Simple, solar-powered water desalination - <AUTHOR> http://news.mit.edu/2020/passive-solar-powered-water-desalination-0207 <comment><USER2> Efficiency in desalination is measured by comparing the energy expenditure to the enthalpy of vaporization of water (basically the energy required to distill water by boiling it). The current state of the art reverse osmosis desalination plants use about 3.2 KWh of electricity per cubic meter of fresh water ([https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/d4d7/821d585699719289dddd10...](https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/d4d7/821d585699719289dddd1025a582253e3314.pdf)). This technology uses about 173 KWh of solar energy per cubic meter of fresh water. The advantage of this method is lower capital costs and not having to convert solar energy to electricity. For large-scale desalination, however, it is almost certainly more cost-effective to use solar panels, batteries, and large scale reverse osmosis systems. This is still a useful project for making drinking water in remote locations, though.

<comment><USER3> One fascinating (well, to me) component of modern RO desalination systems is the rotary pressure exchanger. Such a simple device, but so important. It looks like something from the 19th century, but the base patent was issued in 1988.

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

<comment><USER4> I found this video which seems to animate the concept nicely:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=udffed4Pq3g](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=udffed4Pq3g)

<comment><USER5> Bloody Hell I did not know that. I have parts of broken Katadyn PUR-06. I was thinking of rebuilding it from better materials. The pressure recovery is the worst part. I can totally fathom now a hand-held desalinator with only rotating parts running from solar or Li-On batteries.

<comment><USER5> PUR-06 lasts 300 days, not "indefinitely": [https://youtu.be/dNjdgfGgPdE?t=208](https://youtu.be/dNjdgfGgPdE?t=208)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> "than 1.5 gallons of fresh drinking water per hour for every square meter of solar collecting area."

Units, people. Units. Be imperial. Be metric. Hey! Be both!

<comment><USER7> It comes out to about 0.4 liters per square foot, for those of you who are confused.

<comment><USER8> That means for every square rod of surface area, this unit produces over 11,000 hogsheads of water! Impressive.

<comment><USER9> What, per millifortnight? _cf._ [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22270160](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22270160)

<comment><USER10> How much water can I get in a moon?

<comment><USER11> If by 'moon' you mean our Moon, it has a volume of 2.1958×10^10 km3. Although, how much of that will hold water, we don't know. Anyway, a jerrycan is probably a lot more convenient ... holds 4.4 imp gals.

<comment><USER10> I really meant a month, but that was good :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The combination of hydrogen production and desalination using simple techniques are an exciting prospect for this decade.

For architects of 21st century cities, most of these sustainable technologies would benefit from a cleanslate design, rather than trying to compete with builtup 20th century infrastructure.

I think Austrailia is postured to be the biggest beneficiary of all of these "leaps" in technology this century. Most of the desert area is the perfect canvas to start building indoor cities that will be the models/prototypes for the spacestations that the next generation will use to explore urban life outside of our atmosphere. Even building a cruise ship on land would be a good starting point for a 21st century city if they could support several thousand residents with enough freshwater for self-sustaining agriculture and energy to take root.

Even though we won't have saltwater in space, most of these advancements in sustainables fit the roadmap to space more than they're currently reported. Hopefully they'll break ground on new cities using these new resources sometime soon and change the narrative appropriately.

<comment><USER13> Landships sound like the plot of some dystopian future film; ecosteaders fight off the scavenger bands.

<comment><USER14> It is already - in the my opinion deeply silly book/movie series(?) Mortal Engines. I haven't read or watched them but saw a video ad and thought that it was the stupidest thing I had ever seen. Anyway it is effectively landships except they are massive steampunk mobile cities which grind up and harvest other sessile settlements and smaller mobile ones. I get the extended metaphor involved of colonalism and enrichment by exploitation of the weak and pillaging instead of their own production but even for YA Dystopian it is just too dumb logistically for me to suspend disbelief.

<comment><USER15> The books are much better than the movie, but it's not exactly hard sci-fi. They predate the big surge in apocalyptic YA and are much better than they deserve to be. They're not _less_ plausible than "Cities in Flight" or "Marooned in Real-time" or anything with warp drives and laser pistols.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> It's a solar thermal Multi-Effect-Distillation (MED) plant!

I was part of a team that suggested using geothermal heat for desal with MED technology in Perth, Western Australia a bit more than a decade ago!

The advantage over work based (i.e. electrical/Reverse Osmosis) systems is that you do not lose heat via Carnot (or real world, for that matter) efficiency. You utilize more of the original heat, and via the multiple stages ("effects") you can re-use the latent heat of vaporization over and over.

MEDs are really cool gizmos!

</comment><comment><USER17> >> 1.5 gallons of fresh drinking water per hour for every square meter of solar collecting area.

So a football field could collect around 8,000 gallons of water per hour. Let's say you can get 5 hours of good sunlight per day = 40,000 gallons of water.

>> The team's demonstration device can achieve an overall efficiency of 385 percent in converting the energy of sunlight into the energy of water evaporation.

>> Theoretically, with more desalination stages and further optimization, such systems could reach overall efficiency levels as high as 700 or 800 percent

So now we're looking at 80,000 gallons of water per day.

>> Unlike some desalination systems, there is no accumulation of salt or concentrated brines to be disposed of. In a free-floating configuration, any salt that accumulates during the day would simply be carried back out at night through the wicking material and back into the seawater.

>> In production, they think a system built to serve the needs of a family might be built for around $100.

<comment><USER18> If I am reading [1] correctly, NYC needs approx. 1 billion gallons of water per day. So, they would need an array of 12,500 football fields to meet their needs.

[1] [https://data.cityofnewyork.us/Environment/Water- Consumption-...](https://data.cityofnewyork.us/Environment/Water-Consumption- In-The-New-York-City/ia2d-e54m)

<comment><USER19> > 1 billion gallons of water per day

* How much of that water need be drinkable?

* How much of that water can be salinated (e.g. for flushing)?

* How much of that water can be partially desalinated (e.g. for showering)?

<comment><USER20> Indeed. If you do only the drinking water, 2L per person per day for 20 million people is only 10566000 gallons or 132 football fields.

<comment><USER21> And for those who wonder like I did, I counted around fifty of those on that page: [https://www.nycgovparks.org/facilities/football](https://www.nycgovparks.org/facilities/football)

<comment><USER20> Ok, but if you use those then you don't have anywhere to play. I think more importantly, 132 football fields is about the same as the total floor area of the Pentagon.

<comment><USER22> Install the solar panels over the football fields as roofing.

<comment><USER21> If you can afford it, and/or land/actually mounting the panels is the most expensive part, I'd recommend to install photovoltaic panels instead, though, as they are more versatile.

And it would simplify plumbing a lot to put everything in the same place, vs pumping brine up many roofs, and water down again.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is a well-known approach known as multistage flash distillation:

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

It's surprising they didn't mention this in the article. (It is, of course, mentioned in the paper, because its authors are decent and honest people.)

> _more than 1.5 gallons of fresh drinking water per hour_

I don't understand. Are those imperial gallons, US gallons, US _dry_ gallons, or Irish gallons, which are all different sizes? [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gallon#Sizes_of_gallons](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gallon#Sizes_of_gallons) How many hamburgers is that the same weight as? How many ngogns is that? Or maybe acre-feet, pony shots, or Olympic swimming pools? MIT should be ashamed of their News Office.

The abstract of the paper [https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2020/ee/c9ee0...](https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2020/ee/c9ee04122b#!divAbstract) does give the result in modern units, and to a much higher precision:

> _a production rate of 5.78 L m⁻² h⁻¹ under one-sun illumination_

In Dercuano [http://canonical.org/~kragen/dercuano](http://canonical.org/~kragen/dercuano) I wrote a note about multistage distillation, which I didn't realize was already a known technique until later; see notes/recycling-distillation.html or p. 1776 in the PDF. The basic summary is that modern reverse-osmosis distillation plants require on the order of 7 kJ/ℓ to get freshwater from seawater (which works out to about 50 kJ of sunlight per liter with a cheap 16%-efficient solar panel) while multistage distillation requires a few hundred kJ/ℓ.

The number given by the paper abstract works out to 623 kJ/ℓ if we assume one sun is 1000 W/m² (a common figure for the solar constant at the surface). So if you use those square meters to run photovoltaic panels which you then use to drive a reverse-osmosis machine, you can get dozens of times as much fresh water from the same solar energy. But you need to build or buy a reverse- osmosis machine, and then you need to defoul it, so this device might be a good choice in some circumstances. (You might need to defoul the distillation apparatus as well, though.)

<comment><USER23> _> I don't understand. Are those imperial gallons, US gallons, US dry gallons, or Irish gallons, which are all different sizes?_

Imperial and US gallons would both make sense, and you're right it's ambiguous.

Dry gallons would not make sense, since this is a liquid quantity, and Irish gallons are long obsolete.

<comment><USER9> > _Irish gallons are long obsolete._

The word "Irish" in this sentence is unnecessary. Gallons are long obsolete.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> The full paper: [https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2020/ee/c9ee0...](https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2020/ee/c9ee04122b)

</comment><comment><USER25> > the team's demonstration device can achieve an overall efficiency of 385 > percent in converting the energy of sunlight into the energy of water > evaporation.

I need an explanation with pictures for that, because it seems like the author is using 'efficiency' incorrectly.

<comment><USER26> It takes 1 watt-hour to produce about 3.5 BTUs.

With a heat pump, for instance, you might be able to produce 5BTUs per watt- hour, because you're extracting heat from the environment (a very large heat source), which would be 140% efficient.

The paragraph you excerpted has your answer:

> The key to the system's efficiency lies in the way it uses each of the > multiple stages to desalinate the water. At each stage, heat released by the > previous stage is harnessed instead of wasted. In this way, the team's > demonstration device can achieve an overall efficiency of 385 percent in > converting the energy of sunlight into the energy of water evaporation.

You can't drink steam (and even bottling it is futile), so that heat has to go somewhere.

With counterflow systems, like ventilation systems for houses, the inlet and outlet temperatures are pretty close to each other, and the temperature on the 'inside' of the system is either much higher or much lower.

When distillation came up a month or so ago, several people pointed out that modern systems do not operate at ambient air pressure, so the temperature delta may be less than you'd imagine.

[edit: pedants gonna pedant]

<comment><USER25> I really enjoy artful displays of mental gymnastics, so thank you. A _watt_ is a unit of _power_ , a _BTU_ is a unit of _energy_ , and a _watt hour_ is also a unit of _energy_. If you can show me how solar watt hours are converted into BTU's at an equivalent rate of 3.85 to 1, I will short sell all the energy stocks using my children as collateral.

<comment><USER26> So that's how this is gonna be.

Good luck.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> When I was in Boy Scouts loooong ago, there were instructions and diagrams for making solar stills out of a sheet of plastic, a cup, rocks and dirt.

<comment><USER28> Same. I wonder how well they worked; I've never seen one made.

It surely would require fairly specific conditions to work well; a wet ground and low humidity.

<comment><USER27> Just get a large bowl or pail, put an inch of water, or plants, in the bottom. Put a cup in the center. Cover the top with clear plastic film. Weight the center of the plastic. Place it in sunlight.

After a while, condensation will form on the underside of the film, the drops will run downhill to the center, and drop off into the cup.

Voila! Distilled water.

Found it! [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_still](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_still)

<comment><USER28> Sure, I know the setup. Just never made it nor seen it made.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> This is not only about efficiency. As noted in the article, it would reduce the pollution of highly concentrated brine rejected into the ocean.

See for instance this article of the Guardian about a region in Chile where the majority of drinkable water comes from a desalination plant built in 2003: "The salt they pump back in kills everything'" [https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2020/jan/02/the-salt- they...](https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2020/jan/02/the-salt-they-pump- back-in-kills-everything-is-the-cost-of-chiles-fresh-water-too-high)

<comment><USER30> It only does that by virtue of being much less efficient and spread over a larger area than traditional desalination plants. At the end of the day unless you're storing that brine or trucking it off somewhere you have to dump it back in the ocean. That "highly concentrated brine" isn't all that concentrated to begin with as it's less than a 50% increase in solutes coming out of the discharge pipe and gets mixed and diluted in the ocean relatively quickly. That article is just a fisherman blaming an unrelated problem on the closest thing around.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> This topic always reminds me of the opening scene[1] from Waterworld where a guy on a raft out in the sea passes his urine through some kind of filter that turns it into drinkable water, and drinks it.

I was a little kid when I watched it and wondered why he would drink his own urine when he was surrounded by such vast amounts of water. With this type of technology, maybe he wouldn't have had to do something so gross! XD

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=16txiqRoVNQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=16txiqRoVNQ)

<comment><USER32> Given the agricultural issues in that movie, perhaps the purification device was intended more to collect and concentrate the urea than to purify the water.

But that assumes the scriptwriter would have thought of that, which may be a stretch, given that Earth has insufficient water to cover all landmasses to a depth of 7 km. That would require about 3.6 billion cubic kilometers more water than already exists in the oceans, and there are only about 1.4 billion cubic kilometers of water on Earth to begin with, . Certainly there isn't that much locked up in glacial ice. That is only 26.5 _million_ km^3, which is enough to raise sea level by a _maximum_ of 52 m, far short of the 8 km it would take to cover everything but Mt. Everest.

Anyone who would skip that bar-napkin math was probably only putting that scene in specifically for the gross-out factor. It's just like Mad Max eating the can of dog food. Which is an apples-to-apples comparison, because _Waterworld_ was written specifically to be an ersatz _Mad Max_.

<comment><USER33> So the only possible explanation of the cause of the Waterworld apocalypse is earth being hit by millions of giant ice meteors.

<comment><USER34> IIRC the movie explicitly says "due to global warming" at the start or something to that effect.

But on the other hand, society had collapsed along with most of the stored knowledge of the world, so maybe it was just the people being uneducated and highly insular. They don't even know how long a kilometer is anymore.

There was a point in history a few hundred million years ago where the entire American midwest was a shallow water ocean; we could easily be heading back to that scenario in just a few centuries.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Pretty cool, seems like a modern version of what some people were doing before electricity and solar panels: [http://www.solaqua.com/solwatdis1.html](http://www.solaqua.com/solwatdis1.html)

</comment><comment><USER36> A big question is what do they do with the salt?

<comment><USER37> Kinda explained in the 9th graf:

> Unlike some desalination systems, there is no accumulation of salt or > concentrated brines to be disposed of. In a free-floating configuration, any > salt that accumulates during the day would simply be carried back out at > night through the wicking material and back into the seawater, according to > the researchers.

<comment><USER36> So the salt is just going back into the ocean. How is that different from other systems, they end up dumping the salt somewhere.

<comment><USER38> There's no difference. Except that the _processing_ and _shipping_ of ions is passive / much easier. Contrasted with large permeable membrane plants that have to burn power to push all that brine out into the ocean.

<comment><USER39> But the processing and shipping isn't the problem with desalination. The problem is that dumping bribe or salt into the ocean can kill local wildlife.

<comment><USER10> They dump the salt outside the environment. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3m5qxZm_JqM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3m5qxZm_JqM)

Seriously though, far out to sea away from any landmass it's pretty much a desert. Any salt dumped there would disperse very quickly and not pose a problem to wildlife.

<comment><USER40> Since the brine is denser than water, a long hose could deliver it to the ocean bottom for just the cost of the hose. There are lakes of dense brine on the sea floor already.

Almost every part of the world ocean has been described as a desert, before people went under and looked. It turns out there's a huge amount of life everywhere you look, even miles down.

But there is also a lot of room, so anything localized, unpleasant, and temporary can be swum away from.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> This is pretty cool. It also could solve one of the seasteading problems (water production) in a way that is more scalable. Certainly if they can produce a robust version of this you could pack it into lifeboats so that the first thing you did after abandoning ship would be to toss this overboard and unfold it so that it could be filling/refilling the boat's water tanks.

I am not to sure about it on a metropolitan scale though, that is a lot of surface area per person. One sq kilometer is a pretty big patch for serving up water for about a million people. Call it 800K for losses due to transport.

</comment><comment><USER42> I guess this an awesome tech for places where there is no clean water, as long as those places are close enough to the shore.

But again, I doubt that any investor will be interested, as they will probably not get good enough ROE with this.

This would probably get the attention of government of some poor countries, or maybe some humanitarian organizations, or even the military.

I would probably be confident that a small portable kit could be marketed to survivalists and it would sell extremely well.

</comment><comment><USER43> See [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watermaker](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watermaker) and [https://www.cruisingworld.com/desalination-decisions- waterma...](https://www.cruisingworld.com/desalination-decisions-watermakers/)

</comment><comment><USER44> I have a stupid question (well, not to me because I don't know the answer): isn't desalination tech fundamentally similar to alcohol distillation? I know that's energy intensive too, I'm just curious, because I know a little about alcohol distillation and an wondering if the concepts are transferable.

</comment><comment><USER22> > the team's demonstration device can achieve an overall efficiency of 385 > percent

I don't care how good you think you are, you're not getting 3.85kW per square meter from sunlight.

</comment><comment><USER45> Would this process also be useful for filtering polluted water?

Several pollutants I have in mind are VOCs and fluorine compounds.

Hopefully there is someone here that is qualified to answer this question.

<comment><USER39> Probably depends on the vapor pressureS of the VOCs; if less than water, then no.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> Is humidity usually high by the ocean? Would it be more efficient to pull water out of the air? Maybe take advantage of low night temps to collect dew?

</comment><comment><USER47> Why do these articles never have pictures or diagrams?

edit: I just missed them :(

<comment><USER48> There is a photo and a diagram in the carousel at the top of the page. (Though I agree it's easy to miss.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> Nice. When can I buy one at the camping equipment store?

</comment><comment><USER50> This is great! We need more solar powered projects!

</comment><comment><USER51> A thunderfoot video waiting to happen

<comment><USER52> While we wait are there any sites where people actually intelligently discuss this article?

It seems like a 100 year old tech they are trying to optimise. I feel like random optimisations would mean there are no advances to get here.

But it is _possible_ using computer simulations they could do something of value. Have they?

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> This would make a great DIY project.

</comment><comment><USER54> Seems good for a seastead.

</comment><comment><USER55> A lot of lithium batteries are making their way onto both sailboats and yachts. With significant advantages come equal disadvantages, and those disadvantages are the risk of potential battery fires, which only a Class D fire extinguisher can snuff out.

The Dive boat fire in San Diego, where 34-persons perished, is one example.

<comment><USER9> You don't need batteries to run a reverse osmosis desalinator from solar panels; you can run the desalinator when the sun is shining and store the water.

I'm surprised boats are already moving to lithium. I wonder if it would be worthwhile to tow the batteries in a separate buoy behind the boat?

<comment><USER56> > I'm surprised boats are already moving to lithium.

When the alternative is a bank of lead-acid batteries with effectively ~50% usable capacity and poor charge efficiency, at least for cruisers effectively living at sea off solar power, it's not surprising at all.

<comment><USER9> The lead-acid batteries still cost a lot less per joule of capacity than the lithium batteries do. They just weigh more. Or maybe charge efficiency is the reason?

<comment><USER56> Space tends to be at a premium for cruisers, and modern cruisers are increasingly embracing electricity for powering everything.

Charge efficiency is a big one, but it's also just maximizing energy capacity in the available volume.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: A tool automatically setup an AWS cluster? - <AUTHOR> Hi there,
Is there a tool to automatically setup an AWS cluster? I'm using a variety of different AWS services (Kinesis, RedShift, Cognito, EMR, etc.) that need to be deployed individually for ~100 customers, it would be great if i could just run a script and have them all setup
Thanks <comment><USER2> Have you looked into Ansible?

</comment><comment><USER3> terraform</comment>


Realtime encoding - over 150x faster - <AUTHOR> http://transloadit.com/blog/2010/12/realtime-encoding-over-150x-faster

<comment><USER2> Maybe, if we keep bringing it up on here, startups will finally start putting a couple of lines of boilerplate at the top of their blog pages so we will know what on earth it is that they do when we end up there from HN.

A guy can dream, can't he?

At least this time the logo at the top links back to the main product page. Oh, and I see that the title text of the logo has just such a description! You're almost there guys!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the suggestion, we definitely screwed that up.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I don't really get the 150x bit:

"Since our servers can encode video much faster than most of your users can upload it, this means there is literally no more delay between the end of the upload and the video finishing encoding. In the screencast above this makes a 150x speed difference."

Surely the upper bound is 2x if you could transcode faster than the upload before.

Unless you are just measuring the time between the upload finishing and the transcode being done. But why would a user care about that metric rather than the total elapsed time?

<comment><AUTHOR> > Unless you are just measuring the time between the upload finishing and the > transcode being done.

That is what we are measuring indeed.

> But why would a user care about that metric rather than the total elapsed > time?

Because that is the time where the user feels he has already done his part, but the site he is on is taking forever to do what he needs it to do.

Another reason why we measure the time from upload done to encoding done is because that's what our customers pay us to do.

<comment><USER4> I demand you address the OP question of why you haven't fixed the physical constraints of crappy upload bandwidth? Seriously, wtf would we pay your for otherwise? </snark>

<comment><AUTHOR> As funny as this sounds, fixing the upload bandwidth problem is also something we will work on. Getting a good route between your users and servers can make a real difference.

So at some point in the future we'll offer upload servers in all major geographic areas.

<comment><USER5> It's interesting how difficult this can be. I was recently evaluating Linode locations for a new virtual server, and though I'm geographically much closer to California, the Texas location gave me almost 20x the download speed. To be precise, I was able to download from a California node at 300K/s, while I got close to 6MB/s from Texas.

Comcast used to route my traffic to California through Seattle, Washington, then down to San Jose and then Fremont, but now, it's going to Texas first, then across to San Diego, then up to Fremont, across a saturated link.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It's nice to see people thinking about processing input as a stream rather than waiting for the entire message to be received before doing anything.

If you start to think about input and output in web app as streams rather than buffered data, alot of neat possibilities arise for reducing latency.

<comment><USER7> This is often true, but not always - some video formats put header data at the end of the file, not the beginning, so you can't just start encoding as bits come in. Or if you can, you're encoding blind.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sure, but we think it's possible to "prepare" those videos on the client site before uploading.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> A video starts playing the moment you navigate to that page. Note to OP: please add a play button to your video. The video should start only if the user has specifically requested it. It took me a minute to hunt down the tab that was the source of noise in my otherwise quiet work environment and, once I found it, I killed the tab without even glancing at the page title.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> As you can probably tell, we are super excited about this, feel free to ask me anything : ).

<comment><USER9> This is really neat, but since you said "anything"... I have a legal question that I haven't been able to find the answer for:

How do you deal with the licensing issues regarding open source encoding software? Do you pay the MPEG-LA a fee directly for use of the software? Is it per file/per minute/flat fee?

Just wondering about the mechanics of this, mainly for an in-house streaming application.

<comment><USER7> IANAL, but generally, you need a license if you're using open-source encoders or decoders and you're the one who actually compiles them. (Again, not a lawyer, but that changes ffmpeg from "a source code description of an encoder" to "an encoder.")

MPEG video stuff is generally pretty cheap or free for low volume. Audio codecs are fairly expensive, on the other hand. AAC + MP3 + AMR is >$20K in minimum fees.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> One small question: if a user has their upload stream redirected to your service, and for some reason this upload is unable to finish, are we now forced to have the user try the upload again? It seems one advantage of the two step process would be the ability to try the process again on behalf of the user rather than making them wait and that should be weighed into the convenience formula.

I've never used your service so I'm not sure exactly how the upload stream is redirected to your platform, so this concern might not be totally valid if the upload is running through the client platform anyways.

<comment><AUTHOR> > if a user has their upload stream redirected to your service, and for some > reason this upload is unable to finish, are we now forced to have the user > try the upload again?

If the upload doesn't finish the user needs to redo it.

> It seems one advantage of the two step process would be the ability to try > the process again

You got me confused here. If the upload never finished, there is nothing you can do to fix this.

That being said, resumable file uploading is the next thing we'll tackle.

<comment><USER10> > It seems one advantage of the two step process would be the ability to try > the process again

I should have been more specific: consider the special case that the encoder on your side encounters a random error whereas just a "plain" upload to the client platform would have finished, so precluding any network transmission errors.

Although, with resumable uploading and a simple go-between service on the client platform between the user and your platform all manner of fanciness could be achieved, I think. Thanks for quick response!

<comment><USER11> Your question is answered in the link itself. Did you read it?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The biggest challenge to me seems to be spinning up instances once you get a spike of realtime jobs in parallel. Keeping the 'realtime' promise is often hard once your systems go into production.

<comment><AUTHOR> Of course. But since most people upload with insanely slow speeds, we can actually handle a spike much better with this feature than we could before : ).

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Isn't the whole purpose of pre-encoding before uploading is so that you shrink the file size and upload faster?

Why would I want to upload 4GB of video when I can encode it down to 700MB then upload?

<comment><USER14> It's not for end-users. It's a service for developers to add to their web application. You can certainly try to coax all your users into pre-encoding their video - and understanding how to do that - if you like....

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Kudos on launching the new feature!

The pricing is a tad expensive, but doesn't look bad at all when you consider the need for an on demand encoder for the entire time that the user is uploading.

<comment><AUTHOR> We know we're a little expensive. But we did this so we could lower pricing in the future (which we will), and to attract people who are getting more value out of our service initially.

If you have a project and pricing is a deal breaker, just email us and we'll set you up with a discount.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I was thinking this should be done in realtime on the client machine and streamed up the server. Then you cut down on both transfer and encoding time, and use far less server resources.

<comment><AUTHOR> This means shipping a plugin, or porting ffmpeg and friends to flash / javascript. Maybe something to think about if we ever decide to raise VC : ).

<comment><USER17> Isn't this a great use case for Native Client?

Maybe it's not ready but it seems to be something to look forward to.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> " _While this sounds easy in theory, it is rather difficult to pull off on most stacks._ "

Why is it difficult on most stacks? Because it's tying up a request handling thread?

<comment><AUTHOR> Because most stacks don't have a single threaded, non-blocking I/O event loop.

Sure you can do this with threads, but it's gonna get very tricky to pump data between a socket, file and process using threaded programming.

<comment><USER18> First, I agree that it'd be silly not to use thread-per-CPU non-blocking I/O.

However, I don't see why it'd be tricky in a threaded server. The thread gets an fd to recv() the incoming data from, and it popen()s an ffmpeg process then loops to recv() and write() the data until done.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm not saying it can't be done. In fact the multipart parser we have build for transloadit has already been ported to C++ [1] and I imagine Java has decent libraries as well.

But most people just sit on a request/response oriented Python/Ruby/PHP stack with possibly stupid buffering load balancing in between (nginx buffers uploads).

If you build this from ground up, it is certainly possible with a lot of technologies.

[1] <https://github.com/FooBarWidget/multipart-parser>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Is that "contact us" link correct? It adds an e-mail address to the end of the URL, which conveniently opens a comment page, but it still seems wrong.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ouch, fixed it. Thanks for letting me know!

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> It is not faster, just parallel processing with the upload buffer. This would be a nice feature to add to most web servers/web scripting environments.

<comment><AUTHOR> The fact that it's not actually faster is the entire beauty of it. While our competitors have been super busy to actually make their encoding faster, we have just taken a huge bite of free launch by making the encoding happen in parallel.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> You may want to avoid using the word "sucks" in a professional context because there is a population of people for whom the word evokes the idea of oral sex. Try substituting "is not so good." This will have the added virtue of being super charming in your German accent.

edit: I usually don't bitch about being downmodded. But don't you guys know any old people? And know that old people tend to be in charge of things? In any event, you shouldn't rely upon business leaders of any age being ignorant of the language.

-<http://www.thefreedictionary.com/sucks> 5\. Vulgar Slang To perform fellatio on.

-suck, Old English sucan, corresponding to Latine sugere "to suck." It's of imitative origin. Meaning "do fellatio" is first recorded 1928.

-Slang sense of "be contemptible" first attested 1971

<comment><USER21> Since when has the word "sucks" evoked that?

<comment><USER22> Since before it hung out with the hip words.</comment></comment></comment>


Rands in Repose: Knee Jerks - <AUTHOR> http://www.randsinrepose.com/archives/2010/02/18/knee_jerks.html

<comment><USER2> No need to add the site name, since it's listed afterwards. However, the subtitle would be useful. I'd rename this to:

Knee Jerks: Your instantaneous first reaction

That will get more/better attention.

<comment><USER3> "Your instantaneous first reaction" sound redundant. I like the current title better. Also, I'm not sure if I would have noticed it was from Rands in Repose from looking at the URL – there are no spaces or capitals, so I might have just skipped over it without processing it enough.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'll have to start paying more attention to what I'm doing when I'm surprised.

I think that for surprises that don't affect me on a personal/emotional level I probably identify closest with the Distiller. But for surprises that do, I really have absolutely no clue. While I'd like to think that I behave just as intelligently when a surprise affects me directly, I know that that's not true.

</comment><comment><USER5> that was a very good article and i'd encourage people to read past the hockey bit.

thanks. i don't normally get much from these "managementy" posts, but that really made me think. hmm. although maybe it's just because it connects with other issues today.

</comment><comment><USER6> Interesting. My reaction tends to vary.

I do seem to fall into either Dr. No or My Bad

<comment><USER7> Yes, it is interesting. I'm usually Still Water or My Bad, depending on how much I like the person handing out the surprise or whether I think he did it on purpose.</comment></comment>


Awesome Github 404 page - simple but cool javascript parallax 3d effect - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/someuser/somerepo

<comment><AUTHOR> The script for the effect is not minified or anything, so it is easy to take a look at. It is simple and works like you would think: they just move around the images based on the mouse position. I just ran into it by accident and thought it was cool. Plus, Star Wars!

</comment><comment><USER2> Old news. There is also: <https://github.com/500></comment>


Procrastination, Memory, and Sleep: An Interview with Terry Sejnowski [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.coursera.org/learn/learning-how-to-learn/lecture/8IUbH/interview-with-dr-terrence-sejnowski <comment><USER2> The questions and answers in this interview are very superficial and generic. It seems like the interview was a homework assignment...How is this on the front page?

<comment><AUTHOR> I think the beauty of this video is that there are some simple solutions to these problems that a lot of people (myself included) don't know. Terry Sejnowski is the President of NIPS (Neural Information Processing Systems), which is a machine learning conference that is running this week.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Video was cut off after 2 minutes for me, with a message saying "You are previewing this course."

</comment><comment><USER4> This is a new level of the click bait.</comment>


IBM Unveils Watson Supercomputer for Jeopardy Challenge - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2011/01/ibm-watson-jeopardy/

<comment><USER2> Interesting stuff. One of our managing editors at Forbes spoke with the IBM guy leading the project: [http://blogs.forbes.com/bruceupbin/2010/12/14/ibm- to-ken-jen...](http://blogs.forbes.com/bruceupbin/2010/12/14/ibm-to-ken- jennings-you-will-beg-for-mercy/)

<comment><USER3> I wonder if there's any article with more details on the internals. From reading some of the other stuff it seems they have competing models and Watson picks the answer from the model with the highest confidence. But I haven't found anything more detailed than that unfortunately.

<comment><USER2> Wild guess: Neural net processing old Jeopardy questions w/Baysian updates?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> IBM's website on Watson: <http://www-03.ibm.com/innovation/us/watson/index.html></comment>


Amazon uses airship to dispatch drones for delivery - <AUTHOR> https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/2494314/amazon-reveals-plans-to-make-deliveries-using-incredible-airship-drone-base/ <comment><USER2> For anyone interested, here is the link to full patent text: [http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph- Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=H...](http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph- Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PALL&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsrchnum.htm&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=9527605.PN.&OS=PN/9527605&RS=PN/9527605)</comment>


These strange RFID tags from China - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0QKrHi-G9WQ <comment><AUTHOR> They are incredibly cheap, partly because they use so little metal and such a small chip, and instead have the reader by much powerful.

That's why they can put RFID tags on small individual cheap items and not be at a loss.</comment>


Once again, I am free to speak my mind. - <AUTHOR> http://www.bablrr.com/ Bablrr gives you a choice to be anonymous, it gives you a choice to be free to live in the moment, and the most importantly, it gives you a choice to be who you are. It does not leave any digital trail of what you say. It respects your privacy as it deletes all your posts after their purpose is served so that nobody can access your personal data. <comment><USER2> If it's anonymous, why do I have to sign up? Also some screenshots or a demo might be nice.

Also the link to the apps being prompts for my email address because you don't actually _have_ any apps seems manipulative.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> any suggestions or any feedbacks?</comment>


An Illustrated Guide to Introverts in a Startup - <AUTHOR> http://www.quietrev.com/an-illustrated-guide-to-introverts-in-a-start-up/ <comment><USER2> Love the illustrations. This is a great piece. An extrovert will still not get it though, or will think you are just joking, haha, and go back to treating everyone _normally_.

<comment><USER3> Yeah, it wasn't really written with any sense of getting the other side to understand, just saying what introverts want. As an introvert I found it a little off-putting.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> These articles always seem to be written like "introverts" are a separate sentient species and not a purely descriptive label.

Actually, the whole introvert vs extrovert thing reads like astrology more than anything else.</comment>


Why exams mean nothing out of context - <AUTHOR> http://blog.webnographer.com/2010/11/why-exams-mean-nothing-out-of-context/

<comment><USER2> What are the chances that the kids are good at calculating prices because the sample space of possible total costs of products and offered money is quite small? In this case, they could imitate good mental arithmetic simply by memorising the most common combinations.

If you sell only two products - sunscreen and gum - at a fixed price and most people are unlikely to buy more than a couple of each, you can draw up an easily memorisable table of all likely total costs. Assuming a finite number of notes in "normal" denominations (i.e. not a 8063 cruzeiro note) then it is probably also relatively straightforward to memorise all possible combinations of products and proffered notes. This memorisation might not happen consciously, but through endless repetition.

So if you buy a pack of gum for 300 cruzeiros and pay with a 1000 cruzeiro note, just like everybody else did that day, the kid will know that it's 700 in change from memory. Bring that same kid into a classroom, introduce a suite of new products at different prices and ask him/her to perform the same computations and it is quite understandable that he/she will not perform as well.

Now I'm not saying the classroom setting doesn't have an effect such as making the kids nervous, just that it would be important to control for this kind of memorisation. I couldn't access a full copy of the paper cited, so I don't know if it was taken into account...

</comment><comment><USER3> I can confirm this result from personal experience. In teaching basic algebra, I found people who couldn't multiply 0.8 by 20 without a calculator could easily tell me how much something that cost $20 would be if a store was having a 20%-off sale. Some of them could even compute the amount with sales tax.

</comment><comment><USER4> The problem with the kids in the private schools is that they are taught to memorize a procedure to attain an answer to a pre-constructed question. For them it's different to ask if x is 3.56 and y is 4, what is the product of x times y, in contrast to asking them to multiply a the 3.56 per item cost of four burgers.

In my opinion the problem is not what is taught or how, but the direction teaching as a whole has always had. It's fine to teach kids that the product of x and y is z, as long as you've also spent time explaining the actual uses something might have in the children's life. Kids and teenagers always say "Why do I have to study this if it has no use in real life?", and it's the school's and teacher's job to teach this children that they're wrong.

<comment><USER5> _with the kids in the private schools_

I have observed this is both private and public schools.

<comment><USER4> I was referring to the experiment on the original article in which private school kids where subjected to using their knowledge in standardized tests versus real life situations. This is actually true from elementary school all the way up to graduate courses.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> From the research paper linked from the article, here are how the kids scored in different contexts:

      calculating prices in the street      98%
      solving word problems on an exam      74%
      solving abstract problems on an exam  34%

This would suggest that applying concepts is more important, physical context less so.

Mind you, this is an extremely difficult experiment to carry out scientifically and is open to many interpretations. I would at least want to see it reproduced before giving it much consideration.

<comment><AUTHOR> The experiment was later reproduced by Stephen J.Ceci and Antonio Roazzi. See "The effects of context on cognition: postcards from Brazil" Stephen J. Ceci and Antonio Roazzi, in "Mind Context" Sternberg R. J. and Wagner K. eds. (1994), page 78

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> This might just be why you're an entrepreneur: it's way better doing it than learning about it out of context ;)

<comment><AUTHOR> Very good point that I had not thought about. This is the challenge of business schools, they are teaching out of context. It may be a reason why so many MBA fail at been an entrepreneur.

<comment><USER8> _It may be a reason why so many MBA fail at been an entrepreneur._

I suspect it's right there in the title: "Master of Business Administration". MBA's are master administrators for businesses, which is not the same thing as an entrepreneur.</comment></comment></comment>


Here's why I didn't carry my camera in my recent road trip - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@santhoshsundar/here-s-why-i-didn-t-carry-my-camera-in-my-recent-road-trip-c68a5d25ba7c

<comment><USER2> Good point. Also, best camera is the one you have with you: your phone.</comment>


A look at Ruby 2.0 - <AUTHOR> http://rubysource.com/a-look-at-ruby-2-0/ <comment><USER2> Finally... Real keyword arguments.

<comment><USER3> Meh, can't get excited about them. The hash mechanism, plus the ability to leave out the hash braces, works perfectly well enough for me. All popular languages are doomed to accrete nonessential features until they sink under their own weight ...

<comment><USER4> I'm excited about ruby not having to allocate a hash for every bloody method call ever.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Uh... You shouldn't have to install libyaml from a tarball just because you don't have homebrew. The equivalent of

        sudo apt-get install libyaml libyaml-dev

or for you hat-wearing folks

        sudo yum install libyaml libyaml-devel

should work just fine.

</comment><comment><USER6> Can someone provide a practical use case for prepending modules? I can't for the life of me think of one.

<comment><USER7> Well, the obvious case is a "safe monkeypatch", where you want to add some functionality to a class, but only if it hasn't already been added (maybe by some third module).

I think this could more easily allow for the use of multiple support libraries (like ActiveSupport) without having to worry about them clobbering each other.

<comment><USER8> forgive my ignorance, and I'm not familiar with ruby or ActiveSupport, but how does that solve the problem? Wouldn't different module's be expecting the method to be implemented in a certain way, and this would would have the method implemented, but not the version they expect?

<comment><USER7> Well, any time you have conflicting libraries, you have a potential monkeypatching conflict, but depending on the case, you might want to implement a method, but only if it hasn't been implemented yet. For example, consider that we have our application, and it uses the "foo" library (which provides a "bar") method, but it might also use the "baz" library (which provides an optimized "bar") if baz is installed.

Currently, you have to attempt to load baz before you load foo, and then not load foo's implementation of bar, if baz loaded successfully. In the future, you could just prepend foo, and so if baz was already loaded, it doesn't overwrite its optimized implementation. If baz wasn't loaded, then when it does load, it would overwrite the prepended implementation properly.

This just frees you up from having to worry so much about load order. It's not a huge feature, but it's a nice little quality-of-life change.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Free, encrypted, open-source email forwarding service, with self-hosting option - <AUTHOR> https://forwardemail.net/ <comment><AUTHOR> DreamHost just stopped supporting catch-all emails, so I'll be switching to this to forward my catch-all to my gmail account.</comment>


Solar Sinter - 3D Printing with the sun, fusing sand into glass - <AUTHOR> http://www.markuskayser.com/work/solarsinter/

<comment><AUTHOR> This is something I found particularly interesting. I once attempted to build an aluminum can smelter with my kids. The idea being a giant Fresnel lens (scavanged for free from a dead rear-screen projection TV) focused on the bottom of a feed tube, empty cans put into the top drop into the focal point, get melted and drip into a bucket of water below converting hard to transport mostly smashed aluminum cans into easy to carry aluminum BBs (small spherical balls).

The downside is that you can't melt aluminum this way, it gets hot enough but it oxidizes so quickly you end up with black aluminum oxide dust rather than small balls of aluminum. (You could turn it into sandpaper though)

Sand on the otherhand seems to glassify nicely. Although I don't think he needed to drive into the middle of the Sahara :-).</comment>


A taxonomy of tech haters - <AUTHOR> http://5f5.org/ruminations/hi-haters.html <comment><USER2> My favourite kind of tech hater, which I am one of, is the _" Your application of technology creates more problems than it solves"_ hater.

This type of hater rails against new technologies that have no _realized_ advantage over old analog/interpersonal systems besides appearing more high- tech (and thus making the user appear to be 'in tune' with the times).

Ever seen a AV presentation room decked out with the state of the art of 2004-5? Shit like ceiling lights, projector screens and projectors, and sound systems that can only be controlled from a piece of shit pre-iPad tablet PC that takes 5 minutes to get turned on and another 5 minutes to work... when simple mechanical switches on the wall near the door would have worked just fine.

This sort of tech is characterized by taking a system or process that worked perfectly fine and reliably without a computer/software, and adding unreliable computers and software that don't actually give you any new _useful_ capabilities.

The "IntelliLink" South Park episode does a great job of representing and mocking the sort of tech that I am talking about.

<comment><USER3> Oh dear, that's me.

Top of my shit list is tech which doesn't just creates more problems, it creates extremely damaging problems by replacing stuff that is mistaken for "old fashioned".

Voting machines that undermine the accountability and transparency of democratic elections, public transport chip cards that violate privacy in a way the Stasi could only dream of, that sort of thing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Describing people who dislike your thing as 'haters' is a little bit pop- music-10-years-ago.

I can believe something adds no value without being secretly jealous of it.

<comment><USER5> Well, disliking and hating are far apart on my spectrum. And I think I am not alone.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> 9: People hater. Blogger that writes about the types of people that he's better than.

<comment><USER7> 10 Critic Hater: Culture critics who criticize other culture critics?

<comment><USER6> 11: Critic hater hater.

OK, fair enough :)

<comment><USER7> Locked in a cycle of hate until the end of time. Just how it should be.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Don't want to sound rude, but to me this is just a nice collection of labels to slap at anyone who disagrees with one's opinion on a tech subject.

I personally prefer to just ignore "haters", but critics are more than welcome!

</comment><comment><USER9> Missing my (least) favorite one: the "world priorities hater." Hates anything built by intelligent people that doesn't directly solve the problems they perceive to be important. Most often seen when small startups execute useful tools well.

My favorite example: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5519814](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5519814), an app I use constantly that makes my life better but was trashed in the top comment for solving a "first world problem."

<comment><USER10> I think that's an entirely reasonable stance. I wouldn't necessarily agree, but you could argue that it's a waste of human resources to build applications that in the end only make the lives of a fortunate few slightly more convenient.

<comment><USER9> That logic can be applied to just about anything ( [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallacy_of_relative_privation](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallacy_of_relative_privation)) and when used in the context I linked only serves to belittle the work of others while distracting from the constructive conversations about the product itself.

There are plenty of opportunities to talk about what problems we should all be working on but one of the great things about hn, especially when introducing a new product, is that you can focus on discussions about improving the product that you've chosen to build.

"Look what I built!"

"A car? Pfft, why don't you build a well in Africa?"

":-("

vs.

"Look what I built!"

"Oh wow a car, have you thought about a more aerodynamic shape? What kind of engine is in it? Ooh, you made the speedometer part of the windshield! Love it! Hate the name though, no one will find it on google"

...which one of those communities would you rather be a part of as the builder?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> At first the worst thing about haters is that often they have fake arguments. I believe that in general if you don't like something, you can either ignore it or at least use some kind of constructive criticism, so sometimes it is really annoying when you see that the criticism has serious flaws.

But recently I started to appreciate the value of lemming haters: who is not able to understand when to use or not a technology regardless of what other thinks, is destined to be a loser in engineering. Engineering is a matter of braveness, you trust your judgment, so you are able to do great things instead to follow the common opinions. So, what happens is that lemming haters create a filter for lame people from entering into a community, which in the long term can be a blessing.

<comment><USER2> Lemming Hate can also be useful for pushing the industry/community forward in positive ways. For an example, see the lemming hate of goto (for which Dijkstra was arguably the catalyst). goto has several legitimate purposes _(at least in some languages..)_ but it is best if inexperienced engineers avoid it as a rule of thumb unless they know exactly why goto is the best solution for a particular problem, and can articulate why the rule of thumb should not apply.

Yes, it is best if we educate everybody properly instead of relying on the formation of this sort of Lemming Hate. However little memes like _" goto statement considered harmful"_ are easier to spread throughout the industry than a comprehensive and nuanced understanding of the value of different sorts of control structures. If you want to get a message out fast and have it widely heard, these sort of lemming/meme messages are invaluable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> My favourite kind of hater is the loner hater.

Work with other person's code? No

Readability? Who needs it

Source version control? I will just email you the files

Design patterns, agile methods? That's stupid hippies shit

Using library/framework?No, I will write my own.

Unfortunately, there are plenty of them in the wild.

(edit: formatting)

</comment><comment><USER12> Another hater I run into: The criticism hater. (And I don't mean to imply that the author of the blog post is one of them.) Point out real flaws in technologies that other people like (such as git, OpenGL, etc.) and you'll get a flood of people insisting that you're just stupid for not understanding, or that you're trying to use it wrong, or you don't know the "right way" of using it. You're trying to have a legitimate conversation about why you find a tool lacking, but it's all your fault to these people.

</comment><comment> vezzy-fnord _Someone somewhere said they hated Comic Sans. After hearing this repeatedly and persistently others too eventually started hating on Comic Sans. Doesn 't really know why they hate Comic Sans, but they do. MongoDB, NodeJS, and Redis have met a similar fate._

Huh. MongoDB certainly has achieved status as a stereotype for magpies and using the wrong fit technology for a purpose, but to say that the aforementioned three technologies are as reviled as Comic Sans is simply ludicrous.

Especially not node.js, which has pretty much godlike reverence.

<comment><USER13> Node.js does not. Maybe Redis does for it's advertised use case of caching.

Node.js was commonly hated on for missing crucial scalability features that are being fixed bit by bit. But why people bothered to reinvent those features on top of node instead of using adequate existing systems is a typical tale of tech for tech sakes that asks to be hated on.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Who hates NodeJS? The package management is phenomenal, and just because it's ugly with async doesn't mean you can't fix it with something like Bluebird...

Other than that, it's just a javascript-based server. Not a lot there to hate...

<comment><USER4> I hate node.js (I also love it) for the same reason. The stuff you resolved with async a few years ago you're expected to resolve with q but now you should learn bluebird no wait it's all about highland now. But you still have to wrap everything because stdlib is still err first and that's what everyone actually uses, along with async.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I would add the 'meh hater' and the 'contrarian hater' (the latter sometimes applies to me).</comment>


Hacking Ethernet out of Fibre Channel cards - <AUTHOR> https://blog.benjojo.co.uk/post/ip-over-fibre-channel-hack <comment><USER3> "I have roughly 2 tesco bags of Emulex FC 8Gbit cards and 1 tesco bag of QLogic."

Brilliant.

<comment><USER4> If anyone is wondering about this standard unit of measure, the volume of 1 tesco carrier bag is equivalent to 17.9L (litres)[1]

1: [https://www.reddit.com/r/AskUK/comments/3tt95u/how_many_litr...](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskUK/comments/3tt95u/how_many_litres_is_a_standard_uk_supermarket/cx9fwlv/)

<comment><USER5> Ah, well it depends a bit if it's a standard carrier bag or a bag for life - <USER2> think the bag for life is bigger.

<comment><USER6> Which bag for life? One of the sturdy plastic ones, or the hessian variety?

<comment><USER7> 'Oh yeah, a _hessian_ bag for life maybe, but not a sturdy plastic one, that's my point.'

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Fun fact: you can connect more than 2 systems in FC without a switch. Just hop along from one TX to the next RX and build a ring. (It's called FC-AL, "Arbitrated Loop".) Works with fibre if you break the duplex cables apart to make simplex connections.

Obviously the entire thing fails if any node is powered off or has any kind of problem, but it's quite funny to do ;)

<comment><USER9> > Obviously the entire thing fails if any node is powered off or has any kind > of problem, but it's quite funny to do

Indeed it was funny enough to have that be a very common network topology back in the day. I've never had to investigate a token ring network failure but I can pretty much guarantee it was a frustrating exercise.

<comment><USER10> I was going to say that I thought token ring MAUs handled disconnected stations but then I read this (including the "setup aid" with an included battery) and now I'm not sure any more:

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

(un)fortunately I didn't experience this period of network history first hand. :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> A few years ago I and a few friends found a pile of old PCI Express Fibre Channel cards from some manufacturer I can no longer remember. 2.5 gigabits per second being faster than one and people being on an undergrad budget, we soon started wondering whether they could be repurposed as network interface cards in our ad hoc server colo built in an old abandoned storage room, which didn't even exist in the original dorm floor plans.

A bit of googling turned out that it was possible and supported by the manufacturer - if you ran Linux 2.6 and were prepared to compile the kernel drivers yourself. We quickly ditched the project when we found out that the old driver made newer kernels panic and setting up link aggregation on normal gigabit ethernet cards wasn't that much of a hassle anyway.

<comment> non-entity > We quickly ditched the project when we found out that the old driver made > newer kernels panic

I'm suprised they ever compiled on a newer kernel.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I worked with FC for a while, and IP over FC was always a wonky kinda situation. It really made no sense that if you had a big expensive FC fabric, that you'd funnel your IP traffic through it.

It wasn't that much of a lift for most organizations to just have an IP network for IP type traffic, and leave their high performance FC fabric alone to do its thing.

The few situations when it was done was when someone had some rando traditional IP systems that you'd connect just because, but these were corner cases / kinda forgotten bit of equipment that you just were waiting to replace / time out kinda situations.

<comment><USER13> FCoE (fibre channel over ethernet) was similar. Not only was it an amalgamation of arguably incompatible standards, but it was an unusual use case. If you needed data security / reliability, etc you could go FC. If you needed a cheap data protocol you could go iSCSI.

<comment><USER14> FCoE was (and may still be) pushed heavily by Cisco. It was neat, being able to have your Cisco UCS devices talk to both Fibre Channel NetApp and Ethernet all on the same link.

It worked fairly well once it was up and running, and you set the QoS correctly so that FC traffic won out over Ethernet because Fiber Channel does NOT tolerate drops very well.

<comment><USER12> Cisco's FC solutions were always a weird effort to merge their own IP tech in here or there and it just always felt half thought through to me.

<comment><USER14> Bugs... so many bugs in the various pieces. But I can say it was fairly rock solid once it was up and running.

<comment><USER12> Yeah Cisco's FC products were pretty buggy. I preferred Brocade.

FC is solid generally once you've got it running, the protocol kinda ensures that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> IBM AIX (IBM's variant of the UNIX operating system) has long supported IPoFC (IP over Fibre Channel). [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_AIX](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_AIX)

</comment><comment><USER16> I have used FC 8Gbit transceivers before in my homelab as a replacement for Multimode 10Gbit transceivers. They work quite well. No problems with those Ive still got running.

<comment><USER17> Any recommendations on card brand? One of these days I'd love to give this a shot.

<comment><USER16> I used whichever were cheapest to buy on ebay. WHich currently were Mellanox ConnectX-3 and HP branded Qlogic cards. Both work without a problem in my homelab.

I do have one server with a built-in Intel card, that is more annoying, so I'd steer away from those in the future. The Intel card did not take all transceivers. They only wanted Cisco branded transceivers (from the ones I had available. I'm gonna guess, Intel ones would be fine too).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Here we have a network card which normally pretends to be a disk, but here it's a network card pretending to be a scanner pretending to be a network card.

Top-tier stuff.

</comment><comment><USER19> This is a great hack! Searching for "over fibre channel" and "fibre channel over" will demonstrate that FC was seen as the answer to every need.</comment>


LaunchRock Launches - <AUTHOR> http://launchrock.com/blog/launchrock-launches

<comment><USER2> Wait, why does the conversion rate on a landing page with just a logo and _maybe_ a one line description matter?

Thats hardly a useful metric for determining if you have a good product or a real business. Even after you launch, conversion rate optimization is a waste of time until you find the right product/pricing/etc and have figured out what people want.

The first 6months-1year will be about discovery, not optimization.

<comment><USER3> While I agree that you shouldn't read too much into the metrics, something like LaunchRock gives you at least a platform to start your launch from. Much easier to mail 10-10,000 people who have expressed interest, rather than start cold and try to find that 10-10,000 people.

Don't expect your pre-launch "coming soon" page to bring 1000s of customers with money in hand, but since it's a pretty damn minimal investment, you might as well set one up.

<comment><USER4> We look at this as a place to start building a relationship. Our company today is about landing pages, but it's not staying that way. The things that are coming soon are all about what you do with the list after you have it.

<comment><USER5> Does the data belong to the company or LaunchRock? It is very valuable information to Angels, VCs, especially if you are tracking engagement.

Especially in such a hot tech market, your investors will be able to frontrun other investors when it comes to determining which projects are most likely to get traction.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Sadly enough "entice your friends to sign-up to get an earlier access" is now a cliche. It worked when it was a novelty, but it is something that is being frowned upon now.

<comment><USER7> I think that's only within the tech-elite/tech-aware communities.

I believe this kind of strategy still piques the interest of "regular folks" - in the same way that "buying virtual goods" is kinda cliche and unappealing for most of us on HN, yet the mainstream world still does it.

This might even be an advantage for LaunchRock's customers - getting a healthy mix of early adopters, tech insiders AND passionate + well connected 'normal folks' to try out the customer's beta.

<comment><USER8> i'm really wondering about conversion rates of the 'normal folks' as well. I'd think they'd be more skeptical if they just saw a random picture with a paragraph of text saying 'we'll let you know when we launch, give us your email address'.

<comment><USER4> Jameson from LaunchRock here. It's not uncommon to see 30% on a page. It all depends on design and copy. I was originally skeptical, but people are willing to give out their contact info if you peak their interest.

Where we see the opportunity now (and what we're building) is how you interact with that person after they show their trust and allow you to contact them. it's very important to win them over in a way that is authentic.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Step 5, domain settings, completely killed the flow for me. Thought I'd be able to have a page up and running instantly, but nope, you need to wait for DNS/CNAME to resolve.

You should have it subdomain off launchrock itself, ie. myapp.launchrock.com, and allow Step 5 to take place afterwards.

</comment><comment><USER10> I get the pitch, I don't get the $800K

<comment><USER11> Having played around with one of their competitors, the UI to quickly build a cleanly designed page needs a lot of work, so they could probably put a front- end developer and a theme designer to good use. That's one thing anyway.

<comment><USER11> To clarify this, I don't mean at all to imply LaunchRock's creation UI is bad. It's a general comment on the importance of creation UIs for landing page services, something that such services need to be on top of. And also, I think a library of pre-defined themes are important for people to rapidly create landing pages.

My point was that they probably have a good reason to raise this capital (at least some of it).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I feel like LaunchRock goes against Lean Startup/MVP mindset a bit. It's an excuse to procrastinate.

It takes stones to build a thing and throw it out there, knowing its ugly and broken. It takes humility and perseverance to listen to the first users and iterate on your idea.

I guess I just don't get the viral/buzz thing. Seems like the 2011 under construction gif to me.

<comment><USER13> What you're describing doesn't seem lean. Why "build a thing" if you haven't first identified a demand for it? A landing page can be a part of identifying this demand.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Cogratulations to the LaunchRock team. Great product - like the look, feel and ease of use. It will be interesting to see how they fare once monetization begins.

</comment><comment><USER15> Why didn't they use LaunchRock to launch LaunchRock?

<comment><USER16> They did.</comment></comment>


'Star Trek' Animated Series from 'Rick and Morty' Head Writer in the Works - <AUTHOR> https://www.indiewire.com/2018/10/star-trek-animated-series-rick-and-morty-alex-kurtzman-1202015207/amp/ <comment><USER2> I have so many questions about this series. I have to be honest, I hate everything I've ever seen of Rick and Morty, but, despite disliking most Seth MacFarlane work, for example, I love The Orville.

Should definitely be a unique take on the Star Trek universe, I have to wonder if in the long run if it would be considered as part of the canon, it depends how ridiculous it is.</comment>


Internet Map: City-to-City Connections - <AUTHOR> http://chrisharrison.net/projects/InternetMap/index.html

<comment><USER2> Really nice pictures :)</comment>


Amazon Go is here - <AUTHOR> https://www.recode.net/2018/1/21/16914188/amazon-go-grocery-convenience-store-opening-seattle-dilip-kumar <comment><AUTHOR> Please share your experience if you happen to be in Seattle</comment>


You deserve your own personal search engine - <AUTHOR> http://www.mobifile.co/ Mobifile, a new Israeli startup develops a new personal search engine. <comment><AUTHOR> Share your thoughts. We are looking for beta users, so feel free to sign up :)

<comment><USER2> My own private search engine with all rights reserved. Insidious from the outset!</comment></comment>


What we learned from failing as first-time founders - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@teamvyrtex/what-we-learned-from-failing-as-first-time-founders-straight-out-of-college-43ac6888c73c <comment><USER2> "It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat." \- Theodore Roosevelt

<comment><AUTHOR> incredible quote — possibly the best motivation I've heard for founders

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> That's a great story with some valuable lessons learned, but I can't help but wonder how this forms the basis of someone's driving passion straight out of college: "Our mission was connecting millennials with smart, thought-provoking articles."

</comment><comment><USER4> Glad it's still a side project!

</comment><comment><USER5> "Over 90% of startups fail."

Does anyone know the success rate for 2nd and 3rd attempts?

<comment><USER6> that's a BS number everyone uses but no one knows for sure because it's too hard to calculate. What's a startup? What's a success? Stay open for 5 years. technically their's isn't a failure then because they possibly stay open as a side project for another couple years.</comment></comment>


Apple lightning to HDMI adapter is a computer - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/nyan_satan/status/1155148789977636864 <comment><USER2> Discussion from two days ago: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20544564](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20544564)

</comment><comment><USER3> This was also noted in 2013 - [https://panic.com/blog/the-lightning-digital- av-adapter-surp...](https://panic.com/blog/the-lightning-digital-av-adapter- surprise/)

The anonymous comment is very interesting: [https://www.panic.com/blog/2013/03/the-lightning-digital- av-...](https://www.panic.com/blog/2013/03/the-lightning-digital-av-adapter- surprise/#comment-16841)

</comment><comment><USER4> What are the motivations for putting things like Apple Secure Boot in there? It makes me wonder if they someday want to be able to say "this dongle is not Apple approved".

<comment><USER5> That would not surprise me at all.

I've experienced several third party charging cables that somehow stop working so reliably immediately after an iOS update.

Apple definitely wants as much of the pie as they can get.

<comment><USER6> Or maybe Apple doesn't want to pay warranty claims (or, worse, lawsuits) on stuff that's burned up by cheap third-party power supplies and cables that are millimeters away from a fire at any given moment.

[http://www.righto.com/2016/09/why-you-shouldnt-use-cheap- mac...](http://www.righto.com/2016/09/why-you-shouldnt-use-cheap-macbook.html)

[http://www.righto.com/2012/05/apple-iphone-charger- teardown-...](http://www.righto.com/2012/05/apple-iphone-charger-teardown- quality.html)

[http://www.righto.com/2012/03/inside-cheap-phone-charger- and...](http://www.righto.com/2012/03/inside-cheap-phone-charger-and-why- you.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> similarly your hdd controller was a computer

technically, these days, anything larger than a usb wire can be a computer

smalltalk crossed the physical barrier

<comment><USER8> _> technically, these days, anything larger than a usb wire can be a computer_

USB wires too: [https://twitter.com/kevinmitnick/status/1031662197422710784?...](https://twitter.com/kevinmitnick/status/1031662197422710784?lang=en)

<comment><USER9> You know, I've wondered about this exact attack. Also from wallwarts that plug into USB-C ports.

 _shudders_

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Priced at $50 it has terrible quality.

</comment><comment><USER10> So... any idea why it's so bad?

<comment><USER11> The main reason is probably that 1080p30 is 1580 MBits and USB2 is only 480 MBits, so it has to do decompression.

<comment><USER10> Can you explain why you mention USB? It's Lightning to HDMI...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I think the title needs an edit: "lighting" should be "lightning".

<comment><USER13> Thanks, I was wondering if Apple was making a competitor to Hue bulbs.

<comment><USER12> Agreed, I was initially confused too.</comment></comment></comment>


South Park in CSS3 - <AUTHOR> http://www.wagon-bertrand.fr/southParkCSS3/index.html

<comment><USER2> Looks nice, but instead of using dreamweaver MM_ javascript functions to show/hide layers, why not use PURE css :hover?

Something like:

#stan #stanTeteOeilGaucheToucheTrait { display:none; } #stan:hover #stanTeteOeilGaucheToucheTrait { display:block; }

and so on for each bit you are toggling, or even group the toggled layers into one div and show/hide that on hover:

#stan .toggledLayers { display:none; } #stan:hover .toggledLayers { display:block; }

Would reduce the amount of redundant code :)

(hope yc doesn't destroy my comment)</comment>


Dell refreshes XPS 13 and XPS 15, and debuts XPS 12 tablet hybrid - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2015/10/dell-refreshes-xps-13-and-xps-15-and-debuts-xps-12-tablet-hybrid/ <comment><AUTHOR> The Dell website can't stand the storm it seems. Apple is pushing me so hard away with all the bugs (kernel panics for many Intel HD 4000 GPUs) in OS X and the ridiculous design decisions in the MBPs (Ethernet, antiglare anyone?) that I am considering Windows / Linux for development for the first time in my life... The Dell XPS seem to become a very reasonable alternative.

<comment><USER2> I recently purchased a Dell(not a XPS though) and develop primarly on Ubuntu. Unity has gone long way in terms of usability and i'm totally fine with it. And you don't really miss out on dev features compared to OS X.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> For those out there looking for a developer edition/or to run linux, rumors are these refreshed/new units are no longer carrying the troublesome Broadcom components that were causing kernel panics. These units were designated as "9343/XPS 13 Early 2015".

If your considering picking up a used XPS13 9343 on the cheap and plan to install Linux - be forewarned, we are waiting on BIOS A06 to fix the keyboard jumping issue.

A great source of insight on the Dell XPS13 / Linux program is available at Barton Georges blog - [http://bartongeorge.net](http://bartongeorge.net) \- he is the founder/lead of Project Sputnik (Dell's internal effort to create the ultimate Linux/Ubuntu developer laptop).

</comment><comment><USER4> I have an XPS 13, and it's the only windows laptop I've ever had that can deal with the dev work I do and is comparable to the Mac. An update can only be a good thing.

<comment><USER5> I like the XPS line myself (especially since they are probably the best laptops you can buy pre-loaded with Linux), but as for pure Windows dev, I'll have to wait and see what the reviews are for the Surface Book. I think that could give the XPS line a run for their money.

<comment><USER4> I totally agree, the Surface should give them a run for their money. Whilst the XPS was by far the best Windows laptop I've ever had (fast boot up, fast etc. Good graphics support) It still had some flaky aspects. Sleep resume was erratic and the wireless adaptor power saving didn't know what to do sometimes - so I did have to reboot to fix some problems. It also had a monitor colour temperature issue - sometimes it couldn't work out what the correct setting was, or their was a problem with the firmware, I dunno, but I used to get subtle magenta then green then magenta casts on the screen. It wasn't bad enough to worry about, but still not good. Aaaand It borked one time, so I had to restore from backup. I've never have to do anything on my 3 year old MBP.</comment></comment></comment>


Extremely well produced,entertaining look at technical SEO - <AUTHOR> https://ipullrank.com/runtime/ <comment><AUTHOR> This really floored me. The production values alone make it worth watching. It was fascinating to see how far 'technical' SEO has come (NLP, BigQuery, and various other tools..)</comment>