Ask HN: One thing you wish would happen in the next 10 years? - <AUTHOR> Make contact with aliens in a very transparent way, visible to the wide public. <comment><USER2> Civilized discussion on hard topics -- There seems to be a large amount of shouting matches going on right now. We need to be able to discuss things in a calm and respectful manner even when we strongly disagree with the other side. There are a lot of buzz words that get thrown out that to me have lost meaning (racist, sexist, etc.). These words do have meaning and there are absolutely people doing these things that need to stop. However, lets stop name calling and start sharing our stories with the intend to do just that, share. When the only goal is to get everyone to believe what you believe, it likely won't be a productive conversation.

<comment><USER3> This, but I also think we can't just do this in a pure "freedom of speech" way. In order to have a space where we can talk about things calmly and respectfully we will need to shut-out "bad faith" actors, supremacists and ideologues. Otherwise they will pervert the dialogue in order to win some political battle and we risk the wrong outcomes.

We have to come at this very directly from the perspective of the outcomes we wish to achieve and those that we wish to avoid ("consequentialism") rather than through some mindless repetition of an ideal that we believe to be sacred ("free-speech is _so_ important"). Free-speech might be important but maintaining peace and achieving good outcomes for all involved should probably be held in higher regard [0] than some abstract principle, particularly when that abstract principle is a shibboleth of the people on one side of an issue but not the other.

[0] I'm talking about people that want to argue about racism and sexism while incidentally subjecting those they're arguing with to the most extreme and potentially toxic people in their group in the name of 'free speech'.

<comment><USER4> Is that not just saying discount everyone who doesn't agree with what WE want to talk about, and then lets talk about it?

<comment><USER5> No. Not everyone contributes to the discussion. Some people have malicious intent. Others are just ignorant. You cannot deal in absolutes. I work in the sciences. If we were to consider every crackpot's solution to the hardest problems in math/physics, we would waste our lives in folly and never get anything done.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Decentralized social media, decentralized chat platforms, decentralized almost everything that we depend on the Internet for. Users of the platform have more control over which provider to use, can freely move around and even start things on their own to connect into well defined interoperable systems and protocols.

This is more of a pipe dream than a hope, but I would be ecstatic to see such a world. Like Peter Sunde of Pirate Bay said recently, it looks like we can do only some damage control now. [1]

[1]: [https://thenextweb.com/eu/2017/06/09/pirate-bay-founder- weve...](https://thenextweb.com/eu/2017/06/09/pirate-bay-founder-weve-lost- the-internet-its-all-about-damage-control-now/)

Edit: Added interoperability for the sake of clarity.

<comment><AUTHOR> This could be something that blockchain technology might have an impact on. This article gives examples of how blockchain can be used to decentralize many aspects of our current dynamics.

\- [https://venturebeat.com/2017/04/23/companies-of-the- future-n...](https://venturebeat.com/2017/04/23/companies-of-the-future-no- ceo-no-boss-managed-by- blockchain/?utm_content=bufferb6e1e&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook.com&utm_campaign=buffer)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Renewables to destroy the fossil fuels industry on price. A win for the environment, and some of the oil states will descend into utter irrelevance. Cheap, clean energy will be utterly transformative to the planet and will dramatically raise living standards globally.

<comment><USER8> Agreed with the notion, but will point out that many of the "oil states" are not oblivious to the writing on the wall and as a result have begun allocating significant portions of their "fossil fuel" profits into alternative channels, in many cases into energy as well. The sheer amount of deployable capital at their disposal leads me to believe they will not "descend into utter irrelevance" as you suggest. At the very least they will succeed in maintaining their relative prosperity, but envision there is a state of the world in which they successfully transition into being champions of Renewable energy going forward. It's not very difficult to build an new industrial energy empire when you have trillions of dollars to spend.

edit:spelling

<comment><USER9> > many of the "oil states" are not oblivious to the writing on the wall and as > a result have begun allocating significant portions of their "fossil fuel" > profits into alternative channels, in many cases into energy as well.

And not just recently; it's been that way for _decades_. This (alongside the fact that certain other oil states had not done so) was a major contributing factor to the 1990-1991 Gulf War, for instance.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'll take a liberty to answer it in two ways, one thing for tech and one thing for non-tech.

Tech - Fixing Battery/Energy

This is one of the most important breakthrough we absolutely need. Current situation is like of ancient age, where civilisations used to be near/along the water sources like rivers, sea, etc. Same thing is happening today due to our energy dependencies. It limits the geography where a person can dare to live or explore without worrying or sacrificing the safety of communications. there are some ways currently, I agree, but we need more widely adopted solution. Energy consumption should not be co-related to the guilt! :p

There are two things about this: 1) Better energy backup in relatively portable size 2) Quick recharge ( or maybe disrupt the recharge concept:p ?! )

Non-Tech - Understand humans better, physiologically.

If we achieved this, it will be an amazing achievement for our species. Currently, healthcare system works on trial and error method. Most drugs don't really work without any side effects. We haven't understood our own defence mechanisms completely. Maybe using our own killer T-cells to do a targeted strike on aliens in our body will be more useful for our species than hunting aimlessly for aliens in outer space. I don't mean to undermine the importance of ET search efforts and it's implications, but from value proposition point of view, I'll favour human health system. Well, I'm deliberately avoiding to list why health is SO lagging even in 2017, it's better to assume that it's about time to solve health related problems inclusively rather than just keeping it exclusive filed for the health professionals and pharmas.

Disclaimer: No offence to anyone! :)

</comment><comment><USER11> No more first past the post in the UK and US as it makes politics partisan and uninteresting hysterical carping from wing to wing. There isn't enough centerism and pragmatism.

<comment><USER12> This is really the most frustrating thing for me. The outcomes of our political system at determined so much more by how we elect people than who we elect. The system is so broken, and people want change, but you're never going to get real change just by putting different people in charge.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Information: Decentralized telecommunications. Removal of centralized mobile carriers in favor of alternate mesh and private (micropayments-based?) local wireless access rental popularization. The major technical barrier at present is the user experience around default mesh support on phones (startup anyone?)

Social: Non-government reputation systems worth their salt finally enter commerce and sociopolitics to automate supply chain management, RFQ processes, SLAs, incident handling, direct political representation, etc. A revolution in education, international sociopolitical movements bypassing national political systems to address global challenges, increased respect for the environment.

Physical: Reformation of global logistics with distributed manufacturing and laws and the requirement for commercial product part designs to be published with every sale for independent consumer repairs.

Food: At least one city feeds itself largely from automated rooftop farming.

</comment><comment><USER14> It is really hard to say just one thing but if I could only name one I would say find a cure for cancer. That in and of itself would have wide impact on families who are emotionally and financially devastated as a result; should help reduce the cost of healthcare overall given that cancer treatment is exorbitant; and would allow researchers to focus on other illnesses or worldwide problems.

<comment><USER15> "Cancer" is such a broad term, with ~200 different "types". I agree that "cancer" is a huge problem (my brother had childhood leukemia at 9 months until he was about 6 years old), and its effects on the family cannot be understated. Unfortunately, we've only begun to scratch the surface towards a cure for very few of the 200 types of cancer out there.

<comment><USER16> That being the case, we still can't rule out the possibility of general- purpose treatment methods.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I'd feel a lot better about moving into the suburbs if autonomous vehicles (with wifi so I can work in transit) actually became a widespread thing

</comment><comment><USER18> Getting rid of the commute for work that doesn't require physical human labor.

</comment><comment><USER19> 50% of office jobs are performed > 50% of the time from the worker's home (or remote location of their choice).

<comment><USER20> This is a good one, to add to this I would love to see 4 day work weeks become more popular in the US.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Low cost ($35 or less) 1Gbps internet speeds (up/down) available in the majority of the US and rest of the world.

<comment><USER22> After just updating from sub-10Mbit/s connection to 50Mbit/s, I don't really see why this would be something for which to waste a free wish. I honestly can't think what I'd do better with a gigabit connection.

<comment><USER23> And 640k of memory ought to to be enough for anybody

<comment><USER22> Not what I was trying to imply, just that the connection speeds and prices seem to already be increasing at an okay-ish pace.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Find a cure for death, a cure for aging and bio-replacements become as good as the original.. or better.

It's what I've been dreaming about ever since CRISPR.

<comment><USER25> Me too I just think with this we also need to be able to travel faster than light to expand our access to resources

<comment><USER24> Yes, but that is still a long way off though :( but hey, atleast with a cure to aging and death, we can afford to wait as long as we want :D

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Custodial land assignments. Instead of selling lots, which you'll never fully own as allodial titles no longer exist, set up a system which qualifies individuals and families to be awarded land. The idea that we are thrust into this world which requires us to follow a fairly strict path of hurdles just to have a home is a sadly maligned truth plaguing our existence.

</comment><comment><USER27> _The Winds of Winter_ finally get released (extra points if it is done concurrently with the second season of _Firefly_ ).

</comment><comment><USER28> Universal health care. Including dental.

The rest of people's lives, and their quality of life, is based on good health.

We may not all end up in the same place, nor even wanting the same things. But good health can help each person achieve their personal maximum.

And, if you don't believe human life is a zero sum game, as I don't, then that increases humanity's overall wealth -- cultural, not just material.

P.S. There is also the opportunity to leverage much greater advances. Putting money towards treatment instead of profit-taking including a significant amount of rent-seeking.

And I, for one, would be much more willing to share my medical data were I assured it would not be used against me, neither in denying me treatment nor in denying me work nor other participation in society. The types of research and advances such data mining might produce, could be both profound and readily at hand.

</comment><comment><USER29> Employment for everyone, not screwing up the planet

<comment><USER30> No employment for anyone. Machines do all the work, and we all share the bounty.

<comment><USER31> Not looking forward to this at all. So much conflict is caused by people being bored and not having any employment prospects. Employment is a bit of a pacifier for civilization.

There's only so much golf, painting, woodworking, and reading people can do.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> The price of a single bitcoin is $1M USD in the year 2027.

This is achievable if Bitcoin grows at an annualized rate of 72% for the next ten years.

</comment><comment><USER25> Faster than light travel

Extended human life to treat any illness

</comment><comment><USER33> Discussion where people don't selectivly choose which facts to talk about. I'm seeing this a lot right now with all the hot topics, both sides will take the moral high ground and pretend that they have never said or done the same thing when the shoe was on the other foot, most notably Trump: Obama; Charlottesville:Dallas.

</comment><comment><USER34> Very high density batteries. Fossil fuel's value is as a convenient transport medium than a source of energy...

</comment><comment><USER35> \- Batteries that last longer (in general).

\- 100%, 4G coverage wherever I am in the world.

\- Consistent and reliable internet speeds around the world.

<comment><USER36> I know this borders on sacrilege to say on HN, but I enjoy going out and camping in places where there is no coverage. Being utterly alone sometimes is nice...... I can see the stars (well, I live in Washington, so I have to travel a bit to camp where I can see the stars, but... you know). I, personally, would mourn a little if 4G reached everywhere.

<comment><USER35> I get that, I too enjoying switching off and doing nothing. It's when you need it for an emergency... that's when you realise how poor the global coverage is.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Life extension. Everything else can wait.

</comment><comment><USER38> Law being described in very precise, verifiable terms, such that "in the spirit of the law" is an executable test and assumptions made are automatically verifiable. This means that irrelevant laws can be identified much faster and law can keep up with technology.

</comment><comment><USER39> AGI -> basic income

</comment><comment><USER40> For income and wealth inequality to start trending back in the desirable direction once again.

<comment><USER41> Both of those are trending in a positive direction right now.

[https://ourworldindata.org/global-economic- inequality](https://ourworldindata.org/global-economic-inequality)

<comment><USER40> Globally, yes. And sure, we should care about the global more more than the poor of the developed countries. But I don't see any reason to believe so far that developed countries have solved the problem of rising inequality within their populations, so I see the rising inequality of developed nations as the future of all nations once they have all "caught up". So I would rephrase to say I hope inequality starts decreasing again in developed countries.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> Minimum guaranteed income everywhere.

Also cryptocurrencies (or at least one) becoming mainstream.

<comment><USER43> Minimum guaranteed income is the beginning of the end. From a humanist perspective it is great, but that is short sighted. Human beings are goal driven, strip away the necessity of that basic human drive and who knows what can happen.

"Idle hands are the devil's workshop"

<comment><USER42> The only thing motivating you is the fact that you'll starve if you don't work? That's some poor motivation, let me tell you.

<comment><USER43> I am never in fear of starvation. Western civilization was built on the bedrock of contributing to society through labor. It's how the system works. That whole system will have to change if that axiom disappears. It is very naive to think that wont have a massive effect on mate selection, how people spend their time, morals, etc.

This isnt purely about economics. There are other deeper issues at play when you say people no longer need to work.

<comment><USER42> You're assuming that people won't want to work if they don't have to worry about starving, which I'm not sure is a valid assumption at all.

<comment><USER43> Sure, everyone will keep being disciplined, waking up early to a work a shitty office job. They will keep doing data entry for 40k a year and cleaning up public toilets for 35k a year. They will put up with massive stress and the risk of being laid off at a large corporation

<comment><USER42> Oh, your argument is that people _should_ be under massive stress? Nice.

<comment><USER43> haha yeah, it was funny reading that after I posted it. My point is people, wont work if they dont have to, working is miserable. But it keeps an order in society that has been shown to be beneficial (look at the development of western democracies).

<comment><USER42> I think that people will still want to make money, and work shit jobs to buy iPhones, they just won't be as stressed as they would be if the alternative was starvation, which is good in my book.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> No more authoritarian, liberty-limiting governments anywhere in the world...forever :) I'm aware that the trend seems to be in the opposite direction, but one can always wish.

<comment><USER45> believe it or not you're on the right path. governments are destroying the world.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> Commoditised high-bandwidth quantum-entanglement (i.e. no latency) communication devices. This will change everything from securities trading to interplanetary communication.

</comment><comment><USER47> Cold fusion.

It would change _everything_ more profoundly than steam and oil.

<comment><AUTHOR> How do you mean, what aspects/problems will that address?

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> Making 4 day work weeks the norm. Or 6 hour work days.

</comment><comment><USER49> 50% vehicle market is electric only.

<comment><USER49> Of course 100% woiuld be better. But it is even more unrealistic

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> Reliable, widespread, cost effective, nuclear fusion based power generation.

</comment><comment><USER51> VR/AR becoming mainstream and Disrupting many industries.

<comment><AUTHOR> Do you foresee any negative consequences as well?

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> 100 miles per gallon cars.

</comment><comment><USER53> Decentralised internet.

<comment><AUTHOR> Might be very feasible with upcoming blockchain tech.

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> Universal basic income.

</comment><comment><USER55> Anarchy for all.

</comment><comment><USER56> Worldwide 5G

</comment><comment><USER57> US stops meddling with LA affairs

<comment><AUTHOR> LA?

<comment><USER57> Latin America</comment></comment></comment>


Big Tobacco Has Caught Startup Fever - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-03-08/big-tobacco-has-caught-startup-fever <comment><AUTHOR> > Reduced-risk tobacco >platforms

Is this like "clean coal"

I am sure a majority of their profits will come from regular cigarettes for decades to come.</comment>


OLPC's $100 laptop was going to change the world - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2018/4/16/17233946/olpcs-100-laptop-education-where-is-it-now <comment><USER2> I don't know how they fared in 3rd world countries, but before OLPC every laptop was upwards of $800 dollars, if I remember right. There were small low- power laptops akin to OLPC's XO, but you had to pay a premium for those. The concept of a $100 laptop was revolutionary (even though, as I remember, they never really got the price below $200, but still!) and it spawned a whole slew of cheap small commercial laptops (generally called netbooks). Chromebooks are a direct descendant of the XO laptop.

I bought one when they came out in 2007 and there still isn't a laptop that I've seen that is a durable as the XO. My 3-year old at the time danced on top of it, threw it across the room, and dropped it countless times and it was just fine. It came with a complete repair manual and you could use standard tools to take it apart and put it back together, which I did for fun even though I never needed to. The membrane keyboard was almost unusable and eventually one of the kids that I let play with it dug their fingernail into the edge of a key and ripped it right off. It would have been easy to replace the membrane, but by then we weren't really using it much.

The screen was pretty nifty for its time. It was dual mode, backlit or frontlit. You could go outside on a sunny day, turn off the backlight and have a high-resolution frontlit, completely readable (though black and white) display. It didn't look amazing indoors and new phone screens are readable both indoors and out for the most part, but again _for its time_ it was amazing.

<comment><USER3> > The screen was pretty nifty for its time. It was dual mode, backlit or > frontlit. You could go outside on a sunny day, turn off the backlight and > have a high-resolution frontlit, completely readable (though black and > white) display.

I had no idea that was even possible. Are there any laptops available that have this feature now? I would kill to be able to write blog posts and work on my book or do terminal work outside on a sunny day.

<comment><USER4> What you want is a laptop with an e-ink display. There isn't one AFAIK. The refresh rate is one big limitation. One could design a laptop specifically for writing and reading but it would be pretty special purpose. As I recall, the CTO of OLPC went off to try to make a display with e-ink characteristics that would be more suitable for laptops but wasn't able to bring anything to market.

<comment><USER2> To be clear, the XO's display was not e-ink. It was regular frontlit LCD with a fast refresh rate. The downside was that the backlit mode never looked very good indoors. If someone could fix that problem I bet we'd have that screen on every portable device.

<comment><USER5> No, it really didn't. And reflective outdoors looked even worse. In the shade, it was washed out and the colors were wrong. In the sun, it looked like a bizarre black-and-white rendition of something where, if you concentrated, you could guess what it was trying to display.

With a lot more development time maybe they could have fixed the problems. Maybe.

<comment><USER6> Did you switch modes? There was a mode switch.

In grayscale mode, you got 1200x900 resolution. That was about 200 dpi, so quite sharp for the day. (typical was more like 85 dpi back then)

In color mode, the screen was blurred. It was a 3x3 blur, without the typical pixel/subpixel distinction. Effective resolution was something like 692x519 based on the number of green pixels.

Color mode in the sunlight would look grey, but it was still blurry. You had to switch modes if you wanted the full 1200x900.

<comment><USER7> There was not a mode switch, at least not on my OLPC. You switched from color to B&W by turning the backlight brightness all the way down (thus shutting off the backlight).

<comment><USER6> That was a mode switch.

Turning backlight brightness all the way down was the mode switch as presented in the UI. Very old versions of the UI made it explicit. At the MMIO level of course, there was a bit that got toggled.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> jay-anderson I still have mine, but I haven't pulled it out in quite a while. It was quite slow, but I remember it using it fondly and really liked the sugar UI ([https://sugarlabs.org/](https://sugarlabs.org/)). My kids were very young and we had fun messing around with it (there was a nifty audio application that I remember). Another thing I remember about it was the security system, bitfrost, which seemed well thought out. It also had LEDs wired into the mic and camera so you knew when they were listening/watching. I'd really like to see that in other laptops.

<comment><USER8> This sums up my experience, too. My only real use for it ended up being for weekend/day trips where I didn't need to work and wanted to be quasi-offline but might want to connect to a third-party wifi system (like a motel's) for some light internet browsing.

Anybody still doing anything useful or interesting with theirs?

<comment><USER9> One of my friends brings either an OLPC or an Alphasmart to Burning Man every year.

In one of my other comments in this thread, I mentioned that I used my olpc to animate this logo [0] and to make a patch adding a dodecahedron to the X.org utility ico [1].

[0] [http://bloominglabs.org/index.php/Logo#Animated_Logo](http://bloominglabs.org/index.php/Logo#Animated_Logo)

[1] [https://linux.die.net/man/1/ico](https://linux.die.net/man/1/ico)

<comment><USER10> I miss the Alphasmart stuff. They always felt like the spiritual successor to the TRS-80 Model 100 which was an amazing writing machine for its day.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> There is a huge history of how much aid has hurt African countries[0].

After doing a bit of research, I have come to the conclusion that the best way to help poor people is to give away phones. I think it would really help people keep in contact with friends and family as well as help bootstrap innumerous businesses and really help the GDP of these countries. Sadly I have yet to find a service that lets me send new (cheap) smartphones to people in need.

Although I do not like a tiered internet, I do like the premise of Zuckerberg's Internet.org project. I think that access to Wikipedia in particular should be a right these days. For some reason I always idolize it (along with Kindles) as being the path towards creating a Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy for everyone.

[0]: [https://www.amazon.com/Dead-Aid-Working-Better- Africa/dp/037...](https://www.amazon.com/Dead-Aid-Working-Better- Africa/dp/0374532125)

<comment><USER12> I would recommend GiveDirectly. They give can, not phones, but for any family whose first priority is a phone, they'll get a phone. Others might get a roof first, to deal with leaks leading to sleepless nights, or proper flooring to deal with parasites that live in dirt floors; both of these are problems with major impacts on educational outcomes, which individual families will know they need to deal with. And families that have those needs met will almost certainly go in for a phone or two.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I am a big fan and consider it to have been a success, though not what Negroponte hoped for. Back in 2006 I helped them out (they even gave me a machine as thanks) but the advice I gave them was ignored. I told them at least Brazil and India (and probably other countries) would insist on making them locally instead of importing from China and that if the children themselves could make their own computers it would be even better (see Raspberry Pi and 3D printed cases). I also told them I had experience with children and they normally hated trackpads, preferring (in order) mice, big trackballs, the IBM rubber thing and joysticks instead. The first time a child ever saw a XO-1 was when they were about to ship and wanted to prove that a kid could take it apart and put it back together.

<comment><USER14> "if the children themselves could make their own computers it would be even better (see Raspberry Pi and 3D printed cases)"

I love this idea of letting children/students build their own computers. If it's designed well, it could be both educational and economical. They can learn about the parts and what they do - processor, memory, storage device, etc. - while they're putting them together. Then they can explore the operating system and start programming their own applications..

<comment><USER15> [https://pi-top.com](https://pi-top.com)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I played with one back when it was just launched. Besides the innovative outdoor-friendly display it was an insanely bad experience. MIT Media Lab (and with that I mean Nicholas Negroponte) gone crazy.

The UX (both keyboard and software) was .. just awful.

<comment><USER17> Any chance you could comment further on this? What in particular made it bad?

<comment><USER18> I had one back in the day, and it was the worst computing experience I can remember. The keyboard was like what you'd find on a speak-and-spell, and the system had the performance of a low-end 486 under heavy swap.

I still don't understand why the system performed so poorly, I know a lot of Sugar was written in Python, but there must have been some very fundamental problems with it. Switching to an existing lightweight X window manager was a much better (but still not good) experience.

<comment><USER7> Sugar wasn't just written in Python. Parts of it were literally coded in the worst way possible. We're talking Daily WTF levels.

For example, the icon for each Sugar "activity" was an SVG file. When you started an activity, its icon would "throb" in the center of the screen, fading in and out. Guess how the throbbing was implemented.

That's right, it would perform string substitution on the SVG file, filling in the actual colors for macros embedded in the SVG, then reparse and redisplay the SVG. For each frame.

Had it been a simple matter of being written in Python, Sugar might've been usable. But it was _shitty_ Python and that's what killed it.

<comment><USER19> > That's right, it would perform string substitution on the SVG file, filling > in the actual colors for macros embedded in the SVG, then reparse and > redisplay the SVG. For each frame.

That's intriguing!

I can imagine a path to how they got there:

1\. PyGTK (or whatever they were using) has methods to load and display an image.

2\. A supported image type is svg+xml

3\. SVG is vector graphics. Awesome! Let's use that.

4\. Animation is needed, so we consider just ramping the opacity attribute, scaling attribute, etc.

5\. We don't have any methods for DOM access. Oops.

6\. However, we do have our loaded SVG file which is just plain text.

7\. Well, we _can_ just s/OPACITY/RAMP_VALUE or whatever and display that for our animation. That _at least_ doesn't require a read from the harddrive for each frame. :)

Speaking of which-- I've seen developers do animation by repeatedly _reading a file from the harddrive_ in the same process/thread as a realtime audio engine.

Edit: clarification

<comment><USER7> I uh...I don't remember for sure, but I can't guarantee that the Sugar code didn't reload the SVG file from disk for each frame.

The whole thing was madness, all the way down. It's a wonder it worked at all.

<comment><USER19> At 24 FPS that gives you a total of 41.67 milliseconds to fetch the file from the harddrive, parse it, and display it.

The harddrive was flash memory, no? So we're probably talking hundreds of microseconds to read the file into memory. Let's say 670 microseconds for a rough guess.

That still leaves 41 milliseconds to parse and display the file.

Of course the animation is happening at an arbitrary program's load time which is probably particularly CPU heavy. But OLPC apparently had two cores, so the process controlling the SVG animation should have been able to safely hit its deadlines.

I'm going to guess that the animation was smooth when trivial consumer single- process apps were loaded and janky when something like an office application was opened.

Am I right, or was it always janky?

<comment><USER7> It was never smooth, I don't think it ever ran at 24 fps. But the throbbing was slow enough you didn't notice.

There were no "office" applications for Sugar. The closest it got were Sugarized versions of Firefox and AbiWord. The animation, as I recall, was somewhat jankier when attempting to load one of these.

<comment><USER19> I checked out a few youtube videos like this one[1].

Now I'm wondering whether the lack of smoothness was actually jank or just the choice to animate at a low frame rate.

The animation looks bad but generally uniform in its timing. So I'm guessing whoever coded that just assumed their method of animation was so klunky that they went ahead and set the delay interval to a large value.

It might have helped to use a retro-style step animation, like filling up a cup a quarter at a time where each 1/4 cup is a lighter shade of the same color.

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cdUSpkghdA4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cdUSpkghdA4)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I don't think that OLPC failed, it was just superseded by the smartphone and the tablet.

I can buy an 8" tablet from Aliexpress and get it shipped to me for $70, it even has a SIM slot.

In my travels through Asia, I've discovered that practically everyone has a smartphone. Most of these people have never owned a PC and never will, but they all have computers now.

</comment><comment><USER21> It's great to read the ongoing stories from the boots-on-the-ground still doing the actual deployments: [http://planet.laptop.org](http://planet.laptop.org)

Unfortunately as the project loses momentum these types of stories are dwindling; here's one example from the aggregator:

[http://blog.olenepal.org/index.php/archives/2630](http://blog.olenepal.org/index.php/archives/2630)

</comment><comment><USER22> OLPC is certainly history now and Sugar Labs, while still active, is struggling to keep Sugar relevant.

We at OLPC France started [https://sugarizer.org](https://sugarizer.org) : a HTML/JS rewrite of Sugar. Real-time collaboration on pedagogical activities, the journal to browse past activities, all this in plain HTML/JS.

Contributions are welcome!

</comment><comment><USER23> It was a pretty nifty little device for its time, I used one as my main laptop for a while but it was super duper slow my raspberry pi3 smokes it. It would be so cool if they released that same form factor as a device that you plug your pi into. The actual industrial design was fantastic I would love the same housing to turn my pi into a little laptop.

<comment><USER24> Have you seen this? [https://pi-top.com/](https://pi-top.com/)

I don't know how it compares to OLPC, but it's basically what you're describing.

<comment><USER9> As shams93 said, the OLPC has _tremendous_ industrial design, which nothing else I've ever seen matches. The plastic pieces are remarkably thick, and they all either slide or screw together. There are no sharp corners on the exterior. The textured surface is easy to hold and resists scratching and gouging. The latches are simple, durable, double as port covers, and are adorable. When closed, a series of ridges going all the way around the lid meet in to the body to keep dirt, dust, bugs, etc. from being smeared all over the screen. The screen is rubber shock-mounted. You only need one tool to disassemble the entire laptop. It has a friggin' _handle_. The lithium-iron phosphate batteries are much more durable than other laptop batteries [0]. And it also has the glorious sunlight-readable display.

The pi-top is only very superficially what shams93 describes.

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

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I'd just like to share a story from XKCDB, the chatlog of XKCD's IRC channel. [http://www.xkcdb.com/10124](http://www.xkcdb.com/10124)

XMPPwocky: My own [https://xkcd.com/349/](https://xkcd.com/349/) story. Yesterday, I worked my way from "I should try installing Qubes OS on my dual- boot" to "I have no working boot discs, no CD drive, and no OS on the actual hard drive". Today, i got to try and fix that.

XMPPwocky: The issue is, this is my only computer. so I can't make any bootable media to boot from, except I also had, tucked away in my closet, an OLPC XO-1. Aaand I couldn't find the charger.

XMPPwocky: What I could find? The hand-crank charger.

XMPPwocky: To make a long story short, I cranked through the entire download and installation of an Ubuntu liveCD.

XMPPwocky: would not recommend

</comment><comment><USER26> I had an OLPC and lived with somebody who worked on the OLPC project at the time.

One of the more bizarre twists of the project was that, I think in part because of the well intentioned but incredibly naive liberal utopianism of the project, to use an existing computing paradigm (windows, mouse pointers, etc) would be a form of colonialism.

Therefore, to avoid being colonial oppressors, these educational laptops required a completely new desktop environment and computer interaction paradigm. Obviously, since the colonial computing environment uses lots of rectangles, everything in this decolonized paradigm would be circles. Lots and lots of circles. Obviously, this put the project massively behind schedule, and it was beaten to the punch by the flood of super cheap Asus "netbook" computers - which all ran Windows XP or Ubuntu Netbook Edition.

I finally became disillusioned after going to an incredibly cringey talk with Nicholas Negropente, where his answer about why do African children need laptops rather than vaccines was that we should imagine the beauty of a family in a hut gathered round the an OLPC reading Wikipedia together, or some such drivel. He was really out of his depth, and I think probably only got the project because of his brother's connections.

Still, I loved the OLPC. Cool toy, great screen. Once the Intel clones and the RPi came out, it became completely irrelevant though.

</comment><comment><USER10> You had to be the right kind of poor to be able to buy the OLPC. They were not very interested in selling domestically in the US (except for that buy 2 get 1 offer). Chromebooks and cellphones hit the price point now, and don't require an NGO.

<comment><USER6> Yep. I was helping the project as a volunteer, and the refusal to help America's poor really offended me. Americans were treated as a source of funding. I always got a sense that exotic cultures/languages/peoples/countries were adored, while plain old ordinary poor Americans were considered unworthy. You couldn't just buy an OLPC XO-1 at Walmart for $185, which was about what the devices actually cost. Instead it cost you $400. Parts suppliers hated this too; they gave good pricing because they were promised high volume.

OLPC also ticked off a huge crowd of free software people who had enthusiastically showed up to help. People were eager to support a machine that would never run Windows... until they were betrayed on that. Lots of people jumped ship over that, even though Microsoft didn't really follow through.

Add in a few technical mistakes, and that was that: the WiFi on an internal USB connection affecting power management, the dual-mode touchpad being hopelessly inaccurate, Python being absurdly inappropriate for the GUI of a low-end system, the 16-bit video depth causing terrible performance with all modern code, depending on mesh networking which was more of a failing research project than a viable protocol, some very experimental overlay filesystem stuff...

<comment><USER27> Your mention of the poor touchpad accuracy really brought the frustration back to me. That may have been the single biggest issue that drove me to stop using mine. It's a shame, the XO had so much potential, but the problems you mention doomed it. Much like the Aptera electric car around the same time (off topic, but that was a similarly bold product that ultimately failed by a death of 1000 bad design decisions despite a lot of good ones).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> "There's surprisingly little hard data about the long-term impact of OLPCs on childhood education"

For a project that was literally an educational experiment, that's pretty damning.

</comment><comment><USER29> Interesting story I always think of related to the OLPC. We had someone from the project give a presentation to our local LUG, brought in by the excellent Jonathan Corbet of LWN.

The early OLPC prototypes had a hand crank for power. Everyone loved that idea, internally at the OLPC project and in the public. But, when they were trying to build the final design, the materials scientists said the stresses involved in that crank would cause longevity problems. "We can totally solve this, we just need to make the frame out of titanium." "Uh... Thanks guys, but this is supposed to be a $100 laptop."

<comment><USER30> I heard that there was an even more evocative death behind the hand crank idea: Kofi Annan was demoing the prototype laptop with attached hand crank in public, and the crank broke apart from the laptop while he was turning it.

I worked at OLPC, and I thought this aspect ultimately ended up fine: we quickly moved to having a separate pullcord charger instead. The pullcord didn't put any stress on the laptop, and you generated power with actual large muscle groups along your body, rather than just rotating your wrist, so it was massively more efficient. But everyone kept mentioning the crank, for sure.

<comment><USER27> I was very bummed that h g1g1 xo didn't come with a pullcord generator. I thought it was a great idea.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> A friend of mine bought an XO-1 via the buy one give one program.

It never worked, when he showed it to me the thing wouldn't boot due to storage errors and it was never fixed, DOA. I was seriously bummed out, as I really wanted it to be the laptop I could use for hacking outside in direct sunlight.

<comment><USER32> I had one which I got a "normal" distro running on. It was slow, but a bit better than Sugar, though it couldn't do any of the fun mesh-networking etc. Lots of the most interesting ideas for the OLPC never quite shipped, like the keycombo in to 'view-source' of the app you were in, which would let you hack on the UI nondestructively[1].

1: [http://wiki.laptop.org/go/OLPC_Human_Interface_Guidelines/Th...](http://wiki.laptop.org/go/OLPC_Human_Interface_Guidelines/The_Laptop_Experience/View_Source)

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Charity can't beat profit-driven companies if there is a market. There was a market, so smartphones emerged ... and the OLPC is hopelessly outclassed.

<comment><USER34> capitalism takes with one hand and gives with the other

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> It is a typical case of 1st world people thinking they know what 3rd world people need/want. Like the mythical $25 phone that nobody nowhere actually wants.

</comment><comment><USER36> >After he outlined a dramatic (and ultimately metaphorical) plan to drop tablets out of helicopters...

"I thought it would work! I planned those thing right down to the last detail. It was perfect! Where'd you get those tablets???"

"As God as my witness, I though tablets could fly."

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lf3mgmEdfwg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lf3mgmEdfwg)

</comment><comment><USER37> I find the failure list dispiriting. Because of what I think it says about the critics more than the critique. I still feel by intent and outcome it's more victory than failure. People learned things, including kids. Negroponte and everyone else should celebrate trying, if not fully succeeding.

This is judging the Newton by the iPad. It's judging stallman by torvalds. It's judging CDE by KDE

</comment><comment><USER38> Everywhere and nowhere. I thought they helped inspire the current round of affordable computers (chromebooks, phones, cheap laptops, pi, etc)?

<comment><USER39> Yep.

I'm still waiting on my transflective screen, though.

And on world education.

But hey, these people tried to create a solution. How many people talk and talk, but never do anything?

And even if they didn't succeed as originally intended, all you people typing on your oh-so thin and light ultrabooks, can thank OLPC for helping get the ball rolling.

<comment><USER38> World education is gradually improving! It's a combination of processes of human development and technological aids. Rather than look for a complete solution, I look for whether the situation is improving. Because it's true that most peoples' lives are still depressingly non-optimal!

For example this graph of literacy over the last 25 years (under the heading "Regional Disparities"):

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literacy#Regional_disparities](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literacy#Regional_disparities)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> ...did they solve the Internet connectivity problem? Did their mesh network thing ever work?

If they didn't, no wonder it didn't catch on, kids needed _connectivity_ first, hopefully with ability to play videos and easy to share them and other high-volume content via dirt cheap usb-sticks (a free stick should've been included in the pack), not something to write on as pen and paper are much better for that when learning anyway...

Or at least was it usable as a kindle substitute and did it came preloaded with at least a few thousand sciency books on it? To make it at least sort of usable without networking... No?!

...then what problem were they solving?!

<comment><USER9> > Did their mesh network thing ever work?

Yes it did. Anecdotal, but I've gotten my two OLPC XO-1 laptops to network together just fine.

> did it came preloaded with at least a few thousand sciency books on it?

Yes it did. They're called Collections [0], and part of the deployment process is to select what collections will be on the laptops [1]. Here [2] is a listing of the collections on the default English release.

[0] [http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Collections](http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Collections)

[1] [http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Deployment_Guide_2011/Purchase_Agr...](http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Deployment_Guide_2011/Purchase_Agreements_and_Ordering_Process)

[2] [http://alexvh.me/share/olpc-library- listing.txt](http://alexvh.me/share/olpc-library-listing.txt)

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> In this decade, there's Endless Mobile. Also attempted to compete with commodity hardware, with similar results. Now apparently redefining mission to software-only: a distro for commodity PC hardware.

[https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1381437927/endless- comp...](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1381437927/endless- computers/description)

[https://endlessos.com/home/](https://endlessos.com/home/)

<comment><USER42> To be fair this decade real attempt was the RaspberryPi and it turned out incredibly well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> OLPC had an Open Firmware Forth bootloader. True? False?

Why did OLPC require a "developer key"? (develop.sig)

Will there ever be OpenFirmware-compatible hardware where the Forth bootloader is signed by _the owner of the computer_?

Will the buyer ever have the option of owning and controlling the so-called "developer key"?

Will there always be a requirement for the seller to retain a "developer key" and for the buyer to request it after purchase? Why or why not?

<comment><USER9> > OLPC had an Open Firmware Forth bootloader. True? False?

True. [0]

> Why did OLPC require a "developer key"?

So that kids can't casually screw up their laptops, but people who want to modify their software can. You can read more here [1] and here [2].

Your other questions appear to be more speculative and less specific to OLPC, so I can't answer them.

[0] [http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Open_Firmware](http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Open_Firmware)

[1] [http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Bitfrost](http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Bitfrost)

[2] [http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Activation_and_Developer_Keys](http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Activation_and_Developer_Keys)

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> OLPC was a huge success. But not the way Negroponte expected.

The OLPC scared the industry to death. MS was so scared that it made Windows work on it. Tablets did not exist as consumer goods at the time (we had some but only for businesses and they were not practical to use) and all the major PC maker were expected year after year to churn out low cost laptops for the "education" market.

Then tablets came and the whole product category just disappeared.

</comment><comment><USER45> I got one on the buy one, give one initiative; and being cheap was only a plus, but it was great for it's purpose; as a kid's laptop.

I gave it away a few years ago to someone who could give it a better use (teacher), but now that I have a kid on my own, I'd like to give him something like this. Any recommendations?

<comment><USER46> Raspberry Pi + [https://pi-top.com/](https://pi-top.com/) \+ sugar on a stick ([https://github.com/sugarlabs/sugar/blob/master/docs/rpi- soas...](https://github.com/sugarlabs/sugar/blob/master/docs/rpi-soas.md))

<comment><USER47> Was pretty excited at the pi-top on first glance, but, $319 for what's basically a screen and a clamshell enclosure to the Pi? Yikes. Surely we can do better. The Superbook is a clamshell laptop powered by your smartphone and costs half that.[0]

[0][http://www.sentio.com/](http://www.sentio.com/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> > Designers dropped the feature almost immediately after Negroponte's > announcement, because the winding process put stress on the laptop's body > and demanded energy that kids in very poor areas couldn't spare.

Err, kids in poor areas have less ability to turn a handle than those in wealthy areas?

</comment><comment><USER49> I think the key element missing here is the lack of infrastructure to support technology. I wonder if this would have been more successful if coupled with something like Project Loon.

</comment><comment><USER36> John Perry Barlow with an OLPC XO-1 Children's Computer.

[https://imgur.com/a/ogE9y](https://imgur.com/a/ogE9y)

<comment><USER9> RMS also used an OLPC for a while.

[https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/eb/Stephen_...](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/eb/Stephen_Birch_- _Richard_Stallman_with_OLPC_%28by%29.jpg)

[https://stallman.org/stallman-computing.html](https://stallman.org/stallman- computing.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> I have an extra one that still works. If anyone is interested in it, please let me know. I will send it to you if you pay for shipping.

<comment><USER51> I'd like it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> This article's tone and framing is negative and about failure, but imho this is just a weird capitalist winner-take-all notion of success. The numbers in the article show that millions of units were shipped and you can pretty clearly infer that tens of millions of children had access to a computer they otherwise wouldn't have. As someone who's childhood access to an apple2e was a massive privilege and advantage, I know damn well if I was one of those tens of millions of kids I'd be better off for it.

So this "failure" seems to have helped millions, learned a bunch and developed some OSS. I should hope to fail so hard myself someday.

</comment><comment><USER53> I think nowadays you could make a laptop with a solar panel on it's back. That'd be pretty cool.

</comment><comment><USER54> Lost and forgotten in favour of more expensive laptops. The same applies to Android One/Go

</comment><comment><USER55> The real reason why OLPC failed is that children in downtrodden countries don't need a laptop. They need food, a healthy environment, good old fashioned classroom education and plenty of pens and notebooks. A laptop is the worst tool you can use for studying.

I went through my entire school and undergraduate college without once bringing my laptop into the classroom. My mother and father learned to program in FORTRAN using nothing but pen, paper and the occasional slide rule.

Paper books, decent sized notebooks and ballpoint pens. Spend $100 on that. That will actually help. This whole project was solving a first world problem in the third world.

<comment><USER56> I thought it was crap, too, until I read:

The cheapest way to give 100 books to someone in the third world is to give them a laptop (and a way to power it.)

Also, for most of their target audience, the laptop would be the brightest source of light in their home.

This image, in particular:

[http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/6990034.stm](http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/6990034.stm)

So, no, don't think of it as a "laptop," it's just an educational device in a laptop form factor.

That said, I had major problems with how OLPC executed on that vision.

<comment><USER57> So... do you need a laptop for that or an eReader?

Granted eReaders were a niche at the time of OLPC, we didn't fully grok where laptops fell on the useful vs distracting scale and the idea of a general purpose computer you could also teach kids to code on seemed really really cool and probably the best way to on-board them onto the internet.

All in all, OLPC's heart was in the right place, but until we know _how_ to properly introduce computers into the classroom as a general purpose educational device, something more like a rugged eReader and open source textbooks feels like it would be more productive in accomplishing at least some of the goals of OLPC.

<comment><USER58> If you ignore the question of whether an eReader is something with an eInk display, an eReader is just a general-purpose computing device that has for some reason been limited to reading books, so "do you need a laptop or an eReader" doesn't seem to me to be a terribly meaningful question.

<comment><USER57> The difference is a laptop is custom built, with the required infrastructure to serve the role of a general purpose computing device.

An eReader _can_ serve the role of a general purpose computing device, but it would not serve that role as well as a laptop.

So if you optimize a rugged poly-carbonate brick you could take through a Monsoon, Typhoon, Sandstorm and/or War Zone for the sole purpose of loading text and simple document files and a low-power display, stuffed with only a battery, enough compute power to accomplish the task it is given and cover any overhead, and enough storage to hold however many books you decide you want it to hold, without any graphics or sound (or perhaps very simple graphics), then you still have something meaningful.

You have a Library of Alexandria that any kid can carry in their arms without any of the ideological attachments that the XO had. It holds information in a human readable format and is capable of displaying that information to the person who holds it so long as they are literate.

Much like a modern day light bulb can be a general-purpose computing device that for some reason has been limited to turning on and off in different colors. It might not seem terribly useful to you, but it thanklessly serves the role it has been tasked with without a source code button, a mesh network, a fancy GUI, or a Squeak environment.

It is a meaningful distinction to make because it will ultimately shape your budget and your ability to actually distribute devices in meaningful quantities to the device's intended users.

<comment><USER56> Eh.

I'm all for designing things right, but I think it's not important to get caught up in the naming.

Display. Storage. Battery. Some way to charge it when you're nowhere near reliable electricity. Maybe a keyboard. Maybe the ability to communicate with other ones in a mesh. Maybe they can hook up to the internet if it's available.

And then lots and lots of great content pre-loaded.

For instance, ka-lite, the downloadable Khan Academy:

"The 4781 videos that are available currently have a size of 57.1 Gigabyte."

That's really not that big, any more.

<comment><USER59> I was unaware of ka lite, but this looks like exactly something I was looking for. Thanks for the information!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER60> I remember when a calculator was hundreds of dollars. Eventually they wound up hanging on a tab in the supermarket for $1.99 and then given away as premiums with [Your Business's Name Here] embossed on them. Quite the ignominous end :-)

E-readers haven't sunk that far yet, but they're getting close.</comment>


How a password changed my life - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@manicho/how-a-password-changed-my-life-7af5d5f28038 <comment><USER2> Awesome. Possibly the best hack I've ever read.

(Sure, I'm a security guy, and part of me agrees with some of the other comments. Sure, I'm a tech geek, and I've seen and read about some wicked cool hardhacks, unexpected softhacks, and their ilk, and even some good life hacks. But this is awesome. An arguably silly security policy sought to control a small aspect of his work-life and he gamed the spit out of it to take total control of his life, change things up, get stuff done. Best hack ever.)

</comment><comment><USER3> Congrats on remembering your passwords, but this is a terrible way to generate them. Phrases that are relevant to you or your life are the second thing that somebody making a wordlist is going to aim for, after "password" and "letmein" and friends.

<comment><USER4> I have a word list in front of me (2000 "short" and 10,000 "long" lists), "Forgive@h3r" "Quit@smoking4ever" "Save4trip@thailand" and none of his other passwords are listed on it.

The way those passwords are constructed don't make them common enough to appear on most word lists and it would be very difficult for someone (who knows you or not) to guess them.

Now, dates of birth, or other common profile information is commonly misused in passwords and that is guessable. But that isn't what the article was about and wasn't in their examples.

I think the article rebuffs your post before you even posted it. So unless you can explain better how what the author is doing is insecure (and I highly doubt you can) your criticism seems misplaced.

<comment><USER5> Are you a password cracker? Do you have a password cracker database in front of you?

Forgive is a word. @ is a commonly used symbol h3r is her with vowel replaced with number (very very common).

Quit is a word Smoking is a word Ever is a word For replaced with number (also very common) @ common symbol

Tbh the best password he could have written would probably have been a sentence like

I really should forgive my ex wife who I broke up with on May 23rd @ 8pm!

[https://xkcd.com/936/](https://xkcd.com/936/)

<comment><USER6> Recent research seems to show that xkcd suggestion is not as safe as one would think see ([https://www.ted.com/talks/lorrie_faith_cranor_what_s_wrong_w...](https://www.ted.com/talks/lorrie_faith_cranor_what_s_wrong_with_your_pa_w0rd))

<comment><USER5> Alright then try words written in latin & random characters from different types of alphabets.

ѣд学한☏

Seems pretty secure, but it's not over 8 characters...

If UTF8 was better supported, you could do something like

phone, snowman, snowman, pile of poo, phone.

That's fairly easy to remember and next to impossible to guess.

<comment><USER7> Great, now how do I use that password to log onto a mobile site from my phone? None of those characters are on my phone keyboard. Am I supposed to save them in a text file? That doesn't seem very secure.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> God, i hate those "change your password at least every X days" policies. A good password does not become weak after some time.

<comment><USER9> Sure it does. A lot of people re-use passwords with different services, so if one gets compromised, then criminals have that password.

On top of it, people get compromised all the time. Its trivial for a virus to nab your saved browser passwords. Or someone sends you a phishing link and you happily type in your credentials. It looked official, right?

All of this is invisible to the end user, typically. From the IT side of things these credentials are used for all sorts of things like authenticating with smtp to use our mail server to send spam, log into ftp sites to host malware, etc, etc. Then the end user angrily walks up to IT saying, "Everyone is saying my emails are spam. Why do you guys suck so much??!!"

Forcing password rotation helps with this because there's a chance the password that got leaked is or will soon be retired. It also helps in scenarios when employees give their passwords out to other employees and then one of them gets fired and starts fucking with the system using someone else's credentials.

In short, a lot of these polities exist because people are stupid. Don't blame those of us trying to mitigate the damage. That said, you don't need a 30 day expiration. I find 120-180 days works well enough. You don't need complexity turned on as much as you need a sane minimum length. I'd rather train people to use "mydogsnameisAlbert" than "Password1"

<comment><USER10> If you rotate passwords every month, your users will be annoyed and use password that are either trivial, will write it down passwords, or have a trivial variation from month to month.

In other words, they will resort to using less-secure passwords. The notion that rotating passwords improves security is little more than a cargo-cult.

<comment><USER11> Keeping a password written down (in your wallet, in your desk, etc) is probably safer than you'd think, because people generally know how to secure physical items, but they're much less certain about how to secure digital information.

I think it's obvious that expiring passwords increases security to some degree. It's also clear that user reactions will induce people to reduce the security of those passwords. The password expiry interval you choose (potentially as long as the duration of the system's existence) depends on your threat model, really. Security is hard and often application-specific.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> These are called "affirmations" by self-help books:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affirmative_prayer#Self- help](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affirmative_prayer#Self-help)

[http://www.self-help-and-self- development.com/affirmations.h...](http://www.self-help-and-self- development.com/affirmations.html)

</comment><comment><USER13> This hit very close to home. My (former) best friend and business partner stole a ton of money from me and our business, and I'm about to declare personal bankruptcy, right after my kid was born.

My password is some variation of how much of an asshole he is. But it's not helping. In fact, it's causing me to constantly dwell on it, painfully re- living our conversations, and thinking what I could've done differently to prevent it from happening.

Logically I understand that I need to forgive him and let it go, but I'm not able to do it. I'm going to change my password to an affirmation that I forgive him. I think it will be a good start.

<comment><USER14> That sucks, I was once in a situation where I held a grudge against a person for a very long time, to the point where I thought about them and what they did almost every waking moment. It made it really hard to move on with my life. What did it for me was forgiving the person in my own mind, truly forgiving them. It didn't happen overnight but it made all the difference in the world. Later on I bumped into learntoforgive.com and found that their methodology was exactly what I intuitively did to forgive in my case, I took notes on their process, hopefully they'll help you: [https://docs.google.com/document/d/13w3d4a-e460yQV2y48iUVmBy...](https://docs.google.com/document/d/13w3d4a-e460yQV2y48iUVmByKC0wTkwxr00W-UxkI4U/edit?usp=sharing)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Cheerful and unexpected from a password article :-)

</comment><comment><USER16> Just test your password strength first against [https://passfault.appspot.com](https://passfault.appspot.com)

It might be more useful to use a long sentence passphrase for Windows/Exchange purposes.

<comment><USER17> Is your password secure? Type it into this box to find out.

<comment><USER4> Indeed. That site doesn't even pretend to be secure!

There are versions of that site which do everything in Javascript so your password is never sent to the server. That is also insecure but at least they pretend that it is not.

This site is designed to post your password up to the server and even works on HTTP (as opposed to enforcing HTTPS only). So you've just shared your password, IP address, and browser information with a completely anonymous site!

PS - I think this site is DESIGNED to be Javascript only but the implementation is bad, so the password is in fact sent to their server (which generates an "Internal server error" by the way).

<comment><USER16> To be clear, that's a demo site that's worked for me in the past to preview the software.

You can download it here: [https://github.com/c-a-m/passfault](https://github.com/c-a-m/passfault)

And the project itself is affiliated with OWASP.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I find this quite weird. OK, my password are meaningless sequences of random characters, so maybe it makes things different; but I don't remember passwords as strings, I remember them as gestures. For most passwords I would have to imagine myself typing them to reconstitute their written or spoken form (which can sometimes be tricky if you have to enter them on an unfamiliar device or using an unfamiliar layout).

So I'm confused why after a few days you would still remember what the password means when you type it in.

</comment><comment><USER19> For those interested in these types of things, Love Yourself Like Your Life Depends on It is a great quick read that builds on the same principle: [http://www.amazon.com/Love-Yourself-Like-Your-Depends- ebook/...](http://www.amazon.com/Love-Yourself-Like-Your-Depends- ebook/dp/B0086BX8UE/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1405016447&sr=8-1)

</comment><comment><USER20> I have used this technique to help me memorize company goals and also to connect codenames with their version numbers. I hated when someone would mention "Julio" and I'd have to ask "uh that's version 4.2 right?", or vice versa. "Julio4.2" is a decent start to a password if you add another word or two to it.

</comment><comment><USER21> these are really weak passwords. I write poems that I made up myself. In middle english. I use the letter thorn sometimes.

</comment><comment><USER22> So now, I just need to look at any of your social media posts to figure out your password? Thanks!

<comment><USER23> You just have to figure out his most important personal goal that shows up on social media around the last week of the month, when AD starts warning him to change his password

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> This is beautiful story. I started reading not expecting anything that good. All best.

</comment><comment><USER25> I'm with a password "Quit smoking" for a second week now and _nothing_ happens ( it's my screen saver password - just sayin' :D ). I enter it for 5-6 times a day. What's next?

</comment><comment><USER26> I used to work for one of _those_ companies. My monthly passwords were January2007! February2007! March2007! April2007!

Looking back, I could have improved myself. Kudos for the inspiration!

</comment><comment><USER27> I really expected this story to be about the pain of having a password stolen or something. What a great surprise and great story. Thank you

</comment><comment><USER28> ^^^ goes and changes word list for jack the ripper

</comment><comment><USER29> Find a cat? Cats find you.

</comment><comment><USER30> Well, congratulations.

</comment><comment><USER31> NLP in action :)

</comment><comment><USER32> Very cute story!</comment>


Tor: Illegal Weapons - <AUTHOR> http://kukuruku.co/hub/infosec/tor-illegal-weapons <comment><USER2> Big deal. It is not as if it is something hard to DIY if you are committed to breaking the law.

I think that is the stuff that both sides of second amendment shouting match fail to get - inventing deadly stuff is easy.

<comment><USER3> Would you have the same attitude about kiddie porn?

What you say is true, but being able to buy guns from Tor will save you a lot of hassle over trying to manufacture your own.

I think I am pretty open minded, but I was fairly shocked at what claimed to be available when I logged onto Tor to see what it was all about.

<comment><USER4> Apples and oranges. Guns have no victim unless they are used and the vast majority of them, illegal or not, are never used to hurt anyone.

Our society fetishes guns enormously. I know some people who would be uncomfortable being in someone's house if they new they had a gun, even if they trust and know everyone in the house. Those same people are never scared by steak or hunting knives in the same house.

<comment><USER5> In my country (Australia) I believe _most_ people would be a little uncomfortable if they knew they were in a house with a gun. I'd certainly think the owner was a bit odd/unhinged unless they owned it as part of their employment (farmer, roo shooter etc.).

That said, I don't see this as a big deal. It's always been possible to mail weapons from a jurisdiction with easier access to them. Tor black markets just make it a little easier to organise.

<comment><USER6> If someone isn't comfortable in a house with a gun, regardless of the upstanding character of the owner, that might indicate a harmful phobia of certain kinds of inanimate objects, but it's their choice not to visit a gun owner's house and nobody is going to take that choice away from them. A law against gun ownership is vastly different.

Plenty of people don't like drugs, particularly banned narcotics and stimulants. I might even be uncomfortable in certain instances visiting someone who I know has drugs. Presumably if they have them, they use them on occasion. Let's ban drugs, right? Who cares whose privacy and property rights are violated as long as _I feel better_?

<comment><USER7> I don't think that is a particularly fair correlation. Guns are (historically) tools created with the express purpose of KILLING OTHER HUMAN BEINGS, capitalized for emphasis. Being uncomfortable around them is not indicative of some kind of basic phobia of inanimate objects.

<comment><USER6> You skipped over the middle of that sentence. If you're afraid that the person you're visiting has guns and is unsafe with them, or will actively try to kill you with them, by all means don't visit them. Most gun owners feel the same way. Allowing people to own guns does not give them carte blanche to handle them any way they want without being criticized, shunned or charged with a crime.

They also might accidentally stab you with a knife or have horrible aim when trying to butcher a chicken you're holding, and cut off your hand with a cleaver. Is it reasonable, then, to be uncomfortable around knives in a kitchen, too? Even when they're not in use? Within certain boundaries of storage and safe handling and usage, knives are not dangerous.

It's the same with guns. Within certain boundaries of safe handling, by someone who you don't suspect is mentally unhinged, gun possession or use is a non-problem. Anyone who is unsafe with guns, around anyone who's familiar with gun safety, will quickly be educated about proper gun handling.

As with bows and arrows, and swords, and crossbows (which, when cocked, are not so different from guns... they must be handled very carefully, but where's the casual disparagement of crossbow owners?). And all other things that have their places in everyday use, sport or culture, even when they could be dangerous. The origins of guns as weapons is irrelevant. Guns are not unique in that respect, yet many people who dislike, or are afraid of guns, treat a gun phobia uniquely as something to be praised. "How would any reasonable person not be afraid of guns? They're instruments of death!" How would any reasonable person not be afraid of a crossbow, or a katana, or even a knife? We learn to use knives safely without fear, and learn not to be afraid of swords and (cross)bows when they're being stored or carried or used properly.

<comment><USER8> >Is it reasonable, then, to be uncomfortable around knives in a kitchen, too?

In Britain it is! Bin that knife, criminal!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Law Enforcement knows very well how to deal with Tor, as evidenced by busts against Silk Road and even small time drug dealers as operation ononymous. [http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/operation-onymous-six-britons- arres...](http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/operation-onymous-six-britons-arrested- police-bust-400-drug-dealing-dark-web-sites-1473713)

Russia also knows how to go after Tor, as seen in Malware busts and the arrest of "Paunch" malware creator in Russia. [http://geekslop.com/2013/blackhole- malware-creator-arrested-...](http://geekslop.com/2013/blackhole-malware- creator-arrested-in-russia)

If individual guns can be sold online, it only means that Law Enforcement is not prioritising going after the sales of individual guns - right or wrong - they are not stopped by the use of Tor or even encryption.

<comment><USER10> Paunch had nothing to do with Tor and wasn't exactly trying to hide his identity.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> How does this work? I guess they can not just ship the heavy guns via standard postal services? Aren't there controls in the shipping centers which check for scents of drugs, gunpowder, whatever?

<comment><USER12> Russians always use GPS drop since the post system there is totally unreliable. Everywhere else they disassemble and mail the guns with a pile of scrap and call it 'bike parts' or something.

No idea how they ship the ammo I hope they don't mail it as it goes on passenger planes and live ammunition has to be secured so an LD3 doesnt roll around, crush something then set off bullets flying through the cabin.

<comment><USER13> > Russians always use GPS drop since the post system there is totally > unreliable.

Could you explain me how GPS drop works (I couldn't find information on that topic via Google)?

<comment><USER14> [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geocaching](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geocaching)

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_drop](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_drop)

Think of it as an orienteering game with only two participants. You place the package in a location unlikely to be found accidentally. You transmit the GPS/Glonass location information to the second person. They go to the location and retrieve the package.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Status of Estonia's e-residency program - <AUTHOR> I know that Estonia's e-residency program was affected a security flaw in Gemalto's card in 2017. And apparently they closed access to the public key database at that time.
But what's the current status of the program? I see no available public key database online or any API. Without a public way to verify these signatures, the program is only useful to internal Estonian government programs.
Anyone know what the current status of the program is? Do any other countries plan to offer a similar program?
The problem of verifying online identities in social media is a big one, and the Estonian program was a step in the right direction. It would be a shame if that progress is stifled because of Gemalto's negligence and incompetency. <comment><USER2> E-residency program uses the same technology and infrastructure as "real" Estonian residents ID cards (on which all Estonian citizens and residents rely daily for banking/government services/voting, etc...).

So yes, it still works )

As so the Gemalto vulnerability, it was promptly resolved with remote id card software updates (which most people did), and after that non-updated certificates/cards were suspended and replaced.

More info: [https://www.ria.ee/sites/default/files/content- editors/kuber...](https://www.ria.ee/sites/default/files/content- editors/kuberturve/roca-vulnerability-and-eid-lessons-learned.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER3> [https://www.id.ee/index.php?id=30469](https://www.id.ee/index.php?id=30469)</comment>


Floppy Drives work with Android - <AUTHOR> http://imgur.com/gallery/NtqWjSx <comment><USER2> and why wouldnt they? android is just linux at heart and many usb kernel drivers have been built in for a very long time.</comment>


Message to Workers Under Scrutiny: Cooperate or Get Fired - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/21/business/dealbook/message-to-workers-under-scrutiny-cooperate-or-get-fired.html?ref=business&_r=0 <comment><USER2> This is why you must drop all fear of being fired. I had to work for a really bad company to lose my fears. It was the best thing that ever happened in my career.</comment>


Pontevedra, Spain's Happy Little Carless City - <AUTHOR> https://reasonstobecheerful.world/spains-happy-little-carless-city/ <comment><USER2> Having traveled/lived a lot in Europe I have noticed that totally car-less city is something that actually is not necessary good, but 'limiting car travel' is.

Car based transportation is still needed for:

1\. Shipping of goods/deliveries, etc....

2\. Shipping of people (think elderly, sick, disabled, ambulances, taxis, etc..)

Best way to do this with blocks/chunks of the cities being pedestrian only, and roads with loading/unloading areas that come close enough.... but no parking, or maybe parking centralized underground in one place, with one clear entry exit (so people don't circle around to find parking).

Best solution I have seen is in Barcelona, where you have blocks cordoned off, and pedestrian only use, and still have streets that get close enough to these blocks... so you can do your deliveries as well....

Karlsruhe and Ulm in Germany do achieve this as well . (major areas are pedestrian only, allow cars to come close for loading/unloading, limited on- street parking, and parking in the center only allowed in some major underground place).

Most people can reach the center, if they really have to, but it discourages daily use of the car as it would be too expensive to park.

<comment><USER3> Call me the evil polluter, but I'm sorry I still find cars one of the best inventions humankind has come up with, and it could be a horse and a carriage for all I care. But the freedom of having your own horse/car won't be replaced with stuff like this imho.

If somebody comes up with electric cars that are small and standardized, small enough to carry you and your groceries, and not to be a victim of the elements (rain, heat, cold), then you can call me a believer.

<comment><USER4> Nobody is questioning the convenience of cars.

However, if you have ever had a no commute life- whether it be full remote, or a walkable commute- I think you may just happen to flip your tune. It is a simple delight. If we could build a world around this I think we could be doing something really meaningful and beneficial for society as a whole.

Think grocery stores, doctors, etc all within walking or public transport distance. Imagine if you only needed your car to go visit friends that were far away or to go visit some place that's hard to get to.

I have experienced the full spectrum. I've had a super commute from Olympia to Seattle. I've biked to the train station and ridden with my buddies down to Kent. I've walked 8 minutes to the library where I was an intern. I currently work from home. Cars are a burden on society- one I accept because I occasionally like to take the dogs to the beach or go hiking, but believe me, life is better the less car you can involve in it.

I also happen to enjoy having a cheap old truck as a hobbiest activity. Still, I only drive it on occasion and I love every minute of it. But it is amazing to not depend on it.

<comment><USER5> I lived a no car life, where I walked to work, the store, everywhere. I have also lived the drive a long distance life.

My favorite is my current life... easy parking right in my driveway, short drives to stores with ample parking, short drive commute to work with ample parking.

Walking is great, but lugging groceries sucks, even if the store is close. It sucked when I lived in an apartment where I parked in a parking lot and had to walk my groceries from the car up to the elevator to my apartment.

A car is just easier, assuming light traffic, short drives, and good parking.

<comment><USER6> > A car is just easier, assuming light traffic, short drives, and good parking

And that's precisely the problem, because cars don't scale well. Suburbs surrounding large growing urban areas in the US are often clogged with traffic. Just look at the Bay Area.

You could say the solution then is to decentralize and make it so everyone can have the light traffic car commute. Aside from possible environmental impacts (Who knows, there might not be any with all the reduced traffic from this scheme), I don't think this is realistic right now; humans have clustered around cities for literally millennia.

Edit: I live within a few minutes' walking distance from several grocery stores. Typically I just buy a bag's worth of groceries at a time. Physical ability differs, of course - but that's another argument for reducing car use in my view, so you can clear the roads for the people who truly need the car.

<comment><USER7> >You could say the solution then is to decentralize and make it so everyone can have the light traffic car commute.

You could also say that the solution is to get the government to stop micromanaging what people do on their own property thereby freeing people from the need to build parking when it is not economical to do so thereby creating the political will for good public transit.

<comment><USER3> I live in a place where that is actually a thing, and let me tell you what happens then is that a new coffee shop opens and suddenly a two-lane road becomes a one-lane road. So too much freedom in that sense also hurts.

Also the decentralize idea is not too far off. I think the DC metro area, Pennsylvania and the New York suburbia are great in that sense. You take your car to the commuter train station and off you go into the city. It is the best tradeoff without having to do something radical.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Without regard to the actual topic there is a gem of wisdom that applies to a lot of hackers in "projects from hell": if you want to change something big way, do it in incremental steps, do what is within reach (in reach for the most stubborn/narrow minded opponent).

Just because you figured it all out don't expect others to listen to you lecture them.

A small step, easily digestible, that turns out to be useful, is much more useful than long rants: a) the actual goal is one step closer, b) people will start to really think about what you say once you delivered, c) you might learn you are wrong

</comment><comment><USER9> It rains each three minutes, the sea is deep and wild and the water is cold as death. People talk in high pitch tones, are easy going and friendly by default with (civilised) visitors but also complex inside and sometimes release their sadness or little inner martian also. Is all by the weather

So is basically like the planet Kamino (de Santiago) but with really memorable food. I love it :-)

Here is the official unofficial anthem that explains everything about this crazy people:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t02dFZI7nw4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t02dFZI7nw4)

<comment><USER10> I spent a lot of my youth there, yet didn't know Siniestro! Thanks for that!

Galicia is a great region, you feel like you're living both in the past and in the present at once, without discordance.

<comment><USER11> I grew up in Galicia, my sister still works for child services there. I'll give you some of the cheer and awe, but will dispute the lack of discordance.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This is such a cool publication, by the way. Founded by David Byrne of Talking Heads.

</comment><comment><USER13> I'd love to see a ranking by country of the most carless cities.

<comment><USER14> Based on [0], but it seems to be extremely ill-defined what a "car-free place" is. For example, in the United States, something like a single car-free street seems to fit this definition, whereas in Europe, you will find pedestrian streets basically in every town or village, but only the places where for example the entire city center / old town is carless appear in the article. I also tried to do a little manual disambiguation:

      US 59
      Germany 36
      France 31
      Austria 28
      Switzerland 26
      UK 17
      Spain 17
      Australia 16
      Canada 11
      Bulgaria 11
      Italy 10
      Portugal 9
      Argentina 9
      Poland 8
      Netherlands 8
      Morocco 8
      Mexico 7
      Belgium 7
      Greece 6
      Croatia 6
      China 6
      Sweden 5
      Romania 5
      Japan 5
      Israel 5
      Ukraine 4
      Turkey 4
      Russia 4
      India 4
      Brazil 4
      Serbia 3
      Denmark 3
      Nicaragua 2
      Lithuania 2
      Lebanon 2
      Finland 2
      Vietnam 1
      Urugay 1
      UAE 1
      Thailand 1
      Nepal 1
      Montenegro 1
      Malaysia 1
      Lybia 1
      Latvia 1
      Kenya 1
      Kazakhstan 1
      Indonesia 1
      Hungary 1
      Estonia 1
      Cuba 1
      Colombia 1
      Chile 1
      Sierra Leone 1
      New Zealand 1
      Czech Republic 3
      Costa Rica 2
      Burkina Faso 1
      Bosnia and Herzegovina 1

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_car- free_places](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_car-free_places)

<comment><USER15> US having a first place looks strange given how car-centric it's culture is.

<comment><USER16> One thing I was thinking of are university campuses, which tend to be more often be localized (not spread among a larger city) in the US. I'm sure there are some in European countries but I haven't seen it yet and I'm a student here. In most of these types of campuses that I've been to in the US, the main streets within the campus are therefore closed to non-essential car traffic.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> You know what very famous city is completely car-free? Venice.

That's no joke. Venice has canals and all the vehicle traffic is restricted to the canals, but, well, that's exactly it. Vehicle traffic and pedestrian traffic never have to cross each other's path, in fact they physically can't [1]. There are large areas, especially in the interior of the main island, that are naturally only for pedestrians, areas where only small canals reach that are not accessible by motorboat, areas where you don't hear a vehicle for hours on end.

And just to answer the concerns of people who wonder how commerce would continue if delivery trucks are not allowed to enter a pedestrianised city- Venice is a huge commercial zone where everyone sells everything to everyone else. Free trade doesn't need cars, people.

________________

[1] Unless a pedestrian falls into a canal; or someone like Ottobre Nero, an infamous gondoliero, manages to get their vessel on land which is not impossible with a bit of motivation.

</comment><comment><USER18> I'm from a town nearby Pontevedra. I lived in the city, and outside. I really like carless cities, and move almost everywhere by bike where I live now (Coruña).

Pontevedra is great, and I really like how the city center feels, it got super friendly to walk by foot. But every time I see news like this I get a little angry because they don't talk about the real experience of commuting to the city or its crazy development.

Regarding development: The city has very few parks inside it compared to other Spanish cities. Mainly because they don't save spaces for them, the ones that exist have 30+ years. Building development is crazy, you can build virtually everywhere. You can see new buildings leaving very narrow alleys (example in [1]), tons of new buildings with no single "green zone" nearby (example in [2] where the only planned "park" is the little one by the roundabout)

Regarding commuting: Doing so from the multiple towns around is not easy and got way worse. . Many kids go to study to Pontevedra from 20+ km around. The road from my parent's house from my mothers job has 40 road bumpers in total. She does 4 trips a day counting 160 bumps a day. It gets old quick. The "deterrent parkings" are poorly located to avoid crossing the city and the main one we can use looks like a swamp when it rains, as you can see here: [https://goo.gl/maps/N7E7jjzzC2VbAjmaA](https://goo.gl/maps/N7E7jjzzC2VbAjmaA)

I just want to put our two cents on a different side on the story, I wish they implemented some more policies for outsiders that work / use city services. I hope more people get the whole picture from this.

[1] [https://goo.gl/maps/LTDxgPevfgTyidybA](https://goo.gl/maps/LTDxgPevfgTyidybA) [2] [https://email@example.com,-8.634709,761a,35y,2...](https://firstname.lastname@example.com,-8.634709,761a,35y,223.04h,8.02t/data=!3m1!1e3)

</comment><comment><USER19> There's an intentionally old-timey place in Michigan called Macinac Island (pronounced mackinaw), which has been automobile-less since I can remember. Fun place to go for a bit, get some fudge, go for some nature walks, get a horse drawn carriage ride, etc. Haven't been since I was a kid, so it's hard to say how the experience holds up.

Likely a much, much lower population density than any of these current urban experiments, but I still think of it every time I see the "no cars" thing being done.

[http://www.mackinac.com/about/history/no- cars](http://www.mackinac.com/about/history/no-cars)

<comment><USER20> > automobile-less since I can remember

Sept 2019: [https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/22/us/mackinac-pence- motorca...](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/22/us/mackinac-pence- motorcade.html)

<comment><USER19> For some reason, this feels like a real tragedy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I was lived in Spain for some time not too long ago. Wife and I visited Pontevedra and we fell in love. I wish there were some way for me to get a good remote job and live there.

<comment><USER22> I'm working remote from a near village, and it's soo awesome!

<comment><USER18> Which one? I'm from Moraña myself

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> The article makes it sounds all positive, but I'd love to hear from a local that's been through the transition. Surely the local businesses cannot be all positive about this.

I mean, a car comes with a trunk, where you can put your shopping in. Having to walk 1300m or 15' worth of shopping can't be good for the local businesses.

<comment><USER24> I'm not from Pontevedra, but close, and I know some locals and I've been there.

Complains that I remember.

\- People from outside the city has problems to move apparently. They say that there aren't parkings enough in the city borders, so they have to go for one that's roughly in the center, through very slow traffic lines. That induces them to go less frequently.

\- Businesses like bars, chocolate shops and so on flourished (leisure oriented), but others like hardware stores, furniture stores, two law firms, and a Cinema closed.

Imagine that you were going to the hardware store. It's either impossible to park near it [https://firstname.lastname@example.com,-8.6406022,3a,41.3y,1...](https://email@example.com,-8.6406022,3a,41.3y,155.93h,73.72t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sErTMUAEThDDMOuUgJ_n7sA!2e0!7i16384!8i8192?hl=en) or difficult/forbidden/very slow traffic [https://firstname.lastname@example.com,-8.6417988,3a,42.3y,1...](https://email@example.com,-8.6417988,3a,42.3y,10.95h,73.74t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sM6O8EdLQUe3zkXm8ocZvIg!2e0!7i13312!8i6656?hl=en)

<comment><USER18> Exactly the commuting problem from my comment. Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Relevant: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_car- free_places](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_car-free_places)

<comment><USER26> This is terrible. I read the article and thought "wow this would really work for Vilnius". Something I've thought for last year matter of fact. Initially ai thought some car traffic could be replaced with e-scooters, but cobbled roads wouldn't work well for it. Turns out Vilnius (old town I presume) is already """car free""". In reality there's about 3-5 streets that mostly take tourists and locals around. There are no good reason to keep them open. I really hope one day this changes. It would make city so much quieter and nicer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> One fact I noticed traveling through europe, the small quaint cities that couldn't accomodate cars well... were designed and built for pedestrians and horses in the first place.

</comment><comment><USER28> Interesting to read this one, as just last night I was having dinner with a friend and discussed the topic of car-free cities, driverless cars, etc, for about 2 hours.

It is such an interesting topic, and there's so much assumptions that we always take for granted that prevent us from having a smart conversation about it. And then, of course, there's regulation, which essentially kills any idea almost instantly.

An example? In the US you need to have a rear mirror in a car. A driverless car doesn't need one... But without the mirror, it can't pass the test to make it compliant and allow it to be on the road.

<comment><USER29> Makes sense, driverless cars can still be driven manually right now. So it needs a read mirror.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Jane Jacobs has this all figured out in 1960!

</comment><comment><USER31> >many streets are designed as loops, making it impossible to use them to drive from one end of the city to the other. This solved a major problem—before the redesign, some streets were choked with nearly 30,000 cars a day, most of them simply passing through. Now, Lores told Citiscope, "If you enter by the south, you leave by the south."

They got away with transient traffic and are now generating their traffic in adjacent communities. Smart.

<comment><USER32> What's the point of driving to X if you know you can't get to X by car? The 'adjacent community' traffic surplus idea is bogus. At most you'll generate some short term need for added parking space in adjacent regions.

<comment><USER33> I think you misunderstood it. Take a look at the map and you'll see pontevedra is tiny, a circle barely 2km wide. Car owners obviously don't work there but commute somewhere else (most probably Vigo in the south). Story goes, their roads where clogged with passing traffic, commuters passing by pontevedra going somewhere else. Then pontevedra got rid of all roads and made a big ring road around the city. So they turned their city into a proverbial cul de sac to escape from other people's traffic. If every other community in the way did the same around them guess what.

<comment><USER34> The old city center is a warren of narrow streets and must have been hell to navigate. Seems that it was a dying city center slum and this was a key step in gentrifying it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> There has been an suspiciously steady spate of anti-car posts on HN in the past month.

<comment><USER36> Because use of private transport has to decrease. It is neither sustainable nor healthy. Even if it's a Tesla.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> How many of these posts do we need a day? They have long ceased to be "news" or interesting. The only real variation here is that it isn't citylab.

<comment><USER38> And how many of these responses do we need on each one of these posts? I find it fascinating that articles talking about the benefits of car-free places make some people so viscerally upset. Why does this strike a nerve so much?

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> Typical disingenuous car-hater article.

They show a b/w picture from the 1970's to demonstrate the "before" situation with passthrough traffic ([https://reasonstobecheerful.world/wp- content/uploads/2019/10...](https://reasonstobecheerful.world/wp- content/uploads/2019/10/Pontevedra4.png)). If you look at maps, you will see that since then the AP-9 highway ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autopista_AP-9](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autopista_AP-9)) has been built around the city. So that situation was clearly resolved otherwise. It has nothing to do with the current Mayor's expensive actions to make the city more easily overrun by tourists.</comment>


Is Quality Assurance still relevant with Agile Development Processes? - <AUTHOR> http://99tests.com/blog/is-quality-assurance-still-relevant-with-agile-development-processes/

<comment><AUTHOR> as more and more software development teams move toward Agile, with multiple deployments of the code into production system each day, do we really need Assurance of the software functionality?</comment>


Space Elevators Climbing Towards Reality - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/geekdad/2009/11/elevator-to-the-top-space-elevators-climbing-towards-reality/

<comment><USER2> Good progress indeed. Even though I am not sure if then laser beams is a cost effective way. But it is certainly one of only few choice we have got. Carbon nano tubes seems to be the other good option, hope next decade will bring big breakthroughs in that area.</comment>


PEP 512 – Migrating from hg.python.org to GitHub - <AUTHOR> https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0512 <comment><USER2> "the GitHub migration will be happening this Friday."

[https://mail.python.org/pipermail/python- dev/2017-February/1...](https://mail.python.org/pipermail/python- dev/2017-February/147341.html)</comment>


A Contemplation on Music - <AUTHOR> http://preachermike.com/2009/05/07/contemplation

<comment><USER2> _Given what we have since learned about life in the concentration camps, why would anyone in his right mind waste time and energy writing or playing music? There was barely enough energy on a good day to find food and water, to avoid a beating, to stay warm, to escape torture why would anyone bother with music?_

Duh, for the same reason they would have drunk alcohol if it had been available. Of course people want to short their pleasure circuits all the more when life turns bad. I love hearing and playing music as much as the next guy, but feel no need for joyous mysticism about it.</comment>