Maybe if you freak out and end up in a psych ward or commit a crime you lose your license. I'd put it in the same category as driving a car, riding a motorcycle, operating a motorboat, etc. People are going to be stupid with LSD but people are stupid with motorcycles and rock climbing and those are legal.

Harder drugs? I'm open minded. I used to be against the legalization of heroin, crack, cocaine, meth, etc., but then I read up on Portugal's experience with heroin and now I'm more open to the idea of a pure harm- reduction approach. But I am wary of these. Alcohol is legal and there are alcoholics everywhere. I don't think criminal prosecution is the right tool for the job, but I also am not sure we want _more_ of that.

<comment><USER8> I agree with what you've said, though I tend more toward the liberal side. I'd point out though that "not exceeding OTC drug toxicity" is a very low threshold: just a few more acetominophen tablets or asprins than recommended can induce acute liver failure. This is exacerbated if you also drink alcohol. It's one of the most common forms of poisoning and the top cause of acute liver failure in the US.

It's not easy to accidentally overdose on a drug when it's sold in standard doses, especially if dosage information is presented honestly. The government's position on drugs only serves to increase the rate of overdose among the population using them.

<comment><USER7> Yeah, I just said that to draw a line somewhere. You could eat LSD powder with a spoon and be technically okay, provided you could contend with the spoon's Ka in the liminal realm.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Anti-drug laws plainly violate human rights. And so they breed general disrespect for the law.

</comment><comment><USER10> Psychedelics or entheogens are extremely dangerous for the establishment, because they (might) affect the user's worldview and ultimately users end up challenging the "truths" that the establishment so dearly spoon fed them since they were born.

They start to question authority... of the the State, of the Church, of the Justice system, of core societal values... These substances alter the user's brains in unpredictable ways - generating deviant art, music, literature, movies, comedy!

Fuck no. Ban everything. Throw them in jails. Dirty hippies. Get jobs.

Go to work. Obey. Consume. Repeat.

And when the ideology needs fresh blood, send your children to war. Let them die in battle, like real men.

The establishment doesn't care about your human rights, never has. They - <USER2> makers and players of the game - care about their own well being, driven by the desire to control everything combined with the fear of losing it all.

When enough people start playing this game, war becomes inevitable. Human rights don't apply on the battlefield.

This sickness can be treated or prevented with the "medicine for the soul"..

If wearing glasses is a human right, then using entheogens should also be a human right.

<comment><USER11> I'm pretty sure the internet has done far more for changing peoples' worldview than drugs ever have or could. Actually, I find it completely unrealistic that drug use would change anything at all in the realm of what you're talking about. I mean, none of what you've said requires drugs in any way, and most people are perfectly capable in seeing a billion faults in the status quo without them.

<comment><USER10> You're pretty sure, but I think you're not seeing the bigger picture.

Most of those bands that have enhanced the lives of everyone ( _society_ ) over the years? Really high..

Would the world still be around if it weren't for the cultural revolution of the '60s - during the height of the cold war, with slogans like "make love not war" and "Imagine" ? Possibly not.

The Internet ?

Did you know that Doug Engelbart and many other engineers working on the ARPANet were also participating in LSD experiments ? Look it up, it's out there on the Internet.

The Internet could have been another secret military technology, you know... It took some acid heads to imagine the whole world "turned on and tuned in". So there was Steve Jobs and his team of psychonauts who jumped in to make that vision real.

Check out Google's first ever doodle. Do you notice the Burning Man logo in it ? I guess Larry and Sergey were so inspired by the psychedelic festival that they decided to use it as their startup's logo.

3D animation, Pixar, ILM, Virtual Reality ? Damn hippies.

That's the most interesting part about psychedelics is that the trip never ends.. Once you take it, it changes you forever - you might be sober, but the psychedelic experience goes on - in what you say, what you do, what you sing...

I could go on and on, but again - you can look these things up yourself.

<comment><USER11> Of course you could go on and on. But you'd be saying the same useless "wake up sheeple" non-answer that has been the rallying cry of useless people since forever. Or maybe just stop picking attractive cherries for yourself and start learning about how actually reliable and consistent data works.

I don't have a problem with hippies or drugs. I have a problem with the irrational, baseless worship of hippies and drugs.

<comment><USER10> Something tells me that no amount of "reliable and consistent data" will convince some people, because they already know what they want to know.

Despite the fact that these things are illegal, there are many scientific studies published, books written and a myriad of personal accounts and interpretations given within literature, art, music, film, design, etc. Just ask google.

But do you want to really know the "truth" ?

It's very easy to discover it yourself. No cherry picking. Just go experience it.

That's all there is to it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I am Indian Hindu and I find the western world's laws (which influence others) w.r.t. drugs nothing but racist and prejudiced. Of course it is none of my business how UK/US manage their own country but it is really sad to see that those colonial laws are enforced in my home country and has altered perception of Indians so far away from their roots. I think if start talking about Drug prohibition laws in the perspective of human freedom it is much easier for people like me to go back to my roots.

Marijuana and few other forms of mind altering substances have been like a stepping stone towards spiritual progress in several sects of Hinduism and tribal practices. Drugs like Marijuana were often used to those who started off on the tantra path to make them understand that there is more to human mind than they might have thought. Once the mind is opened the students can explore more possibilities and realities.

Here is an excellent article by Indologist Dr. Elst

</comment><comment><USER13> Human Rights are arbitrary. So, the only question is what people agree that it means; making this a rather circular justification for anything.

EX: Is breathing air free from pollution a human right?

<comment><USER14> FWIW, I would take the strong stance that it damn well should be.

<comment><USER15> But what's pollution-free? Taken to the extreme, this implies nobody can drive, or light a camp fire for that matter.

It's all about quantity, and balancing the conflicting freedoms of individuals. Your right to breathe perfectly clean air goes against my right to produce energy and heat myself or go places.

Likewise, there's a general consensus that the state can detain you temporarily. It's an affront to the freedom of the person detained, but most individuals agree that it's necessary to preserve their freedom to go about safely and without fear of violence.

There's a process around it, to try and balance the rights on both sides. It's all in the details and the implementation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> The piece mentions David Nutt who was infamously fired by the British government for his use of inconvenient facts

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Nutt#Government_position...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Nutt#Government_positions)

<comment><USER17> Yes, it's sad, but drug policy in the UK is not defined based on evidence - rather, it seems to be based on the whims of politicians who understand very little about the drugs that they outlaw.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> The section of the article discussing paternalism, infantilization, has some interesting connection with that other article on HN, about debunking the ego- depletion theory: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11239674](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11239674)

I can easily see the ego-depletion theory being used as a basis for the idea that people just can't control themselves.

Though the problem is also that drug policy makers have been ignoring research. The current argument, as brought up in the interview, is that "illegal drugs are bad because they are illegal."

</comment><comment> awinter-py Don't all restrictive laws by their definition violate human rights? 'Rights' is the sphere of activity the law agrees not to encroach. This question is tautological.

Better question -- given that legalizing psychedelics will make 1% of us healthier or better at our jobs at the cost of doubling the pedestrian strike rate in large cities, do metropolitan mayors want to make that trade?

</comment><comment> guard-of-terra Yes they do, and I hope to live to the day when people behind these laws are violated in return, at least the memory of them.

</comment><comment><USER19> Are there laws which prohibit the actual taking of drugs? I thought they all targeted manufacture, distribution, and sale, which are definitely in the purview of the state to limit. I guess simple possession would be the grey area here, but there are plenty of other substances whose possession is regulated as well.

<comment><USER8> If you completely eliminate all avenues to acquiring something, then you're taking away the right to have or use it. Imagine if the government had banned the manufacture, distribution and sale of printing presses.

Also possession of drugs is hardly a gray area. It's quite explicitly illegal in all countries but a few.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> It's heart breaking watching the UK walk further and further away from liberalism.

<comment><USER17> The USA has surely been the biggest progenitor of the 'war on drugs', and yet even they are, state by state, legalising cannabis.

At a time when other countries are finally seeing the folly of fighting an unwinnable 'war', it is even more ludicrous that the UK should continue down this path (e.g. the Psychoactive Substances Bill which comes into effect in April).

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Yes.</comment>


How Bundling Benefits Sellers and Buyers - <AUTHOR> http://cdixon.org/2012/07/08/how-bundling-benefits-sellers-and-buyers/

<comment><USER2> The author makes a good point that bundling of services _can_ be of value to both buyers and sellers, but the conclusion that it _is_ of value does not follow.

The example of 2 people, one willing to pay $10 for ESPN and $3 for The History Channel and the other willing to pay $3 for ESPN and $10 for The History Channel disregards the likely majority who would pay $10 for the one and $0 for the other.

The problem with bundles is that they force you to pay for things that have zero value to you. And given that the incremental cost of providing the product approaches zero, this is strongly in the seller's interest.

<comment><USER3> But really no one places zero value on anything which is why your argument breaks down.

<comment><USER4> Actually you are correct it's not Zero. It's negative. If your claim were true, no one would clean the crapware off their windows machines. With respect to tv channels extra channels impose poorer usability for the on screen guides, and degrade a simple channel surfing experience.

(Note I'm not claiming the bundling prevents purchase, just that there is an economic opportunity in non-bundled alternatives, such as Windows boxes without crapware, or solving the problem of a clogged experience due to poor bundling such as Netflix's focus on surfacing desirable content.)

<comment><USER3> Unlikely, even if you mistakenly think your provider would only show you the channels you subscribe to.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Fallacy 1: There is a linear relationship between the area the author calls "consumer surplus" and the total happiness of customers.

Fallacy 2: There is no relationship between the act of bundling and the happiness of consumers.

Fallacy 3: The additional money saved by consumers if the goods were not bundled would not be allocated to higher happiness inducing products.

And so on.

There's an argument to be made regarding the paradox of choice and the inconvenience of micro-payment systems, but I don't find this one very convincing.

<comment><USER6> Another argument is the negative feeling you get from adding each additional channel. Saying let's pay another $1 for channel X 30 times has a higher negative perception than saying - oh $30 for 30 channels.

<comment><USER7> True. Same reason if you go to a restaurant and they started charging for the tap water a fee, even a nominal fee, you would have a negative reaction (unless of course all restaurants did that and it for some reason became accepted practice).

People don't want to pay for something that has no value to them but they will accept features that have no value if they feel they are included in a total price of what they are buying (except of course when they can compare products and make a decision not to buy a product because a competitive one is cheaper etc.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is true. However it is also true that if you have both bundled and a la carte offerings competing, there is no stable competitive price. See [http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/rt...](http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/rt/printerFriendly/535/456) for more. So if you're in a market with one pricing structure competing, be careful about choosing the other.

Of course even if the existing market bundles, you may have little choice. Your minimum viable product pretty much by definition cannot be a viable bundle.

</comment><comment><USER9> Except I _hate_ bundled services because I feel like I'm getting ripped off. I don't have a subscription to Rdio because I think "wow, I can listen to my favorite bands and have access to _all this other content_ ". No. I have a subscription because the price I pay to listen to my favorite bands is cheaper than what I would have paid if I were to buy the album on ITunes and more convenient than pirating.

If all my favorite shows were available on ITunes, I'd kiss cable goodbye in an instant.

</comment><comment><USER10> Ugh, I really hate comments in HN's economic threads. As with all economic theory, this is a _framework_ for thinking about a problem, not a description of reality.

All the author is saying is that there is a set of assumptions that when met, bundling benefits both consumers and sellers. Specifically, this set of assumptions includes 0 transaction costs. Thus, the decrease in transaction costs does not mean the end of bundling.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm guessing that most HNers will reject the merits of bundling and it's because they have a limited grasp of human behavior, consumer preferences and economics. Simply: bundling tv channels is much better for everyone.

Here's another example: 100 channels for $1 each. The average customer chooses 30. Bundling all 100 for $40 would benefit everyone.

<comment><USER11> Limited grasp of human behavior? You're describing the average economist there, unfortunately. :)

Bundling all 100 channels for $40 doesn't benefit _everyone_. There are a ton of assumptions embedded in that analysis that may, or may not be true. You assume that every channel yields positive marginal utility, for example.

Personally, I would pay for _maybe_ three cable channels. But each additional channel would lower my utility because of the knowledge that I was contributing to its existence (I sleep better at night knowing that I am not contributing to the development of shows about obese people with 14 children, etc.). Thus, I do not have cable at all.

You also assume that each channel costs the same to provide. Under an a-la- carte pricing scheme the prices would be all over the map because cable providers couldn't afford to offer certain channels for $1. So "the average customer chooses 30" would become a bit more complicated.

There are also probably psychological issues in play. For instance, why aren't HBO and Showtime part of "basic" cable? Surely they could make more money through bundling! Starz was included (bundled) with Hulu (or was it Netflix?) for awhile, but it was removed because the network feared losing its image as a "premium" brand. I suspect HBO feels the same way.

Beyond this, a television channel _is_ a bundle in itself. You get a set of shows (or even episodes) and movies that you can't alter. So even if channels were un-bundled, the bundling would just move from cable providers to networks themselves, or to other intermediaries such as Hulu.

<comment><USER3> This, on your last paragraph. Premium a la carte channels (bundles, actually...you usually get 5 or so HBO channels) depend on being differentiated from the rest, one important variable being differentiated pricing, distribution and exclusivity.

<comment><USER11> Seems like there is a good chance that the Internet will end up encouraging this. The same thing happened in magazine publishing. General interest magazines fell off a cliff, but special-interest magazines generally survived.

The same could be done with television. Instead of buying a subscription to 200 channels, you could just buy a set of comedy channels, or channels related to cooking and entertaining. Of course the whole idea of a "channel" is really a legacy concept, but the concept would be the same.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Interestingly enough, bundling is illegal in some countries...</comment>


Swift Tuples - <AUTHOR> https://whatilearnedtoday.io/swift-tuples/ <comment><USER2> I wish that tuples (and structs, really) automatically gained Equatable/Hashable conformance if all elements were Equatable/Hashable.</comment>


How quitting my corporate job for my startup dream f*cked my life up - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/everything-about-startups-and-entrepreneurship/how-quitting-my-corporate-job-for-my-startup-dream-f-cked-my-life-up-3b6b3e29b318

<comment><USER2> It was here already: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8307251](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8307251)

</comment><comment><USER3> Another one selling a "You Can Do It, Too!" book.</comment>


Pulitzer Prize-winning author Junot Díaz annotates his own novel on Rap Genius - <AUTHOR> http://gigaom.com/2013/07/26/pulitzer-prize-winning-author-annotates-his-own-novel-on-rapgenius/

<comment><USER2> I find it confusing that RapGenius seems to be for rap, or at least music, or perhaps poetry... but books don't fit as well into their world.

Great to see them getting some publicity but they'll definitely need to make an effort to brand beyond 'rap' especially b/c it can elicit a negative connotation for a lot of people (like 'country')

<comment><USER3> Rap lyrics seem to be just one use case for their technology. And rap itself is a niche that's easy to build an audience/test case with. I think the tech itself applies well to things like books as demonstrated by things like notation in Kindle books. It probably just needs a format different than the thin-column layout they currently have.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> To clarify: Pulitzer Prize-winning author Junot Díaz annotates three paragraphs from his own novel on Rap Genius.

</comment><comment><USER5> It's just a link to [http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2013/jul/25/junot-diaz- share...](http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2013/jul/25/junot-diaz-shares- pulitzer-prize-novel-inspiration)

<comment><USER6> Here's the actual annotated excerpt: [http://poetry.rapgenius.com/Junot-diaz- the-brief-wondrous-li...](http://poetry.rapgenius.com/Junot-diaz-the-brief- wondrous-life-of-oscar-wao-excerpt-lyrics)</comment></comment>


Other than making Windows a *nix distro, what would MSFT have to do to not suck? - <AUTHOR>

POSIX compliance, the standard file system, and . . . what else? How many steps are on the path from where they are to where they need to get to, and what are they? <comment><USER2> Windows does not come with a decent set of tools. A powerful shell and standard installations of interpreters like Python and Perl would go a long way.

The graphical user interface is incredibly clunky. I could tolerate that more if (see above) Windows didn't have an equally clunky shell.

I think one of the things that bugs me most about the Windows GUI is that it can't use space effectively: lots of things that can't be resized, scrolling lists showing 3 elements at a time out of 1000, tons of truncated text, tabs everywhere, and relatively small fonts. This isn't easy to use. It really does seem as if almost no one at Microsoft puts any thought into it.</comment>


Department of Homeland Security Devices on SF Streets - <AUTHOR> http://sfist.com/2016/01/27/trust_no_one.php <comment><AUTHOR> Ok found the device: [http://iom.nationalacademies.org/~/media/FFB5490AAC79421A80D...](http://iom.nationalacademies.org/~/media/FFB5490AAC79421A80DEDEACE48F4ED4.ashx)</comment>


Multiple Firefox Profiles (HowTo video) - <AUTHOR> http://youtu.be/_5oubQ4kggs <comment><USER2> In Linux at least, if you want to use a temporary profile for testing an app or extensions with default settings, you don't need to muck around with the Profile Manager at all:

        mkdir /tmp/test-profile
        firefox -no-remote -profile /tmp/test-profile

Browse around, do your testing, blow away the directory when you're done.</comment>


ANSiEdit.js – A network-enabled ANSi Art creator - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/andyherbert/ansiedit <comment><USER2> The server was unresponsive when I tried the site.

If it meets the guidelines, this might make a good 'Show HN'. Show HN guidelines: [https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html)</comment>


Two abandoned Soviet space shuttles left in the Kazakh steppe (2017) - <AUTHOR> http://edition.cnn.com/style/article/baikonur-buran-soviet-space-shuttle/index.html <comment><USER2> Everytime I witness the relics of the "Space Age" it takes me a few days to shake the feeling that we might be living in a new "Dark Age".

Where the scientific & technical accomplishments of the past seem implausible ---contrasted against the modern era challenge of trying to make a reliable & resilient API service---were it not for the documented evidence of their occurrence and these relics left behind to marvel at.

<comment><USER3> There were people toiling in the golden era of the Space Race doing menial things of no lasting value as well. The idea that some people have of the best minds of our generation being wasted just focusing on ads and APIs and worthless things is silly.

It's like some people pretend that no one is working on space ships, sustainable energy, electric cars, extending the human lifespan, genetic engineering, quantum computing, memristors, real-time communications platforms to remove national boundaries, etc, all of the stuff that is actually changing the world and is actually happening right now.

We're not in a dark age. If anything we're in the brightest age we've ever been in. So much cool shit is happening, so much groundbreaking and future- shaping research is occurring, and the very nature of what it means to be human is evolving faster now than it has in thousands of years... and the coolest thing about it is, so much is happening that people are able to forget about it. People are able to set aside the idea that they're holding the entire world in their hand, wirelessly, with chips as powerful as the most powerful desktops running silently, obeying their every command as they connect to the World Wide Web and complain to everyone around the globe that we must surely be in a dark age because we don't have government-sponsored space shuttles anymore.

And that communication may very well be bounced off a satellite placed into orbit by a private company with a launch that is so commonplace that it's not even announced on TV anymore. Dark age indeed.

<comment><USER4> And yet our infrastructure is literally crumbling - and repairs often take longer than it originally took to build the thing being repaired.

<comment><USER5> Infrastructure requires a continual investment, which means that at any given time you can always point at something that is, quite literally, crumbling away. That's just the nature of the modern era - that we rely on such projects for far longer than the original engineers could've imagined speaks to both their and our ingenuity.

Is there truth in the idea that repairs take longer? Sure. Sometimes it's due to incompetence and lack of funding. Other times it's for the same reason that software takes a lot more effort to maintain/refactor than it took to write in the first place. There's a lot of momentum you have to undo if you want to make an old thing new again.

<comment><USER6> >That's just the nature of the modern era

I dont know... Japan, Korea and Taiwan can build roads and public transit far better than they do it at home in Boston... And for a fraction of the cost.

<comment><USER7> We have wars to fight so no nice roads for you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> There was a great youtube video of some people visiting the site which I found absolutely riveting: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-q7ZVXOU3kM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-q7ZVXOU3kM)

<comment><USER9> Isn't that trespassing on military property? I would shit myself, the risk is too high to be detained and accused of spying.

<comment><USER10> >Isn't that trespassing on military property? I would shit myself, the risk is too high to be detained and accused of spying.

in Russia it isn't blind straight application of Femida. Instead it is always personal - you can be accused of spying or given a private tour, especially if you have a bottle of good cognac and a high quality cold smoked salmon to share :)

<comment><USER11> > in Russia it isn't blind straight application of Femida. Instead it is > always personal - you can be accused of spying or given a private tour, > especially if you have a bottle of good cognac and a high quality cold > smoked salmon to share :)

That's the better way right there. We need more of that attitude in the U.S.

<comment><USER10> > We need more of that attitude in the U.S.

everything has its price, and as an immigrant to US from Russia, i'm not sure that i would recommend for that attitude/approach to be applied here, at least not in full force, may be if just a bit/sometimes :)

<comment><USER11> Yeah, my point was not to run the entire society that way. We have too much of that on the big issues. Rather, it's OK to have it on a small scale where it's basically harmless, like paying off some cop with a little vodka when you get caught trespassing on some private land because you want to see some old space shuttles. And not OK when you steal billions with some fake mortgage repackaging that you sell to investors.

The U.S. has gone too far on the small stuff, and completely misses the big stuff. Posted something crass on Twitter 10 years ago? That's it, you're fired! We should consider jailing you! Amassed hundreds of millions of dollars while earning a government salary? No problem, nothing to see here.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> another important difference -- while the US Space Shuttle was manned, the Buran flew an _unmanned_ mission. It launched, orbited the Earth several times, and landed just a few feet from the X on the runway under automated control. A rather impressive achievement.

If not for the fact that the US&USSR were working like mad to find a way to destroy one-another, the cold war + space race was great for advancement of science.

<comment><USER13> The Buran was never man-rated so doing an unmanned mission would have been the only way to test it.

<comment><USER14> It wasn't man rated - yet - because of course you're flying first flights unmanned. Unlike those crazy Americans...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> One of the hangers collapsed back in 2001, severely damaging one of the Burans:

[http://www.buran-energia.com/bourane-buran/bourane-fin.php](http://www.buran- energia.com/bourane-buran/bourane-fin.php)

<comment><USER14> If was _the_ Buran - the one that flew - and the roof collapsed on 2002.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> They also have one of these at the Speyer Technik Museum in Germany [0]

[0]: [https://speyer.technik-museum.de/en/spaceshuttle- buran](https://speyer.technik-museum.de/en/spaceshuttle-buran)

<comment><USER17> It is not exactly a Buran. It's a test vehicle for atmospheric flights, not a spaceship, strictly speaking

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OK-GLI](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OK-GLI)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I remember when another traveler (Ralph Mirebs) posted this expedition on his own website after the first trip. Amazing to see. [https://ralphmirebs.livejournal.com/219949.html](https://ralphmirebs.livejournal.com/219949.html)

I would also highly recommend visiting De Rueda's website for a number of remarkable post-soviet and other ruins.

[https://www.davidderueda.com/explore/](https://www.davidderueda.com/explore/)

</comment><comment><USER19> Tangential topic. I had the opportunity to visit the Speyer technik museum a few years back, and it was an amazing place. Among other things including the Buran, , it has an Jumbo 747 on some steel poles so that it looks like it is landing.

There is also a sister museum in Sinsheim which is also amazing.

[0] - [https://speyer.technik-museum.de/](https://speyer.technik-museum.de/)

</comment><comment><USER20> The similarity between these and NASA's shuttle is stronger than I remember. Does anyone know if the more distinctive features like the shape in which the heat tiles are applied, and the leading edge of the edge of the wing are simply because one copied the other? Or are they inherent design decisions you'd almost always arrive at if you tried to design an orbiter / plane-type craft?

<comment><USER21> They're not that similar. Buran has no launch engine; it's lifted entirely by the booster group. Buran's heat tiles are a better design than NASA's; they're not as fragile. Buran was capable of unmanned operation; the only flight, which was successful, was unmanned. Buran also was going to have a turbojet in the tail to help with landing; NASA's shuttle landed as a glider.

The wings are almost identical, which is why it looks like a copy.

<comment><USER20> Yeah the wings are what I'm most curious about - if they're somehow the ideal shape for what is essentially a super-sonic glider or something.

Wasn't aware the tiles themselves were that different, but the layout, with a step near the nose? Very distinctive.

<comment><USER21> Buran was designed later, so the USSR copied the parts that worked well, like the basic shape, and redesigned the parts that gave NASA trouble.

<comment><USER14> When Buran was being designed NASA still hadn't too much visible troubles with Shuttle. Buran creators worked from their strong abilities and their understanding of dangers and possible requirements.

<comment><USER21> The big headache was the tiles. They were tough to install, kept falling off, and were brittle. That was known early, and Buran did it differently.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> It's crazy that the government never decided to put these into a museum or sell them to an American museum. I think any of the several air and space museum's in America would be absolutely thrilled to purchase one of these and show it off.

</comment><comment><USER23> They look similar, but under the hood are very different machines. For instance, buran was pilot-optional. It could fly without crew. It also didnt have main engines like shuttle, making refit much simpler.

<comment><USER24> I'm curious why you'd construct a "pilot optional" spacecraft, presumably adding in stuff (which amounts to weight) to support a crew that will not even be present.

<comment><USER23> Shuttle flew on autopilot. The crew was largely there to supervise, at least in terms of the flying up and back down to landing. Automated systems actually flew the craft. The pilot was the emergency backup plan. So Buran wasn't all that much of a leap.

Shuttle's crew did the things the autopilot could not, all the docking, all the satellite grabbing, and certainly all the science. Buran's one flight was just an up-and-back proof of concept. So a crew wasn't needed.

Without a crew, the pilots' only job would have been to save themselves in various emergency scenarios should the systems fail. Take the pilots out and you don't have to train/study/prepare for those scenarios, at least not before the first flight. By removing the pilots, Russia reduced early program costs. It was a form of technical debt. They would eventually have to prep for humans, but at least they could get the craft flying first.

<comment><USER24> The point I was making was that you need lots of support equipment for humans, which must be hard to fit into a spacecraft and pay to launch even if you know you're not going to need it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> What a find! I wonder if this location (and the accompanying abandoned property on the real estate) could be purchased for cheap, fixed up a bit, and turned into a museum or tourist destination.

<comment><USER26> It's in "Baikonur", a 100km circle of real estate in Kazakhstan that is leased by Russia for its space program. The site is not abandoned, but definitely has abandoned pieces of infrastructure.

Getting caught in Baikonur is no joke, it's typically the FSB that respond. With that said, typically if you're not in active infrastructure, you'll "just" get booted out of Baikonur (or Russia, depending on their mood..)

Fun fact: another Buran sat in an abandoned lot in an Inner Sydney (Australia) suburb for many years.

<comment> Harvey-Specter > Fun fact: another Buran sat in an abandoned lot in an Inner Sydney > (Australia) suburb for many years.

That wasn't an actual Buran, it was a test vehicle used to test the handling of the aircraft for gliding and landing. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OK- GLI](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OK-GLI)

<comment><USER26> Great clarification. From what I understood the OK-GLI was still refered to (colloquially and officially) as a Buran, but absolutely, the buran that ended up in Australia is not the same as the one in the Baikonur hanger.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Suggesting it may have been safer than the shuttle and referring to the accidents is a bit absurd. Shuttle fleet logged 135 missions and 1322 days total flight time. Cool story otherwise!

<comment><USER14> Both Challenger and Columbia disasters were at least studied informally by RKK Energia personnel with some sound arguments how those couldn't lead to similar disasters for Buran.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Also a little discussion here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17465763](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17465763).

</comment><comment><USER29> Seeing this kind of abandoned equipment really fuels the imagination.

What if it was actually aliens, or some secret cabal planning to use it for rogue space wars, and just renting the space from the soviets? Maybe a leader like Khan Noonien Singh and his followers actually launched themselves on a sleeper ship undetected, with plans to return in 20 more years and defeat us all? What did that last person leaving think on his way out, tuning off the lights, knowing he wouldn't be back tomorrow?

</comment><comment><USER30> Oh, these are things of beauty..

<comment><USER31> I agree. I tear up when I see these things in their current state. Despite being built to essentially destroy my country, space exploration technologies are incredible achievements for all humans. It's the only way this species can survive. Whether it's our doing or not, the Earth won't last forever.

I can only imagine how proud their creators must have been, putting all their hopes and labor into them. It's a shame to see them in such a forgotten state.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Cool fact is that part of Buran software was written in Soviet clone of Prolog.

</comment><comment><USER33> I remember seeing a Buran test vehicle in Sydney in the early 2000s - [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OK-GLI](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OK-GLI)

</comment><comment><USER34> Adventure ever to the abandoned Soviet Space Shuttles in Baikonur

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-q7ZVXOU3kM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-q7ZVXOU3kM)</comment>


Commit Driven Development - <AUTHOR> http://tosbourn.com/2012/08/development/commit-driven-development/

<comment><USER2> This is a nice little-p process. I've kind of stumbled into it from time to time when I'm having trouble nailing down what I want to do. Tower.app actually helps, because it leaves your commit message betweens cancels.

I say little-p because I've found it to be a nice tool in certain circumstances, but it's not a very proscriptive process, and it's not always clear that you need it until you already find yourself doing it. So it's nice to identify that it happens, and to give yourself a chance to take advantage by pausing and reflecting before you commit, but honestly that's just good practice regardless.

For me, sometimes I'll write some code, get a commit message ready, then realize as I'm writing my message that there's a better/clearer/more general solution to what I just did, and I use that as an opportunity to improve my commit.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm not sold on doing this at the commit level, but we have been using Pull Requests on Github in this fashion for Wufoo and SurveyMonkey. We start with an initial commit to start the branch for a new feature and then immediately initiate a Pull Request. That pull request contains a list of items that need to be done for the feature and as it gets developed you can see how commits are working towards making that pull request ready. This also helps tremendously with code reviews because you can do them as the feature is being developed.

What's nice about this method for us is that you can just look at the list of active pull requests for a project and see what features are in active development and get an easy way to drill down into the progress of each.

I guess you could call it Pull Request Driven Development.

<comment><USER4> We do something quite similar.

Because issues and PRs are hopelessly intermingled in Github, we create issues with the sole intent of creating an initial PR "feature/1234-api-auth" so we can reference and close the initial ticket.

The issue describes what is the problem and what needs to be accomplished, while the PR body describes what actions will be taken and the overall progress.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> How might a commit-first Git workflow look? I'm imagining a lot more use of squash/fixup and the like than sounds fun.

<comment><USER6> Usually I write a little code, commit what it is supposed to do, then fixup all the little edge cases and bugs that come naturally. But what's important is that first commit is sets up a little problem with a clear goal, and then everything afterwards works toward that goal.

Two extremely useful aliases:

      [alias]

      fi = !sh -c 'git commit -m \"fixup! $(git log -1 --format='\\''%s'\\'' $@)\"' -

      ri = rebase --interactive --autosquash

First alias allows me to create a commit prefixed with fixup! very easily. So workflow looks like this:

      2536aw3 implementing feature foo
      sfd93ja fixup! implementing feature foo
      ok4jzvd fixup! implementing feature foo
      k4okvxx fixup! implementing feature foo
      2okoswa fixup! implementing feature foo
      zxvorm3 fixup! implementing feature foo
      ko2koaa fixup! implementing feature foo

And then I rebase when git log --graph --pretty goes off the screen.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I prefer thought driven development.

</comment><comment><USER8> This X driven development stuff is getting out of hand. Because I know what my next block of code is going to be once I've written the commit message.

<comment><AUTHOR> You might not know what it is going to be, but you should know what it will do.

<comment><USER8> I'll also know:

      - All the TODOs
      - Applicable Nota Bene's (you know, "this breaks in X")
      - Whether or not I'll be distracted before completing the task with something else that would need a different summary.

Yes, I know what it will do, but a good commit message isn't a generic one- liner that describes it beforehand. What you are looking for is "task driven development".

<comment><AUTHOR> A very fair point, but surely Task Driven Development is more about how you write something, not about the workflow around it.

<comment><USER8> False. "Task Driven Development" (notice the quotes?) is not about how I write something. That is decided elsewhere. Same for workflow. My commit messages don't dictate either of those.

Here is an example task I completed yesterday:

        #1982: Automatically update events widget

That, to the uninitiated, means diddly-squat. It ended up being "write a wordpress shortcode plugin that hooks into our API for event retrieval". The commit message was as follows:

        SG Shortcode

        Instructions coming. Depends upon APC being enabled for caching to
        work properly. Triggered through the use of `[events]` shortcode

I then had a few cleanup commits, and some calibration of things such as curl timeout, apc cache length, and shortcode option support. I also added some documentation of the feature to our internal wiki and sent out an email to the people who would end up using the feature. I'll probably end up yelling at one of them today to see how he's using it.

How I write something was largely irrelevant in the beginning, so long as it completed the task. In this instance, there was a bit of back and forth in the github issue concerning the implementation, but for smaller things there usually isn't any back and forth. The scope of the task and the depth of it's affects should drive the workflow around your development, not a commit message you through together on the off-chance that the task is still relevant at the end of the day.

If you have a large enough task that you are using commit messages to plan out how a feature will work, you're gonna have a bad time. You might want to start chunking your work into smaller, more manageable, testable components, otherwise whatever the hell you ended up writing is going to be full of failboat.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is EXACTLY what an integration test gives you, start there and let it drive your commit message instead, no need for a new mantra.

<comment><AUTHOR> That is very true, to be honest my post was food for thought more than a call to action.</comment></comment>


Booking Video: Aaron Swartz Jokes, Jousts With Cops After MIT Bust - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/2014/04/aaron-swartz-booking-video/ <comment><USER2> chilling, absolutely chilling -- that this happens for writing code. hell, scraping a website. i agree that what Aaron did was not a 100% legal, but to equate it with a criminal offence? Bah! Support Aaron's Law! [https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/06/aarons-law- introduced-...](https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/06/aarons-law-introduced- now-time-reform-cfaa)

<comment><USER3> More than that, make sure that the prosecutors on his case, Stephen Heymann and Carmen Ortiz, never ever have the opportunity to do the same to anyone else.

<comment><USER4> They need to be removed immediately for misconduct. Every day they are allowed to continue practicing law is a spit in the face.</comment></comment></comment>


Deciding The Fate Of Your Digital Stuff After You're Gone - <AUTHOR> http://www.npr.org/blogs/alltechconsidered/2013/04/12/177031885/deciding-the-fate-of-your-digital-stuff-after-youre-gone

<comment><USER2> Why does Google--or anyone else--think that already existing probate and testamentary laws don't apply?</comment>


The NASA Design Program (2011) - <AUTHOR> http://www.thisisdisplay.org/features/the_nasa_design_program <comment><USER2> It speaks to the challenge of good design and of changing organizations.

But I got a soft spot for the meatball. Today, the worm reads as cold and clinical, and potentially kind of out of touch with NASA culture. The meatball kind of exudes a certain optimism.

Astronauts fill their jump suits with patches, and all mission patches are fundamentally dorky, committee like things. And even while the new logo was in vigour, people still wore the old one! [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Nelson_(astronaut)#/med...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Nelson_\(astronaut\)#/media/File:Nelson-p.jpg) This one is from 1985, the year after they won their award: [http://www.nasa.gov/images/content/276615main_BarbMorgan_5.j...](http://www.nasa.gov/images/content/276615main_BarbMorgan_5.jpg)

I wonder whether the new logo wouldn't have had better adoption had they used the new logo type where appropriate but showed it off inserted in a cleaned up, subtler version of the meatball.

</comment><comment><USER3> more: [http://www.grapheine.com/typographie/logo-de-la- nasa](http://www.grapheine.com/typographie/logo-de-la-nasa)</comment>


The Minimum Viable Rails Stack, Now Reddit Frontpage Approved - <AUTHOR> http://goodfil.ms/blog/posts/2012/09/15/minimum-viable-rails-stack/

<comment><USER2> This is almost exactly how I deployed NameTerrific (<https://www.nameterrific.com>). It automatically gets ready for any horizontal scaling in the future.

In addition, I allocate the workers to their own instances so that they can grow independently. Also I use Capistrano to automate deployment. Whenever additional resources are needed, simply clone the instance and add it to the load balancer.

I use 2 Nginx workers and 8 Unicorn workers in a single app instance, and they serve in HTTP at 80 and 443 (yes they respond in HTTP via port 443 and the app should assume it's HTTPS). The app instances are firewalled in a private network and they use private IP addresses.

The load balancer has two networking interfaces, one public-facing and one private-facing. It's basically a reverse proxy serving traffic in both HTTP and HTTPS (which will be forwarded to HTTP:443). So the load balancer handles the encryption entirely.

The assets get compiled during deployment, and everything gets cached. I bundle all the CSS and JS into a single package, so that there's nothing to load other than the HTML and images (natively async) in subsequent visits. The website is simply way more responsive when deployed this way. I also use CloudFront to host the assets by simply pointing the cloud distribution to the website itself as the origin. Rails will handle the assets host automatically as well.

Whenever I need to deploy or manage the database directly for any reason, I will need to connect to the private network via VPN. It's secure and just neat.

If I need to build a local mirror, I'll install another nginx box, connect to the VPN, and reverse proxy HTTPS requests to the HTTP:443 directly. This reduces the HTTPS handshaking latency while still maintaining the security. And it just works.

EDIT: Added a link to make it easier for the curious people.

<comment><USER3> If you don't mind me asking, what load balancer are you using? I'm trying to setup multiple app servers on EC2 behind ELB using Redis as a session_store and I can't get sessions to persist.

<comment><USER2> I used to use ELB, but later I migrated the whole app to a self-hosted private cloud on a dedicated server.

I'm using Nginx as the load balancer, and there're no session problems for me because I use the built-in secure cookie store.

<comment><USER3> Thanks for the response. I appreciate it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> "We didn't have any page caching in place at all."

Cache me if you can! If you're a high-traffic site and you are not caching static content (I recommend Varnish highly), then your are throwing money or good user experience out the window.

<comment><AUTHOR> The key thing I got a bit wrong was high-traffic mostly static "content", vs high-traffic "very custom" which is a) what I was used to at envato and b) what I _thought_ we had on our hands at goodfilms.

I think in a growing site with a lot of custom per-user content (like a social network) the extra complexity of a cache layer and managing expiry is more pain than it's worth while iterating the product quickly. If you're mostly a content site, it's definitely the #1 thing you should be doing.

Realising that we're both at the same time, depending on the user or page, means that sometimes the cache stuff is the right thing to do, and sometimes not. I was leaning too far towards not, and happy now with the balance we've picked.

<comment><USER5> Absolutely. At theconversation.edu.au we run a content site—we publish the news, which is the same for everyone. This means we can cache the front page and all the articles as static HTML, and then annotate the page with user info for signed-in commenters, editorial controls for signed-in editors, and so on.

(We have a separate cookie that is present for signed-in users, so the fronted knows whether it should fire the annotation request.)

The result is that we can serve a sudden influx of unauthenticated users (e.g. from Google News or StumbleUpon) from nginx alone, which gives us massive scale from very little hardware. It's likely that the network is actually the bottleneck in this case, and not nginx.

<comment><USER6> Interested in what you mean by annotating the page after caching it, do you have any more info on this?

<comment><USER7> The cached page contains content suitable for everyone, so it looks the the user is logged out.

An extra AJAX request grabs the users logged in status, CSRF token and similar data as JSON and then modifies the page so the user sees what they expect (a logout button, a comment form, etc).

<comment><USER8> Doesn't that cause content movement?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Great post, it is great to see startups being open about how they architect their systems and overcome issues with scaling.

This sort of information helps people building the next group of startups save both time and money.

Keep up the great work!

</comment><comment><USER10> Well done guys, keep scaling and keep representing the Melbourne tech scene!

</comment><comment><USER11> We used New Relic for a while with Heroku but turned it off because of a number of performance and stability issues we seemed to be seeing with it. In particular application boot times (for the first requests anyways) seemed to be negatively affected.

</comment><comment><USER12> While the "webscale" method with nginx you detailed is nice [1], why not use Varnish or nginx's built in proxy_cache features [2]?

[1] <https://gist.github.com/3711251>

[2] <http://wiki.nginx.org/HttpProxyModule#proxy_cache>

</comment><comment><USER13> Nice post, but:

Don't self-back-pat.

It read more like marketing for the company than anything of much worth.

Don't use the words "web scale".

It is a meaningless term. How many requests per second and how many guest and user sessions for how long of a time is "web scale"? Does "web scale" just mean Christmas shopping traffic on your crappy e-commerce site that no one visits, does it mean you can survive being top link on HN on a Friday morning, or slashdotted, or DoS attacked by anonymous, or survive a fucking flood and the data center lifts off the ground and enough flexibility and strength in the trunk lines to handle a tsunami?

Don't just throw users at it.

Unless testing is very costly and you need every user's eyes on your untested code as possible, that is just stupid. Look at Tsung, Grinder or JMeter, or the many other ways you could generate load as a first step before you do that.

Don't gloss over the details.

Sure you said you were using Rails 3.2 and postgres and a tad bit about the architecture, but who in the hell _doesn't_ know that you need to load balance, need to put the DB servers on different VMs/servers than the apps. Although- having everything on both and some stuff just not turned on and live is not a bad idea for emergency fault tolerance, and you didn't mention that.

<comment><USER14> Your caps-lock key appears to be broken.

<comment><USER13> Oh, you're right- thanks! Just fixed the comment. I'll get the capslock key fixed on Monday.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> A few questions:

1\. Is it possible to spin up two apps on Heroku? 2\. What load balancers are available with the above? 3\. Anyone have a link to a run down of how to back up your Postgres DB periodically?

Thanks

<comment><USER2> For 1 and 2: AFAIK Heroku already has three layers, the Nginx routing mesh, Varnish cache and your dynos. Everything is already handled for you so if you have two dynos, the traffic will rotate between the two. You don't need a load balancer for Heroku. It's built-in.

<comment><USER16> Note: Varnish isn't available on the (standard) Cedar stack. Here's how Heroku suggests you approach cacheing:

<https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/http-caching>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Great job! Can you do such page for EC2 too?

<comment><USER18> Engine Yard Cloud does a lot of this out of the box on EC2 while still affording root access. There is a price premium obviously.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> we have pretty much used a similar stack in websketch.com</comment>


The Drunken Bishop – An analysis of the OpenSSH fingerprint [] (2009) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://www.dirk-loss.de/sshvis/drunken_bishop.pdf <comment><USER2> It was a great idea, however after using it a few years I think it does not really help. Even in the best possible case where you login with a password to a single site, it is too difficult to remember. Particularly since you never quiz yourself before it really matters. If there was a more active process where you had to identify if a given image was correct or not or the connection would be dropped then maybe you would learn it well enough for when you needed it. Much better to use public key authentication.

Kinda fun as abstract ascii art, though. I still enable it :).</comment>


CoronaVirus – FAQ, misconceptions, information, from a statistical perspective - <AUTHOR> https://www.reddit.com/r/China_Flu/comments/exe552/coronavirus_faq_misconceptions_information_from_a/ <comment><USER2> Most important point, as far as I'm concerned:

 _Ok so - definitely, the death count is too low. We all agree there. But before you freak out, there 's a bright spot. We CAN also put an upper bound with a fair amount of certainty on the general death rate. How? Because there have been enough cases reported globally already, and enough data from the patients OUTSIDE of China, that we can tell the death rate is NOT anywhere near 10% with a strong degree of certainty (many patients have recovered, and are just awaiting the viral test all-clear before they can be discharged. Most other patients are in stable and recovering condition)._

 _So we don 't know, from the China data, whether the fatality rate is 0.5% or 1% or 2% or 3%... but we can be FAIRLY sure it's not 5% and definitely not above that. Simply because otherwise we'd already see the mortality in International cases, and that's outside of Chinese control._

Of course, this assumes access to a hospital, so if they get overwhelmed, I would expect the death rate to be higher, but unsure of how much.</comment>


The Top Dumbest Hiring Mistakes Smart People Make - <AUTHOR> http://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20140321053539-15454-march-madness-the-top-10-dumbest-hiring-mistakes-smart-people-make?trk=tod-home-art-list-small_1

<comment><AUTHOR> Some pretty interesting observations here. Hiring can be an arbitrary and inaccurate process, especially when dealing with total strangers. Obviously, when the hiring party and applicant know each other, it's a different ball game altogether.</comment>


Show HN: Invoiceless – send simple recurring invoices with AWS Lambda and SES - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/forrestbrazeal/invoiceless <comment><AUTHOR> Nothing fancy here. Just a simple serverless scheduler that generates and sends invoices to clients on your behalf.

If you send recurring invoices that look the same each month except for the date, why not let Lambda, CloudWatch and SES do it for you?</comment>


Microsoft: Windows CE nearing end of life and we could start over - <AUTHOR> http://technologizer.com/2009/02/18/microsoft-windows-ce-is-closer-to-end-of-life-than-windows/

<comment><USER2> It sounds like Singularity will have more influence over their next mobile OS than over Windows.</comment>


The Clock (2003) - <AUTHOR> http://techno-logic-art.com/clock.htm <comment><USER3> I've had an idea that I've been pinning to build for a while. I call it "the anachronism clock". The time piece is an old fashion pendulum. This is used to generate regular electrical pulses via point contacts. This signal would go to a series of electro-mechanical counters based on drums, motors, point contacts, and regions of non-conductivity. The counters would be arranged to output their position to mock nixie tubes built from LED's and plexiglass. Once an hour a tape recorder would be activated which will play a recording of the chimes of big ben.

<comment><USER4> Definitely could be done; you'd also need an electromagnet to "pulse" the pendulum (much like the magnetic "perpetual motion" toys out there).

Also - I would suggest using regular bulbs instead of LEDs. If you can deal with the higher voltages involved, neon lamps would give it a great look.

Also, rather than a tape recorder, use one of those large doorbell "big ben" chimes instead (if you can find a really old one - from the 1960s or so - <USER2> of them used a similar motor/drum switched sequencer for the solenoid chime playing system).

It sounds very intriguing, and probably would be cool to watch function...

<comment><USER3> For the nixie tube I was going to copy this design [https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:880429](https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:880429)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> He has another project - the tower, which looks amazing

[http://techno-logic-art.com/tower.htm](http://techno-logic-art.com/tower.htm)

Anyone know if there's a video of it in action?

<comment><USER6> I found the creator's HN account, looks like he planned on making one at some point: [https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=Technologicart](https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=Technologicart)

Maybe he'll see this post and finish the video :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I really like the clocks made by Maarten Baas, it's basically a 24 hour long video of a guy "updating the time" every minute.

He has made a couple different ones:

[http://maartenbaas.com/real-time](http://maartenbaas.com/real-time)

<comment><USER8> That is really cool. I also liked "The Clock", a 24hr film montage with every scene showing a clock with the correct time. I didn't see much of it but it was mesmerising to watch.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Clock_(2010_film)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Clock_\(2010_film\))

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> How can the clock utilize a 120V 60Hz AC signal when it's only taking power from a 12V DC Adapter?

<comment><USER10> It could be a 12V _AC_ adapter. Not too common, but they do exist. Four of the myriad diodes would be connected in a bridge rectifier to convert the AC to DC. (I don't see any smoothing capacitors though....)

Depending on how creative you wanted to get, a clock might be designed to run directly on a pulsating rectified DC supply. That would give you a sort of baseband embedded clock signal at 120 Hz. Or use two half-wave rectifiers and design the whole clock based on trinary logic, +12V/0/-12V.

Realistically, since the mains connection is hidden behind the frame, it would be easy to tap off internally a connection to the 12V AC signal from the secondary of the transformer, before it gets rectified and filtered to DC.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Awesome, btw I did not think you would need so much discrete components to do that, but probably the conversion of the counter to the digits segments is the majority of it.

<comment><USER4> It looks like DTL (diode-transistor logic) is being used; if implemented properly, quite a few parts are needed for just a NAND gate, and a BCD decoder uses a lot of them.

That said, counters aren't lightweight in that arena either...

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> That's a time piece I would call a piece of modern art, here "art" being used in the most direct and non-ironic sense, as it was used in Renaissanse times.

</comment><comment><USER13> Makes me wonder, why not use decimal counters? If designed cleverly enough, they could drive the segments directly.

Each digit would have 7 latches, one for each segment, and cycle through just 10 of the otherwise possible 128 states. It would be ironic to use clockless logic, making simpler latches.

</comment><comment><USER14> How long might one expect it to work before something fails?

</comment><comment><USER15> Does it respect daylight saving time, and leap seconds?

<comment> augusto-moura Does any clock implement it correctly?

<comment><USER16> 5071A does leap seconds ([http://leapsecond.com/notes/5071a-leapsecond.jpg](http://leapsecond.com/notes/5071a-leapsecond.jpg)) and IIRC even can do timezones and DST (although that seems like a feature of somewhat questionable utility). Whether you want to call such an device a "clock" is another issue ;)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Why no video?

</comment><comment><USER18> Is this for sale? Take my money!

</comment><comment><USER19> beautiful.

</comment><comment><USER20> Why are there so many diodes? There totally seem to be more than necessary... Are you biasing transistors with diodes? That doesn't sound like it's going to work well as temperature changes...

<comment><USER21> [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diode–transistor_logic](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diode–transistor_logic)</comment></comment>