Tesla Autopilot HW3 details - <AUTHOR> https://www.reddit.com/r/teslamotors/comments/acjdrt/tesla_autopilot_hw3_details/ <comment><USER3> Imagine being on the team involved in the development and reading through this write up - I'm sure it would bring a smile to their face. "Got this right, got that wrong."

<comment><USER4> I was once on a team that had a product with some crypto features that was under attack.

There was a hackers forum where daily discoveries were discussed.

It was indeed exhilarating, and exactly that way you describe it: on one hand, we didn't really want the thing to be cracked, but on the other it was impossible not to be rooting for those scrappy hackers going down the wrong path at first before figuring out the right one, one step at a time. Every morning, we'd log in to that forum to check their overnight progress.

Still, we were confident that our bank-strength crypto algorithm would prevail.

It did not. :-)

While we had done our due diligence, an external implementation partner had decided to change the audited code later in the process, which broke things completely, in the most embarrassing way.

In the end, it didn't matter, and we probably sold a few more units that what we would have sold without the broken crypto.

Fun times.

<comment><USER5> Sounds very interesting. This being hacker news, are you able to elaborate a bit on the specifics, specifically the type of crypto and how it was broken?

I wonder what the "most embarrassing way" would mean in this context -- I'm thinking timing attack or padding oracles, but it sounds like it might have been even more trivial.

<comment><USER4> Have some random thoughts about the most crucial element of a challenge/response system.

<comment><USER6> xkcd 221?

<comment><USER4> Close enough!

There really is an XKCD for everything...

<comment><USER7> To be honest, that joke is very common. A much older version of it exists in a Dilbert cartoon from 2001 [1], and it wasn't a new joke at that point.

[1] [https://dilbert.com/strip/2001-10-25](https://dilbert.com/strip/2001-10-25)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> > As a point of reference - Google's TPU V1, which is the one that Google uses > to actually run neural networks (the other versions are optimized for > training) is very similar to the specs I've outlined above.

The TPU V1 is a 2015 chip (publicly announced in 2016, and that Google had been using internally for over a year). 4 years is a big lag in terms of technology.

Additionally, the comment about "actually run neural networks " seems to be, AFAIK, plainly wrong. The first version was _limited_ to inference because it could only perform integer operations, while V2 and onward support both training and inference, as they can perform float operations.

TPU V1 was never available to the public, but both V2 and V3 are available on Google Cloud. I don't have any info on it, but at this point, I'd expect all V1 chips to have been deprecated and likely removed from production, given the savings in space and power from V2 and V3.

<comment><USER9> 4 years is a big lag if you're not doing safety critical work. If you _are_ doing safety critical, 4 years isn't particularly fast, but it's not unreasonable. If you've never worked in aerospace or automotive, you would be shocked at the requirements for software and hardware that can kill people if it breaks (assuming that Tesla is following the automotive equivalent of DO-178/DO-254, ISO26262)... I guess the automotive guys do have an advantage because they're not required to have independence for the various stages of verification, but it's still a big chunk of work (more than the actual development).

<comment><USER8> > If you are doing safety critical

Well, Tesla clearly isn't doing safety critical work on autonomous systems (it wouldn't have even launched "autopilot" if it was), so 4 years is indeed a big lag.

<comment><USER10> Tesla claims [1] that autopilot driving is safer than regular driving in terms of risk of accident per mile. Not sure if I agree with the way they've constructed their statistics, but for a moment take them at face value.

Isn't then the safer thing to release and encourage autopilot to the largest extent possible?

[1] [https://www.tesla.com/blog/q3-2018-vehicle-safety- report?red...](https://www.tesla.com/blog/q3-2018-vehicle-safety- report?redirect=no)

<comment><USER11> That statistic is wildly and purposefully misleading. It compares the safety of Autopilot (which only drives on the freeway) with human drivers on any road. Accidents-per-mile are already much lower on the freeway.

Plus, the statistic ignores the fact that responsibility is actually shared between humans and the car. If autopilot gets into an unsafe situation and gives control to the human at the last moment, the car company might claim that the accident happened under human control. We have a long way to go before we can truly understand the safety of semi-autonomous vehicles.

<comment><USER12> I'd even expect their human driven statistics not actually representative or useful for comparisons. Their cars are expensive, mostly excluding young and thus often unexperienced drivers. They also don't particularly target older people, the other group with high accident rates.

Controlling for all those variables is hard and not to their benefit, thus I'd never expect their pr team to do so. But I wonder if that might even creep into their automated driving stats... e.g. by drivers taking control in dangerous situations.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The hardware upgrade will be free to existing Autopilot owners: [https://electrek.co/2018/08/08/tesla-autopilot-hardware- upgr...](https://electrek.co/2018/08/08/tesla-autopilot-hardware-upgrade-free- with-full-self-driving-package/)

<comment><USER14> Still makes me scratch my head when the car was billed as having "full self driving hardware" at the point of sale. This is the second _hardware_ upgrade they've done already, although if it's free I suppose nobody but investors are complaining.

<comment><USER13> It certainly isn't fully self-driving, but I must say that it does remarkably well on interstates. Still isn't worth the additional 5-6k for me yet.

<comment><USER15> > I must say that it does remarkably well on interstates

... until it mis-view an exit lane and attempts to crash/kill you, that is (see events of 2018).

That is kind of deal breaker for me, when talking about 1+ ton metal box moving me around I will take "slow to market but not blind" instead.

I'm still waiting for Tesla to accept reality and put lidar (make the option more expensive if you have to and you probably do, whatever)

<comment><USER16> > That is kind of deal breaker for me, when talking about 1+ ton metal box > moving me around I will take "slow to market but not blind" instead.

The way Elon Musk tells it, they put it into production once it was safer per mile than human drivers. Which seems like a legitimate point.

You use something when it's better than what you would have to use in the alternative, not when it's 100% perfect with no possibility of ever making a mistake under any circumstances. Which is probably not even actually possible to do.

The problem is if human drivers kill more than 30,000 people in a year, it's not news, because it's been that way forever. But one autonomous car kills one person and it's the top story.

<comment><USER17> > _they put it into production once it was safer per mile than human drivers_

The thing is that I can take precautions to increase my safety margin - don't drive impaired, drive in good weather conditions, get lots of sleep, don't be aggressive, don't follow closely, etc. etc. etc.

I don't have a Tesla, but I imagine there's nothing I can do to voluntarily make it safer. It functions normally until it doesn't.

<comment><USER18> You can pay attention and keep your hands on the wheel. From what I know all the people who had accidents failed to do this. The challenge seems to be how to overcome the false sense of security drivers get, precisely because the thing works so well most of the time.

<comment><USER19> > _" You can pay attention and keep your hands on the wheel."_

In that sense these Level 2 systems are a lot like q-tips. The box says you shouldn't stick them in your ear, but everybody knows that's what you buy them for. If everybody were to follow the directions, the consumer desirability of the product would plummet.

Even though you're not supposed to take your hands off the wheel, level 2 systems are often referred to as "hands off". And during a _60 Minutes_ interview Elon Musk is seen taking his hands off the wheel. Unofficially the point of Level 2 automation is that you can take your hands off the wheel. Officially, your hands must remain on the wheel. The unofficial usecase is what actually gets consumers enthusiastic, but the official usecase is what companies like Tesla cover their ass with.

They're having their cake and eating it too.

<comment><USER20> The actual point of a Level-2 system (other than as a safety measure, e.g. wrt emergency braking) is that it provides driver assistance for things _other_ than having to pay attention to the road & surroundings at all times - <USER2> there are _plenty_ of such things that can meaningfully impact driver's comfort. That's all there is to it. Don't think "Autopilot"; think "Fly-by- wire".

<comment><USER19> Yeah that's nice and all, yet when you have Elon Musk promoting his cars by taking his hands off the steering wheel, it's pretty clear that Tesla's Level 2 system is being sold to consumers as "hands off".

<comment><USER20> Why are people assuming in this thread that Tesla is the only auto maker that's providing Level-2 driver assistance? This couldn't be farther from the truth.

<comment><USER19> The topic of this thread is Tesla, specifically Tesla's implementation of automation features. That is why I am talking about Tesla's promotion of their Level 2 system.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> IIRC, California posts the annual disengagement reports at the end of January. It'll be interesting to see if Tesla filed one for 2018. They didn't report any miles driven in 2017. In 2016, they reported a small number of miles, maybe the number needed to record their FSD demo that they have on the Autopilot page.

[https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/dmv/detail/vr/autonomous/testi...](https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/dmv/detail/vr/autonomous/testing)

<comment><USER22> The problem is that with a L2 system like the current autopilot where you have to take over when you exit a highway and encounter for example a traffic light, you trigger effectively a "disengagement" while operating with the expected flow of the system. It means that the "disengagement metric" gets very noisy (I'd say useless) in this case.

<comment><USER21> I don't mean that Tesla will an anamolous number of disengagements, I mean that that they will file a report _at all_ , which they haven't done in 2017 because presumably they stopped autonomous driving on real roads. These reports don't cover systems like the current Autopilot, as it is not considered autonomous driving.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> > with all vehicle sensors (radar, ultrasonics, cameras) staying the same.

Still no LIDAR? LIDAR was _the_ enabling technology in the DARPA challenges, and it remains so today. I can think of one Tesla customer who would still have a head if his "self driving" car was equipped with LIDAR.

<comment><USER24> i thought LIDAR has high cost barrier to be in consumer vehicles.

<comment><USER25> > i thought LIDAR has high cost barrier to be in consumer vehicles.

Ok, so you save a few bucks, kill a few people... then eventually come to the same conclusion every other Autonomous Driving company already has... you need LIDAR for this work reliably?

<comment><USER26> Or, you know, you get it working without LIDAR and make boatloads of money.

Humans don't rely on any sort of LIDAR to drive, I don't see how you could be so certain that computers need to.

<comment><USER25> > I don't see how you could be so certain that computers need to

We're nowhere close to emulating what goes on in a human brain... neural networks are an absurdly simplified approximation of simple life-forms... it took the K supercomputer (having 705,024 cores and 1.4 Petabytes of RAM) 40 minutes to emulate 1 second of 1 percent of human brain activity.[1]

Since we cannot come close to sensory input processing a human can do... we need to augment our systems with better sensors. LIDAR is a better sensor, and can help "see" things that would otherwise go missed.

> you get it working without LIDAR and make boatloads of money

And why can't you make "boatloads of money" while using LIDAR? Killing people is bad for business... no?

Before you jump on it, no LIDAR is no silver bullet... but it's available technology that can help quite a bit. Why not use it? Unless you've overpromised what your price point will be for technology that is yet to exist?

[1] [https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/10567942/Supercompute...](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/10567942/Supercomputer- models-one-second-of-human-brain-activity.html)

<comment><USER19> > _" Before you jump on it, no LIDAR is no silver bullet... but it's available > technology that can help quite a bit. Why not use it?"_

Because Elon wanted to advertise his cars as having all the hardware necessary, because the automotive automation hype is very real. He wanted to sell luxury cars to tech enthused idealists, but he didn't want to cut down on his profit margins by actually delivering what he was selling.

The fact that he always admitted the software was lacking gave him plenty of cover. It allows his customers to continue to believe, even though their car can't actually drive itself. That's the beauty of selling hopes and dreams instead of anything concrete.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Seems like these operations are common in all kinds of convolution with a filter kernel...

</comment><comment><USER28> Wait so this is not about Jetson AGX Xavier but some unknown GPU computing unit?

</comment><comment><USER29> Interesting, so no more nVidia hardware...

<comment><USER30> Can you blame them? They were bitten once by relying too much on proprietary tech that they had to license from Mobileye who eventually pulled the plug. I can't imagine they are in any rush to repeat that process.

Bringing as much of the software and architecture in-house as possible shields them a bit more from that happening again.

I have no idea if that is the ultimate reason, or if it was even a significant reason, but it sure can't hurt!

<comment><USER31> It's amusing, given that they expect the opposite from their own customers.

<comment><USER30> can you explain a bit more what you mean?

<comment><USER31> Intentionally sabotaging repairability, remotely bricking people's cars, etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Is there an ELI5 for this? There are too many details I could not grasp.</comment>


Lithium: a 16-bit kernel (sort of) written in Clojure (sort of) - <AUTHOR> http://blog.danieljanus.pl/blog/2013/05/26/lithium-revisited/

<comment><USER2> Abdulaziz Ghuloum's An Incremental Approach to Compiler Construction is seriously underrated. The notes from the tutorial seem to have disappeared from the internet. You can get a copy here: [https://sites.google.com/site/juliangamble/Home/Compilers%20...](https://sites.google.com/site/juliangamble/Home/Compilers%20Tutorial%202006-09-16.pdf?attredirects=0)

I'm interested to see more of this in Clojure.

<comment><USER3> Thanks for that... Fascinating to see how similar this approach is to the start of my own series (which is also bottom up) - up to and including using gcc output to figure out what to output.

<comment><USER2> Is any of your series (or code therein) available online?

<comment><USER3> <http://www.hokstad.com/compiler> \- it's about two years since I published any of it, but I have 3 new complete parts now written in the last month and a half. Just "buffering" a couple more before I start posting them again.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> losethos seems to have lost his patience or something (see bottom of page). I wonder if it's the lack of attention his work gets - his submissions all have 1 point with 0 comments.

Is there a specific reason or does nobody care about his work?

<comment><USER5> <http://qaa.ath.cx/LoseThos.html>

<comment><USER6> While not relevant to the top article, I found this link a valuable discussion of the topic at hand. Not clear why you were down voted.</comment></comment></comment>


The Weird World Inside a Pitcher Plant - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/07/science/pitcher-plants-insects.html <comment><USER2> What is weird about this? Isn't symbiosis an accepted thing? Humans also can't live without a microbiome, etc.

<comment><USER3> The article clearly highlights a few unusual (aka, weird) things:

1 - Unlike most other pitcher plant species, this one has low acid and relies on the droppings of the worm larvae

2 - This is the only place the larvae have been found to live (a small and [i imagine somewhat] threatened area)

3 - The main food source appear to be other insects born inside the plant that get caught in the web leaving. Not other insects/animals that fall inside

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> [https://outline.com/9fnkTp](https://outline.com/9fnkTp)

<comment><USER5> This account looks like a spammer, most submissions are nothing but links to outline.

<comment><USER4> I see what you mean but I'm just a reader. No affiliation to outline.com or anything else. My understanding is it's ok to post paywall workaround links and I wish more people would do it.

<comment><USER6> I think what you do is super helpful and I appreciate it. Maybe adding context or just saying it's a paywall workaround would prevent people from getting the wrong idea.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


RC4 is now entirely disabled by default for Microsoft Edge and Internet Explorer - <AUTHOR> https://blogs.windows.com/msedgedev/2016/08/09/rc4-now-deprecated/ <comment><USER2> I always had a soft spot for rc4; it held up so well for so long. We shall meet again.

<comment><USER3> lol, where would you like to meet this deprecated cypher again? Hoping for an RC5?

<comment><USER4> RC5 does exist and I think was patented by RSA Data Security. Needless to say, it failed.</comment></comment></comment>


Mio: A High-Performance Multicore IO Manager for GHC - <AUTHOR> http://haskell.cs.yale.edu/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/hask035-voellmy.pdf

<comment><USER2> The choice quote being:

 _Our evaluations show that the new Mio manager improves realistic web server throughput by 6.5x and reduces expected web server response time by 5.7x. We also show that with Mio, McNettle (an SDN controller written in Haskell) can scale effectively to 40+ cores, reach a throughput of over 20 million new requests per second on a single machine, and hence become the fastest of all existing SDN controllers._

<comment><USER3> I like this one too:

 _After removing various bottlenecks in our system, SimpleServer scaled to 20 cores and serves nearly 700,000 requests per second. This workload places an unusual burden on the Linux kernel and triggers a bug in Linux; Under such a heavy load, the epoll subsystem occasionally does not return read events for a socket, even though the socket has data ready, causing worker threads in SimpleServer to wait for data indefinitely._

[...]

 _This long-standing bug affects all Linux kernels since 2.4 and a patch fixing the issue has been accepted into the Linux kernel_

In short their "simple server" with the Mio manager was so fast that it broke epoll :)

<comment><USER4> They didn't break epoll, epoll was straight-up broken. They just managed to supply enough pressure to reliably trigger the bug, which is even more impressive if you think about it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Another discussion regarding this

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6198068](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6198068)

</comment><comment><USER3> Extremely impressive. But I'm surprised by the number of Haskell threads on the front page. Is this Haskell day?

<comment><USER6> > surprised by the number of Haskell threads

I see what you did there!</comment></comment>


How DNA can be used to store computer data - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/news/av/science-environment-43395686/how-dna-can-be-used-to-store-computer-data <comment><USER2> Ugh. nobody has made a coherent case for DNA storage yet. Yes, we know in theory it can store a ton of data. But we have other methods that work better now and will continue to scale more affordably for the foreseeable future.</comment>


Traders Profit as Power Grid Is Overworked - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/15/business/energy-environment/traders-profit-as-power-grid-is-overworked.html <comment><USER2> This is how I understand the stakes at the point immediately preceding the grid hiccup:

DC Energy Trading Firm: Out a sizable chunk of money. Incentive to stir trouble in the energy grid. No evidence that they did.

Power company: Has extra money from selling the contract and double incentive to spend that money in a manner that would prevent price differences between Northport and Port Jefferson.

\</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>----

CMV, but it sounds like the market is doing exactly what it is supposed to be doing. DC Energy placed a bet that others were underestimating the probability of trouble between Northport and Port Jefferson. They created an incentive for other market players (especially power companies) to take action against this possibility and install backup capacity, perform preventative maintenance, or generally to do whatever a power company can do to prevent problems like the one that happened. Since these measures weren't taken DC energy now gets their payout for having "told them so." At least, that's how I understand it. If my understanding is correct it seems like everything is on the up-and-up. Consumers were victims of power companies that not only failed to anticipate the problem but didn't take the hint when trading firms offered to bet that there _would_ be a problem.

The thing that would make this a scandal would be if it were discovered that DC Energy had, say, payed someone at the power company to "pull an Enron" and sabotage maintenance. The danger of this kind of scheme is obviously real (see: the audio clips of Enron traders giggling like kids stealing cookies (yes, really) as they ordered power plants offline in California, driving up prices by creating an artificial shortage that eventually became known as the infamous rolling blackouts). However, it doesn't look like there is any evidence that the same conflict of interest is happening here.

Is the article arguing that these markets shouldn't exist because this kind of behavior would be nearly impossible to detect, making for tremendous moral hazard? That's the only "point" I can extrapolate from its discussion. It's not an unreasonable question. I could forgive its clickbaity title if only the article itself had been clearer about its own purpose.

<comment><USER3> > Consumers were victims of power companies that ignored market signals, not a > crafty scheme to leverage them out of their money.

DC Energy didn't exactly go to the power companies and say, "Hey guys, when I bet against your power capacity, it means put more money in it so I can lose my investment!" That's just completely absurd.

From the article: > The contracts were intended to protect the electricity producers, utilities and industries that need to buy power. The thinking was that the contracts would help them hedge against sharp price swings caused by competition as well as the weather, plant failures or equipment problems. Those lower costs could reduce consumers' bills.

> But Wall Street banks and other investors have stepped in, siphoning off > much of the money. In New York, DC Energy accounted for more than a quarter > of the total $639 million in profits in the congestion markets between 2003 > and 2013, The Times found. Some of DC Energy's biggest paydays involved Port > Jefferson, a village 60 miles east of Manhattan. Because of the geography of > the grid, moving power from one point to another means demand often briefly > outstrips supply here.

It's exploitation by DC Energy pure and simple. Exploitation is a foundation of Capitalism. What occurred is inadequate protections, whether intentional or not. The lack of a working strategy to protect electric producers is the true 'signal' that DC Energy conveyed.

<comment><USER4> _" Exploitation is a foundation of Capitalism"_

For every voluntary buyer in capitalism there is a voluntary seller. The NY Times presents this as exploitation.

<comment><USER5> Most people accept the notion that access to things like electricity, road capacity, heating gas and similar commodities are different than other commodities.

It's ridiculous that it is acceptable for the owners of critical infrastructure to stand back and allow easily foreseeable market disruptions to take place. In businesses where meaningful competition exists, doing so puts you out of business. Peak energy demand is very easy to project with great accuracy, there is no excuse for a saturated/failed electrical grid.

Government isn't here to promote capitalism -- it's broad charter is to promote the general welfare if its citizens. Unstable market prices for electricity is a market and governance failure, period.

<comment><USER4> The quality of the decision made by either party does not invalidate that capitalism is a collection of voluntary activity. It's when government is involved that there is restriction on that activity, which frequently has unintended effects. If there is inadequate planning for future demand then prices may certainly vary more than is considered acceptable. Poor planning on a utility's part is not the fault of capitalism, but which seems to be the major point of the article and the original poster. Indeed, selling future contracts is generally viewed as a good way to stabilize future prices as it gives a signal as to general (market) consensus - if insurance for some activity is considered expensive then it should tell even the minimal of planners that an activity has unevaluated risk. An inability to act properly on such signals does indeed indicate poor planning on one party's part.

<comment><USER5> That's a very sophisticated way of saying that utility companies have some magical entitlement to say "Fuck you, pay me".

There's another answer that that a 5 year old could come up with, and happened to work very effectively for 75+ years: when the electrical grid is out of electrical transmission capacity, add more capacity.

Writing future contracts doesn't accomplish much, other than create jobs trading electricity, because the supply problem isn't generation, it's distribution. There is no market for electrical infrastructure.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> From reading this article, it appears that these are not Over The Counter bets that are placed between one Investment bank with another. Rather this is a product created and sold by the grid operator NYISO in order to hedge price volatility and collect a fee.

While there is a mention of price manipulation, the article fails to clarify exactly how the prices are "manipulated" in order to favor the banks. The focus seems to be more on "bad banks" making money.

</comment><comment><USER7> This article could've stood to have fewer empty quotes from a podunk mayor and some kind of an explanation of the contracts themselves instead. There's just "congestion = profit" repeated over and over again, presumably as some kind of dog whistle to the average NYT reader.

</comment><comment><USER8> The results of decades of the government failing to properly invest into power generation + grid:

[http://i.imgur.com/L6adSdy.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/L6adSdy.jpg)

</comment><comment><USER9> The price volatility in the power market makes bitcoin seem downright boring.

</comment><comment><USER10> [http://www.dc-energy.com/careers/who-we-are/people- profiles/...](http://www.dc-energy.com/careers/who-we-are/people- profiles/carson)

It boggles my mind to think they're writing their systems in PHP.

<comment><USER11> Looking at job ads I would guess that PHP is the most popular / common language for writing web pages theses days.

<comment><USER10> Well yeah but they're hiring PHDs to write PHP? I would think their proprietary trading algorithms (which I was talking about) would be...not written in that.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: reviewing a startup idea - <AUTHOR>

I'm thinking about building a product similar to 99 dresses but for eye wear as sort of a side project. I believe many people will be more comfortable wearing glasses that have been used rather than something like a dress. Any advice or criticism you may have about the idea would be appreciated and ideas for "99 dresses for x" would also be helpful! <comment><USER2> Sounds like something you could definitely make a small MVP for, and not have to spend much time/money on it.

It's pretty clear who you would target as a customer, so just test your market and see if you can't get paying customers to demand you to continue.. That's better than anyone on HN validating your idea!

</comment><comment><USER3> Validate it on craigslist via an ad :)

<comment><USER4> Could you explain further?

<comment><USER3> Check out this post ;) [http://www.nevblog.com/people-just-copied-this-and-it- worked...](http://www.nevblog.com/people-just-copied-this-and-it-worked/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> you can pitch to <http://www.heystartup.com> and see what others would say.

</comment><comment><USER6> Do you mean like sunglasses?

<comment><USER7> Yeah most likely. Maybe sunglasses as well as prescription frames?</comment></comment>


Mobile application maintenance service - <AUTHOR> https://app-fixers.com <comment><AUTHOR> App Fixers is a first subscription based Mobile Application Maintenance as a Service.

Mobile application lifecycle doesn't end at app store upload, It requires frequent updates. We help app owners to maintain and update their applications.

We make sure that app is running well in upcoming OS and Devices. We integrate essential frameworks and libraries into application.

Please watch the video to know more about us: [https://vimeo.com/239445384](https://vimeo.com/239445384)</comment>


Silicon Valley's Innovative Approach to Creating American Jobs - <AUTHOR> http://www.technewsworld.com/story/Silicon-Valleys-Innovative-Approach-to-Creating-American-Jobs-69661.html <comment><USER2> The same two paragraph intro to the act copied from any HN post. Do these 'sites' have journalists anymore or are they just a markov chain?

<comment> daniel-cussen My vote goes to markov chain. These dudes put (NYSE: V) after Startup Visa.</comment></comment>


Stripe Checkout - <AUTHOR> https://stripe.com/payments/checkout <comment><USER2> What's new here? This was released a while back?

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19739630](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19739630)

</comment><comment><USER3> Starting to compete directly with a lot of their customers. Big change in strategy.

<comment><USER4> How so? Are there checkout-experiences-as-a-service vendors that use Stripe under-the-hood?

<comment><USER5> It seems like payment/e-commerce companies in general are shifting towards offering "express checkout" experiences nowadays - Shopify, Paypal, Amazon Pay, are a couple prominent examples. My former employer Affirm was also very concerned about owning the checkout experience/acquiring users up-funnel. It's a smart move, really.

<comment><USER6> We always hear about how payment networks manage to nickel and dime merchants to produce lots of revenue, so it was probably only a matter of time before other players in the process wanted a piece of that action.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Stripe checkout has existed for awhile, which might not be obvious seeing it on the frontpage of HN.

It does make Stripe integration much quicker, which usually takes quite awhile especially when many users only need basic functionality when starting out.

However it's still intended for people that know how to do at least a little development, so I wouldn't call it a competitor to Shopify and so on.

</comment><comment><USER8> I really wish Stripe would either support Elixir or drastically improve the quality of their docs.

As it is, every guide I see assumes the use of one of their few officially supported languages.

It doesn't have to be that way. For a web API, the strings sent back and forth in HTTP requests and responses can be generated by any server-side language.

Edit: Here is an example, the first guide linked from that page: [https://stripe.com/docs/payments/accept-a- payment?integratio...](https://stripe.com/docs/payments/accept-a- payment?integration=checkout)

As you'll notice there's a toggle for language in Step 1 "Set up Stripe". The options are: Ruby Python PHP Java Node Go .NET. Note that CURL is _not_ an option. The entire guide presupposes you're using one of 6 languages Stripe has blessed.

This has been the case for every guide on every similar Stripe product announcement I've seen shared here over the past year and a half.

<comment><USER9> > As you'll notice there's a toggle for language in Step 1 "Set up Stripe". > The options are: Ruby Python PHP Java Node Go .NET. Note that CURL is not an > option. The entire guide presupposes you're using one of 6 languages Stripe > has blessed.

That example you cited is about installing dependencies for the languages. You don't need to install an additional dependency to run a curl command. I've looked over the documentation you've cited in other posts and the only times it seems to omit curl requests is when you aren't required to make a request for the checkout flow.

While asking for specific documentation and language support for elixir is a reasonable request, it seems a bit unfair to claim their documentation doesn't provide enough information to roll your own interface.

<comment><USER8> The documentation _does_ provide enough information to roll your own, but it's buried. Notably, the newer "guides" seem to assume everyone is using one of their official libraries.

Here's an example of something you'll need to know for subscriptions or anything else involving webhooks: [https://stripe.com/docs/webhooks/signatures#verify- manually](https://stripe.com/docs/webhooks/signatures#verify-manually)

How many clicks is it going to take you from the subscriptions page of the docs to get there? You know it exists, which is already a big leg up, but I suspect it will take a while.

To be clear, _my_ site is integrated with Stripe. A lot of Elixir users in my audience have had a rough go of it, though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> As much as i loved integrating Stripe before i have to say it is pretty expensive for micro-transactions in Europe (less than 5€). They charge a base fee of 0.25€ +1.4% so this pretty much kills the business margin. We went with a local payments company in Spain (paycomet) because they could offer a flat 17€ fee a month.

<comment><USER11> (I work at Stripe.) We're working on microtransactions in Europe! We can support most use cases in Spain today, and we can look into hooking it up for you if you email me at firstname.lastname@example.com.

<comment><USER10> Thanks edwin but its a bit late, we've done the integration already.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Correct me if I'm wrong here, but there doesn't seem to be anything new with this release but a landing page?

<comment><USER11> Stripe Checkout has been around since 2014, but along with the new page, there are a bunch of new updates today (coupons, tax rates, and more payment methods). More in the blogpost: [https://stripe.com/blog/checkout](https://stripe.com/blog/checkout).

<comment><USER13> Since January 2013 according to the Wayback Machine:

[http://web.archive.org/web/20130113004155/https://stripe.com...](http://web.archive.org/web/20130113004155/https://stripe.com/docs/checkout)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Seems like a direct response to shopify. I like the competition. Interesting how the design language is so similar, too. Seems there's been a solid convergence in the payment space around simplified payment flows. As a developer and a user I'm very happy with this trend.

<comment><USER15> > As a developer and a user I'm very happy with this trend.

From the perspective of a dev starting a new app, it's a great trend.

From the perspective of a dev maintaining a Stripe integration first built in 2014, the breaking changes and migrations haven't always been fun. Stripe circa 2016 "just worked". Today, we regularly run into stripe issues (ie. irregularities in webhook data structure) as a result of new edge cases introduced when Stripe has added new functionality + features.

Then again, I think we're at a point in technology where we basically need to assume that nearly 100% of an application's code will need a significant refactor (or complete rewrite) at least every few years in order to remain maintainable.

<comment><USER16> Hi, Kenneth here from Stripe. I'd love to chat with you about the problems you have with webhooks. How can I best reach you? My email is firstname.lastname@example.com

<comment><USER15> firstname.lastname@example.com

We're not actively having problems. It was a few months ago. Refreshing myself on the technical details of the payload inconsistency and its cause would take a couple hours. But I believe it was related to us using a 3rd party service (that integrates with Stripe) sending out emails to customers whose charges failed, with a form to collect updated credit card info. The form for updating cc info used payment intents (may be using the wrong term) which is delivered differently than the (old) payment sources type.

The edge case being now there exists 2 groups of customers, 1 group who have a payment method attached under the new payment method / payment intent architecture, and a 2nd group with payment methods attached using the original / old method.

Webhooks often include the payment method, and the data structure for the payment method differs depending on how the payment method was attached to the customer.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


TV Prices Falling Fast - <AUTHOR> http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/10/25/tv-prices-falling-faster/ <comment><USER2> As someone who doesn't presently have TV in my lifestyle (we have a couple old CRTs in the basement that are unplugged, but nothing we use), I'm not sure how low prices would have to go to make me pick one up. I'm not sure that the quoted prices are low enough.

That said, it's pretty awesome that it's only a matter of time before plasmas are cheap enough to have in every room of your house, should you desire to do that.

<comment><USER3> The price cuts probably aren't targetted at people who don't use and don't want to use a TV.

<comment><USER2> I'm not trying to be this guy: <http://www.theonion.com/content/node/28694> \-- it's not something I'm serious about avoiding, my wife would love to have a decent TV, and I used to install them professionally and love the geeky aspects of home theater. I just don't know where I stand on the demand curve.

I can say these big + cheap TVs would be a lot more appealing to me if they were higher resolution -- this way I could use it as a decent computer monitor as well. The size and picture quality of a 50" plasma would be great, but (for example) the Panasonic one is 1366x768. I have pretty decent eyesight, and at any distance where that panel would feel immersive I could see the individual dots.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The only distinction between a TV and a monitor these days is the video input and integrated speakers. I have my TV hooked up to a Mac Mini so I can do all my Hulu, Youtube and home movie watching on a decent sized screen.</comment>


A Postmortem of Failed Products - <AUTHOR> http://losingfight.com/blog/2013/12/03/a-postmortem-of-failed-products/

<comment><USER2> A really candid view to the travails of making a product a "success".

I think the following quote sums up pretty much everything:

> OK, how about this: most of my failures seem to be marketing failures. This > includes misjudging if there is a market for a product or how big that > market even is.

Perhaps the point in all of this is that it's almost all a clear case of technology-push as opposed to market-pull. Your chances are a whole lot better when you've got the product-market fit sorted. It's almost always more difficult than the technical side of things when it comes to success at the end game.

</comment><comment><USER3> Choice quote:

> I got a call from Developer Relations saying they didn't allow "that kind of > app" in the store.

</comment><comment><USER4> That made me really sad.

<comment><USER5> Odd. It made me ... content, is perhaps the closest word. It's hard to make a product. I've had several attempts of mine fail, while I make a living as a consultant. In fact, I wouldn't say that I've had a success yet. So it's nice to hear someone else talk about the ongoing difficulties in software product development, rather than only from the occasional software successes.

<comment><USER4> You're right. Negative experience is valuable as well. I mysefl is now in a somewhat similar situation: I convinced my wife and my friends to try to implement a web-service I had in mind with a small working prototype. They agreed to suppor me financially and I quit my day job and took a year for now to finish it and have at least beta version running.

I should say that I feel really grateful and really appreciate this opportunity and what my friends are doing for me.

<comment><USER6> What did you build?

<comment><USER4> It's not working yet, sorry.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask news.yc: Name your startups of the year - <AUTHOR>

anywhere, songza and few more i need to think for a minute and come back <comment><USER2> Dopplr, Fire Eagle (does Fire Eagle count as a startup?) and Tumblr

<comment><AUTHOR> definitely tumblr

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Octopart and Bountii are done really well.

</comment><comment><USER4> I like the idea of Songza, but I expected a much better looking design from Humanized.

<comment><USER5> I had never heard of Songza. I just tried it out and it's pretty amazing. I agree with the red being a poor choice for a background, but everything else I think is pretty spot on.

Searching while listening to music is great, I like it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> where does songza get the songs from?

<comment><AUTHOR> i think youtube.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Mine.</comment>


Housing's new brand identity - <AUTHOR> https://housing.com/lookup

<comment><AUTHOR> I'd personally find it better if Housing were investing in better things than brand identity. Also, this page is full of ridiculous brand-isms.

They take pictures of buildings in a certain way, because it aligns with their new logo. Also, new typeface for no reason.</comment>


Application for Fixed Satellite Service by SpaceX - <AUTHOR> https://fcc.report/IBFS/SAT-MOD-20181108-00083 <comment><USER2> The application lists the following benefits

\- Rapid, passive disposal in the unlikely event of a failed spacecraft

\- Self-cleaning debris environment in general

\- Reduced fuel requirements and thruster wear

\- Benign ionizing radiation environment

\- Fewer NGSO operators affected by the SpaceX constellation

The first two are because there is more atmospheric drag. I believe that orbital debris in the case of a collision was something that SpaceX was struggling to mitigate (every struggles, but no one has put up this many satellites before).

The third is because originally the plan was to launch to a 400km orbit and then have the satellites lift themselves to a 1150km orbit. Now they intend to launch to a 300-350km orbit and lift themselves to 550km. They expect that the smaller amount of lifting will increase satellite lifetime by 50% even after accounting for atmospheric drag.

The fourth is apparently just "there's less radiation lower, and radiation is bad for electronics".

The fifth is just "less of the other theoretical internet constellations are at this height" as far as I can tell.

(All information sourced from the technical information attachment)

<comment><USER3> Curious that they don't mention lower communications latency as a benefit.

<comment><USER4> Perhaps because it's only 2ms per direction. I assume that someone that sensitive to latency wouldn't use satellite communications in the first place.

<comment><USER2> This constellation should have lower latency over long distance than is even theoretically possible using terrestrial fiber, because the speed of light in space is substantially better than the speed of light in fiber. [0]

Even over short distance the latency (which the "Legal Narrative" pdf quotes as 15ms) is negligible for almost all applications.

[0] paper [http://nrg.cs.ucl.ac.uk/mjh/starlink- draft.pdf](http://nrg.cs.ucl.ac.uk/mjh/starlink-draft.pdf) / video [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AdKNCBrkZQ4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AdKNCBrkZQ4)

<comment><USER5> > than is even theoretically possible using terrestrial fiber,

If we're talking about theoretical limitations then hollow core waveguide fibers should get you close to vacuum speed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This animation based on this proposal is good, [https://m.youtube.com/watch?feature=youtu.be&v=AdKNCBrkZQ4](https://m.youtube.com/watch?feature=youtu.be&v=AdKNCBrkZQ4)

<comment><USER7> That animation was great. Just what I needed to wrap my brain around this.

But 4,400+ satellites! How many launches is that going to take?

Also, glad to see that Alaska doesn't get shafted in this. As the computer voice noted, it's an FCC requirement.

<comment><USER8> good question so I found this[1] faq which says:

      Using a Falcon 9 at 25 satellites per launch it would take 177 flights, about 36 flights per year.
      Using a Falcon Heavy with 40 satellites it would take 112 flights, over 5 years that's about 22 flights per year.
      Using a BFR assuming 350 satellites per launch, until someone comes up with a better number, would need 13 flights total.

now those are based on the old higher orbit so presumably the numbers move substantially with this new plan.

[1][https://www.reddit.com/r/Starlink/comments/7zqm2c/starlink_f...](https://www.reddit.com/r/Starlink/comments/7zqm2c/starlink_faq/)

<comment><USER9> Ehh, give 'em a few more years, they can do it with one rocket over the course of a few days.

Only a little </s>.

Imagine a business plan for 4,400 satellites being _sane_. What a world.

<comment><USER10> Not only that, but the companies first successful orbital launch was only 10 years ago!

In those 10 years they went from being literally laughed out of rooms, to being the forefront of the industry. And even now that they are arguably "on top" in many ways, they keep on trying to do these insane things.

They are currently trying to build a rocket with the largest launch capacity in history, launch and maintain a satellite network which is the largest in history (if successful, it won't just be the largest, but will be at or near half of all satellites in orbit!), and still have a goal of getting humans to mars.

Say what you will about Elon Musk, the guy knows how to set goals.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Not sure where you got 116. Looks like the number is the same but they're relocating some.

"On March 29, 2018, the Commission authorized Space Exploration Holdings, LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Space Exploration Technologies Corp. (collectively, "SpaceX"), to construct, deploy, and operate a constellation of 4,425 non-geostationary orbit ("NGSO")satellites using Ku- and Ka-band spectrum. With this application, SpaceX seeks to modify its license to reflect constellation design changes resulting from a rigorous, integrated, and iterative process that will accelerate the deployment of its satellites and services. Specifically, SpaceX proposes to relocate 1,584 satellites previously authorized to operate at an altitude of 1,150 km to an altitude of 550 km, and to make related changes to the operations of the satellites in this new lower shell of the constellation."

<comment><USER2> I think this quote better summarizes the change.

"Under the modification proposed herein, SpaceX would reduce the number of satellites and relocate the original shell of 1,600 satellites authorized to operate at 1,150 km to create a new lower shell of 1,584 satellites operating at 550 km"

This shell will also now use 24 orbital planes instead of an originally planned 32. (per a table in the technical information pdf).

The total number of satellites in the constellation goes from 4,425 to 4,409.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I wonder if there is any consideration for high quantities of LEO satellites affecting ground based telescope operations? I guess one question would be "how many LEO objects are up there that are the size of say more than 1 cubic meter in size right now?".. if SpaceX would be doubling the total number up there right now that does sound concerning.. I personally love the idea of the global internet constellation they are working on.. just worry that there could be other ramifications..

<comment><USER13> I think something that most people don't comprehend is just how HUGE space is. For context, at 550km orbit, the "surface area" of the sphere surrounding the earth is ~601 BILLION square kilometers. Suppose we had 40,000 (double the number of objects larger than a softball we have been tracking) objects up there, in that exact orbit, we would still only have one object every 15 MILLION square miles.

So, while it is a valid concern... until we put up "millions" of items, I think astronomers will be pretty safe. However, orbital debris avoidance... much bigger issue.

<comment><USER14> I agree with your conclusions. Just a nit: the r² increase in surface of a sphere that makes this so much bigger an area to scatter the satellites across also applies to the field of view of telescopes and thus cancels out.

Edit: Clarification. The above is only true if having a satellite in the field of view is enough to be a problem.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Are SpaceX going to put a bunch of their previous satellite operator customers out of business?

<comment><USER5> Not just that, they will even compete on latency with transoceanic fiber operators.

<comment> Tuna-Fish Also bandwidth. Because there is little other use for the satellites over the pacific, the instant the first phase of the constellation is up, it is better than the Southern Cross fiber line at everything it does.

<comment><USER5> I'm a bit skeptical about that. Fiber has mind-boggling bandwidth scaling compared to beaming radio signals through a hundred kilometers of atmosphere. Light has a higher bandwidth and you can put more than one fiber into a cable and there's less interference too.

<comment> Tuna-Fish Their satellites don't communicate with each other by radio links, but by laser. Laser works better in vacuum than it does in fiber. Radio is just for the downlinks.(1)

They have not publicly stated anything about the inter-satellite links, but a research paper published by independent researchers(2) estimated that based on other state of the art, they get >100Gbps of bandwidth between two communicating satellites. The total trans-pacific capacity between NZ and the US will be better than the SC fiber line because there will be many different non-sharing paths using different satellites.

(1): Also likely for crossing connections. The paper mentioned below assumed use of laser for those too, but that is IMHO unlikely because steering would be too hard. Lasers work great for satellites on the same plane and those that are on the neighboring ones, because the angular speed that the system needs to move to track stays very low -- the satellites near them are almost stationary from their point of view. In contrast, satellites on crossing planes zip by very fast and have high angular motion, especially when near.

(2): [http://nrg.cs.ucl.ac.uk/mjh/starlink- draft.pdf](http://nrg.cs.ucl.ac.uk/mjh/starlink-draft.pdf)

<comment><USER5> The up/downlink is the bottleneck if you want to provide backbone-like connectivity over satellites, and that's still done via radio.

Those speeds may be great for individual endusers, but if you're a datacenter which needs a lot of bandwidth then starlink would be limited by the shared radio bandwidth to the sats, which could be quite crowded in an urban environment, while fiber wouldn't be. That's why I only see them as competing on latency, not on bandwidth.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> 10.7GHz... right on the edge of a radio astronomy protected band. Having a downlink here is not very good...

</comment><comment><USER15> how can they prevent these satellites being hacked? If they were they would be hard to recover I'd guess?

<comment><USER17> How do you prevent any communication satellite from being hacked? What makes you think that those satellites are easier to hack than others?

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Do you know why are they doing this? Lower orbit is probably cheaper?

<comment><USER19> Low orbit is cheaper to get a satellite to just considering launch costs (less fuel, easier to recover the first stage), but as siblings have mentioned, it's more expensive overall, particularly considering that you need lots more satellites to provide coverage.

Their plan to launch O(1000) satellites is to get lower latency and higher bandwidth, which would render the current generation of satellite internet obsolete.

It's a great example of the sort of business plan that's only possible with cheap launches that SpaceX's reusable rockets have provided.

Here's a more detailed primer:

[https://arstechnica.com/information- technology/2016/11/space...](https://arstechnica.com/information- technology/2016/11/spacex-plans-worldwide-satellite-internet-with-low-latency- gigabit-speed/)

<comment><USER20> What is O(1000) satellites?

<comment><USER21> It's borrowed from comp sci, but you can read O(x) as "on the order of x", so maybe 900, maybe 1200, but somewhere around there.

<comment><USER22> In Comp Sci O() notation has a very specific meaning and "on the order of" does not approximate it. I think it was probably just a misuse of the notation.

<comment><USER23> In informal contexts it's also used as a fudge/handwave, purely as a questionable analogy that nobody is expected to take too seriously. `theptip` almost certainly knows that O(1000)=O(1), they were just being playful.

<comment><USER22> Exactly.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Tom Lehrer - <AUTHOR> http://www.casualhacker.net/tom.lehrer/ <comment><USER2> While at UCSC in the early 90s, one morning I fell asleep in the front row of desks in an empty classroom (after a long night of studying).

I was awoken some time later in a quite full of students class room by Tom Lehrer. He stated with a smile that while my snoring had a nice rhythm, it was drowning out his lecture.

<comment><USER3> I took Tom's Nature of Mathematics course. Lots of fun.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> 'I know some people feel that marriage as an institution is dying out, but I disagree and the point was driven home to me rather forcefully not long ago by a letter I received which said: "Darling, I love you and I cannot live without you. Marry me, or I will kill myself." Well, I was a little disturbed at that until I took another look at the envelope and saw that it was addressed to occupant.'

</comment><comment><USER5> I highly recommend this long article about him: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7580638](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7580638). The story of the master tapes in his basement is striking, but the whole portrait is striking.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ah, thanks for that! Great article.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I have fond childhood memories of poisoning pigeons in the park

<comment><AUTHOR> The song I hope?

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Some of you may be amused to know that Lehrer's "Fight Fiercely Harvard" [1], written as a parody of his (and my) alma mater's traditional football fight songs, has been enthusiastically and affectionately adopted by Harvard students themselves, and is frequently played at games by the Harvard Band.

[1]: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=27PSHASlGUU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=27PSHASlGUU)

</comment><comment><USER8> > Tom Lehrer is a comedian who has found a large group of fans all over the > world, but embarrassingly few good webpages. This page is supposed to be > pretty good. I even manage to update it from time to time. Thanks to > everybody who's been sending me e-mail. I really appreciate it!

nice! i hadn't realised it, but he's absolutely right; given how popular he is among geeks, lehrer has startlingly little about him on the web.

<comment><USER9> He pretty much dropped out of the public eye so long ago--and did it absolutely. In the late 70s, we tried a variety of good personal connections to persuade him to perform at MIT and the answer was a resounding no. Add to that a relatively small body of songs and there's just not a whole lot more to say past a certain point.

Edit: That said, there have been a couple of in-depth articles relatively recently. I suspect the issue is that they needed a lot of research that went beyond easy-to-find sources.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I got the crap kicked out of me in music class when I was 12 for playing "National Brotherhood Week" as an example of a song I liked...

<comment><AUTHOR> I'd have happily stood with you, that's my favorite by far. Be grateful that it doesn't last all yeaaaarrrr...

Fantastic song, super sharp and as applicable as the day it was written.

<comment><USER11> Whatever happened to National Brotherhood Week as an institution?

It seems like the sort of thing which the US could do with more of, given how much race relations have deteriorated since the 60s.

<comment><USER12> Race relations have deteriorated since the 1960s? I agree that they aren't superb now. But watch a little footage of what happened to protests back then, or the reaction to Freedom Summer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Members of the corps

All hate the thought of war

They'd rather kill them off by peaceful means

Stop calling it aggression

We hate that expression

We only want the world to know

That we support the status quo

They love us everywhere we go

So when in doubt, send the Marines

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HHhZF66C1Dc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HHhZF66C1Dc)

<comment><USER12> The day after the US invaded Panama, some NPR affiliate led off a piece with a snippet of the piano work from that. I wonder how much of the audience got that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> When I was 15 or so, a teacher asked us to bring in a song making a political statement. In class we traded and discussed them.

The kid I traded with had brought in NWA's "Fuck Tha Police." I'd brought in Tom Lehrer's "Pollution," which I thought was funny and knew by heart already; my parents had a moderately diverse collection of vinyl records that I'd listened to for years, playing them low and just sitting against the speaker.

[http://www.casualhacker.net](http://www.casualhacker.net) /tom.lehrer/the_year.html#pollution

It was an eye-opening moment -- I was a fairly solitary kid who hadn't realized how out of step I was from most of my peers.

<comment><USER4> When I was at school we were on occasion obliged to perform musical numbers for parents and visiting dignitaries. And thus I discovered Tom Lehrer: for one year, one of my friends was drafted in to such a performance, that time of `Masochism Tango'.

Heaven only knows what the parents thought about that! - since my friend couldn't sing for shit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I was remembering Tom Lehrer fondly the other day after seeing BAM's new production of How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, which has a hilarious fight song from "Old Ivy", sending me back to TL's "Fight Fiercely Harvard", the only Harvard 'fight song' I ever learned.

[http://www.casualhacker.net/tom.lehrer/revisited.html#harvar...](http://www.casualhacker.net/tom.lehrer/revisited.html#harvard)

</comment><comment><USER16> Tom featured heavily in Dr. Demento's radio show, which is how I learned of him. My dear aunt just emailed me about the glowing blue orc sword in a British museum and we both agreed the only good orc is a dead orc.

We finished the email thread with a lyric repurposed from Tom's classic _Poisoning Pigeons in the Park_ :

        We'll murder them all amid laughter and merriment,
        Except for the few we take home to experiment.

He and his music are timeless.

</comment><comment><USER17> My favorite songs of his, in no particular order :

Who's Next?, National Brotherhood Week, The Elements, The Vatican Rag, Pollution, Send the Marines, Wernher von Braun, Be Prepared

</comment><comment><USER18> One song appears to be missing: "Selling Out", which is on the first CD of the 3-CD set "The Remains of Tom Lehrer".

</comment><comment><USER19> "It is a sobering thought, for example, that when Mozart was my age, he had been dead for two years."

[https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Tom_Lehrer](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Tom_Lehrer)

</comment><comment><USER20> Daniel Radcliffe (Harry Potter actor) did Lehrer's periodic table song not too long ago. Earnest and cute!

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rSAaiYKF0cs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rSAaiYKF0cs)

<comment><USER12> My son was looking for something he could play to accompany a report in 8th grade chemistry class, and after he failed to download more than the intro to some song or another, I suggested that song. He reported that it was a hit.

<comment><USER20> 8th grade? That's an impressive bit of memorization. Kudos.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Tom Lehrer sang a new song a few years ago: _Sociology_

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mB97Qe2D4V0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mB97Qe2D4V0)

<comment><USER22> Apparently that was filmed in the '90s, at MIT.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Odd fact about Tom Lehrer, he was a mathematical prodigy who got into Harvard at 15.

</comment><comment><USER24> All of his stuff is on Spotify, in case you're not into MIDIs.</comment>


Markdown and mock = textmock - <AUTHOR> http://www.textmock.net/ <comment><USER2> Nice to see someone else working on tools like this. I think Markdown has a good level of 'accessibility' in that the syntax is friendly while fairly capable.

If you're curious, here's some of my experiments (best viewed on desktop):

\- [https://datadown.collected.design/github/RoyalIcing/lofi- boo...](https://datadown.collected.design/github/RoyalIcing/lofi- bootstrap/master) \- [https://lofi.design/syntax/](https://lofi.design/syntax/) \- [http://collected.design/research](http://collected.design/research)

Keen to collaborate with people!

<comment><USER3> hard to tell exactly what you're doing from mobile but looos interesting and i'll look more later - here's mine let's collaborate [http://www.hyperfiddle.net](http://www.hyperfiddle.net)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> If you enjoy writing html without the annoying punctuation, you might also like Pug: [https://codeburst.io/getting-started-with-pug-template- engin...](https://codeburst.io/getting-started-with-pug-template- engine-e49cfa291e33)

<comment><USER5> Formerly known as Jade.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm glad someone's experimenting with this idea. The makers of CakeMail did something similar with email templates a while back (see [http://cakedown.alexandredeschamps.ca/](http://cakedown.alexandredeschamps.ca/)), and I always thought it was a bummer that they didn't keep going with the idea.

</comment><comment><USER7> This could be a very convenient tool! Is it an open source project? If it is, I can imagine using this to quickly create landing sites or web sites for code projects. No worries if not.

<comment><AUTHOR> No, it's not OOS, but I'm thinking about it. Why not?

I saw that as a useful to quickly prototype an idea. But I'm not yet sure frankly.

<comment><USER8> This is smart. If you're not going to do anything else with it, you should publish it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Beware, there's a popup video when you open the page.

<comment><USER4> For possibly the first time ever, I really liked this one, and it makes great sense why it happens. It showed a clear demo in seconds, and then automatically closed itself to reveal the UI it was just showing.

The demo is so robust I probably wouldn't have figured out the tool's purpose in 10 seconds without the video.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Great idea, but is the TextMock->HTML interpreter open-source for rendering elsewhere?

If the format is only easily usable/previewable on some proprietary site that might go away, people will be reluctant to learn/adopt the format.

<comment><AUTHOR> I completely agree, I'm thinking about that. I should probably specify the grammar and make my tm->html converter open source. And probably allow to store on a personal git repo so that nobody is afraid to be locked in. So many interesting things to do, and so little time :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I use the markdown editor [http://typora.io/](http://typora.io/) for a few years now.

It's a downloadable client and for on Windows, Linux & OS X

</comment><comment><USER12> This is great! I'm not sure if I'm missing it somewhere, but it would be nice to be able to see the resulting HTML without having to view the page source.

<comment><AUTHOR> Agreed, you are not the first to give this feedback. I'll work on that, it should be available tomorrow.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> They typo'ed on the word poopular. Or not. :D

</comment><comment><USER14> This is cool. I also can't help but notice the objective-c [method message] smalltalk-like syntax.

</comment><comment><USER15> Using markdown as a sort of templating language, like Haml, is a pretty cool idea.

</comment><comment><USER3> useless on mobile safari can't even watch the video or see any of the copy

<comment><AUTHOR> It's only 88KB, but I should not display the video on mobile indeed. I'm removing it right now.

<comment><USER3> thanks much better

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Neat but what was wrong with HTML again?

<comment><USER17> _> what was wrong with HTML again?_

That it's a lot harder to correctly type HTML than it is to express a basic page layout in this new form. In other words, on this view HTML is not source code, it's object code, and should be produced by a program, not by humans. I would agree with that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Love this. Would be great to have the converter. Not so much to mockup sites but to generate help docs and blog posts on my bootstrap site.</comment>


Modified a vintage typewriter to function as a USB keyboard using an Arduino - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/LukasStefanko/status/886604699331436544 <comment><USER2> I'm just imagining this becoming the next big thing in the mechanical keyboard community. They're a bit nuts, but then again, so is just about any bobby's community!

60% typewriters incoming?</comment>


IT community against political repressions in Russia - <AUTHOR> TL;DR, please:
- press the "star", if you are against political repressions in Russia: https://github.com/developers-against-repressions/case-212
- upvote this post
- share the post with your colleagues
Thank you very much!
If you want to sign the letter (basically, it says that all political repressions in Russia must be stopped):
- add yourself to signed/1.txt (the format is "<name> | <role>, <company>", e.g. "John Doe | Software Engineer, Google")
- OR create a file in the "signed" directory with any name (more complex - better) and put any number of people in the format described above
and send the corresponding pull-request.
<comment>
This summer was crazy in Russia. Almost all (let's say 95%) independent politicians were not allowed to participate in local elections for NO legal reason. That is why people were protesting a lot (in a non-violent way!). Several thousand protesters were detained for NO legal reason, and some of them (~10-20) are at risk of getting several-year sentences for nothing. There are software developers among them as well and one of them has already been sentenced for FOUR YEARS FOR REPEATEDLY TAKING PART IN THREE NON-VIOLENT DEMONSTRATIONS. Literally.
More reading:
- About protests in general: https://www.rferl.org/a/how-a-local-vote-rocked-russia-moscow-election-caps-summer-of-discontent/30150471.html
- Four years for nothing: https://www.rferl.org/a/russian-sentenced-to-four-years-in-prison-for-repeatedly-taking-part-in-unsanctioned-protests/30148730.html
- At risk of 3 years for nothing: https://www.rferl.org/a/moscow-case-ustinovprominent-russians-protest-repression/30171770.html </comment><comment><USER2> When has something like this worked in the past?</comment>


Interns in tech make more than workers in most occupations - <AUTHOR> https://www.theatlas.com/charts/ryBZlr17e <comment><USER2> That's because workers in tech make more than workers in most occupations.

When you hire an intern, you pay them almost-entry-level rates because they are doing almost-entry-level work.

Interns are not slaves to be under-paid, and tech is a high paid industry. I'm not sure what's surprising about this.

<comment><USER3> Yup, agreed with this.

Call me a privileged asshole or whatever since I work in tech and I get paid well, but isn't that how supply and demand works? Once upon a time, you could get a really well-paying factory job or a well-paying job working in the coal mines since those jobs were in demand.

I feel like that's how it's kind of working in software. Factory jobs are going away because robotics are taking over, which creates a demand for engineers to maintain these robots. We're kind of going through a second industrial revolution, except it's a digital and robotics revolution. Unfortunately, that means we're also feeling the crunch of that which means there's a big demand for engineers that our workforce doesn't supply for... yet. So yes, tech interns are going to get paid more than most other places.

<comment><USER4> I kinda feel like if we were really going through a second Industrial Revolution, GDP and productivity growth rates would be a lot higher. Maybe we'll manage to unleash an Industrial Revolution if we break up monopolies, fund public infrastructure properly, and do other things to create space for really new enterprises.

<comment><USER5> Productivity is up, massively, for those who are able to participate in the "new" economy. You can reach millions of users several magnitudes cheaper than ever before. Even small companies owned and operated by a single person can have customers spread over the entire world.

Needless to say, most people are not able to participate.

<comment><USER4> >Productivity is up, massively, for those who are able to participate in the "new" economy.

Do we have any numerical evidence for this? Sure, it could explain Google's revenues, but monopoly rents from being _the_ search-engine could explain that too. What about on a per-worker-hour basis, wit some official numbers?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Also important to realize that no intern actually gets the full yearly salary -- these internships usually last around 3 months.

Not a huge fan of this site, presenting data without context seems like a great way to stir up trouble without doing any actual reporting.

<comment><USER7> I agree. Interns also generally receive no extended benefits like 401(k), stock, medical, and so on, so the comparison isn't very fair in terms of total comp.

<comment><USER8> But interns do get things like free housing and free cars which full times do not.

<comment><USER9> Never heard of free cars - who does that?

<comment><USER10> I got a free rental car from Amazon in summer 2013. I don't think they do that anymore tho.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Interns in tech _in the United States_.

<comment><USER12> And interns in Canada. On my second internship, I got paid more per month than my mother who works in the public sector!

<comment><USER9> Wait, really? I've never heard of Canadians from UW making $8K like they do in SV/SEA/NYC

<comment><USER13> A lot of Canadians from UW _are_ the ones working in SV/SEA/NYC.

<comment><USER9> Yeah, I was assuming the compensation in Canada is why they choose to do so.

<comment><USER14> It does sound like he means companies in Canada.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Wow, it's almost like supply and demand have an effect on wages.

</comment><comment><USER16> Funny anecdote is that when I used to be intern from Poland on J1 (~5500 USD per month), savings from 3 months of internship in USA divided by 9 months were higher than average salary in Poland. We got most of taxes back. We also had free tuition and great scholarships from EU.

It was quite easy to get the internship. Back in my time, ~2011, ~1/3 of students from my alma mater, Warsaw University, did J1 internship in USA.

<comment><USER17> Do most students from your university stay in Poland, or do they move elsewhere after graduating?

<comment><USER16> Bay Area is definitely the most popular destination. Then Zurich (Big Google office), London and finally staying in Warsaw.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Related data [http://observer.com/2014/12/the-master-list-of-tech- internsh...](http://observer.com/2014/12/the-master-list-of-tech-internship- salaries-revealed/) [https://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/engineering-intern- salary...](https://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/engineering-intern-salary- SRCH_KO0,18.htm) [https://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/software-intern-salary- SR...](https://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/software-intern-salary- SRCH_KO0,15_SDMC.htm) [https://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/software- engineering-inte...](https://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/software-engineering- intern-salary-SRCH_KO0,27.htm) [https://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/software- developer-intern...](https://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/software-developer- intern-salary-SRCH_KO0,25_SDMC.htm)

BLS data on pay by occupation [http://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes_nat.htm#00-0000](http://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes_nat.htm#00-0000)

While the graph in the OP seems a bit subjectively selective, the BLS data seems to support the argument and data from other sources seems to support the 74k number for software intern average salary.

Adjusted for length of employment (assuming about three months per year) that would be $19,500 / yr. Not entirely unexpected tbh.

There are some articles out there hint at the average seasonal salary being around $69k [http://www.simplyhired.com/salaries-k-seasonal- jobs.html](http://www.simplyhired.com/salaries-k-seasonal-jobs.html)

</comment><comment><USER19> I wonder how it stacks up against law and banking internships.

<comment><USER7> I've had several big name tech internships, and I got an internship offer from a bank to do tech work. The bank offered around 2/3rd the comp with significantly worse benefits, which surprised me considering that a) they were in NYC b) they were a big name and c) they approached me, not the other way around. Not sure if they pay the trader type interns more...

<comment><USER9> Which one was that? IIRC Goldman pays the same or more for Tech than for others, but I'm not sure.

<comment><USER7> It was GS

<comment><USER9> For Junior interns salary is very competitive with even Big4. Total compensation lags because of no housing, though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Yes, salaries in SV are high. But, you can bet your ass that that sample set is made of students who for the most part come from a handful top-notch schools.

</comment><comment><USER21> I find the stats looks rather skewed? anyone else thinks so too ?

<comment><USER22> The tech intern data was a self-reported online survey distributed around tech-focused Facebook groups (eg: I definitely saw and participated in this survey last year, on Hackathon Hackers).

The other salary data was from "BLS May 2015 National Occupational Employment and Wage Estimates".

I found the survey useful to compare your offers to other offers at that company/ones nearby. It was way easier to use than glassdoor, especially because the offers increase a little every year and you want to be sure you're not getting screwed somehow.

Definitely should be used for any real analysis though, not even blog-post analysis.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Sample size for interns\graduate hires was 352 (57 female, 278 male). Which I don't suspect is a large enough sample.

<comment><USER24> Looking at their raw data, it looks like there was a total of 718 respondents ([https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Km9bsx0SWPDiOPMYvrem...](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Km9bsx0SWPDiOPMYvremSDujyS5sF0ZQvbxr5S52wSA/edit#gid=1801472043)).

Large enough sample to be ultra conclusive? Not really, but I think it gives you a taste for the data and it's unlikely that tech interns /do/ make more than most, but it's not really surprising.

<comment><USER23> The survey include a 50/50 mix of interns and full-time positions, so some of that data might be for FTE's.</comment></comment></comment>


One Game A Month - <AUTHOR> http://www.onegameamonth.com/

<comment><AUTHOR> Make this your New Year's resolution. Visit the site and watch the keynote. Hope to see many of the HN readers there:)</comment>


DeZombification - How to get yourself out of autopilot... - <AUTHOR> http://www.dezombification.org/

<comment><USER2> hehe, go scare yourself. I liked the music.

<comment><AUTHOR> it is actually not that easy to spook yourself ;)</comment></comment>


$682 Hackintosh Mac Mini vs. $1,300 Apple Mac Mini - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aZU9KD2YESQ <comment><USER2> Hackintoshes are fun projects, I've made a few of them. Where they fall apart, though, is updates. If you're prepared to stay on the same OS X version or want to take the risk of something breaking, I highly recommend this kind of project.

If you're looking for something that will smoothly update like the Mac mini does (set it and forget it) then Hackintosh is really not for you. I recommend a used Mac mini, which you can get for a good price on craigslist.

<comment><USER3> Installing untrusted software of dubious origin to run at highest privilege levels is not a security best practice.

<comment><USER2> Agreed, one of the reasons I considered my Hackintoshes to be toys more than machines for serious work. I don't put my real Apple ID on them. I've got one sitting around just for playing music and updating my iPod, though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I have been running hacktinoshes as my daily drivers since 2011. Certainly there are trade offs, but I am surprised I don't see more love for them here on HN given Apple's recent lackluster hardware offerings.

</comment><comment><USER5> Didn't know mac mini 2016 were actually _less_ powerful than 2012 ones. That's just insane....

<comment><USER6> Similar to the 2016 MacBook Pro benchmarking worse than the 2013, 2014, and 2015 MacBook Pro

[http://browser.primatelabs.com/mac- benchmarks](http://browser.primatelabs.com/mac-benchmarks)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> If only there was a good-looking laptop...

I'm considering buying the MacBook Pro (without their retarded touchbar), but it costs over 1900EUR.

I would really love it if I could reliably run macOS on cheaper hardware.

<comment><USER8> Try this method[1]. It allows me to run macOS virtually on a cheap laptop.

[1] [https://techsviewer.com/install-macos-sierra-vmware- windows/](https://techsviewer.com/install-macos-sierra-vmware-windows/)

<comment><USER7> Yes, but how is the performance?

Also, I read that not everything works.

<comment><USER8> Performance is decent. I run Xcode and the iOS simulator on a $850 Lenovo 7th gen i7 laptop with 16gb (8gb allocated to the BMW) and ssd.

I think some folks have mentioned they couldn't get their iMessages from their iPhone to work but I haven't tried pairing my phone.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Visualize the universe as the measly Earth peasant that you are - <AUTHOR> http://danieljakobian.com/logs/log0011.html <comment><USER2> Can we have your liver then? [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yq4uCWtQE24](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yq4uCWtQE24)</comment>


Must have VSCode extensions for Front end developers - <AUTHOR> https://sharelist.co/ankit/lists/DHpmWTFShl1UPh6gYCT1 <comment><USER2> I dislike prettier, imo it is too aggressive all around. I understand the lack of configurability is intentional (to force consistency on a macro scale) but I don't like its style. Anyone have any good experiences with a more configurable formatter? Looking for one to adapt to existing coding style in a several years-old multi-application project.

<comment><USER3> Why do you care about its style so much?

<comment><USER4> It's a bit annoying when you have a large project then someone introduces prettier. Suddenly every pull request has dozens of random formatting changes everywhere and it obscures the actual changes. It also completely nullifies the functionality of git blame (I know there are other ways to see the file history).

<comment><USER5> Run prettier on the entire codebase once and add an ignore-revs-file: [https://git-scm.com/docs/git-blame#Documentation/git-blame.t...](https://git- scm.com/docs/git-blame#Documentation/git-blame.txt---ignore-revs-fileltfilegt)

<comment><USER6> How does that help? Genuine question.

<comment><USER7> > running it on the entire codebase

The autoformatter config file is checked in with the PR that's runs it on the entire codebase. Everybody's machine autoformats the same way.

Only things that are changed in the PR will be formatted along with the PR.

The separate problem I've found is any outstanding PRs at the time of running it on the whole codebase should merge in the commit before the format all, then the format all change, then current master. It's made resolving the PR merge conflicts easier

idk what the ignore rev file does

<comment><USER6> > idk what the ignore rev file does

Sorry - my question was ambiguous. That's the part that I don't understand.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I am not sure what it does here.

On VSCode there is a nice recommendation system, based on file types and vox populi (so one can see if other people use it). I wish other pieces of software hard it as well. (For Sublime Text there is [https://packagecontrol.io/](https://packagecontrol.io/), but it requires checking with an external website.)

...

As a side note, do you know if there is a VSCode REPL for TypeScript? There is the console, but it is static in the sense - once can run the whole file. I have a lot of experience with Jupyter Notebook for Python, and it is a kind of tool that for some prototyping (especially in numerics) makes things orders of magnitude faster to detect, and fix, errors.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Would love to hear about other extensions Frontend engineers use. Let me know in the comments :-D

</comment><comment><USER9> Emmet is horrifyingly useful when you're typing html by hand. You may even forget where <, > and / are located.

</comment><comment><USER10> Do you really need autoprefixer nowadays?</comment>


Taiwan remains world's fifth biggest creditor at end of 2018 - <AUTHOR> http://focustaiwan.tw/news/aeco/201906150010.aspx <comment><USER2> The NIIP (Net International Investment Position) measures whether a country is net debtor vs net creditor.

This wikipedia list from 2017: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_international_investment_p...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_international_investment_position)

has some interesting trends:

1) US is far down below in the list as a net debtor country with the NIIP being 43.4% of its GDP

2) Many erstwhile developing countries like China, India, Nigeria are slowly getting closer to the 0 mark twards net creditor status

3) Venezuela is a net creditor country with NIIP beign 30.5% of the GDP. How does that work for a country that's internally collapsing? Is it from historical oil lending deals to other countries?

<comment><USER3> Is it necessarily a bad thing to be a net debtor? Generally when a business or country borrows money it's because they can put it to some productive use that generates a greater return than the cost of borrowing. If the US is borrowing money, it means that it's making productive use of other countries' assets and getting return from those assets that the other countries are not. This should be a good thing (for the US).

People tend to react to news about national debt like it's their credit card bill that they ran up on takeout food and flatscreen TVs. It's not really the same thing.

<comment><USER4> You're assuming we're maximizing the productivity on our debt. I would say the US is spending money on the government equivalent of takeout food and flatscreen TVs.

<comment><USER5> 4K TVs are incredibly cheap yet good quality these days, and it's not like you need more than one.

<comment><USER4> That wasn't really my point, my point was that we take on enormous debt and we spend it on things that aren't the best. Why don't we spend more on infrastructure, research, investing in clean energy, etc? I understand that we need a military to protect our position in the world, but I'm not sure $750 billion dollars per year is needed. Sure some of that is spent on research, but I think there are more efficient ways to spend the money.

<comment><USER5> Well, because everyone in the US has brain damage from inhaling leaded gasoline in the 80s, and so they're stuck in 1992 and think all government policy means bombing countries in the Middle East while ignoring Asia, Africa and their own country.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


USB 3.0 to get 10Gbps throughput - <AUTHOR> http://reviews.cnet.com/8301-13727_7-57562569-263/usb-3.0-to-get-10gbps-throughput/

<comment><USER2> What are the applications these high throughput rates for the average user?</comment>


Physicists confirm possible discovery of fifth force of nature - <AUTHOR> http://phys.org/news/2016-08-physicists-discovery-nature.html <comment><USER2> Relevant: [https://www.quantamagazine.org/20160607-new-boson-claim- face...](https://www.quantamagazine.org/20160607-new-boson-claim-faces- scrutiny/)

Basically, take this claim with a huge dose of salt. For general physics related news, you can't go wrong with Peter Woit's blog, and the other blog recommendations there: [http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/](http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/)

</comment><comment><USER3> Weren't electromagnetism and the weak force unified at some point? I thought those were two aspects of the same force, so this would be a _fourth_ fundamental force, not a fifth.

Am I off base here?

<comment><USER4> You are correct. At high temperatures, electromagnetism and the weak force merge into the electroweak force. However, these temperatures only existed at the very, very early stages of the universe. As temperatures fell, the two forces split apart into the (rather different) ones we see today, so it is habitual to refer to them as different forces, even though strictly speaking they are different manifestations of one underlying force.</comment></comment>