It's not just Flash for Mobile, Flex is dead too - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.adobe.com/flex/2011/11/your-questions-about-flex.html

<comment><USER3> I spent the last 3 years developing complex data visualization apps. We had strict constraints as to what kind of browsers we could expect(think government agencies) hence our use of Flash/Flex to build the rich apps our customers required. Flex helped us build some really cool stuff quickly, and had a rich ecosystem of tools, resources, and examples to draw upon. I'm really disappointed that Adobe didn't even provide some sort of gradual migration strategy. They basically took the only parachute in the airplane and jumped, yelling, "We are going to make it open source!" on the way out.

I have a difficult conversation waiting for me on Monday with my boss when I explain that our significant code base is now part of a legacy platform that the vendor has jettisoned. The software industry has an interesting gambling component: you bet on which language/technology/platform is going to be popular and hope for the best. Looks like I rolled snake-eyes.

<comment><USER4> Sorry mate, ever heard of vendor lock-in ? This is what happens adopting closed source technologies, they sounds great to start, then ... here you are.

Migrating to community-supported-free-open-source technologies "suddenly" makes sense.

<comment><USER5> Wasn't flex also open source at some point? I remember there was some hype about it a few years ago. At least the compiler and SDK were opened.

Back then I played around with it a bit and eventually concluded the new AS was basically a re-do of the Java language, library and ecosystem (even the bytecode was similar). I know there is a curse on Java in the browser, and making it look like Java helps enterprise adoption, but mirroring Java to that degree looked like a bit of a wasted effort.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I built a number of visualization and charting tools for a client of mine using Flex. They worked well, but printing was always problematic and once iPads started emerging, the "this won't work there" problem reared its head. The fix for me was to go back and re-implement what I'd built using Flot ... an HTML5-based visualization library. Migration was simple ... maintenance is much easier, and performance-wise, it loads faster than Flex ever did. For anyone in the same boat, I highly recommend checking Flot out.

<comment><USER7> In the environment where I used Flex printing was always a problem as well. There was an (understandable) expectation that they should be able to print out a meaningful representation of what they saw on the screen. A _huge_ source of pain.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> From the article:

 _Is Adobe still committed to Flex?_

 _Yes._

Seems like putting "Flex is dead" in the title is too much editorializing.

<comment><USER9> I believe the title is accurate. As with their last post regarding the death of mobile Flash, Adobe seems to have an unfortunate penchant for ambiguous language. Rather than just coming out and saying that they are putting Flex out to pasture and wish it well, they spin the news by reaffirming their commitment to Flex while admitting that the Flex team is moving to HTML-based projects. It's a confusing, seemingly contradictory message.

That said, I think it's admirable that Adobe is handing over stewardship of Flex to the Apache Foundation instead of just killing it outright. They should be commended for that, since many other companies seem unwilling to so. But given the long-term trajectory of technology trends, it does indeed seem likely that Flex's days are numbered.

<comment><USER10> It is not accurate, it's a lie. The product hasn't been cancelled, the SDK will continue to be developed. Which bit didn't you read?

<comment><USER11> Just like google wave isn't dead yet -- the apache foundation will continue wave... yeah, it's dead jim.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I don't even know what Flex is. Yes, that's ultimately ignorance on my part, but it's not the case with most other dev tech.

<comment><USER13> Flex is a library that sits on top of Flash that provides controls and a layout system.

Flash itself doesn't have the concept of a checkbox, drop down list, grids or any controls beyond a button. Flex adds these.

Flash also doesn't have any sort of layout system other than absolute positioning. Flex adds various layout controls.

It works pretty well, but also increases the size of your .swf file quite a bit.

<comment><USER14> So flex is to flash what DOM and CSS are to JavaScript? [coming from someone who has never done flash but loads of html5/js]

<comment><USER15> No. More like if you wrote a toolkit for displaying ui items in canvas (I think Mozilla did this with Ace/Bespin/Skywriter/whatever-its-called), then it would be equivalent to flex.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Pulling out of mobile, which is the present and future, hints a little at Adobe's focus now. Flash seems to have lost with mobile and now Flex being pulled, how long before desktop is EOL or sunsetted?

Flash 11 and Stage3D seemed a promising alternative to WebGL or competitive player, which will they choose there? Google had O3D and chose WebGL. But Flash would have supported IE and Unity and Unreal have committed to exporting to it since it is a low level and compiled render engine, it may be faster than WebGL with just javascript for some time or more steady across all browsers like Unity. Anyways, lots of questions on Adobe's direction... standards or not? and which ones?

<comment><USER17> Flash 11 and Stage3D aren't just a promising alternative to WebGL: they're the only viable alternative. WebGL only works in Firefox and Chrome (50% of the market) and, further, half of the Firefox and Chrome users don't have modern or secure enough GPUs or drivers to use WebGL.

Said plainly, WebGL only hits 1/4 of the desktop market. Stage3D/AGAL, on the other hand, are well designed and have an automatic software fallback. It will work on every machine, with one of the fastest software renderers known to me (I believe it's SwiftShader, please respond if you know more).

I really hope Flash 11 doesn't go away anytime soon because WebGL just isn't ready for ubiquity.

<comment><USER18> > half of the Firefox and Chrome users don't have modern or secure enough GPUs > or drivers to use WebGL

Fixed with current Firefox, as far as I know. The first release of Firefox with WebGL had an awful whitelist/blacklist system for video drivers, primarily due to them crashing when asked to do relatively basic initialization and operations. Now, Firefox has a sensible probing mechanism for video drivers, and as a result, almost any modern video driver will work just fine. (Certainly anything new enough to run OpenGL 2.0, which means all the graphics chipsets sold today, and those sold in the last few years.) Intel, ATI, and nVidia chipsets all work just fine; those represent the vast majority of the market at this point.

(Also, if a user's graphics drivers don't provide enough stability or security to work with WebGL, Flash won't improve that situation either.)

As for browser support, right now it works in released versions of Firefox and Chrome, and preview versions of Opera and desktop Safari. iOS 5 supports WebGL for iAds, and web content will likely follow soon; people have already figured out how to make it work using private APIs. As far as I know, current Android releases support WebGL as well. So, as usual, that just leaves Internet Explorer. (And even IE users have several possible alternatives, quite apart from upgrading to a better browser: plugins like IEWebGL, Chrome Frame, and even some attempts to use Java or Flash as a fallback.)

So, while WebGL support does need a bit more time to become sufficiently widespread, it seems likely to do so in the near future.

<comment><USER17> You missed my point entirely. Even if Flash has the same blacklist as Firefox/Chrome, it has a high-performance software implementation, meaning you can hit the entire market with Flash 11. Until IE gets WebGL, everyone out there updates their drivers, and the Intel GMA950 is no longer the top video card, WebGL just isn't ubiquitous enough.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> As Adobe mentioned, they are going to donate Flex SDK to community. Developing SDK is not a major problem. But development of underlying platform is. Can community trust Adobe that Flash Player runtime will be around for a longer time?

</comment><comment><USER20> As someone that has worked around and with flash for years, I say good riddance. Though there are portions of the flash 'product' I think are much stronger than HTML5 and javascript (specifically, I feel that actionscript 3 is lightyears ahead of javascript), Flex was always one of the weaker parts. It always came off as half baked and did not blend well with everything else. The whole concept of MXML files was ridiculously obtuse and only led to unmaintainable code.

<comment><USER21> I did some work with flex/mxml stuff about a year and a half ago, and frankly, it ranks as the worst software development environment I have had the displeasure to use. This includes the 8086 chip with 1 LED for debugging.

<comment><USER22> Hyperbole much? Having done UI work widt GTK and Swing, I can tell you that Flex (especially the newer spark component set) is much nicer.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Sorry, but I'm failing to see how this means it's dead... Things might change, but die?

Sounds a lot like people making things up to me...

<comment><USER24> Not good at this "reading between the lines" or even "facing the blatantly obvious" thing, then, eh?

What part of:

"Does Adobe recommend we use Flex or HTML5 for our enterprise application development?

In the long-term, we believe ##HTML5 will be the best technology## for enterprise application development.

We also know that, ##currently##, Flex has clear benefits for large-scale client projects typically associated with desktop application profiles."

Is hard to grasp?

<comment><USER23> It's a mature open-source framework - the Flash Player is getting some significant upgrades (Unity + Unreal engine with Stage3D), allowing many things not possible now, tomorrow or next year with HTML5/Js. I know I'll be using it on our projects this time next year, as will numerous other codeshops like ours.

This is all before you look at what becomes possible with executables created with 3rd party tools like SWFStudio & Zinc (where we roll our own native code into the release).

Sorry, but even this time next year, there's going to be nothing around that approaches what we are doing with these tools now, in the timeframes and budgets we are doing them in (this part is key for our customers) - <USER2> me, we've evaluated all of them long & hard.

Just because it might be the end of Flex for you and your projects, it's not going away overnight for many other developers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> _" In fact, many of the engineers and product managers who worked on Flex SDK will be moving to work on our HTML efforts."_

Hell yes.

</comment><comment><USER26> With both Silverlight and Flex gone, the roadmap for future projects is clear: It will be HTML5. Unfortunately, what is not clear is which HTML5 runtime. In many ways, Safari enjoys the greatest reach - runs on Apples and Windows. Presumably Windows 8 will lock out Safari, which means we still have to support Safari and IE10. And we still haven't figured out where Android browsers fit in.

Perhaps Adobe's tool will be able to account for browser quirks better than humans can. We can all hope.

<comment><USER27> _Presumably Windows 8 will lock out Safari_

Hmm? Why?

<comment><USER28> In Metro, IE is tied in pretty well, and currently there aren't any other browsers that work in Metro. On tablets (only Metro), the browser would have to be compiled to run on ARM processors (assumedly), so the barrier to entry is perhaps higher than now.

I think that it's likely there will be alternative browsers (assuming MS doesn't lock them out), but it may well be a similar situation to the iPad, where these browsers are really just a skinned UIWebView, rather than a different rendering engine.

Good job IE10 looks like it will be pretty good!

<comment><USER27> IE was always tied to Windows, but that never prevented other browsers from running.

 _On tablets (only Metro), the browser would have to be compiled to run on ARM processors (assumedly), so the barrier to entry is perhaps higher than now._

Sure, but that's hardly locking browsers out, and besides Mobile Safari already runs on ARM (as does Firefox).

 _I think that it's likely there will be alternative browsers (assuming MS doesn't lock them out), but it may well be a similar situation to the iPad, where these browsers are really just a skinned UIWebView, rather than a different rendering engine._

But why? Just because Apple locks other browsers, MS will too? I don't get why you assume that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I just wish people wouldn't criticise Adobe for making these difficult (but correct) decisions. They see the writing on the wall as clearly as everyone else. HTML5 and WebGL is what the rest of the computing industry is moving toward, and Flash is long in the tooth and the wrong development model for the future of the web. Flash served its purpose as a stop-gap techology until the web caught up. It's time to move on and we should thank Adobe for not prolonging this transition any further.

<comment><USER30> Heck, I'll go so far as to _praise_ Adobe. While it's easy to "see the writing on the wall" from out here, history seems to say that it's often really hard for companies with dominant/historically strong positions in a market to see that revolution before it completely passes them by... I think Adobe has been more quick to change than many large/dominant companies in tech and other industries in years past.

<comment><USER31> Everyone is better off with Adobe on the "same team". They were trying to swim upstream and they knew it. The web dev world was marching forward with or without them and I'm glad they made the difficult but correct decision to embrace what is clearly the future.

Despite the widespread hatred for the Flash runtime it's almost universally agreed that Adobe makes great tools to create Flash things, and now we have them making those tools for the web. Which is also widely acknowledged as a giant hole in the modern web dev process. This really is a good thing for almost everyone as far as I can see.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> for those jumping to html5 on mobile..

If you can avoid manipulating the DOM or use a framework that avoids manipulating the DOM you will get fast applications...

</comment><comment><USER10> The SDK will continue to be developed, the roadmap for the commercial product will be outlined. What I'm missing here? Pro-Apple troll. Go away. Who was the idiot that crafted the headline?

<comment><USER22> >What I'm missing here?

They're essentially pulling funding and engineering talent from Flex Development, and made it clear that they see HTML5 as the future.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Slightly offtopic, but those who wants to move on with HTML5, I found <http://www.html5rocks.com/en/> is a very good resource to learn about HTML5.

</comment><comment><USER33> Does anyone else have the feeling that Adobe was just waiting for Steve Jobs to die before they killed Flash, just to avoid giving him the pleasure? He would have been delighted that he won. ;)</comment>


Unrest in China's cities: Middle-class blues - <AUTHOR> http://www.economist.com/blogs/analects/2012/10/unrest-cities

<comment><USER2> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslows_hierarchy_of_needs>

OK, I'm not sure if Maslow is 100% correct. Philosophy might not be the pinacle of human endeavor, no matter what philosophers may believe. Whatever the case, people's demands change as they get richer. Engel's law (note the apostrophe - he wasn't a famous friend of Marx) states that the relative demand for food decreases with income.

Virtually no-one in China dies from malnutrition. Cancer is now the leading cause of death. People now care more about pollution than economic growth at all costs. Corruption isn't a big deal if the land reforms by the corrupt official stopped you from starving, but that changes when you aren't so hungry anymore.

And as people get richer, and society gets more diverse, it deepens conflicting interests. Do you want universal healthcare for the uninsured, or a larger private health sector? Should poor people be allowed to migrate to cities? Is corrupt and inefficient public better than greedy private solutions? Not everyone is going to be happy.

And sometimes people just want the right to have their say.

China doesn't want to go down the same path as Russia - a decade of lost growth, then a bunch of thugs taking over the government and industry. But they do want reforms.

<comment><USER3> Russia went from oligarchs to...corrupt officials and their families taking over industries. They have basically moved toward the China model. The best we can hope for in China is something like a Singaporean police state, where the officials are autocratic and a bit unfair but, at least, incredibly honest.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This seemingly bold unrest for China and the reporting of dissatisfaction could also be related to the fact that Jintao's term as president is soon coming to an end. A large portion of the power structure in China is proportionate to an individuals' degrees of separation from the current political party in control, and with a switch coming up, I think we're going to see more unrest in the next year as some power is diminished.

Just my 2 cents.

</comment><comment><USER3> I got this from the ToFu blog link in the article:

reporter: 你幸福吗? (ni xingfu ma? or "are you happy?")

migrant worker: 不,我姓曾。 (bu, wo xing zeng. or "my name is zeng").

It plays on a pun of two words that are pronounced "xing," with different tones. The idea is that the migrant worker might have purposely misunderstood the question to avoid answering it with a negative that would have made someone angry.</comment>


Death of Matt Lightner (creator of Site5) - <AUTHOR> http://ryanbigg.com/2011/12/matt-lightner/ I just read on Ryan Bigg's blog that Matt Lightner, the guy who started Site5 when he was 15, has died. His facebook account "is currently unavailable". I have no idea of the circumstances, and it would be wrong to speculate.
Here's a link to his personal web-site: http://www.mattlightner.com/
Site5 was one of the mileposts on the way to where we are today and it's so sad to lose an innovator so young. <comment><USER2> Matt's mother, Deborah, submitted a very poignant comment on Site5's weblog: [http://www.site5.com/blog/s5/saying-goodbye-to-a- founder/201...](http://www.site5.com/blog/s5/saying-goodbye-to-a- founder/20111228/#li-comment-9010)

<comment><USER3> Just read the comment. Blew my mind. Hats off to such people and sorry to see them pass on. RIP.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Just 28 years old. Sad. What was the cause of death?

<comment><USER5> Tom Sepper (COO of Site5) posted on Web Hosting Talk ([http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showpost.php?s=fed7907b397ade5...](http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showpost.php?s=fed7907b397ade5ea78f6d272999c333&p=7874619&postcount=9)) when someone asked this same question. His response included the following:

"With respect to everyone in mind, it's not our place to release any details (nor are they fully known)."

<comment><USER4> That's nice and everything, but I'm really not interested in Tom Sepper's opinion on proper etiquette. I'm just curious about what happened, thanks.

<comment><USER6> That is pretty private information, and up to his family if they want to get into medical details. The important point is that it sucks, not the reason for it. Thanks, Ben

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm a Site5 customer. One of the things that I love about the company is that I can pretty much forget about it until I need to change something. None of the pushy upselling and other annoyances that are business as usual for so much of the rest of the web.

<comment><USER8> I'm pretty sure they sold site5 about 18 months ago. I agree solid service for the price.

<comment><USER6> Over 3 years ago Joel and I bought Site5 from Matt/Rod. Feel free to hit me up too.

Thanks, Ben Site5 CEO firstname.lastname@example.com

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I exchanged a few emails with Matt in the early days of Site5's support for Ruby on Rails. Truly upstanding guy who was committed to his business. So sad to see him pass away so young.

We don't know what's the cause of death, but given his young age, there is a chance that he may have taken his own life. Depression can be a disease as real as heart disease. If you are depressed, and reading this, please seek help.

</comment><comment><USER6> It is very sad, I couldn't believe it when Vince told me. Way too young and too much great stuff left to do.

I'm sure his family appreciates the communities outpouring of support, thanks for that everyone! Ben Site5 CEO

<comment><USER10> I've been a Site5 customer for about 9yrs now, and that's by far the longest I've stayed with _any_ web host. I had a few email exchanges with him back in the early days and he always left me with a great impression - very friendly, very smart, very dedicated to taking care of customers and providing a great service.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Whilst I've never been a customer (as I had our own dedicated servers) I've followed Site5 for years. They have always had a reputation for good customer service and this is usually instilled by the founders. Whilst I don't know the circumstances behind Matts death, it is very sad to see someone so young die. My thoughts are with his family.

At least Matt has been created is able to continue beyond him. That he was (with help of his cofounders and colleagues) able to build this business feels, to me anyway, that he has done more than many people who live longer lives

</comment><comment><USER12> Very sad to hear this. Despite working in the industry for some time (and therefore being able to have free quality hosting) I have paid for Site5 hosting for some time now. That's a mark of their service.

Deepest sympathies to his family, friends and colleagues

</comment><comment><USER13> I had no idea he was such a big deal. strange to see random people you've had conversations with show up in on the front page, much less an obit out of the blue.

</comment><comment><USER14> Very sad to hear. Really nice guy to talk to an IRC - I shall indeed miss his banter.

</comment><comment><USER15> RIP. Seems like there's no wikiepedia entry for Matt Lightner?

</comment><comment><USER16> confirmed :/

<http://www.beddingfieldfuneralservice.com/obits11.htm>

</comment><comment><USER17> Really depressing when such young and dynamic people die un-timely deaths. :(</comment>


The Pentagon is battling the clock to fix serious, unreported F-35 problems - <AUTHOR> https://www.defensenews.com/air/2019/06/12/the-pentagon-is-battling-the-clock-to-fix-serious-unreported-f-35-problems/ <comment><USER4> > _The 13 deficiencies include: The F-35's logistics system currently has no > way for foreign F-35 operators to keep their secret data from being sent to > the United States._

I marvel at how foreign buyers of something as complex as stealth aircraft can have any confidence that the system is not riddled with back doors, remote control capability, "phoning home", surveillance, and kill switches. How would you prove to a foreign buyer that your F-35 would not:

\- upload all your secret flight data to a tire pressure monitor every time a maintenance worker checks the tires with the special gauge he has to use, which then retransmits the data when the gauge is put back in the hanger, without needing any cooperation from the maintenance worker

\- cause all your F-35s to fall out of sky _everywhere in the world_ when the GPS satellites transmit an extra 64-bit coded message that cause fuel actuators to shut off

\- put your F-35 under remote control when a coded microwave message is transmitted directly to the plane during combat or a close encounter

Even children's toys and home appliances are routinely discovered to be phoning home and doing sneaky unexpected things. I'm going to hazard a guess that all large weapons systems are compromised —— perhaps by more than one nation simultaneously since parts and expertise come from hundreds of contractors and many different countries. I'm not aware of any revelations of weapon-system backdoors yet, but we might hear about some of them in the _aftermath_ of the next major war.

<comment><AUTHOR> The thing is that nobody just buys a weapon in isolation. You buy into a weapons _system_ , which includes not just the weapon itself but a whole universe of concerns that surround it: logistical concerns like spare parts, fuel and ammunition, operational concerns like tactical doctrines that work well with the weapon, and so forth. Without that stuff, the weapon by itself is pretty close to useless.

All of which means that it's more or less impossible to buy a weapon from a foreign power without opening yourself up wide to that power. You have to let their military advisors onto your bases, to train your troops on the doctrines that go with the weapon. You have to let their logistical specialists into your inventory systems, so they can hook you into the pipelines through which the spare parts and ammo flow. Any of these people could be using their access to snoop on you or worse, but there's not much you can do about that because without them all you've bought is a $100 million paperweight.

If you're the buyer, yes, that absolutely sucks. But, unless you're willing to spend vast amounts of money you don't have to build up your own domestic military-industrial complex, you don't have a lot of alternatives. You either buy into one of the existing ecosystems (American, Russian, European or Chinese), or get curb-stomped by a neighbor who did. Once you're bought into one of those ecosystems you're effectively at the mercy of the state that operates it, of course, but hey, you do what you've gotta do. As the saying goes, the strong do what they will, and the weak suffer what they must.

<comment><USER5> Yep, nobody buy F-35 planes because it's a superior airplane (it's not) countries buy it in order to have better diplomatic relationships with the USA.

It's pretty telling to see Germany refusing to buy F-35 or Hungary buying ones in order to piss off Sweden.

<comment><USER6> Can you name a fighter being sold today that's superior to an F-35A? And quantify how you determine that it's superior?

<comment><USER7> The F-22 would win in 1vs1 combat

<comment><USER8> The F-22 is not sold to other nations, or even being manufactured at this point.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Isn't this sort of thing expected through the process of developing cutting edge hardware and software?

I can't imagine there are many airframes that are pushing the technological boundaries as the F-35, aren't bleeding edge products prone to difficult development?

I don't see how this wont be worth it in the long run in terms of getting ahead in an arms race as a superpower.

It seems as though this is probably the hardest thing to get industry insight into given the secret nature of it all.

<comment><USER10> _> Isn't this sort of thing expected through the process of developing cutting edge hardware and software?_

To a great extent, that's the fundamental problem with the F-35 program - it's a technological showcase first and a useful weapons system second. It has been designed and commissioned by people who believe that "most advanced" necessarily means "best" and who are indifferent to the actual tactical and strategic requirements.

The Army and Marines have been crying out for years for a suitable replacement for the ageing A-10. It's the finest close support aircraft ever made, it has a legendary reputation among infantrymen who served in Afghanistan and Iraq, but the USAF are still planning on retiring it in favour of the F-35, an aircraft that is simply incapable of performing the same role. Even if the F-35 were inarguably an excellent aircraft, it's the wrong aircraft for a vitally important job.

The F-35 helmet is a $400,000 showcase of AR technology, capable of providing unprecedented levels of data to a pilot. It's also really bad at being a helmet - it's so heavy that it could literally break the neck of smaller pilots during ejection and so bulky that it limits visibility. Test pilots have mixed views on the usefulness of the AR cameras, but they all want the ability to look over their shoulder. It's _maybe possibly_ better at doing a thing that nobody asked for, but it's demonstrably worse at being a helmet.

Servicemen don't want cutting-edge innovation - they want weapons systems that work reliably in the field and provide useful combat capabilities. That's what you need to keep in mind when you hear the DoD hype the F-35. We know it's a hell of a lot less reliable than existing US aircraft and competing foreign aircraft. We know that the one-airframe-to-rule-them-all model is deeply flawed and leaves serious gaps in the combat capability of the US military. What does the F-35 actually offer in the field that couldn't be provided by a cheaper, simpler, more reliable weapons system? I've yet to hear a good answer to that question.

<comment><USER11> >It has been designed and commissioned by people who believe that "most advanced" necessarily means "best" and who are indifferent to the actual tactical and strategic requirements.

They said the _exact_ same thing about the F-15. And the F-18. Both of which went on to spectacular success - the F-15 in particular has never once been bested in air to air combat, while claiming 105 enemy kills (including MiG-29s). It's able to do that due to its big sexy radar and complicated electronics and all the other techno-gadgets that people like Pierre Sprey decried every step of the way because he still thinks we live in 1967.

On the ground, there is less room for innovation. Guns are a mature technology. The primary concern in 2019 are things like reliability and cost, because the difference between an AK47 and an M16 is not that big. They both shoot bullets, they both are capable of full-auto, they both are light. To the soldier holding them, big difference of course - but from the 10,000 mile perspective they're basically doing the same job in the same way. It doesn't make much difference if I'm a general planning strategies whether my rifleman are holding M4s or M16s or AK47s.

Air combat is different, technology is still radically changing things every generation. And if you're caught a generation behind it's hard to make a fight of it. We have jet engines, and our enemies don't. We have solid state avionics, our enemies don't. We have AESA radar, our enemies don't. And now? We have all those advanced technologies in the F-35, like production line stealth, that no other peer enemy yet has deployed on the field. Certainly technology is not everything, you also need training, tactics, support systems. But it is undeniably a massive advantage, and one that's worth a little teething to get.

>The Army and Marines have been crying out for years for a suitable replacement for the ageing A-10. It's the finest close support aircraft ever made, it has a legendary reputation among infantrymen who served in Afghanistan and Iraq, but the USAF are still planning on retiring it in favour of the F-35, an aircraft that is simply incapable of performing the same role. Even if the F-35 were inarguably an excellent aircraft, it's the wrong aircraft for a vitally important job.

The A-10 is a really awful CAS platform. It's ungodly slow and so takes forever to get on station, the cannon is horrendously inaccurate, it's got a low mission capability rating and the entire concept of its design (low-flying ruggedness) was rendered obsolete with the invention of the manpad. I mean this is the platform that flew the least number of CAS missions of any capable airframe in Iraq 2, yet had the _highest number of friendly fire incidents_ in absolute terms. If you're curious how, the cannon. All the other platforms are using fancy sensors and PGMs, while the A-10 is often going on gun runs with the Mk-1 human eye. The A-10's only two numerical advantages are loiter time and cost per flight hour, but drones exist now so it doesn't even have those unique positives anymore.

The fact that soldiers love the A-10 is meaningless - sailors loved battleships too, even after they were turned into big metal deathtraps by airplanes. The troops just really like giant cannons, even when they're not actually useful anymore.

>Servicemen don't want cutting-edge innovation - they want weapons systems that work reliably in the field and provide useful combat capabilities.

Soviet jets could handle pebbles being blown into their air in takes. They could handle smacking down onto the tarmarc at a velocity that would cripple any modern American jet. They could be nearly shaken apart, but were just built so robustly they'd still make it home. Comparatively American jets were fragile prima donnas who needed huge amounts of maintenance and could only be flown on the most pristine of air fields.

But once they were in the air? USAF planes showed exactly why all that TLC were more than worth it. I'd rather be sitting in an F-15 than any Soviet fighter ever put in the sky. At the risk of repeating myself, the ground pounder ideology of "rugged, reliable, lowest-possible-tech" is suicide in the air. In the air, technology advantages still play a huge role and so suffering a low mission capability rating is quite possibly worth it if you get a massive return on power (within reason of course).

<comment><USER12> > They said the exact same thing about the F-15.

Er, citation required. I dont remember those kinds of complaints. F-16, sure, and theyd be right.

> And the F-18

Well, that depends on if you mean the F, or the A part. Many thought the F-14 was a way better fighter and had better legs. For attack, we ended up with an a/c with less range and payload capability. Which just makes it more acceptable to replace it with something with even less range. All of which reduces the strike bubble of a carrier group.

<comment><USER13> No one has ever thought the F14 was a better fighter than the F18. The F14 was an interceptor designed for long range fleet defense, not air to air combat.

The JSF has longer legs than both as I recall.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I worked in defense contracting early in my career. White-collar welfare. Disgusting level of waste.

<comment><USER15> I work at a defense contractor. One of the guys in my row of cubicles has his wall plastered with political cartoons mocking welfare, social programs and anyone who thinks the government has a role to play in reducing poverty.

Every-time I pass this gentleman's desk, I see him playing solitaire on this computer. Defense contractors are adult daycare.

<comment><USER16> Think of the irony here.

Government is the one funding this guy's adventures in Solitaire. What makes you think Government can do anything efficiently, let alone reduce poverty?

<comment><USER15> I am not lost on the irony. The military industrial complex has irony with layers of richness, second to none. The idea that private enterprise leads to greater efficiency can be thoroughly discredited by anyone who has stepped foot into an industry that manages rent-seeking.

<comment><USER16> Adam Smith had a thing to say about rent-seeking.

Trying to use rent-seeking to discredit free market economics is about as disingenuous as using movie piracy to discredit the Internet.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> >a so-called "green-glow" night vision

Go to 28:30 (actual flight helmet recording) [https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B30EHgj_ikFIOTlEeGh6UHFPOTQ...](https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B30EHgj_ikFIOTlEeGh6UHFPOTQ/view)

"Use the force, Luke."

<comment><USER18> Better link: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=faxuDFHJ3NY&t=28m30s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=faxuDFHJ3NY&t=28m30s)

(the google drive never loaded for me)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> What are the chances all of the negative press the F-35 has gotten is disinformation designed to mislead adversaries?

<comment><USER20> Most of it is fanboys or anti-fanboys.

You'd think people in software would be more familiar with having defects in your product not meaning doom or incompetence.

<comment><USER21> I hardly think the Office of the Director, Operational Test & Evaluation counts as an "anti-fanboy". And their reviews of F-35 progress of been the bureaucratic equivalent of damning.

Full report here: [https://www.dote.osd.mil/pub/reports/FY2018/pdf/dod/2018f35j...](https://www.dote.osd.mil/pub/reports/FY2018/pdf/dod/2018f35jsf.pdf)

Article summarizing it here: [https://www.flightglobal.com/news/articles/dote- delivers-ano...](https://www.flightglobal.com/news/articles/dote-delivers- another-scathing-report-on-f-35-progr-455483/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Has there every been a USA military aircraft built in the last 20 yrs that didn't have damning reports, tons of waste and over budget issues?

<comment><USER16> The F-35 has been in development for 27 of those last 20 years.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Cost+ needs to die. Contractors should be forced to either meet their original bid or go bankrupt trying.

<comment><USER24> Disaster possibility 1 is that nobody bids on the project. It is too risky.

Disaster possibility 2 is that the original bid is met... but one critical feature is left out of the contract (overlooked) and is thus not in the result.

Disaster possibility 3 is that the company does go bankrupt. Uh, oops, we needed that company. Now we can't get parts for other products. This could be fixed via a huge bailout.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> This is a terrible project for many reasons. The insane cost, a plane trying to be everything but master of none, and the whole concept of human piloted planes is so antiquated.

Air craft carriers are obsolete, the same way the carrier made the battleship obsolete in the second World War, but nations were slow to realize it. Missiles make the carrier obsolete today. If you look at China's fast missile boats, they know this already. However it's quite handy still for projecting air power against much weaker foes - which to be fair is what the USA does today.

Human planes are just silly though. Make drones, work on improving the ability to control then accurately remotely. They can out fly and out manoeuvre piloted planes at a fraction of the cost without risking the pilot's lives.

<comment><USER26> The big risk I see with drones is that with aggressive jamming and cyber attacks your drone fleet could ostensibly be crippled. But as you said a drone could easily turn harder than any manned aircraft could, loiter/patrol for far longer, and have a much smaller radar cross section since it wouldn't have to accommodate a cockpit. Sooner or later unmanned combat aircraft will dominate.

I also agree that the aircraft carrier will be supplanted at some point because of sophisticated anti ship missiles. But, if carriers can launch drones from much greater distances it will allow carriers to extend their usefulness for quite some time.

<comment><USER25> I think lots of smaller done carriers make way more sense than supercarriers when all it takes is one missile to sink them. Drones don't have the same runway requirements.

Jamming remotely piloted drones is a good point. A backup autonomous system can help there. But I don't understand enough about how easy it is to jam signals designed to work through jamming would be.

<comment><USER27> Backup autonomous system is how Iranians(not Russians or Chinese..) managed to take over and land completely in tact top of the line US drone. Autonomous fool proof weapon system that are actually given freedom to kill things are VERY far away.

I think looking at Russian commitment to EW is one of the possibilities of next step. Imagine war with no gps, barely functional coms etc. Basically go back 40+ years that is war vs adversary with good EW.

Now the counter is killing EW platforms as they necessarily emit.. so emit less or communicate less to not get fixed and pounded into the ground etc.

Manned platforms are not going anywhere any time soon. Humans are just too clever and adaptable

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> "The F-35's logistics system currently has no way for foreign F-35 operators to keep their secret data from being sent to the United States."

Wow.

<comment><USER29> countries that buy f35 don't really have secrets from the US anyway

<comment><USER30> I hope you're joking.

<comment><USER31> The US won't sell F35 to non-friendly countries, and friendly-countries are already in bed with the US intelligence-wise, where the US typically allow the other countries to use their intelligence-gathering systems, in exchange for the US to get access to the information they gather.

That ends up meaning that all intelligence that other countries intelligence- agencies end up collecting are available to the US.

<comment><USER32> I'm sure Norway and the US are friendly and exchange lots of information within NATO, but if Norway wants to tell the US how their F-35 moves between various caves for service I'm sure they want to do so in a high level intelligence exchange type of way, and not because some Lockheed logistics system automatically phones home about Norwegain F-35 locations.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Its funny how I hear that a lot of UFO activity is really just "secret defense projects" that are not available yet, like there is some skunk works out there that is building stuff that is light years ahead of the state of the art. Meanwhile when we look at what the defense department is _actually_ doing, they are building a plane that is trying to be all things to all people that defies the laws of physics with the expected results.

</comment><comment><USER34> Reminds me of [https://youtu.be/4xJBvKJht78](https://youtu.be/4xJBvKJht78) (The F-18: Just how good is it? (1980))

<comment><USER35> Just to add to your video there is this: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PkrtxDdaWuM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PkrtxDdaWuM) (F-16, Sale of the Century).

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> I'm really of the belief, based purely on imagination, that a lot of the spending and research went into being able to make the F-35 autonomous with a switch.

Drone warfare really is the next step and having full jets that appear to be piloted but are actually completely autonomous would put the US ahead by decades.

<comment><USER37> Starting with a manned aircraft is a terrible way to build an unmanned one. A good fraction of the weight is there to provide life support and safety for the pilot. The canopy is a huge compromise between aerodynamics and visibility. And for manned aircraft, it's worth spending 10x more to get a slightly lower failure rate, because pilots are so valuable. For unmanned aircraft, the reliability calculations are all different.

<comment><USER36> But it gives access to thousands of hours of training data for that particular aircraft across a range of different situations, and it allows you to test that ML model in real situations.

Moving to something lighter or more aerodynamic becomes a lot easier after that. If you look at the Boeing Airpower/Loyal Wingman UAV, it looks like its based on this concept quite closely.

<comment><USER38> That doesn't seem to be the route the XQ-58 is going, though. [0] It's an attritable stealthy missile/bomb truck - and at a projected unit cost of $2-3 million, they'd be cheaper than some US air-to-air missiles.

0: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kratos_XQ-58_Valkyrie](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kratos_XQ-58_Valkyrie)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> F-35 project is infinitely more valuable as its contuined production provides A LOT of employment and contracts. I sincerely don't expect the project ever end or deliver anything worthwhile.

</comment><comment><USER40> What is the main problem with developing a remotely controlled fighter jet? Is it signal jamming? If so, why not make it autonomous? After all, we are actively developing self driving cars...

<comment><USER41> The optimal design for a 'jet fighter without a pilot' rapidly converges on a missile.

<comment><USER38> Does it though? I suppose it heavily depends on your definition of "fighter", but cranked-kite and flying wing designs have been the go-to for subsonic stealth jets and UCAVs. Under a "something that is intended to kill other planes" definition a subsonic stealth air-to-air platform with good sensors might qualify as a fighter, but many people seem to think "fast, hypermaneuverable" are requirements too. Confusing the goal with the method, IMO.

Another major design constraint difference between "unmanned fighter" and "cruise missile" would be the deployment and reusability goals. Cruise missiles tend to need to fit in launch tubes or under wings, while presumably an unmanned fighter would not be so constrained (and thus be able to use larger wings). And while cruise missiles are _very_ single use, the sensors on an unmanned fighter may make it too expensive to discard that way.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> It's a counterfactual speculation now, but what would have happened if there were two airplane projects, one designed for vertical takeoff and landing, and another for more general use?

What if airplanes had to be cranked out at a rate like the WWII Merchant Marine Liberty Ships: 2,700 of them from 1941-1945? (There's a restored one, SS Jeremiah O'Brien, at pier 45 in San Francisco.)

Are these machines so complex now that it necessarily must take a generation to develop a new one?

</comment><comment><USER43> If there was ever a contender for the most complex _thing_ humanity has ever made, I think DoD bureaucracy is a strong favorite.

</comment><comment><USER44> Counterpoint: [http://www.airforcemag.com/Features/Pages/2019/June%202019/L...](http://www.airforcemag.com/Features/Pages/2019/June%202019/Lockheed- Reported-Deficiencies-in-F-35-Already-Fixed-or-Being-Resolved.aspx)

</comment><comment> yc-kraln Could this be related to the fatal crash of the F-35 in Japan?

</comment><comment><USER45> Japan recently lost one of their first F35s and the pilot. One wonders whether one of these problems was the cause of the loss of the airplane and the pilot, not pilot error.

<comment><USER6> The most recent report shows that the pilot lost spatial awareness.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> Brewster Buffalo II.

Sounds good on paper, disaster in practice.

</comment><comment><USER47> Why do so many people on hackernews appear to really know their stuff when it comes to aeronautics?

Between the F-35, the ethiopian crash, and plenty other related topics, I'm amazed at the quantity and quality of the comments.

I would expect this topic to be kind of niche, and not attract >100 comments everytime!

<comment><USER48> Perhaps the perceived shortcomings appear to be obvious to even the non- aeronautically trained?

I recall the MCAS issue being discussed here well before governments grounded the 737max. The FAA being one of the last to ground.

The F-35 issues appear to share those common in engineering. Over promising, over spending and not able to deliver on those promises, because no solution can satisfy all wants/requirements.

In my explicitly unqualified view, the F-35 tries to be everything to all services, yet my limited understanding on aeronautics is (similar to marine engineering); is the best designs are those that focus on a specific task.

<comment><USER49> To alter the picture a bit and complicate a lot more:

it's of course possible to make a new jet fighter/bomber/thing that satisfies all of the requirements. The issue is cost and time.

The F35 is a classic mega-R&D project. Like going to the Moon, fusion, self- driving cars, XUV litography [or the whole process/node change from 10nm to 7 or 5nm]. Costs are enormous, lifetime TCO is also very high. It's so complex and funding is so far from infinite, that it is and will be never "done".

We know these. Just as you can always tweak a nuclear reactor or atomic bomb design, just as you can always make better microchips, you can always make better jets.

It's also very similar to the JWST (James Webb Space Telescope) - <USER2> goal/design is pretty straightforward, just the engineering way to get there, is not. It calls for "tech" that's simply does not exist, and calls for systems integration of that tech on a level that simply cannot be adequately estimated/planned.

Fusion, the JWST and the F-35 have different principal constraints (the JWST seems the simplest, it is simply cost constrained - every part of the R&D/assembly/verification process seems so underfunded that all the other parts/participants have to wait for each other - and downtime is not cheap either, specialists can't just go and have a gig while they wait for others/testing/manufacturing; the F-35 is probably very bureaucratically constrained, a bit like ITER [the big international fusion project] - <USER3> has a small part in it, so there's is lots and lots and even more back and forth between everybody, problems are discovered, tweaking needs discussions, discussions with many parties are a nightmare, everything needs paperwork, because it's public money after all, etc.)

This does not make the F35 "bad", but of course begs the question of spending efficacy. Was there really no better way to spend all this money and achieve very similar goals? There probably was.

But. Usually these projects are a success even if the end result is useless. Because they fund R&D in many places.

For example a good overview of how mega-R&D translates into tangible innovations is the W7X brochure: [https://www.ipp.mpg.de/987655/w7x_and_industry_en.pdf](https://www.ipp.mpg.de/987655/w7x_and_industry_en.pdf) (Germany spent a few hundred millions euros, and most of that went to small shops iterating on their tech - which of course helps Germany remain competitive on the global markets).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> Timing is impeccable: Trump is about to sell a bunch of F-35's to Poland, so let's hit them with a "cluster of damning reports" to sour the deal.

If you read the actual article, you'll see that most problems are either fixed already or aren't as severe the headline would make you believe. But nobody really reads the articles.

<comment><USER51> In your scenario, who is behind the "cluster of damning reports"? Liberals? Poland? Russia? China? Defense contractor competitors? I agree with the second part of your comment.

<comment><USER50> Could be anyone. Could even be several parties simultaneously feeding information to the media. The only unlikely party is the competitors, since it's not in their interest (in this case) to shit on Lockheed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> One point five trillion dollars.

</comment><comment><USER53> War, war never changes ...

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xBDrv1PY- uU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xBDrv1PY-uU)

</comment><comment><USER54> >controlled flight into terrain

Uhm what? Presumably no pilot will fly into terrain if in control.

That whole thing just reads like a nightmare project

<comment><USER55> Controlled flight into terrain can cover incidents such as flying in limited visibility using instruments where the instruments aren't wrong, the pilot is conscious and in control, but gets task focussed or misinterprets a signal and takes deliberate action that ends up in an unplanned lithobraking event.

Flying limited visibility or with horizon obscured is a typical scenario for controlled flight into ground. Some pilots will also feel less confident with a particular implementation of the artificial horizon.

Then there are transition states between particular instrument assisted flight modes ("autopilot") and manual flight modes, as well as assisted flight modes where the pilot and the computers disagree on the appropriate course of action (similar to, say, automatic trim of horizontal stabiliser in aircraft with engines slung under the wing). The pilot might switch modes and assume control over pitch and yaw but the computer was handing over control of throttle. So the pilot ends up fighting the computer for control rather than actually flying the aircraft.

Labelling it "pilot error" can cause investigators to stop looking for the root cause. "Controlled flight into ground" leads to the question "why would an otherwise competent pilot do what this pilot did?"

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> For the trillion(s) that have gone into this fighter, one could wonder if there were other better uses of that money.

Even if defense is a necessary evil, it should be obvious by now that electronic (cyber - forgive me) warfare is the future of military.

Why attack with physical weapons when you can literally shut down the power to an entire country? Or jam its communications en masse. Or cripple its transportation infrastructure.

<comment><USER57> There is no "future of warfare" in terms of just being one thing.

When guns came out, they said it would be the end of warfare. Instead of spending years training archers, you could pull farmers from the fields, put together huge armies almost overnight. When machine guns came out, it was the end of warfare. How could massed formations fight against so many rounds going downrange at the same time?

This continued on with aircraft, aircraft carriers, nuclear weapons, missiles, and so forth. Nuclear weapons are especially interesting because instead of eliminating war, it looks like they eliminated _formal_ war, pushing all that conflict down into police actions and non-state actors.

All those other things stuck around. What became really tough is that you had to integrate all of those other things together so that you use that right tools in the right way, almost like putting together a symphony. Cyber is the same way. What we're seeing now -- and I'm a firm believer we are currently in a cyber war -- are a lot of different actors seeing how hard they can push things. It's a war without any conventions about what "fighting fair" means. Bad place for us to be.

I think the F-35 has been a giant disaster, but that's part of a different discussion about military priorities versus strategic planning.

<comment><USER56> But I think you need to take a step back and ask what the point of a military is.

If the point were actually about defending one's country, then there are surely more effective ways to spend the money.

By all appearances, the modern military is just a convoluted way to funnel public money into the pockets of a few contractors and corporations (whose investors and shareholders win). It's an immensely inefficient way to skim money from the general population.

One might say the modern military is more precise, suggesting that we care about avoiding civilian casualties. However, the US drone use blows that theory.

If the goal were to defend a country from terrorists (modern invaders), then we would be concerned with right wing extremism which is responsible for more deaths than foreign "terrorists".

Lastly, if we were just concerned with human lives and longer lifespans, we would be putting most of our money into combating heart disease.

<comment><USER57> >>But I think you need to take a step back and ask what the point of a military is.

I completely agree. I think at the heart of the United States is a terrible vagueness and corrupt idea of why we have a military.

They to call it the War Department. While that certainly doesn't sound very nice, it cut to the direct point in having a military: fighting a war. That made it a lot easier to reason about.

So what's a war? A war is when people are doing something you don't like and you want them to stop. You have tried talking and reasoning with them and that didn't work. So you have to figure out other ways of making them stop fighting you.

That's it. You don't need guns, tanks, or even explosives. If you can make those other people over there stop fighting you, they surrender, you win.

At some point, probably around the time of WWI, mission creep started taking us into all kinds of places that either wasn't a war or we didn't like admitting was a war. So we started changing the language, setting up all sorts of units and programs that were only tangentially-related to war, and so forth. I read at some point when Bush was president we had military operations in over 80 countries.

Now most of those operations were peaceful: medic clinics, training, and so forth. You could argue that they were strategically fighting a war -- happy, trained people tend to be happier. But that sure looks like social programs, diplomacy, and police action than war. Don't get me wrong: these may be great things to do. My point is that if you stretch the language so far, then pretty much any damned thing you want to can be considered part of the military. Or a war, for that matter.

Based on this, and the ton of inertia and corruption that's been associated with war fighting since forever, I really don't think we can expect the Department of Defense to act in a sane manner. My gut tells me that we built the F-35 because we thought that's what we were supposed to do: come up with new, expensive tech that's better than the other guys.

We're going to need to get back to funding DoD to fight wars: real, live, in- person conflicts where the other guys need to be convinced to stop fighting us. That's going to take a ton of re-organization and strategic planning that I don't see happening any time soon. (Also, agreed with your statement about tunneling money to contractors, and defending the country. We've come a long, terrible way from the idea of a citizen soldier defending his home.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> "Lockheed Martin plans to implement a software fix for the flight control system."

Now where have we heard that before. Software patches to fix inherently unstable hardware. Move fast and break shit.

<comment><USER20> F-35 and _all_ fighter jets all use and must use by design synthetic stability, without computer control the airframe would be impossible to pilot. You need this aerodynamic instability to be maneuverable. If you don't have it turning is very slow. Flight characteristics are very much dependent on software. It isn't a glitch or a "move fast break shit" but a fundamental design feature of fast maneuverable planes.

<comment><USER58> How does an F-14 and others of the same vintage fly? Isn't that all hydraulic servos? Not trying to be an ass, just curious.

<comment><USER59> The last couple generations of fighters have moved away from airframes that are passively stable (imagine a car or something that requires no control to remain upright).

Newer designs are only stable when their attitude is constantly monitored and adjusted by control software. (To continue the metaphor, imagine a Segway or a pogo stick, more agile than a car)

The benefit you get from giving up passive stability is increased maneuverability in the case of fighters.

<comment><USER60> Nice analogies! Thanks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER61> If the military-industrial voting complex (defense companies geographically spreading manufacturing operations over key swing congressional districts), I believe more can be done than most think. I believe their key influence is what props up US military spending that the pentagon does NOT want [1].

[1]: [https://www.military.com/daily-news/2015/01/28/pentagon- tell...](https://www.military.com/daily-news/2015/01/28/pentagon-tells- congress-to-stop-buying-equipment-it-doesnt-need.html)

<comment><USER62> Lots of countries burn money on labor and goods they don't need, they just call it "socialism" instead of "defence". The US might be better off of they acknowledged that the fruits of this particular labor weren't going anywhere real.

<comment><USER63> > Lots of countries burn money on labor and goods they don't need, they just > call it "socialism" instead of "defence"

Got any examples?

<comment><USER64> I wouldn't know anything about this except that there was one excellent example on Hacker News the other day, about whaling in Soviet Russia: [https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2019/05/on...](https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2019/05/one- of-the-greatest-environmental-crimes-of-the-20th-century.html)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Newtiny - Record your Web History and Search anytime - <AUTHOR> http://newtiny.com

<comment><USER2> You should really have some semblance of a privacy policy before asking people to send you their browsing history on all websites they visit.

Also, there have been other attempts at this (WebMynd, for example, before their most recent pivot). Would be great to know how Newtiny is different / better before installing.

</comment><comment><USER3> I won't be trying out your service until you have the TOS and Privacy Policy up and visible. As well as a video or walk through explaining what exactly this app does.

I can't stress the importance of this enough.

I am sure I would love your service, I used to index and collect my history for local searching, that project fell off over time. I hope your project could be the rebirth of it as it did prove an invaluable resource.

<comment><AUTHOR> trickjarrett

I appreciate your concern. I'll try tp put that up as soon as possible. It was a weekend project and I put it out for everyone out of sheer excitement. I'll appreciate if you can try the service out and help me with the feedback. Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4>
      Look it as an alternative to the bookmarking service. You never have to click on a button to record your favorite pages.

Personally I _want_ to use a bookmarking service (currently using historious) because it works so much better than history ever can.

I love how I can search history through the address bar to find a site that I know the title or URL of (which, therefore, i wouldn't really have much trouble finding through a search engine if I lost my history), but I find that actually searching for a lost link in browser history is absolutely horribly.

Yesterday evening I got into an argument with a colleague over how GSM works (Vodafone's network in the UK had severe downtime in many areas for much of the day), and I wanted to look up an article I had read in the last month or so about the man who thought up SMS, and his quotes on why it was limited to 160 characters.

It wasn't interesting enough for me to want to bookmark at the time, but it would have been useful last night. I spent about ten minutes trying to find it (through searching for keyworks in the history, to looking for related HN topics, as I know I found that article through a link from this site - eventually I was just scrolling down the list at what I think was roughly the date on which I might have read it).

I definitely read it on this computer, in this browser, within a time period that it is still in my history. Somewhere, but I sure as hell don't know where.

Eventually I gave up and bothered to Google it, what a surprise, it took me hardly any time to find what I wanted.

 _Afterthought:_ Maybe the Google should offer to archive your history and provide a search engine of just pages that you've viewed. We get a much better way to trace our footsteps, Google get even more data with which to target adverts towards us, win win.

<comment><AUTHOR> It all comes down to the search. I know we have a lot of work to do on that front.

Bookmarking mostly never worked for me, because like you pointed out in the example, you may never know what information you might have to recall.

We may come up with a way to 'star' a link to help bring up the favorite pages.

<comment><USER4> As a non-Chrome user I'm not your target audience anyway - but if you were doing it for Firefox (or if I were a Chrome user), it would take a lot of very positive endorsements to get me interested enough to really try it out. Until then I'll settle with the fact that browser history will very rarely be the best way to find something I've seen before - most of the time I will have bookmarked what I later want to re-read, so it's not a huge issue anyway.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> quick question: Can I be sure that the service will not index my confidential site visits (banking, creditcards, etc.) and/or capture information sent to those sites (usernames, passwords, etc.)?

On the download page it says that I grant your plugin "Your data on all websites." That couldn't sound less appealing.

If there is a way to bypass the collection and indexing of certain sites (I'm assuming, too, that it is stored and indexed on your servers), then you might want to explain how that happens from a link on your front page.

</comment><comment><USER6> I'm interested, but your website doesn't motivate me enough to install a plugin that threatens privacy.

I'd _love_ this if data were encrypted and hosted locally.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Guys thanks for trying out the service.

It's completely secured. I am encrypting data on all sides. Your data will be completely private. It literally started as a weekend project and now, on monday I am releasing it. So please bear with me as this looks like a rudimentary offering. Please feel free to use the service. I appreciate your feedback.

<comment><USER5> "It's completely secured." -- Yikes, I'd never have the courage to make such a statement.

How is my encryption key generated and where/how it is stored on your server?

Forgive me if the key is generated by me on the client -- I'm afraid to try your plugin, so I'm not sure if that functionality exists. Looking forward to trying it out once I know more.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> So, given that all these hackers want to know whether they can trust this, I downloaded the pkg and had a look at the source code. The main file seems legit. I don't understand the popup.html file and the call to flickr though. (also, the packaging is a bit sloppy with two copies of the same file).

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry about that. You are right, i think I forgot to remove popup.html file, which was an example from Google.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Someone please explain to me why just using the browser cache isn't enough?

<comment><AUTHOR> Your browsing cache will just go back to a limited time. This you'll feel free even if you switch your comp, crash it or clear your cache.

Look it as an alternative to the bookmarking service. You never have to click on a button to record your favorite pages. Even if you miss it to click, you'll still have it stored somewhere.</comment></comment>


Trouble in Paradise with ClojureScript and React.js - <AUTHOR> https://diogo149.github.io/2014/10/19/om-no/

<comment><USER2> I agree 100% with this post. Reagent is the best UI library that I've ever worked with. It's powerful, just works, and it's easy to understand what's going on under the hood.

I was able to teach a data scientist on our team how to build UI components in Reagent in less than 24 hours to the point that he was able to build his own visualizations for his data analysis with minimal guidance, that's how intuitive it is.

Compare that with Om which I've tried for about a month to grok and still can't get a handle on it. The only advantage that Om gives you over Reagent that I can see is global undo out of the box, but it's at the cost of significant added complexity. And if that's what you were really after you could just build one global state atom in Reagent to give you global undo without all the added complexity of Om. What am I missing here?

I think Reagent's model is the perfect blend of ClojureScript + React. The only shortcomings are that it's not actively maintained and I wish there was a more robust library of helper methods baked in, but those are easy tradeoffs to make for something so simple and powerful.

<comment><AUTHOR> I wouldn't go so far as to say that Reagent's model is perfect. Definitely pretty good, but we've had some issues that were somewhat non-obvious.

If you're worried about it being maintained, there was actually a great discussion of this post on the clojure subreddit ([https://www.reddit.com/r/Clojure/comments/2jq0cu/om_no_troub...](https://www.reddit.com/r/Clojure/comments/2jq0cu/om_no_trouble_in_paradise_with_clojurescript_and/)) where others talk about Reagent having a community-maintained fork with new features.

Out of curiousity though, what kind of helper methods would you be looking for? I found it pretty comprehensive on its own (though I do have some utility methods for some niche uses involving hierarchical atoms).

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> OK, as someone who is a believer in the Om philosophy, it behoves me, for the sake of a substantive debate, to give my best rebuttal to OP...

First of all, I cannot stress enough that Om is very much an ALPHA project. You cannot possibly visit the Om github page and not realize this. It says clearly "Om is still in the design phase so enhancements are low priority" so you should expect that there's zero hand holding for newbs for this project right now. Om is HARD right now, because the author is focusing on clean design, not on optimizing a beginner's learning curve. I highly respect the author for taking this position.

Because of this, very basic and obvious things are missing in Om (such as a macro to add syntactic sugar to the "reify" command, for example) and this is because the author feels that there is still a lot of uncertainty on "best practices" in client side development and that it is therefore premature to decide what sort of syntactic sugar is best. Most likely, this is the correct choice.

Additionally, by admitting you're trying to put mutable state into the application state object (well, at least it sounds like you're admitting this... correct me if I misread your post) you're really placing pretty unrealistic demands on the Om library- This is comparable to a person going to an AA meeting and saying "I want you guys to keep me sober on 6 days a week, but on Wednesdays I really like visiting my biker friends at 'Sloshed Biker Bobs' and will drink it up to the max on just that one day... but if you can't keep me sober on the the other 6 days I'll just assume AA is useless."

<comment><AUTHOR> If any of my post sounded as if I was complaining about the lack of syntactic sugar, I apologize as that was not at all my intention. The best practices and syntactic ugliness didn't matter to us at all after the learning curve. We wrote some macros to solve the problem, and didn't have to think about it anymore. We used sablono as well, so the syntax was almost the same as that of Reagent.

The biggest problems that we faced with Om were how normal Clojure-y things just didn't work with it, and how the app state had to be kept in a tree instead of a DAG (mostly the latter), which created issues with consistency, performance, or both.

> trying to put mutating state into the application state object

How you're supposed to use Om is put all the mutable state into a global atom. I didn't mean putting reference types in the global atom or anything horrible like that, but the problems with cursors being pointers still exist.

<comment><USER3> Hmmm... having a library like Om where the cursors function on a DAG actually sounds pretty useful... I'd love to see an implementation of this :-)

<comment><AUTHOR> Yup! We were about to implement something like that, but we realized Reagent's model of having atoms store the state worked pretty well with javelin's FRP, and once you break down the state into atoms, the cursors aren't needed anymore.

<comment><USER3> Looks like David implemented this on Saturday (reference cursors)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Actually Om's undo is very powerful, my framework Coils allows playback of sessions, which is very useful for customer service to know how a customer uses a webapp:

[https://github.com/zubairq/coils](https://github.com/zubairq/coils)

:and a demo here:

[http://connecttous.co/connecttous/connecttous.html?playback=...](http://connecttous.co/connecttous/connecttous.html?playback=true)

:and here:

[http://connecttous.co/connecttous/connecttous.html?livedebug...](http://connecttous.co/connecttous/connecttous.html?livedebug=true)

</comment><comment><USER5> I haven't had a piece of technology make me feel like more of an idiot than Om. I don't know what it is but I just don't get it. I've found Reagent to be more accessible.

</comment><comment><USER6> fiy reagent is not "unmaintained" anymore

there's a reorg going on, a github org has been created and development is restarting

previously, dev was happening at whoops' fork

<comment><USER7> Just thought I'd post the link to save readers a search...

[https://github.com/reagent-project](https://github.com/reagent-project)</comment></comment>


Llamatron "read me" file - <AUTHOR> http://dadgum.com/halcyon/BOOK/MISC/LLAMA.HTM <comment><USER2> Nothing valuable to add. Just wanted to tell someone that I grew up not only playing and loving Llamatron, but I lived just 5 miles from Mr Minter, out in the sticks of West Wales. I never met him. Now I too am a software person, championing the idealism of shareware/open source, but nomading on the other side of the world. I like to think it was something in our water.

</comment><comment><USER3> I remember reading this file back when I got Llamatron on a cover disk in the 90s. Jeff Minter has been a bit of a hero ever since then. Llamatron on the ST was/is remarkable and great fun.

It's strange to see the various turns that the industry took after Shareware. A small number of people did very well out of it; I'm not sure Yak did. But analyses of Shareware vs. Freemium are interesting. For example: [http://www.whatgamesare.com/2012/08/freemium-is-not- sharewar...](http://www.whatgamesare.com/2012/08/freemium-is-not- shareware-20.html)

<comment><USER4> He is still out there plugging away. Looks like updated ports of old games to the Nintendo Switch.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> There is another article [1] that speaks very similarly about how niche unique things become popular and ultimately subverted. It (being [1]) speaks about subcultures being completely dead and I disagree with that. They are just transformed in the wake of the internet and the beginnings of social media. I would even say that due to sites like Reddit and Patreon more subcultures exist and are more diverse than before.

[1] [https://meaningness.com/geeks-mops- sociopaths](https://meaningness.com/geeks-mops-sociopaths)

</comment><comment><USER6> I am guessing, based on the timeline of his ludography on Wikipedia, that the secret project he enthuses about at the end was the Atari Jaguar? By all accounts his Tempest 2000 was one of the best games on the Jaguar; shame the console didn't see more success.

Not sure what he has against the SNES, though.

<comment><USER7> > Not sure what he has against the SNES, though.

I think that was just his way of hinting that his top-secret project wasn't on SNES, for which the hype machine was in full swing at the time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> LLamatron? Well, some of us bought Gridrunner for the Vic-20 when it came out.</comment>


Show HN: octo.cat - URL shortener / mobile Github - <AUTHOR> http://octo.cat

<comment><AUTHOR> This is just a late-night hack that I did after I got tired of viewing Github repository links on my iPhone.

The app is on Github if anyone wanted to fork it for whatever reason. Hopefully Github doesn't have an issue with me using 'octocat'. If you do, please contact me.

The .cat TLD has a requirement that sites have at least Catalan within 6 months; I'm working on a translation.</comment>


Show HN: Hosty – Image/Text self-hosting for minimalists in PHP - <AUTHOR> https://bitbucket.org/xrstf/hosty <comment><USER4> Looks good. Bepasty looks similar also, however not sure if it supports fully public url's.

</comment><comment><USER5> Hastebin (written in Node) is also cool if you intend on making it public - <USER2> put an instance up at [https://paste.ian.sh](https://paste.ian.sh) and I use it every day.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Some weeks ago, I got tired of using imgur for hosting screenshots and stuff, partially because I was trying to share work-related content and using a public site like imgur doesn't seem appropriate.

I then looked around for existing, __simple __self-hosting tools, but all I found where huge near-community apps like Gallery2, Coppermine, ownCloud or ownstagram (with commenting, rating, folders, tags, ...) or PHP scripts from before there was PHP 5.

Long story short: None of them fit my need, so I built my own. It's based on Silex (Symfony2's micro-framework sister) and Twig and only offers the bare minimum. Files are placed in the local filesystem, a database is not needed. Apache2 is the default supported webserver, but we have Hosty in production using nginx over SSL as well.

Uploading is only allowed for registered users (and users have to be configured in a config file), viewing is allowed to anyone having the link to a file. It's __not __intended to be a public file hosting service, so do not try to add some public register form or something like that ;-)

Hosty can be used inside a LAN without Internet access; no external resources are being used. It's published under MIT and deliberately doesn't add any promotional links or "Created by Hosty" footers.

<comment><USER6> You missed MediaCrush ;)

[https://github.com/MediaCrush/MediaCrush](https://github.com/MediaCrush/MediaCrush)

Building your own is easy and fun, though, I don't blame you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Sometimes I'm missing the Good Ol' Days. You know, when you where able to download some PHP files as a ZIP, extract them, maybe change some configuration and be done. You didn't have to bother with a bunch of other tools just to get some script ready.

(This is, by the way, no offense to this project at all! I just couldn't resist to write this.)

<comment><USER8> I agree. For such a simple script, requiring all these tools (npm, bower, composer, grunt), it just doesn't seem practical.

Is this how people develop and deploy PHP stuff nowadays?

<comment><USER9> For the life of me do not understand why anyone would require _Node 's package manager_ as a requirement for a _PHP application._

One of the few strengths of PHP is that there doesn't have to be a "build process."

You don't even _have_ to compile CSS and JS, really, but I guess people aren't comfortable with js or css which isn't machine generated. Fair enough - <USER3> are benefits to that, but as general practice, it's needless complexity.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's a build requirement, not a requirement to run the app. If you know a better way to install grunt-contribs, please tell me.

I made it more obvious in the readme that you do not need build tools to run Hosty. Seems like that confused a lot of people.

<comment><USER9> > If you know a better way to install grunt-contribs, please tell me.

I would just not use grunt. I understand it's not required to run it, but even as a build dependency, unless you already have Node installed and running, it's a lot of overhead for relatively little benefit, I think.

<comment><USER10> I'm on the fence on this one. On one hand, I'm fond of package managers. On the other, there's a TON of crap every time I run bower install... I've yet to figure out the best way of doing things. I'm thinking of using bower- installer, ship with a copy of the assets, and include bower.json, but not bower_components/. The other alternative is obviously CDNs, but then you're maintaining assets manually

<comment><USER9> PHP already has a package manager though (Composer.)

Granted, the amount of friction involved depends on personal preference, and whatever environment you're working in, but why require a package manager in another language (and, potentially, the language itself) when one exists for the language you're actually deploying in?

<comment><USER11> I'm sympathetic to your point. Where I work, we use Grunt and npm for our PHP projects, and I'm in the process of replacing them (slowly but surely) with PHP-based versions of the tools we use, and replacing Gruntfiles with Makefiles. It's experimental, currently, but I feel like it's doable. The only dependency then is PHP and Composer, which I think is nice.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Trump's Washing Machine Tariffs Stung Consumers While Lifting Corporate Profits - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/21/business/trump-tariffs-washing-machines.html <comment><USER2> My close friend is opening a gym, part of this includes purchasing these thick rubber mats from Chinese suppliers. The new tariffs made it unprofitable when buying from china. His equipment supplier is currently negotiating with a US supplier. My friend is fine with waiting a few weeks.

<comment><USER3> I think you mean horse stall mats, which you can find at Tractor Supply, etc. 4' x 6' x 3/4" vulcanized rubber:

[https://www.tractorsupply.com/tsc/product/4-ft-x-6-ft-x-3-4-...](https://www.tractorsupply.com/tsc/product/4-ft-x-6-ft-x-3-4-in- thick-rubber-stall-mat)

The ones I have (I used a few in my home gym) were made in Canada. I'm surprised any of these come from China.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The American middle class is being kept alive with cheap Chinese goods. The entire US economy is based on consumer spending so when prices go up it will hurt.

<comment><USER5> That is a horrible justification for continuing to outsource American middle class jobs to China.

Cheap trinkets are not worth the loss of jobs. That idea is an economy-killer and is the long-term death of the nation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Good job citing 0.0001% of the negative effect Trump's tax cuts had, while ignoring the 99.9999% positive net effect.</comment>


The Flight of Gifted Engineers From NASA - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.houstonpress.com/hairballs/2014/08/space_flight_some_of_the_best_and_brightest_engineers_are_leaving_nasa_for_the_private_sector.php

<comment><USER2> The article heavily focuses on the experience of one intern, who not unexpectedly had something of a culture shock to bureaucracy. She will find a different sort of shock in the private sector as well.

I don't find this long article particularly enlightening about NASA's situation, except that budget cuts and lack of moonshot type projects aren't particularly inspiring to the young.

<comment><USER3> _I don 't find this long article particularly enlightening about NASA's situation, except that budget cuts and lack of moonshot type projects aren't particularly inspiring to the young._

Ultimately, that's where space activity should go (and hopefully will go). Over a few centuries, shipping went from having the perception (rightly or wrongly) of adventure and travel, to a base commodity. Today you could ship a 40ft container of laptops from Dalian to Rotterdam (5500 km by North-East passage) for 60 US cents a laptop, and if you're sending lots of containers, expect a bulk discount. If the cost of shipping[1] doubles, the end consumer buying the laptop won't even notice! This is where space activity should end up :)

[1]: Obviously by shipping I mean the bit on actual ships; not the cost of trucks to and from the ports, which is horrifically expensive by comparison.

<comment><USER2> Shipping was done for items like pepper and tulips that were worth their weight in gold. Or in the case of the Spanish, actual gold.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Why modern articles are so long? 6 long pages, isn't worth it.

By the way, only in English internet I see that articles are broken down on pages. I presume that's for showing more ads.</comment>