Texas Instruments' Biggest Blunder: The TMS9900 Microprocessor - <AUTHOR> http://spectrum.ieee.org/geek-life/history/the-inside-story-of-texas-instruments-biggest-blunder-the-tms9900-microprocessor <comment><USER2> My first job out of college was to write a polygon fill routine for the TMS34010 graphics processor. I developed a love for it's clean 32-bit risc architecture ... it was even bit addressable with a flat address space. I actually loved programming in assembly language ... you could fit most subroutine arguments in registers.. use any of 32 registers you pleased.

Later I did some 8086 assembly programming. I learned why a generation of programmers hate assembly... only a few special purpose registers, segmented memory, long list of nonorthogonal instructions, ... yuck

I blame the general aversion for assembly programming to the choice of using the 8086 for PC's.

<comment><USER3> You could choose that the memory accesses be at any bit size from 1 to 32 with both unsigned and sign-extended register loads. In fact, I think you got to pick two sizes and for most normal operation you'd choose 16 and 32 bits. There were some load/store operations that always operated at 8 bits so you'd get the usual complement of data sizes. Pretty useful feature for something that was intended to be a graphics processor. I've also seen the different bit sizes used for fast and simple Huffman decoding in gzip decompression.

The auto-increment/decrement addressing modes were aware of the bit size. Thus you could have polymorphic subroutines where the same code could be used to sum an array of bytes, words, 13 bit quantities or whatever size word you wanted (up to 32 bits).

Since the processor had built-in circuitry to help drive graphics displays it took a high input frequency of something like 40 or 50 MHz and actually divided that down to run the processor at around 10 MHz or so. The opposite of what we're used to now and made the darn things look scary (well, scarier) from an emulation programmer's perspective.

The memory interface was designed to work with shift-register VRAM. The idea there being that the VRAM chips had a built-in shift register 512 pixels wide. The display circuitry would make use of it by having each line from the frame buffer dumped into the shift register as the raster was moving down the screen. And then the shift register would clock out the pixels as the raster moved across each line.

During VBLANK (when the video circuitry is waiting for the raster to return to the top of the screen) you could use special instructions to load and store the shift register which would be as fast as any load/store operation. The entire frame buffer could be filled very quickly with any repetitive pattern or erased entirely by copying some fixed line to all the others.

Lotta cool stuff in that beast.

<comment><USER2> Yes and then the TMS34020 came out which had a trapezoid fill instruction. Essentially you would partition your polygon into trapezoids; For each trapezoid you would load the appropriate registers ... the slopes of the edges used 16.16 fixed point numbers. I remember how much you could do with fixed point arithmetic.. very few programmers even know how program using fixed point anymore. A very useful lost art.

There was also a built in Bressenhsm line drawing instruction.

Then there was the TMS34082 floating point coprocessor. I essentially wrote a primitive OpenGL'ish pipeline API. That was fun.

Wow... I really wish a general purpose processor like this made it into the PC. The best stuff doesn't always win in the marketplace.

<comment><USER4> Last time I used fixed point arithmetic was for a J2ME game targeted at the Sharp GX20, for a game competition sponsored by Vodafone.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The same chip family included the TMS9918 Video Display Processor: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_Instruments_TMS9918](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_Instruments_TMS9918)

The TMS9918 was the first chip to refer to overlaid graphical objects as "sprites." It was used in a multitude of early computers and game consoles, like the MSX1, Colecovision, Sega's SG-1000, and of course TI's own 99/4 (where it was paired with a TMS9900 CPU). It also served as the basis for the video controllers in the Sega Master System and Genesis/Mega Drive.

The TMS9918 is also interesting because it was one of the few off-the-shelf video generator chips ever produced. (There were a couple others, like the MC6847 used by the CoCo, but almost every other home computer/console of the era used custom silicon for video generation.)

<comment><USER6> And for $395 you could get a SuperSprite board for your Apple ][, which was a card containing a TMS9918 and a AY3-8912 programmable sound generator, basically turning your Apple ][ into a ColecoVision. Except you'd have to write your own games, because no existing games supported it. I still wanted one!

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> The architectural Achilles' heel of the 9900 is the obtuse excessive use of memory bandwidth. It specifies a workspace pointer, which points to an area of memory to be used as registers. Which isn't actually so bad if you accelerate those architectural registers into on-chip physical registers. But they didn't. The 9900 squandered great amounts of memory bandwidth.

<comment><USER8> Wait, am I understanding you correctly? It used _main memory_ as registers? I feel like I must be misunderstanding this, because that seems absurd even for 1978.

<comment><USER9> Sure, it's a decent idea. You can even make it fast if you cheat.

I believe that the PDP-10 (well, some versions) had the first few memory locations equivalent to registers.

The AT&T Hobbit (Aka Crisp) chip had a stack pointer, and aggressively cached memory around the stack, essentially. Once cached, stack-relative memory operations were as fast as registers. (The Apple Newton was going to use the Hobbit, but switched to ARM when it became clear that AT&T wasn't truly interested in committing to consumer grade pricing of the CPUs).

<comment><USER10> > I believe that the PDP-10 (well, some versions) had the first few memory > locations equivalent to registers.

Essentially. Actually the registers were addressable as the first 16 addresses in memory for all models. For the PDP-6 and first PDP-10 (model KA) the registers were fast semiconductor devices (DTL, as I believe it predated TTL) while the rest of memory was literally core (convenient for when the power went out, as happened occasionally in Cambridge -- whatever process was running died since the registers were lost, but everything else was in core, so the machine could just be restarted).

Since they were addressable you could run code out of them, like bootstrap routines or some deranged TECO code I once wrote). On the other hand any word of memory could be used as a stack pointer (two addresses fit in a word, so one half was the base and the other half the depth).

It was quite a RISC-like, highly symmetrical architecture for its time and a pleasure to program. I still miss it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Great article. The 68000 went on to become the first processor in Sun workstations and the original Macintosh so I wouldn't call it a total loser.

<comment><USER12> Also the Amiga and the NeXT. All of the above were influential computers, and obviously the Mac achieved some success, so I think calling it an "also-ran" is a bit of a stretch.

<comment><USER13> Also the Atari ST series, a whole wack of arcade games, the Sharp X68000, a bunch of Unix workstations, dedicated network hardware, etc. etc. And it is still manufactured in a modified form in the ColdFire.

But it still never approached near the volume of sales of x86. And was abandoned by Motorola by the early 90s (when they started to go down the RISC road with the 88000 and then PowerPC)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The MSP430 instruction set is heavily influenced by the 9900, so although TI missed the PC revolution they sold a heck of a lot of silicon derived from this project.

</comment><comment><USER14> What strikes me about this article is the disparity between how much TI-99/4A hackers love that machine and the TMS9900 vs. how much the TI leadership of the time seem to hate it.

There's virtually no inside information written down about the history of this chip, so this was pretty fascinating.

<comment><USER15> The love/hate thing might have been related to the eventual fire sale pricing.

Towards the end, you could pick them up for $200, which was unheard of for that class of PC. Easy to see why that would draw an adoring audience while frustrating TI.

<comment><USER16> At the very end they could be had for under $100.

<comment><USER14> Mine was $50 in 1983 and I've met several people who remember getting it for that price.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> From the article:

If IBM, and not Microsoft, had controlled MS-DOS, Windows, and so on, the computing world would now be a different environment.

-

iMHO probably a much worse world. Microsoft might have been the "evil empire" but ibm was the original.

<comment><USER4> People complain about Apple, but they are the single company left from those days, where each manufacturer controlled the whole stack.

Had IBM done that, we would be in a similar position regarding PCs.

On the other hand, maybe thanks to that single event, Atari ST or Amiga variants would still exist.

However, the industry seems to be turning back to those days.

Even FOSS won't help here, because each OEM just packages their own OS and SDK flavour and locks down the hardware.

<comment><USER18> Commodore/Amiga/Atari couldn't capture a big enough market.

Apple (Mac) was never open enough.

None of the UNIX companies would have ever made anything cheap enough to hit the mass-market until after Windows 95 came out.

Without Microsoft we could have ended up with some weird IBM world running OS/2\. They might have even switched to Motorola eventually.

But Microsoft and Compaq made things open and cheap enough to get us to where we are today.

<comment><USER4> But that was kind of my point, without Microsoft, the PC would just be yet another platform like the Commodore/Amiga/Atari/Mac.

None of them would get a piece big enough of the pie.

The PC only happened due to the way OEM market was created, originating a race to the bottom regarding computer components.

My other point being that given the current state of computer market with iDevices, Android, Chromebooks, IoT, hybrid tablets (aka netbooks), TVs, Watches,..., those OEMs are now trying to turn the remaining of the market into that vision.

So besides their proprietary OSes, we get customised versions of their own forks from open source OSes (e.g. Huawei Linux, LG BSD, put your flavour here) in locked down hardware like those computer systems with their OSes written in ROMs.

Microsoft is still here, but the day they actually do loose the PC market, don't expect the "Year of Linux/BSD" to happen.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> It's always interesting to hear stories of when a hodgepodge of companies like TI, Commodore, and Radio Shack were vying to become dominant stewards of computer technology, from the OS down to the processors. It doesn't seem like that will ever happen again, but who knows?

<comment><AUTHOR> That tends to happen with most new disruptive technologies. So we probably won't see the same thing happen again with microcomputers, but maybe with AR goggles or whatever comes next.

<comment><USER15> Seems to be happening with Lidar right now. Granted, a much narrower space.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> So the Intel won with the ugliest instruction set and Microsoft won with the ugliest OS. "Ugly" is apparently an overrated design disinclination.

<comment><USER20> I have wondered about that. I have programmed. I am not skilled enough to warrant calling me a programmer. I did so out of necessity, I kinda hated it most of the time.

But, I hear this about Intel's instruction set - at a number of tech sites.

Intel got their start making memory (SRAM). They had Moore and Noyce, as I recall.

Anyhow, I am not qualified to opine on instruction sets. I am curious as to where it went 'wrong.' I accept your declaration as being likely true - I've seen it echoed elsewhere. But, if you know, do you happen to know where (perhaps even why) it went wrong?

I have tried the mighty Google, by the way. It was no help. I may have not had the correct search terms. I am a mathematician, I only programmed (retired now) out of necessity. In fact, I hated computers for the longest time. I am just curious about the history of where they went so wrong that so many people complain about it.

<comment><USER21> This is a basic summary of why it sucks. [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=276471](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=276471)

<comment><USER22> That tells me why it sucks from the perspective of a compiler writer in 2017. But it doesn't tell me if it sucked in 1979 in an era when ask was much more frequently hand-written and there were many more physical constraints and trade-offs. x86 seems often to be judged by later innovations like RISC. But that wasn't a thing in 1979 and sucks for hand-writing anyway - perhaps you _want_ more complex and non-orthogonal instructions in 1979.

<comment><USER21> Someone who is familiar with the 70s and 80s will have to chime in, but I'm not sure how popular it was with assembly writers then (I don't think it was).

<comment><USER23> As someone who wrote a reasonable amount of assembler, my first exposure to RISC (SPARC) nearly blew my mind; so easy to learn and much less struggle to write well. I never understood the attachment to arcane ISAs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> My sister's school bought a bunch of TI99/4As and I got to play with hers once when visiting. She said it was a little flakey, as I recall. One interesting feature of the 99/4A was the speech synthesizer module, which used the same LPC technology that TI used in the Speak & Spell toy. That was a fairly unusual peripheral for that generation of home computer.

<comment><USER25> Well, I remember a lot of fun with my father Spectrum. He attached a board with a SPO256 chip and we had the Speccy talking us with weird accent (We are Spaniard.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Pretty bizarre that they call the 68000 an "also-ran" (twice!). But I guess this is more of a personal story than an attempt at objective computer history.

</comment><comment><USER27> One of the links on that page points to this fascinating memoir by Gary Kildall: [http://www.computerhistory.org/atchm/in-his-own-words- gary-k...](http://www.computerhistory.org/atchm/in-his-own-words-gary- kildall/)

As an erstwhile CP/M user, I have of course known Kildall's name for decades, but never had a sense of who he was as a person. This somewhat autobiographical recounting is very illuminating in that regard.

</comment><comment><USER28> The first personal computer to use the TMS9900 - the Marinchip 9900.[1] This dealt with the problem of using a 16-bit computer on an 8-bit bus by using external logic which turned one TMS9900 memory access into two bus accesses.

Everything ran much slower back then.

[1] [http://www.s100computers.com/Hardware%20Folder/Marinchip/990...](http://www.s100computers.com/Hardware%20Folder/Marinchip/9900%20CPU%20board/9900%20CPU.htm)

</comment><comment><USER29> This is an intriguing article, and the comments posted here are that, squared. This happens quite a lot on HN, so much so that asking "did you read such-and- such on HN last week, and what did you think of the discussion" would be an excellent interview question for students applying to a computing program at university. Showing an interest in such threads would be a good indication of future potential for jobs above the code-monkey level.

</comment><comment><USER30> One of the comments has a pointer to a fascinating article in InfoWorld, reprinted from Texas Monthly, recounting the rise and fall of the TI 99/4\. I can't figure out how to copy and paste the 500-character URL but it's very much worth following the link in the comment.

<comment><USER31> [https://books.google.ca/books?id=wy4EAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA63&lpg=PA...](https://books.google.ca/books?id=wy4EAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA63&lpg=PA63&dq=ti+99/4a+lawsuit&source=bl&ots=vWNx4mFFgg&sig=jkeSAPUwPQCTPoBj- AJy2d3lYtA&hl=en&sa=X&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q=ti%2099%2F4a%20lawsuit&f=false)

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> What a great story - and now I know about Lubbock, TX.

Google street view has confirmed the authors' opinion.

<comment><USER33> If you are not from the US, I cannot express the desolation, wind, dust, and smells of West Texas. Hell even if you are from the US. Imagine a windier drier more right wing Mongolia, with feed lots and oil wells everywhere.

<comment><USER11> West Texas holds a certain primitive charm to me as a native Texan. But if I ever moved back to Texas, I'd want to live near Austin. It's the only part of Texas that has urban amenities, educated people, and relatively tolerable weather.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> the only lesson is that ibm being a huge monopoly at the time got to make the wrong decisions for everyone else. So, the lesson is: please the big monopolies?</comment>


Tell HN: take a moment and check your backups today - <AUTHOR>

do yourself a favor and take some time out today to check your backups.  make sure they've been running properly, try doing a test restore of some crucial piece of data to a test machine.  time it, see how long it takes and whether you have all of the proper recovery steps documented.<p>i fat-fingered a database change and had to restore a full table of data from a recent backup.  if i didn't have working daily, redundant backups (that is, doing a full table dump of each table in each database on each server, not just backing up the raw mysql binary files) i would have really been screwed. <comment><USER2> Agreed. Nothing worse than pulling a tape only to find out the backup was incomplete. It happened, it was painful, someone got fired for it. We check for errors while dumping databases, do md5sums after on the local machine and then again on remote server where the backups are synced. Most of our backups are restored on a daily basis on development systems so we are assured they work.</comment>


A language in 20 minutes - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CqhL-BDT8lg

<comment><AUTHOR> A very interesting talk from James Coglan about building a Lisp-like language in 20 minutes by using JavaScript.

From the video description:

"Sometimes, the answer to an engineering problem is not a new library, or a new platform feature, but a new language. We often gripe about the warts and limitations of HTML, CSS and JavaScript and there are dozens if not hundreds of new languages vying to replace them. But if the future of JavaScript is, well, not JavaScript, how can everyday users shape this future?

JavaScript, so the legend goes, was built in 10 days. I'd like go one better and show you how easy it is to get started with language hacking, by building a working Lisp engine from scratch in just 20 minutes. It'll have arithmetic, conditional logic, variables, user-defined functions, recursion and lexical closures: a minimal useful feature set that you can use to understand how languages work and explore your own ideas."</comment>


Ask HN: Los Angeles to San Fran, where to visit? - <AUTHOR>

I'm driving up from LA to San Fran. (1st time I'm visiting NorCal.)<p>Where should I stop on the way? <comment><USER2> Stick to the cost as much as possible, but check with CHP (California Highway Patrol) if Hwy 1 is open between Morro Bay and Monterey. That stretch of Hwy 1 is a dangerous, but gorgeous, drive. Occasionally it gets closed due to rock/mud slides in the winter.

Pismo Beach (go for a drive on the sand).

Avila Beach (Figure out why it's called "Harms Bay")

Morro Bay

Big Sur

Monterey/Carmel

Santa Cruz

Half Moon Bay

</comment><comment><USER3> Hearst Castle. It's stunning, and a great story. (Also, I want an afternoon alone on the driveway up the hill to the castle on my motorcycle...)

<comment><USER4> I second Hearst Castle. Goes well when paired with Citizen Kane.

Also, Monterey is cool. Can also be paired with Cannery Row by Steinbeck.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I've done this (as a tourist) several times and The Madonna Inn at San Luis Obispo stands out as the most amazing place I've stayed at along that stretch (though even a brief visit is recommended). Their steak restaurant hit me with one of my best steaks too. I love it enough that I took 6 other people all the way from England to go visit it <g>

Santa Cruz was also awesome. Hearst Castle was OK. Big Sur was beautiful. We didn't like Monterey though the aquarium was pretty good. And my wife and I fell in love with San Luis Obispo as a city - it seems to have a perfect blend of size and youth without being hyperactive or "big".

<comment><USER2> The Madonna Inn is an expensive and absurdly gaudy tourist trap. It is laughably and entertainingly over-the-top if you're into that sort of thing, but just taking one of their tours should suffice for giggles. I've lived in Morro Bay and San Louis Obispo (SLO) and used to commute past the Madonna Inn every day on my way to Avila Beach. I've never known any locals who actually recommend _staying_ at the Madonna Inn. Some tourists might consider it mildly amusing, but it's really not very interesting. --In short, the Madonna Inn is certainly not for everyone, and there are plenty of far more beautiful places to stay around there.

If you really want overly expensive, and gaudily but entertainingly over-the- top, then you should go to Vegas.

<comment><USER5> Thanks for correcting my opinions. Now you can move on to contradicting the other genuine and well-meant suggestions left here.

<comment><USER2> Your response to me is a personal attack.

As for contradicting the opinions of others, you made disparaging comments against Hearst Castle and Monterey, both of which were highly recommended by others here.

I did not "correct" or "contradict" all of your opinions, instead, I pointed out a potential problem many people will have with one single opinion you have.

Since there is a good chance some people will feel ripped off by staying at the Madonna Inn, having both positive and negative opinions voiced about the place really does make sense. Providing people with more information about a destination so they can make more informed decisions based on their own preferences is entirely beneficial.

Some people love the tourist nature of Vegas, but others hate Vegas for its tourist nature. To each their own. If you take a step back from being offended, you'd realize my statements about the Madonna Inn are actually more valuable, supportive, and even "positive" than your statements to anyone who likes the entertainingly over-the-top. If you're into that sort of thing, then by all means, have at it. But if you have different preferences, then at least now you know what you're getting yourself into.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> All great suggestions here. Here's a few more:

\- Monterey Bay Aquarium, in Monterey

\- It's a good time of year to see elephant seals. There are two good places to go that I'm aware of. One is just a bit north of Hearst Castle. See <http://www.elephantseal.org/>. The other is Ano Nuevo State Park, <http://www.parks.ca.gov/?page_id=523>

\- If you like wine, there are plenty of good wineries to visit in the Santa Barbara, San Luis Obispo, and Paso Robles areas, among others.

</comment><comment><USER7> If you are going up through the central valley, instead of the coast, and if you are interested in airplanes, you might consider hitting the Castle Air Museum. It has an SR-71, a MIG-17, a B-36, and a bunch of other interesting planes (including an allegedly haunted B-29).

</comment><comment><USER8> Are you a Hacker? Stop by the Hacker Dojo. It's especially cool if there is a good class/event going on when you're here.

<http://wiki.hackerdojo.com/w/page/25437/FrontPage>

</comment><comment><USER9> Obviously, In-n-Out in Kettleman City off the 5. Its what I look forward to most on my drives.

</comment><comment><USER10> Near Big Sur (<http://goo.gl/maps/gN91>), eat/drink at Nepenthe while enjoying the view: <http://www.nepenthebigsur.com>

</comment><comment><USER11> If you want to experience a weird town, while filling up on pastries, visit Solvang. Los Olivos is next door, which is where the movie Sideways was filmed (and I was born), and has some fantastic wine tasting (try Longoria).

</comment><comment><USER12> I recommend looking through <http://www.roadsideamerica.com/>. I've found a few neat spots for my trips.

</comment><comment><USER13> Point Sur Lighthouse is cool, <http://www.pointsur.org/>

</comment><comment><USER2> hella,

How much time will you have for the trip?

What time of year?

Solo or with Family/Friends?

Any particular interests?

Sorry for all the questions, but the number of beautiful and interesting things worth seeing between LA and SF is rather substantial.

</comment><comment><USER14> Definitely Big Sur. Eat at the Big Sur bakery.

</comment><comment><USER15> Big Sur, Monterey/Carmel, Cambria (go to Hearst Castle!!), Santa Cruz.

I'd skip Santa Barbara, Pismo, and SLO they're fairly boring and not that much to do other than go out to eat.

<comment><USER16> Carmel for sure. I agree on skipping the same cities.</comment></comment>


MongoDB presentations from MongoSV - <AUTHOR> http://www.10gen.com/video

<comment><USER2> We're adding more videos today - presentations from Intuit, Yottaa, Wordnik, etc. Keep checking back!

<comment><USER3> This is a great set of videos. Can you post transcripts & slides? I simply don't have time to watch more than 15 minutes of video.

<comment><USER2> Sure, will add some slides below the videos. Don't have any plans to transcribe the talks but that is a great idea worth looking into.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> There are quite a few videos there, any in particular that are especially good?

<comment><AUTHOR> I really enjoyed the Yottaa talk which is going up soon. It deals with using MongoDB for analytics.</comment></comment>


Mssql-cli, a new interactive command line tool for SQL Server - <AUTHOR> https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/dataplatforminsider/2017/12/12/try-mssql-cli-a-new-interactive-command-line-tool-for-sql-server/ <comment><USER2> I find interesting to observe how Microsoft position has changed over the years. They tend to focus now on command line users, and provide tools with open source licenses, it seems they are trying to be more 'Unix-like' these days; still, I don't think they offer any substantial value over mature, powerful and integrated tools, and personally I don't feel attracted to the idea of supporting a company that practices EEE and uses monopoly strategies to retain market share.</comment>


Python-safethread | CPython mod for safe, easy, and scalable concurrency mechanisms. - <AUTHOR> http://code.google.com/p/python-safethread/ <comment><AUTHOR> We're going to have to start doing stuff like this when we start to reach 8-16 cores per processor in the next 5 years or so.

</comment><comment><USER2> Wow, this is ambitious!</comment>


Ask HN: What do you do if someone has your startup's twitter name? - <AUTHOR>

So we have just discovered that someone else already has "our" twitter name ( http://twitter.com/splitthebill ) !<p>Bad planning we know, but what would you do? Ask the current owner if you can have it? Use an abbreviation? Something else? <comment><USER2> On the list of things to be worried about, this just seems to rank a few notches after what font you should use for the names on the conference room doors.

</comment><comment><USER3> How important to the business plan is the twitter name? I dont think you will get it from twitter just because you want it.

If twitter is vital to your business suceeding/marketing plan, then maybe something like "splitthebilldotcom", to make it look "official".

I see you asked twitter, but have you asked/received a response from the user yet?

<comment><AUTHOR> The twitter account will be used more for status/news then for marketing...

Other then sending the user a DM (which they are unlikley to answer on an inactive account) we have no obvious way of contacting the owner...

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Do you have a trademark on the name? If you do, contact twitter and they will give it to you (I worked for a company that did this). Even if you don't, it's worth a try contacting twitter since the account seems inactive.

<comment><AUTHOR> No trademark (in the US). Have sent an email to twitter support. Not holding my breath however.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Oh, since it's pretty much dead, contact twitter and let them know that's your startup's name.

</comment><comment><USER6> Has anyone had any luck requesting transfers with non-brand names that have been dead for years? I tried contacting twitter, the account owner, other twitter reps and tried their web forms, all to nothing.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> BTW we launched our alpha today: <http://blog.split-the-bill.com/its-alive-45>

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Just an update. Got no response from twitter, so we went with @split_the_bill</comment>


Python.org redesign - <AUTHOR> http://python.org/?

<comment><USER2> Comments on this from yesterday: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7266869](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7266869)</comment>


Amazon Has Tried Everything to Make Shopping Easier. Except This. - <AUTHOR> http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/02/03/amazon-has-tried-everything-to-make-shopping-easier-except-this/

<comment><USER2> This article made my head spin. "Hey, maybe Amazon could open their own brick- and-mortar stores. It seems like a bad idea, but Apple did it when it seemed like a bad idea and it turned out to be a good idea. And Amazon wouldn't have to have things for sale in their stores, you'd just go there to order things online. But it probably wouldn't work and I'm not sure why I brought it up to begin with."

</comment><comment><USER3> and they won't, either.</comment>


Bitcoin price jumps 21 percent over 4 days, reaching a 21-month high - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2016/05/30/bitcoin-price-jumps-21-percent-over-4-days-reaching-a-21-month-high/ <comment><USER3> China speculators are doing it again. Not particular reason, but this proves again that Bitcoin is doomed. I think it's all orchestrated, though - <USER2> know Bitcoin is going to be replaced by Ethereum, but there's still a lot of money in BTC that needs to be converted to ETH, and having expensive Bitcoin and cheap Ethereum is a dream come true! I just don't understand who are the idiots buying Bitcoin at these prices!

<comment><USER4> I don't they're speculating. They use it to smuggle money out of the country. Spend CNY to buy bitcoin. Go overseas, spend bitcoin to buy USD. This process may take weeks so during that they're holding hundreds of thousands of dollars of bitcoin. Why they spike in people smuggling money out? The PBOC is sending the CNY on a downwards trajectory, appearing to accelerate last week. [1][2]

[1] [https://www.google.com/finance?q=CNYUSD&ei=StpMV9CCLsuE0gSp2...](https://www.google.com/finance?q=CNYUSD&ei=StpMV9CCLsuE0gSp27joDw)

[2] [http://business.inquirer.net/210705/china-fixes-yuan-at- over...](http://business.inquirer.net/210705/china-fixes-yuan-at-over-five- year-low-against-dollar)

<comment><USER3> Also, I assume, you justify the illicit application? This makes Bitcoin smell even worse and look more doomed than ever - its only application is to evade taxes and governmental controls. Nice!

<comment><USER4> I am an observer of financial markets, and am not attached to success or failure of bitcoins.

<comment><USER3> Didn't mean that, but it's more proof for the demise of this filthy thing.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Cocoa developer here. What APIs/tools for writing a commercial Windows app? - <AUTHOR>

Hello.
I've been writing Mac OS X desktop applications with Cocoa for quite a while now. I like Objective-C immensely and enjoy developing with Xcode. The best thing about developing for the Mac is that there is a single "official" API and a single set of development tools, which means I don't have to spend time picking a toolset, language and API.
Now I want to jump into Windows development. I was not a big Windows fan back in the XP era, but I like Windows 7. C# and Visual Studio are great. A friend -- also a Mac developer -- and I have an idea for a desktop application both of us sorely need, but we cannot decide what API we should use to write our UI.
There used to be Windows.Forms, but that's deprecated now. I've heard rumors about Microsoft deprecating WPF over Silverlight in Windows 8. Is this true? Doesn't Silverlight just use a subset of WPF?
Windows 8 will also provide a way to write applications using HTML and JS, so there's that.
Now we're thoroughly confused. Deciding between different versions of Windows and Visual Studio was hard enough, but I believe we made the right choices there. This one is a doozy, though. We don't want to spend 6-8 months writing an application just to have Microsoft deprecate the API we use.
I wouldn't even have dreamed of asking this question if our app was just another CRUD app. But UI is a huge part of what we're planning, so we want to make the right choices there.
Help?
EDIT: formatting.
EDIT 2: more formatting. <comment><USER2> Great question.

I have tried to understand this myself without a good answer.

Google chrome UI team had an article on how they didn't find good user controls or windowing system for Windows and had to write everything from scratch. The chromium source was way too complex for our needs so we ended up not exploring it.

Still open source GUI code. (So good open source GUI code in Windows has been hard to find, but that's a good bet).

You probably want your app to run on both XP and 7 ?

8 is vaporware as a target platform for releasing and scheduling purposes.

We started with Windows Forms for our work because we were familiar with the code. (We did use MVC pattern using MVCsharp). We _meant_ to switch to WPF but we never made the leap. There are UI-controls you can buy (with source) which you can use as plug and play. There are a few popular vendors.

Windows Forms still look ugly (lipstick on a pitbull kind of thing)

WPF is supposed to be a panacea with XAML being markup and that letting you generate "fluid-UI" just like HTML with auto-resizing and scaling as in the browser for your web-app.

I'd explore WPF and figure out a MVC-pattern library for separation of concerns.

Hope this helps.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks.

> _You probably want your app to run on both XP and 7?_

No, we're only targeting Windows 7 and up. This is a personal itch we're scratching. The commercial angle is a bonus ... for now!

> _8 is vaporware as a target platform for releasing and scheduling purposes._

What about, say, 4 to 6 months from now? That's the timeline we're thinking of right now.

> _WPF is supposed to be a panacea with XAML being markup and that letting you > generate "fluid-UI" just like HTML with auto-resizing and scaling as in the > browser for your web-app._

I've read a bit about WPF. It sounds amazing. My major concern is: will it be actively developed in the future? I know Microsoft will never break backward compatibility, but will they keep adding new things to WPF? That's what's been bugging me.

But I guess having this discussion is fruitless. After all, what choice do we have besides WPF?

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> There are many people out there wondering the same thing - the Win8 HTML/JS announcement has thrown the rumor mill into a frenzy.

My advice - wait one month for BUILD (<http://www.buildwindows.com/>).

(disclosure - I work at Microsoft)

<comment><AUTHOR> Ah. I suppose we'll start working on the core of our application now and decide on the UI later.

Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Pick up Visual Studio Express (Visual C# Express) for starters:

[http://www.microsoft.com/visualstudio/en- us/products/2010-ed...](http://www.microsoft.com/visualstudio/en- us/products/2010-editions/express)

If you have a .edu or other edu-type email address, sign up for the DreamSpark program and get a bunch of software for free at <http://www.dreamspark.com>.

Windows Forms is NOT deprecated, nor is WPF.

The good news is that you can jump in anywhere and the skills you learn will help you down the road. WinForm and, even moreso, WPF programming will help you if you wish to jump into Silverlight.

It's all the same crap and you'll be able to transition easily. I've been playing with WPF and Silverlight as of late. Perhaps you should start with WPF.

You can write your app in whatever today and it probably won't be deprecated for at least a decade, but in the current eco-system of WinForms/WPF/Silverlight it's pretty easy to transition code if you keep it clean.

</comment><comment><USER5> There are many graphics APIs for Windows. Which one is best for you depends entirely on what kind of application you are building, which you have not told us.

I would not worry about Microsoft deprecating an API in "6-8 months". Microsoft has been extraordinarily diligent in maintaining old APIs; I know of new desktop application development being done in WinForms, and 20-year old 16-bit MFC applications that are still being used.

If you are building an application now, choose the best API now. Do not worry about what will happen in 6-8 months, because by then there will be another new API coming. Waiting for the ultimate API means you will never start.

</comment><comment><USER6> I don't want to sound like a live-free-or-die-hard FOSS fanboy (even though I am), but, you could always use an open toolkit like Qt or GTK. They're ubiquitous, and especially in Qt's case, totally customisable in terms of look & feel. Microsoft can't perform any cathedral-style deprecation (cannibalization) to these toolkits.

<comment><USER7> Qt all the way for windows app

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> My suggestion would be to use Silverlight :

1.Single codebase between Mac & Windows

2.Out of browser support

3.Rich UI capabilities <http://www.silverlight.net/showcase>

Seeismic Desktop 2 is a good example .</comment>


Bellingcat journalists targeted by failed phishing attempt - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2019/07/27/bellingcat-targeted-failed-phishing-attempt/ <comment><USER2> "The researchers use open-source intelligence and information gathering where police, law enforcement and intelligence agencies often fail."

intel agencies may succeed but they certainly are not shouting their success to the skies except in rare cases. Open source intelligence gathering isn't always about one-upping the intelligence agencies! It's about retrieving information that can inform the public and isn't locked away by intelligence and political actors.

<comment><USER3> Bellingcat to me looks like a way for intelligence agencies to announce their results to the world without saying how they figured this stuff out.

It's very easy to do this 'open source journalism' if you already have the answers via an NSA tipoff.

<comment><USER4> Not sure why the NSA would squander all the positive publicity of identifying those GRU officers that killed Skripal. OTOH, you could also argue that not stopping them at the border was a failure.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Statement from ProtonMail: [https://protonmail.com/blog/bellingcat- cyberattack-phishing/](https://protonmail.com/blog/bellingcat-cyberattack- phishing/)

<comment><USER6> There is this interesting part:

> Furthermore, the attackers attempted to exploit an unpatched vulnerability > in an open source software that is widely used by email providers in an > effort to bypass spam and abuse filters. We were previously aware of this > vulnerability and have already been watching it for some time, but we will > not disclose it here because the software in question is not developed by > ProtonMail, and it has not yet been patched by the software maintainers. > This vulnerability, however, is not widely known and indicates a higher > level of sophistication on the part of the attackers.

So there's a yet unfixed vulnerability, but some email provider knows about it and also probably some russian spies. Yet protonmail doesn't want to disclose it. Why do they know about it in the first place? Who else knows about it?

<comment><USER5> The phishing mail spoofed email@example.com, which should have been caught by SPF and DMARC.

And protonmail-to-protonmail should be E2E encrypted and authenticated.

Many unanswered questions here about how this got past ProtonMail to users.

<comment><USER7> Nice observation. Maybe the vulnerability might be related to spoofing SPF and other security mechanism? They should be fixing this by now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> ga-vu ThreatConnect source: [https://threatconnect.com/blog/building-out-protonmail- spoof...](https://threatconnect.com/blog/building-out-protonmail-spoofed- infrastructure/)

The article glosses over attack details and mumbles about 'Russia is bad' for three-quarters of the text

<comment><USER8> I don't understand why you take onus with the Russian state/Fancy Bear aspect of the story. They seem to be addressed in the same spirit in both articles.

<comment><USER9> It you look at the indicators of compromise that law enforcement shared on Fancy Bear and Grizzly Steppe you would notice that a large portion of the IP address are tied to VPN providers like Hide My Ass. Attribution is very very very hard.

[https://krebsonsecurity.com/2017/08/blowing-the-whistle- on-b...](https://krebsonsecurity.com/2017/08/blowing-the-whistle-on-bad- attribution/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The language in the phishing mail comes off as awkward and ingenuine.

<comment><USER11> It's very poor English.

I find it hard to believe that a state actor couldn't put together a spoof email written in good idiomatic English if it really wanted to.

But from my limited experience of Russian troll farms they seem to be staffed by younger people who don't respect Westerners and think any action is a bit of a joke, so attention to detail may not be their main interest.

They're effectively a kind of weaponised Russian version of 4chan, not a professional intelligence department or PR machine.

<comment><USER12> This is interesting. Do you have more information to share about this topic?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> s/Bellingcat/SomethingAwful Posters/g</comment>


Deck-build – A powerful and tiny bash framework to build custom Docker images - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/flexos-io/doc/wiki/deck_build <comment><USER2> I took over a Dockerfile that called out to ansible for all the heavy lifting, presumably because that's what the authors knew and liked.

Translating to individual RUN lines removed 100s of lines of code, and vastly sped up the build process. In addition the build process should be more familiar to future Dockerfile devs, who can see the entire build in one file and don't need to learn an extra tool.

Wrt this project, how well does it use Dockers build cache? And is it really better than idiomatic Dockerfile when you account for future developers?

<comment><AUTHOR> Build cache is supported ([https://bit.ly/2S8Z3oi](https://bit.ly/2S8Z3oi)), it's the job of the user to structure his code wisely (same as with docker RUN commands). And: No, it's not "better", it's a different approach. Like most/any other community solution it will not replace the standard Dockerfile process :)

<comment><USER2> Thanks for the link

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> This combines two of my least-favourite things.

If anything, Dockerfiles are already too powerful[^]. It's trivial to zoom into an exciting world of asset opacity and rotting bits.

 _Images_ are very useful, though. Insofar as they are liberated from the sins of Dockerfiles, there's a bright future ahead.

I don't see bash as such a liberator. Swapping one mess for a different mess still leaves me in a state of resentful squalor.

Disclosure: I work on Cloud Native Buildpacks ([https://buildpacks.io](https://buildpacks.io)), so I have a horse in this race. We're getting near to our first beta release.

[^] The original, pre-dang-editing title was something like "Dockerfiles not powerful enough?"

<comment><USER4> >> If anything, Dockerfiles are already too powerful

How? Why doesn't docker allow me to arbitrarily copy files, create any layers and execute shell commands from command-line instead, as opposed to a Dockerfile?

<comment><USER5> Can't you via `docker exec` or do I misunderstand the ask?

<comment><USER6> You can't `docker exec` unless the container is running, so you first need to `docker run` something. (Like an infinite sleep loop, like `bash -c 'while true; sleep 60; done'`.)

You can create images via just `docker`, but it's a wee bit hard to do, IMO. IIRC, the docker command that captures the resulting image will by default also change the entrypoint to whatever the `run` was, which isn't helpful.

<comment><USER4> >> You can create images via just `docker`, but it's a wee bit hard to do, IMO.

Also if you do that, then you can't edit the ENTRYPOINT without adding another layer because docker can't edit the respective json in the .tar file directly.

As in - it has the documented functionality to do so in the "POST /commit" API, but that would never work and that parameter will be simply ignored.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> You can already run whatever commands you want when creating a Docker image, including your own shell scripts. It isn't clear to me why one would want to use this.

<comment><AUTHOR> You are right, deck-build doesn't have any magic regarding the build process (this is part of the concept). But:

1.) It bundles a lot of useful functions ([https://bit.ly/2N9mAEu](https://bit.ly/2N9mAEu)) in the "kit": Have a look at this gist: [https://bit.ly/2Nby0HZ](https://bit.ly/2Nby0HZ) \- Four lines to create a container with two users (foo and root) including their own python packages installed in their home directories (PIP_USER=1).

2.) It's very easy to expand the kit and the plan/artefact concept helps to structure and reuse code ([https://bit.ly/2BEIcnH](https://bit.ly/2BEIcnH)) stored on your local disk or in repositories.

<comment><USER5> Why would I use this tool for 1) instead of Make or just throw CMD useradd -m foo into my Dockerfile?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, your are both right, of course you can RUN "useradd ...". But we have often made the experience that we need to run more complex processes during docker builds (with if...else conditions etc.) resulting in complex Dockerfile RUNs. Bundling and reusing this code in plans/artefacts is very useful. In the end we use docker-build to create our images, of course it's not intended to be a substitution for the great (docker hub) image concept.

<comment><USER5> _But we have often made the experience that we need to run more complex processes during docker builds (with if...else conditions etc.) resulting in complex Dockerfile RUNs_

That's fair, I've come across those types of scenarios as well, but trying to solve them during docker build seems like you're giving yourself, and inheritors of your docker image a lot of unnecessary extra work. Shouldn't those processes be solved independently of the docker daemon, and the results fed to Docker when it's ready for them?

<comment><AUTHOR> I am not sure if I understand your comment correctly, but we all know that there is a very large range of image requirements. Some of them need to be solved during builds (e.g. sometimes you want to distinguish between dev and production setups), other will be processed during container setup.

You are right regarding inheritors. Creating a docker-hub image has differnent requirements than creating images for your private environment.

<comment><USER5> I guess I'm not entirely understanding how the scenarios you bring up to myself and others aren't sufficiently solved in the current Dockerfile implementation, along with other command-line tools that I can use immediately or retrieve trivially. A 'framework' for bash + docker feels a bit anti- pattern-y/or at least the benefits just aren't obvious for the way my team uses Docker presently.

That said, if what you've put together has solved problems for your team, maybe it will for others, so don't let my incredulity spoil anyone else's curiosity who reads these comments later.

<comment><AUTHOR> In the meantime I have realized that the term "framework" is very missleading... ;) But you're pointing out a crucial point. IMO, the need of many Show-HN solutions is often not fully understandable in the first moment. But when processes and requirements change over time, sometimes these solutions are remembered again and can be a starting point for own ideas. That's one of the reasons why I read HN :) Thank you for your constructive comments!

<comment><USER5> _when processes and requirements change over time, sometimes these solutions are remembered again and can be a starting point for own ideas._

You have a good point, here. Thanks for the responses and helping me understand your work a bit better!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> There are three aspects of Docker that aren't too bad in itself (and have obvious or logical reasons), but taking them together leads to close coupling and code duplication:

\- There is no composition of images, but only inheritance

\- Shell scripts can't define any environmental variables that will survive beyond the script itself

\- Docker doesn't have any way to take or template values from other Dockerfiles

That means that you might be able to separate RUN logic out into shell script (like the method deck-build proposes), so that you can compose multiple tools into the same image. Still any ENV variables that your tools might need (if only a simple $PATH) need to be manually copied into the composing Dockerfile and maintained when changes occur.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thx for your constructive summary. Not sure what you mean with "tools might need" but deck-build only needs some well defined ENVs ([https://bit.ly/2TSTImv](https://bit.ly/2TSTImv)). Regarding shell scripts used in RUN commands: Why not COPY a conf file that will be sourced by every script?

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> If you find yourself using complicated custom methods with Dockerfiles, you should probably be building Linux packages, publishing to a local repo, and installing them from the Dockerfile. You gain the idempotent, immutable, versioned, system integrated, dependency-mapped, cryptographically verifiable, remotely distributed, cacheable benefits, and you don't have to adopt any new software or systems.

Your organization can follow any workflow/lifecycle it wants to build and publish the packages. Once they are published, developers can just install and use them with no learning curve whatsoever.

<comment><USER10> And to create those packages, I've found fpm[1] a joy to use. [1] [https://github.com/jordansissel/fpm](https://github.com/jordansissel/fpm)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> This reminds me a bit of the container image builder "Kubler" ([https://github.com/edannenberg/kubler](https://github.com/edannenberg/kubler)) which is also configured with Bash scripts.

Just creating a cross-reference for the interested here :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you, I didn't know and will have a look :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Check out buildah, it's a tool that builds container images using real shell commands, with no big fat Docker daemon necessary. So instead of a COPY command, you can just use cp.

</comment><comment><USER13> Why not just use buildah?

<comment><USER14> Came here to mention this. I loved rkt for the fact that I didn't need a special syntax for a file. Instead, just a shell script that built the image I needed. Honestly when it comes to deployments, it was much better for us to just get everything into one big layer and move on.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I will be sad if I ever need to spend significant amounts of time configuring docker, or any deployment system.</comment>


Improving my programmer skills - <AUTHOR> How can I make the jump from knowing a programming language to constructing actual projects? <comment><USER2> Think of a small project you'd like to work on, something very small that you can sit down and work on for about an hour. You'll realize that once you start writing some code, you'll want to continue improving and adding more "features".

It helps to think of some of your projects as a learning tool.

Don't hesitate to reinvent the wheel, you should definitely try rebuilding something that's out there and you're familiar with it. It'll give you guidance on what needs to come next and when it can feel "complete", I bet you'll find a lot of tricky parts of that being things that appear to be very simple at first. E.g. for a web project, for me, I always spend a lot of time figuring out how to best organize a project, seems very simple in hindsight but sometimes I just don't think about it when starting a project.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm by no means a proficient programmer so take it with a pinch of salt.

Learning syntax is easy, the art form is morphing that knowledge into something that's actually got a function or purpose, then making something that's maintainable and secure is a whole different game again.

Most of my programming skill was improved from writing small apps to solve something, generally something part of the day job that was boring, menotinous or time consuming.

When I'm going to benefit from the output it's far easier to be motivated, I find it much harder to code on side projects as they're benefiting others more than myself...

Keep expanding and improving your small scripts, and you'll eventually end up with a "system" which does a load of different jobs, then improve that system

</comment><comment><USER4> You know, imo the funniest thing happens when you find a small project that's interesting: you solve it by writing the solution. But then wowie, suddenly there's the thrill, the adrenaline rush, and boom! you're now asking, what can I solve next? It happens to people putting in patches for open-source stuff, or whatever coding it is that gets you excited.

I wouldn't say start small, or learn anything in particular. My suggestion: get excited, get pumped up, find something fun to do and do it! Project euler and /r/dailyprogrammer are imo both ways to amp up the fun and get in the zone.

</comment><comment><USER5> You have to practice. What sorts of projects would you like to work on? Just knowing the language is usually not enough; you'll have to learn some libraries and frameworks. Also, most people learn the important stuff on the job.

</comment><comment><USER6> One tactic I've used is start with modifying something that already exists - something you kind of like already.

Certainly as you work with it you will have changes, as you work with it you will get the feel of the structure and mod it all the ways you want to see if you can do it different or better. Once you've groked that project a bit you will realize the basics of writing yours from scratch, make something maybe borrow code, it get easier and more you as you work on stuff.</comment>


U.S. Soldiers Accidentally Reveal Secret Bases with Jogging App - <AUTHOR> http://chicago.cbslocal.com/2018/01/29/jogging-app-secret-military-bases/ <comment><USER2> More at [https://www.cnn.com/2018/01/28/politics/strava-military- base...](https://www.cnn.com/2018/01/28/politics/strava-military-bases- location/index.html):

"From the site, it's possible to identify individuals' running routes, and around military bases users had posted profile photos of themselves wearing military uniforms."

This seems incredibly stupid. Is training of military personnel really this lacking?</comment>


British aerospace company claims biggest engine advance since the jet - <AUTHOR> http://uk.reuters.com/article/2012/11/28/uk-science-spaceplane-idUKBRE8AR0R520121128 <comment><USER3> The BBC article, <http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-20510112> has some nice explanatory graphics.

It appears they are using a liquid nitrogen boiler to chill a helium loop through their heat exchanger and in turn chill the air.

So, perhaps someone better at these calculations can help out, cooling incoming air by 160°C by moving nitrogen from -195°C to -15°C is going to require them to haul up liquid nitrogen and cool a bunch of atmospheric nitrogen that they don't really need. The heat of vaporization is the key that will make their solution win, but by what factor? How many grams of nitrogen must they haul to chill a gram of atmospheric oxygen?

<comment><USER4> The liquid nitrogen is just used for the ground tests. On the Skylon itself, this cooling capacity will come from boiling the liquid hydrogen fuel.

<comment><USER5> Skylon would basically use the cryogenic fuel as a giant internal heat sink.

A more fanciful application of the concept: <http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/StealthInSpace>

<comment><USER6> How is this different to HOTOL ?

<comment><USER7> Similar concept, different design.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Elon Musk was specifically asked about this technology when he was at Martin School last week. He didn't hear about it, but he seemed skeptical that it would work better than rockets. His response here:

<http://youtu.be/c1HZIQliuoA?t=48m55s>

SpaceX might still be the first one with a re-usable rocket if they finish the Raptor engine in 3 years. Plus, his could actually be used to land on Mars, while this can only be useful where you still have atmosphere and oxygen - <USER2> only for launches to orbit.

But it's great to see more private companies competing in this area. And even if nothing comes out of it for space travel, it might still turn out be a useful technology for airplanes.

<comment><USER9> > so only for launches to orbit

Isn't that our biggest challenge right now? I like how dismissive you are of it, like we have somehow overcome that and are now on our way to Mars any day now.

If someone was able to reduce the cost of going into orbit by as little as 10% that would be a MASSIVE achievement. Getting out of the atmosphere is still a massively costly, logistical, and dangerous challenge.

<comment><USER10> But you don't reduce the cost of going into orbit by 10%. Not even in the absurdly best case.

Let us take Elon at his word that increasing the size of the booster stage by 5-10% can replace these engines entirely, and assume that it actually is 10%. The booster stage is mostly fuel, which varies as volume, but the costs are all in the metal part, which scales as area. So this size increase costs you at most 6.6%. It actually costs less because the complicated rocket thrusters are left unchanged. So let's say 5%.

But we're not reducing the cost of the whole rocket by 5%, just the booster stage. If we assume that the booster stage is, say, 70% of the rocket we're only saving a maximum of 3.5% in reductions on the existing rocket components.

But we haven't yet factored in the cost of the new component. Which is, after all, very much like the existing engines except more complicated. In a Falcon 9 we have 9 rockets, so each one is about 11% of the cost of the total. If we strap on 3 of these new things, which are much like rockets except more complicated because of the whole hybrid thing, they each can cost a maximum of about 1.2% of the total cost to stay within our budget.

So unless these things, which are more complicated than rockets, cost you 1/10th as much, you don't get any cost saving at all. It is difficult to see how they can be this cheap.

Meanwhile, back in reality, Elon has plans to reduce the cost to orbit by another factor of 10 in a similar time frame to when these might actually become commercially available. (He's already reduced launch costs by a factor of 10.)

A large part of how he's managed to reduce costs so much is that he does this kind of common sense analysis in his sleep, and uses it to ignore everything he has to ignore, and zero in on what he needs to pay attention to. The numbers on this technology simply don't add up for space.

(But they don't have to. A practical technology to double the speed of jets by a factor of 2 will be extremely interesting to various militaries. Plus the potential savings for the existing airline industry - which is a much, much bigger market than space right now - means that they are going to have no shortage of potential customers. Elon is simply not one of them.)

<comment><USER11> A tank's weight is proportional to volume, not surface area, assuming equal pressure and material strength.

Also, you often can't just simply stretch tanks - you need to increase thrust. Otherwise your payload drops because of lower T/W and more gravity losses in early flight.

<comment><USER10> _A tank's weight is proportional to volume, not surface area, assuming equal pressure and material strength._

The weight of a full tank, yes.

The weight of an empty tank, no. An empty tank is mostly a shell, and the size of that shell corresponds to area.

 _Also, you often can't just simply stretch tanks - you need to increase thrust. Otherwise your payload drops because of lower T/W and more gravity losses in early flight._

I am assuming that Elon Musk's 5-10% estimate takes things like this into account.

Incidentally "early flight" in this case is very early. At the ground, oxygen levels are a bit over 20%. But as you go up, oxygen drops off faster than nitrogen, so oxygen intake falls off slower than drag. At some point you'll gain nothing. I do not know what that point is, but the oxygen/nitrogen level is part of why it is most efficient for commercial airlines to fly at around 9 km high. So it is really just a few km that you get a potential benefit. But your top speed at that moment is a pretty small fraction of what you need to get to orbit.

<comment><USER11> Nope, the shell. In a bigger tank (similar material and pressure) the shell has to be thicker. It's mathematically trivial.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This is just rocket-based combined-cycle propulsion that has been proposed and studied by various organizations over the years.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocket-based_combined_cycle>

[http://investor.gencorp.com/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=7085...](http://investor.gencorp.com/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=708513)

[http://www.isset.org/nasa/nano/www.grc.nasa.gov/WWW/AERO/bas...](http://www.isset.org/nasa/nano/www.grc.nasa.gov/WWW/AERO/base/ccp.htm)

The concept is not new, but Reaction is probably the closest to a commercial implementation. Also, it's not fair to compare it to the jet when RBCC isn't a fundamentally novel form of propulsion, just a combination of existing ones (like a car that is both gas and electric propelled). This is not something that could supplant the jet.

Some people are comparing this to SpaceX's pure-rocket approach. Up until yesterday, SpaceX and Scaled were working on their own type of combined-cycle launch with Stratolaunch: [http://www.flightglobal.com/news/articles/stratolaunch- and-s...](http://www.flightglobal.com/news/articles/stratolaunch-and-spacex- part-ways-379516/). The difference is that the jet and rocket would be separate vehicles instead of fitting into one nacelle. It'd have some of the advantages of using air as propellant as with a RBCC engine, but easier to design I think.

<comment><USER11> The precooler / heat exchanger is the SABRE's distinction. Ramjets and scramjets don't have such. It enables low internal gas velocity and small compressors and more thrust from a smaller engine and higher top speed than jets.

It's like saying when the Wankel was invented that "it's just another internal combustion engine". Sure, it is, but it's quite different from most of the others.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> The MAGLEV Launcher.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocket_sled_launch>

<http://www.reallyrocketscience.com/node/2393>

Using MAGLEV as a launch assist technology to offset the amount of energy derived from burning tons and tons of fuel. Some of the articles estimate a potential to increase payload by 80% compared to a conventionally launched rocket.

If you want to get a little deeper into it, this is a good read:

[http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/58/Maglifter...](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/58/Maglifter_Mankins.pdf)

Some fun data points:

        Power for large scale system: 10GW for 20 seconds.
        Thermal Management system capable of dissipating 40GJ.

What's the probability of this ever being built? In the US, my guess is zero. I could see the Chinese throwing money behind such a crazy project if the numbers make any sense at all. If a system like this can significantly reduce cost to orbit it could represent a huge competitive advantage.

<comment><USER14> The payoff would be immense though. At datacenter electricity prices, the fundamental energy cost to LEO is about 50¢/kg.

<comment><USER15> Fuel (energy) cost is less than 1% of the cost to launch. The big costs are manpower, maintenance, and refurbishment.

<comment><USER16> That was the interesting takeaway from the Elon Musk talk about how cheap the fuel was compared to everything else. Having the Skylon be reusable then shifts some of the operational costs back to fuel.

Of course a plane that can fly a Mach 5 and 100,000' has other uses, the most obvious one being the SR-71 replacement. Nothing like a bit of high speed aerial surveillance "right now" to help folks on the ground make better decisions. I'm sure _someone_ would pony up the $400M they need.

<comment><USER15> Yes, but having anything be reusable does that. If you can make up what you would have gained with Skylon by making the fuel tank 5% larger, then the opportunity cost of developing a radically new engine isn't worth it. Mach 5 does have other uses, though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> From the article: "The company has deliberately avoided filing patents on its heat exchanger technology to avoid details of how it works - particularly the method for preventing the build-up of frost - becoming public."

I would think that for something like this, the patent system would actually work fine. Anybody who tries to make this is going to be located in the US, Canada, Western Europe, or Japan. It's not like they're going to make cheap ones in China and India, and if they did it would be easily correctable with the WTO. What am I missing?

<comment><USER18> SpaceX doesn't have any patents either. Musk has specifically said this is because in the long term their main competitors are the chinese, who treat patents as recipe books.

<comment><USER17> I appreciate the argument about SpaceX (and the other thoughtful replies to my question). I just think that this case is fundamentally different from a rocket company. This is something that, to make profit, would need to be used by global airlines, where patent laws are much more enforceable.

My thinking boils down to this: if SpaceX comes up with a novel, patentable way to improve rocketry, China can steal it.

If these guys come up with a much faster aircraft engine, even if China made them for cheap, they could and would prevent United, Lufthansa, BA, and the other big airlines from using it.

China can steal IP when it is used internally, or sold as consumer goods to other countries that violate patent laws. They can't steal IP and sell it to large multinationals.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Unfortunate title here - British Aerospace was involved in the project some years ago, but Reaction Engines is a distinct company and I believe they exist despite BAe's "assistance"

<comment><USER20> As an American, I parsed the title as "a British aerospace company..." not "the British Aerospace company..."

<comment><USER21> As an Englishman, I parsed the title the same way as you did, though I did wonder if it meant BA.

<comment><USER22> BA is British Airways. BAE Systems is the new name for what used to be British Aerospace, which used BAe as its abbreviation, to avoid confusion with BA.

I don't know why it bothers me, but I really dislike the used-to-be-an- acronym-but-not-any-more names. For example SRI (not affiliated with Stanford so the S doesn't mean that any more), and my least favourite "HRL Laboratories" which we have to pretend does not expand to "Hughes Research Laboratories Laboratories". Yuk.

<comment><USER23> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAS_syndrome>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The problem with these advanced technologies is two fold

1\. it requires a large amount of hydrogen - which is not heavy so it looks good on paper but is very cold and voluminous, meaning you need huge insulated tanks. They are expensive to build, have bad mass fraction and are aerodynamically problematic. Hydrogen is also expensive to handle in systems and infrastructure.

2\. the dry mass of an air breathing engine sucks because they process gases (rockets process liquids with 1000x density), though SABRE is better than stuff like scramjets. This is especially bad for an SSTO like they are proposing since you carry the inlets and precoolers and all that all the way to orbit.

My bet for cheap spaceflight would be a two stage kerosene-oxygen rocket. A SABRE engine might make a great first stage but I doubt if you would want to carry it to orbit. I haven't performed much calculations though.

<comment><USER24> That was my first thought - Hydrogen has low energy density, even in frozen form. That is the thing that holds Hydrogen cars back more than anything else - tiny range for massive (and costly, and complex) fuel tanks. The same would have to apply to both airplane and rocket designs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> I think the first article I read about Sabre was on HN so it's nice to see it getting followed up.

The technology sounds like it's progressing, even if parts of it are still heavily conceptual, and getting a sign off from the ESA is quite a big step (even if certain space company founders have dissed them recently). The last I read was they were struggling to find funding, which is on one hand utterly surprising as if it works properly then it's got the potential to revolutionise travel and who wouldn't like to say "yeah, I put money in before they were famous", and on the other isn't a surprise at all as the returns are probably a decade out.

Still, I wait patiently and optimistically for when Britain is showing everyone that whilst we were slow off the mark on the space race we aren't out of it yet.

</comment><comment><USER26> Here's a documentary that was broadcast on BBC4 a couple of months ago about Bond and his quixotic journey to get HOTOL/Skylon into the sky:

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vZ_a21fPkYM>

It includes a test-firing of the new heat-exchanger at the end.

<comment><USER19> One of those truly inspirational stories, where people dedicate their lives over decades to an idea and see it through. Granted, their aircraft isn't yet built, but they're well on the way.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Article from the BCC at <http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science- environment-20510112>

</comment><comment><USER28> Someone asked on another list for an explanation of the press release. This is my try.

Hypersonic engines are up against hard physics. The ram air heats so much in the inlet that it's hard for combustion to add much energy to make it go faster out the back.

The idea behind the SABRE engines is to cool the ram air before it is compressed. The heat exchanger to do this is what the press release is all about. With not much more than a ton of mass, it sucks 400 MW of heat out of the incoming air, dropping the temperature from 1500 C to -150 C in a few inches of heat exchanger that looks much like fabric because the tubes are so tiny.

The engine cycle also uses the temperature difference between the ram air and the LH2 to run the compressor. It takes close to 2/5th of the energy from burning hydrogen to liquefy it. The engines recover much of this by running a helium turbine on the temperature difference between the ram air and the liquid hydrogen flow to the engines. The turbine powers the compressor stage that raises the pressure of the -150 C air to rocket chamber pressure.

The design is extremely clever thermodynamics which also avoids most of the metallurgical problems of high temperature. Fabricating the air to helium heat exchanger was a very hard task. They have miles of tiny tubing, tens of thousands of brazed joints and they don't leak!

Using these engines and breathing air, the vehicle reaches 26 km and about a quarter of the velocity to orbit giving an equivalent exhaust velocity (back calculate from hydrogen consumption) of 9 km/s. That's twice as good as the space shuttle main engines. It is expected to go into orbit with 15 tons of payload out of 300 or 5% even though the rest of the acceleration is on internal oxygen that only gives 4.5 km/s exhaust velocity.

Leaving out the oxygen and using big propulsion lasers to heat hydrogen reaction mass, such a vehicle would get 25% of takeoff mass to LEO, reducing the already low cost by a factor of 5. That's enough to change the economics of power satellites from being too expensive to consider to a cost substantially less expensive than any fossil fuel.

But try explaining any of this in a press release.

</comment><comment><USER29> I wonder how this will impact air travel. It is a real shame that after Concord retired there is no supersonic jetliner in service, which at least kept the dream alive even if Concord is expensive and short legged. I believe no viable program exists right now for supersonic jetliners. The problem, if I recall correctly from my aerospace professor, is not the jet engine's thrust but heat generated from friction with air. If this Sabre engine can get the airplane mostly out of atmosphere cheaply, heat problem can be alleviated. I don't know how practical my guess is, but if it works, the market potential is immense.

</comment><comment><USER30> This guy has been at this in various forms for 30 years. Amazing story and for once not completely fucked up by the British Govt, unlike our aerospace industry after WWII that was world leading.

</comment><comment><USER31> > This core piece of technology solves one of the constraints that limit jet > engines to a top speed of about 2.5 times the speed of sound, which Reaction > Engines believes it could double

Is that 2.5 times the speed of sound limit just for jets at low altitude? At high altitude it is certainly not true. Both the SR-71 and MiG 25 did well over Mach 3.

<comment><USER14> They mean turbojets ("conventional" jet engines). The SR-71 doesn't use a conventional jet engine.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_SR-71_Blackbird#Engine...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_SR-71_Blackbird#Engines)

> _A unique hybrid, the engine can be thought of as a turbojet inside a > ramjet. At lower speeds, the turbojet provided most of the compression and > most of the energy from fuel combustion. At higher speeds, the turbojet > largely ceased to provide thrust; instead, air was compressed by the shock > cones and fuel burned in the afterburner._

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Does anyone have guesses on how the heat exchanger might work to prevent frost?

Perhaps ultrasound?

<comment><USER32> How about dividing the heat exchanger into two sections? One section cools the air while the other section defrosts, and then alternate.

<comment><USER33> That was my first guess too. With that many pipes, they could have many sections which migrate the frosty sections down into the engine in waves.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Sounds like quite a disruptive innovation in the aerospace industry. Always wondered how much it cost to get innovations like this off the ground. $400m funding round sounds pretty serious...

<comment><USER35> That's the blind, the bet required to play, in aerospace, it's not a lot of money at all by their standards.

<comment><USER36> Or by social media standards. I know it's a rather over-used meme now, but I'm again reminded of Instagram's $1b buyout vs. this.

This seems like a good blue-sky venture for a scientific philanthropist. There's a lot that could go wrong, it might not work (though as pointed out elsewhere, this isn't all theory - they _have_ tested the heat exchanger in real life on a proper jet engine), but it could be a big win. If only someone like Gates could put down $400m for a chance of a big pay off later.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Personally I'm always more intrigued by the prospect of getting around the world quicker. Making the world a smaller place, and more accessible to all, would do wonders for humanity.

<comment><USER38> You're missing the "cheaper" part that would be required to make it accessible to all.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> I don't see where this technology "fits". When you're going to orbit, 90% of the flight takes place outside the atmosphere, so an air-breathing engine doesn't do much for you.

For commercial sub-orbital hops, they'll have to bring the cost down considerably to compete with existing air service. Sure, we'd all love to be able to go from NYC to Frankfurt in an hour. But how many people will pay ten thousand dollars for the privilege?

<comment><USER40> Given that people already spend multiples of ten thousand dollars to fly it in greater comfort at "normal" speeds, I suspect there is already a significant market.

<comment><USER39> The numbers are too small to justify a separate design. This is why Concorde failed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> I'll maybe believe it when I learn more. That it's an idea on paper only means it's way too early to tell. I'm also wondering if they are relying on exotic building materials being developed in the future for this to work, like a previous expensive but failed US space-plane program.

<comment><USER19> The critical part (the cooling mechanism) has been fabricated, and validated in tests.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> This is great news, but it also makes me a bit sad - because all this innovation died down in the 80's when everyone lost interest in the space race. We could be 30 years further down the road already and many of us probably won't live to see people setting foot on Mars.

<comment><USER15> I think many of us will.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> Another discussion of this has broken out here:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4856986>

</comment><comment><USER44> "The company has deliberately avoided filing patents on its heat exchanger technology to avoid details of how it works - particularly the method for preventing the build-up of frost - becoming public."

Evidence that the main use case for patents - protecting true innovation and development - does not even need the patent system.

</comment><comment><USER45> I was skeptic about them so far, I would love to be proven wrong here.

</comment><comment><USER46> I'm sure some of you chuckleheads are going to figure out how to use this to OC some poor unassuming Ivy Bridge CPU...</comment>


Ask HN: Learning Web Development, where should I start? - <AUTHOR>

I recently came across this article: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=123903 and this was posted almost 7 years ago.Most people here suggest Perl/Ruby/Python.
I have recently started to learn MEAN stack, and I don't know if I am on the right track.
What is the best combination of frameworks/languages that you can use for webD, as of today? <comment><USER2> I would personally start with Python. It's easy to learn and super practical. You can use it in software development, statistics, scientific computation, dev ops, and, of course, web development.

Once you learn Python, it's much easier to learn JavaScript and/or Ruby.

Note: I am co-founder of Real Python ([https://realpython.com](https://realpython.com)), which teaches the Python syntax and web development through real world examples.

I also teach at a full-stack JavaScript bootcamp - [http://www.refactoru.com/](http://www.refactoru.com/) \- and am a mentor through [https://www.thinkful.com/](https://www.thinkful.com/) in Angular, Node, and Python.

Feel free to reach out with more questions - michael at realpython dot com.

Cheers!

P.S. - Curious about Python vs. Ruby? [https://github.com/mjhea0/python- ruby](https://github.com/mjhea0/python-ruby)

<comment><USER3> Thanks for posting that github link; it was really informative and well- written. Props to you, sir.

<comment><USER2> Cheers!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Learn the basics: HTML, CSS and client-side JavaScript without any frameworks, libraries or code generators.

Then do the same for the server-side, learn the basics of HTTP GET, POST (and others) with a language, no frameworks or libraries. I'm not saying write a web server from scratch but just learn the basics of how a browser communicates with a server. Pick Python, Perl or Ruby. Perl is where I learned this with CGI scripts, which nobody will admit to using these days likely.

Once you understand the basics of how a server sends content and how a browser renders it then start looking at frameworks, libraries, etc.

There are too many "camps" around what essentially are tools and it's better to know how things work at the basic level. You will then pick up new (to you) frameworks, libs, etc. pretty quickly.

</comment><comment><USER5> Among Perl, Ruby, Python and Javascript, which one do you _like_ to program in? Choose that one.

</comment><comment><USER6> Either PHP or Python for the server side. HTML5 + CSS + Javascript (jQuery + KnockoutJS are my favorites there) for the client side.

</comment><comment><USER7> JS + html/css. Take a look at [http://www.freecodecamp](http://www.freecodecamp) if you are looking for some good resources.

</comment><comment><USER8> Nothing is the overall "best". It all depends on what you need to build, and what you enjoy working with.

</comment><comment><USER9> i would suggest to start with html/css and JavaScript</comment>


Ask HN: Favorite books on how to be a good manager? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> For a more alternative view (not sure if it still counts as alternative as it's pretty well accepted, but in my experience not that well adopted, but the "rewards and incentives are bad, monitoring is bad, trust and autonomy is good" line)

* Drive, by Daniel Pink

* Punished by Rewards, by Alfie Kohen

* Flow, by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

I wrote about some of these ideas here [0]

For a more traditional approach

* High Output Management, by Andy Grove

* The Manager's Path, by Camille Fournier

* The Thing about Hard Things, by Ben Horowitz

Not specifically about management, but in general, if you haven't read Jonathan Haidt's "The Righteous Mind", you should do that first. This is the book that has changed the way I think and understand people the most, and has indirectly helped me more with management than all of the management focussed books combined.

And I just finished "The Mythical Man Month" which is definitely still a must- read decades after it was first published (get the 20th anniversary edition as it has a nice summary at the end, including where the author thinks he was right and where he admits freely what he got wrong).

[0] [https://www.codementor.io/garethdwyer/enter-the-zone- fight-i...](https://www.codementor.io/garethdwyer/enter-the-zone-fight- imposter-syndrome-and-unlock-intrinsic-motivation-kjpbpe5a5)

<comment><USER3> +1 for High Output Management. Great book.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> If your first thought is "Oh ----, I'm a manager now. How the hell do I do this?" I'd highly recommend The Effective Manager by Mark Horstman. It's prescriptive in a helpful way, and was brilliant in helping me find my footing when I started management.

His podcast Managager Tools is also excellent, and has deep archives addressing pretty much every question under the sun: [https://www.manager- tools.com/map-universe/hall-fame-highly-...](https://www.manager- tools.com/map-universe/hall-fame-highly-regarded-guidance)

</comment><comment><USER5> I would recommend books like Daniel Kahneman's "Thinking, Fast and Slow" and Dobelli's "The Art of Thinking Clearly". Maybe also "How to win friends and influence people" for good leadership mentality. And Erich Fromm's "The Art of Listening" for empathetic leadership.

I've read a couple of consulting books, but psychology books helped me more. Most good consulting books are essentially applied psychology books IMO.

Focussed on a related topic because most good books were already mentioned.

</comment><comment><USER6> Manager's Path by Camille Fournier is IMO the most practical book on engineering management in recent memory. Managing Humans by Michael Lopp is pretty good too.

</comment><comment><USER7> My favorites so far: High Output Management, Turn the Ship Around, Radical Candor, and the Five Dysfunctions of a Team.

</comment><comment><USER8> +1 Extreme Ownership +1 How to make friends and influence people

Leaders eat Last by Simon Sinek

Books by Adam Grant and his podcast. He is a brilliant organizational behavioral psychologist from Wharton. Even his Thursday advice tweets are great.

I highly recommend two of his podcast episodes. One on trust which featured an international team of astronauts that had to bond for a major mission in a very short time. The second on all stars and humility about an NBA player with 2 championship rings who makes everyone else on his team perform better when he's on the floor.

</comment><comment><USER9> "A Manager's Guide to Human Behavior, Fifth Edition" \- Really great book that will teach you how to manage an organization based on the behavior of employees, as well your own behavior. It's a great psychological analyzation book.

</comment><comment><USER10> A wee bit long but totally worth it - [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhagavad_Gita](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhagavad_Gita)

<comment><USER11> This is totally worth it. :) Plus reading about Chanakya Neeti is good.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> In addition to others already mentioned, "Becoming a Manager," by Linda Hill: follows a group of new managers for a year, discussing how their understanding of their role changes. Absolutely great - for a long time I kept a home copy and a work copy. Follow-up "Being the Boss" is also good. And "The Leadership Pipeline," by Ram Charan, Stephen Drotter, James Noel: what you need to learn/change to succeed at each different level of management.

</comment><comment><USER13> If you haven't read it, also read The Mindset by Carol Dweck. It's not about Management but in my view, it is very helpful for learning how to coach and mentor.

</comment><comment><USER11> I had some good insights from Work Rules! by Lazlo Bock - [https://www.workrules.net](https://www.workrules.net)

</comment><comment><USER14> Highly recommend The Hard Thing About Hard Things, Ben Horowitz. But it's a very high level view about being a CEO in a billion dollar company.

</comment><comment><USER15> Extreme Ownership: by Jocko Willink & Leif Babin

</comment><comment><USER16> The Effective Executive by Peter Drucker is a classic starter manual

<comment><USER17> Yep +1 for Drucker.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> \--> One Minute Manager

\--> Hard things about hard things

\--> The Phenix Project

\--> Measure what matters

</comment><comment><USER19> For me this one, even if not about the methodology itself but rather the mindset: Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time.

</comment><comment><USER20> I would recommend to read - Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency

</comment><comment><USER21> A study of the Popular Mind By Gustave Le Bou

</comment><comment><USER22> Need to bookmark that post.</comment>


Show HN: [WIP] an Automated IoT Indoor Garden - <AUTHOR> https://chlorobot.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> I'm building this project with my son (he's 6) and it is my first real venture into electrical engineering (aside from tearing DC motors from VCR's as a kid). There is still a lot to do and many unsolved issues but it's serious fun.

I understand the GitHub repo is bare, I'm trying to muster the bollocks to work with mains electricity first, then I can get to the code (I'm a system engineer + programmer by trade).

Feel free to ask any questions you may have - constructive criticism is quite welcome.

</comment><comment><USER2> Hey looks really cool. Have you checked out collaborizm.com I'm the CTO, we have maker projects and a community which helps users take their products to the next level.</comment>


Ask HN: Software developers: What percentage of your workday is fun? - <AUTHOR> Programming is fun, but in my experience software engineering is not. I would say about less than 8% of my day is fun, rest is testing, docs, emails, etc, which is needed, but not fun <comment><USER2> ~80% for varying values of fun.

<comment><AUTHOR> that sounds really good, are you self employed or work at a company?

<comment><USER2> I work at a very small company. There are only 4 developers: 3 full-time and 1 part-time.

A full work week is defined as 35 hours, 5 of which are to be spent on research/study.

So when you figure in the daily standup, I get to spend ~29 hours per week building things -- essentially protected from everything else.</comment></comment></comment>


Why you should wait on upgrading to .Net 4.6 - <AUTHOR> http://nickcraver.com/blog/2015/07/27/why-you-should-wait-on-dotnet-46

<comment><USER2> TL;DR : "The methods you call can get different parameter values than you passed in."</comment>


Git-mirror – Sync and serve Git mirrors locally - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/beefsack/git-mirror

<comment><AUTHOR> After the GitHub outage yesterday I decided to throw something together to keep Git mirrors up to date and serve them over HTTP. This is also a requirement we've had at work so it scratched a couple of itches for me.

Feedback and criticisms welcomed.</comment>


Parse Migrate - <AUTHOR> http://parse-migrate.rusic.com/ <comment><USER2> Keeping an eye on parse-hosting.com they have the most details about their plans and pricing so far. Do you have some more information? The landing is not informative at all. Would be interested to know what are you doing to offer.

</comment><comment><USER3> Sad that Facebook pulled the plug on this. They owned it for so long it is hard to imagine that it was an acquihire. Good luck to the Parse team. I am sure Adam and people like him can help users migrate away smoothly.

</comment><comment><USER4> We almost used Parse on a huge project recently. My thoughts go out to anyone who needs to consider migrating. This service looks like a good solution.</comment>