Preparing for the Future of Artificial Intelligence - <AUTHOR> https://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2016/05/03/preparing-future-artificial-intelligence <comment><USER2> This level of hype reminds me of the AI winter. Concerned that public interest hits a peak and then a few months later disillusion sets in and AI becomes a discredited failure in the public's eye, since even rapid progress moves slower than an election or typical news cycle.

<comment><USER3> At this point, I really don't think our government has any idea how to deal with what is coming.

<comment><USER4> Our government doesn't know how to deal with what happened a couple of decades ago, technologically speaking; a couple of decades _at least_.

<comment><USER5> Well, except for those pesky NSA and DARPA agencies, to name just two of many, that have access to technology you haven't even dreamed of yet.

Congress might be full of idiots or smart people trying to make you believe they're idiots, but don't for a moment think the federal government as a whole is technologically stunted.

<comment><USER6> Certainly not but consider the level of dysfunction and complete lack of interdepartment cooperation. We have the NSA actively hacking other nation- states and our own private sector and then we have an FBI that resets an icloud password preventing them from getting a backup of data they desperately needed.

<comment><USER7> The NSA hacks anyone who seems interesting. But that, arguably, is their job. As they see it, anyway. The FBI isn't so high-tech, for sure. But they get help, eventually.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> From the press release: _" In education, AI has the potential to help teachers customize instruction for each student's needs."_

Does anybody actually do that? Most "online education" still seems to be canned lectures. There was work on this from the 1960s to the 1990s, but efforts seem to have stalled.[1] There are drill-and-practice systems, but they're really just workbooks with automatic scoring.

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

<comment><USER9> There's a hip startup downtown working on something just like that.[0]

Will these systems be any better than an automatic scoring system with spaced repetition? Well. More fundamentally, what are a student's needs? Sesame Street and other organizations[1] have known for a long time that the most "engaged" learners also happen to be having fun.

The only particularly controversial thing in that quote is the word _teachers_. Left relatively unsupervised, the kids today will voraciously seek youtube videos to teach themselves how to make a Turing machine in Minecraft. What an intelligent tutor really needs to be able to do, is pay attention to what a student is _curious_ about. Ubiquitous sensors will probably play into some of the new efforts. But the biggest leaps will come from systems that help kids learn from each other, together.

[0] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1lG4xBoEgZo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1lG4xBoEgZo)

[1] [http://www.instituteofplay.org](http://www.instituteofplay.org)

<comment><USER10> > Left relatively unsupervised, the kids today will voraciously seek youtube > videos to teach themselves how to make a Turing machine in Minecraft

I am currently teaching middle school and high school and I think nothing is further from the truth. A few kids do, maybe most children of HN's parents, ... but most kids don't care at all about programming, science or building anything.

It's a lot harder to do differentiation than it sounds. After 10 min of hour- of-code many are bored out of their mind, say they don't like video games and want to do something else (acting, paint _without code_, do sports, take selfies, gossip, read a novel, etc ...).

<comment><USER9> I don't mean to say that every child shows a natural interest in programming. But I didn't have access to YouTube 30 years ago when I was first learning to program. And even with the resources available, we were the privileged few who were able to pursue our curiosity.

Teenagers congregated in the same place, away from their parents? That's the age when humans tend to get much more curious about other humans. You could have them code on paper, and reason with each other while _looking_ at each other.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> With all the people scared from AI, I can imagine if they would replace politicians and government officials with AI in just small part of the country, after the initial surprise, within weeks satisfaction would be through the roof and we would have AI running the country.

<comment><USER3> For software based AI to be successful at what it does, it must compete. If it does not compete well, it will suck, and the government will suck just as bad. Government, at least the way we've been thinking about it thus far, will have to change for AI to be good at it.

<comment><USER12> For a software based AI to be successful, it must be good at convincing people to go along with it and balancing sometimes paradoxical concerns from the public. I think efficiency is the least of its worries.

<comment><USER13> I think that if given a chance, current AI would be terrifyingly effective at maximizing public support while minimizing accountability. It seems like the sort of big-data problem that's a perfect fit for modern machine learning methods.

<comment><USER5> I was just talking to a friend about this. RNNs are rather brilliant in their infancy. Imagine when they grow up.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> AI is, at the end of the day, just software. We have the intellectual tools to enable us to make high quality software and systems, stemming from industrial experience stretching back three quarters of a century. We need to free that knowledge; ossified in dozens of mil-std and similar institutional documents: re-institutionalising it in the public domain, making free tools and systems available to support the (public) quality processes that a distributed, heterogeneous, partially open-source future AI requires.

</comment><comment><USER15> The folks here commenting about entrenched power structures should remember that Ed Felten (who put his name on the release) is not a career bureaucrat at all.

<comment><USER16> True. As FTC CTO, his able past work in privacy and data security was certainly relevant to traditional FTC interests. As Deputy US CTO, I think his agenda has broadened.

There's already a ton of gov't interest/activity on surveillance and security issues, mostly via the military services and adjuncts. I assume this initiative ain't more of that.

This announcement seems to presage greater federal gov't interest and involvement in how computing might be used toward _less_ defensive/clandestine ends, especially in governance (social good), control, and safety, as well as legal implications -- adding AI as the means to serving gov't ends, so to speak.

If so, great. I'd love to see greater OPEN use of computing in government, especially in gathering unbiased metrics and making better use of them to evaluate the outcome of changes in policy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> How wonderful would it be to replace many government jobs with AI ;-)

<comment><USER18> I suspect we've already replaced 100,000+ jobs in call centers with AI -- you know the menu system that you get before you talk to somebody. (You might not think of that as AI now, but that's "success" \-- 20 years ago it undoubtedly was AI.)

I'm not all that excited about interacting with more AI.

<comment><USER19> We had phone menu systems 20 years ago and they most certainly weren't "AI". I'm actually not sure they were considered as such at any point since DTMF was devised.

<comment><USER18> I'm not talking about just a menu system; I'm talking about the system that asks you what you're calling about, does voice recognition, NLP, and then directs you do a part of the menu.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I really hate politico speak. What does this really mean?

"to spur public dialogue on artificial intelligence and machine learning and identify challenges and opportunities related to this emerging technology."

<comment><USER20> It's a quite clear statement (though in a niche jargon) - such language means that they intend to dedicate resources to organize some events/discussion panels about the topic, and possibly even to some research grants.

The only unclear thing about politico speak generally is that is not clear if they will do X or if they just wanted to publicly claim that they'll do X for some PR or voter support, with no intention to actually do it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> The idea of a computer deciding whether someone is guilty or not is a scary prospect. This is a bandwagon I'm not so sure the government should be so eager to jump on.

<comment><USER22> Computer program makes a decision based on the set of rules it was programmed with.

We have a law to make humans work exactly the same way. Law is a set of rules that say who is guilty and who's not. Only that humans are bad at being objective: [http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/notrocketscience/2011/04/1...](http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/notrocketscience/2011/04/11/justice- is-served-but-more-so-after-lunch-how-food-breaks-sway-the-decisions-of- judges/)

<comment><USER23> Laws are rules but they are not enough on their own to make decisions. They are written with the implicit cultural background and the intent of the humans who wrote them. Plenty of case law is around determining what the authors actually meant when they made a law.

As long as humans write the law, and that there is the notion of a sovereign people, human judges should decide how to interpret and apply the law.

<comment><USER24> Justice tends to be harsher on a hungry stomach.

I think we should strive for well written laws that don't require so much interpretation.

[http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/lunchtime- leniency...](http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/lunchtime-leniency/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> they should discuss a universal basic income to counter the pervasive unemployment which ai will bring with it.

<comment><USER26> Given election cycles and how expansive it will be to deal with this problem, none will address this until the effects are strongly felt by avg. voter.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Love this but they're really not holding one of these in the Bay Area? -_-</comment>


Identifying People from their Writing Style - <AUTHOR> https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2013/01/identifying_peo_3.html

<comment><USER2> So even if I do everything right to protect my identity, someone can now identify me based on my writing. Amazing, and scary.</comment>


A Bot Bought Dozens of RTX 3080 Units Before Consumers Could Grab Them - <AUTHOR> https://www.pcmag.com/news/how-a-bot-bought-dozens-of-rtx-3080-units-before-consumers-could-grab-them <comment><USER2> > On eBay, you can already find hundreds of listings for the $699 RTX 3080 > card for $1,200 to $2,000 and more.

One thing I'd really like to know, and none of the news coverage seems to address this question, is why are people willing to pay such a premium over the MSRP to get it now, as opposed to just buying it a bit later.

Are these eBay buyers consumers, or is it for some commercial applications? (I assume there must be buyers, since the article says there are hundreds of listings at this price.)

<comment><USER3> Potential buyers could be purchasing the cards for crypto applications.</comment></comment>


Here's What Happened At Fluent - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2012/08/08/heres-what-happened-at-fluent/ <comment><USER2> So according to the story's only named sources, the co-founders of Fluent, the reason Fluent failed was because it was _so breathtakingly ambitious_ that it scared lily-livered investors away; but don't worry, kids, the founders had _so much integrity_ they turned away multiple acqui-hire offers from "other red-hot Valley startups." (Which aren't named, but trust them, they were red hot.)

Note to journalists: it makes a better story if you also talk to people other than the subjects of the story before hitting Publish.

</comment><comment><USER3> It is a near impossible task for sure. I got to know them pretty recent, and by briefly checking out their UI and features, I really felt inclined to try it out.. too bad I never got in the beta.

I feel maybe they should have endured a little longer? At least launch or public beta, and take it from there?

It looks that they shut down primarily based on monetary reasons and not being able to raise a seed. Because they needed "proof of quite large user numbers and growth – something we couldn't supply with our own money."

<comment><USER4> "something we couldn't supply with our own money." I find it likely that next round investors were deliberately asking to see the company jump a high hurdle before funding- to see if it was hobby or a commitment.</comment></comment>


Serving configuration data at scale with high availability - <AUTHOR> http://engineering.pinterest.com/post/112895488589/serving-configuration-data-at-scale-with-high

<comment><USER2> Easy to play armchair quarterback, but if each server is storing the complete list, why not just use a queue to push out the change?

        for {
         message = blockWaitingForMessage()
         if message.action == "add" {
           lock()
           blacklist[message.domain] = true
           unlock()
         }
        }

On startup you'd need to bootstrap a server. Use a database as your source of truth, and wrap an internal-only api to fetch all domains.

<comment><USER3> Because this way you only read the data in once and don't need to make any changes to it which allows you to pick different data structures.

<comment><USER4> May be.

I read the article twice but had the exact same reaction on both occasions that somehow we used a "big" bat to kill a small ant when some easier solutions would have sufficed.

Though, it's looks very likely that I might be missing something really minuscule.</comment></comment></comment>


Startups That Received Investment from In-Q-Tel - <AUTHOR> http://mattermark.com/106-startups-who-received-investment-from-the-c-i-a-most-frequent-in-q-tel-co-investors/ <comment><USER2> Time for another thrilling round of everyone's famous game, _Guilt By Association_ yaaaaay!

The truth is usually 83.46% more boring than conjecture, but in this case I bet it's 100%. I have no affiliation with In-Q-Tel, nor have I ever worked for an In-Q-Tel-funded company, but I have friends on the management teams of more than one and my bet is: In-Q-Tel just gives money to things they thing DoD will find useful, and that's that.

<comment><USER3> i'm sorry, but i think this is mistaken. it's both mis-applying the term and misunderstanding why this list could be useful.

guilt by association is when, say, two companies happen to share the same building. if one is known to work for the intelligence community then guilt by association blackens both. but this isn't (accidental) association. this is a direct, paid relationship.

and association isn't useful anyway. what's interesting is understanding _why_.

you don't give money for nothing. you use it to buy (or invest in) something. maybe it's a useful service. palantir's products seem like exactly the kind of thing you'd buy if you were an intelligence agency. or hardware and software for processing a large volume of data.

but what about other companies here? can they all be explained that simply?

if not, what else could the money be buying? access? information?

that seems like a smart question to ask. particular when you no longer trust the person paying.

i don't think this is being paranoid, but i _am_ curious. i'm not painting everyone black through simple "association", but i am asking myself what is being sold.

and that seems like a reasonable question.

[indeed, given how reasonable that seems, your knee-jerk dismissal is odd. do you really not see the questions raised?]

<comment><USER4> If you look at their portfolio you would see most of these investments are centered around products, namely those that processes or make sense of either large amounts or complex data, nothing that includes covert surveillance a la facebook.

NSA bad actors withheld, I have a tough time seeing why anyone would consider In-Q-Tel a bad thing. A lot of our current technology (lets not forget the Internet) were born out of government funded projects.

<comment><USER5> > I have a tough time seeing why anyone would consider In-Q-Tel a bad thing.

Wholeheartedly agree.

I take their investment as a stronger sign of success because they are closer to the customer (rather than just being one of those firms that bets on the greater fool theory).

Case in point, consider their 10gen play. CIA has been a major player in database design since the beginning:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oracle_Corporation#Overall_time...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oracle_Corporation#Overall_timeline)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Whether they received investment is one thing. What would be much more interesting to know about are the conditions of the investments and whether or not there were any side-letters or small favours to be done in return for the investments, I find it hard to believe that the CIA would make 'investments' hoping for a monetary ROI but at the same time I find it even harder to believe that they would make an investment without any kind of ROI at all.

Some surprisingly august names in that roster, not everybody there will be happy to be associated in this particular manner.

<comment><USER7> I agree, both with you and with TPTACEK, as in-and-of-itself, an investment by In-Q-Tel just means that they are interested in the value of the tech in general defense/intel perspective.

What I would be interested in, and there is likely never going to be any way, other than an actual leak of proof, whether ___IF_ __a company could be leaned on to comply with some NSA /CIA request based on their funding;

E.g.

" __ _Hey, you know how we gave you $100MM to build out your infra? Yeah - well here - install this box into your DCs as well. "_ __

<comment><USER6> Barring such a leak this is really just speculative. But such a leak would definitely shine a different light on all the other investments. So until then this amounts to a big fat '0'.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> In-Q-Tel's own site list's their portfolio: [https://www.iqt.org/portfolio/](https://www.iqt.org/portfolio/)

</comment><comment><USER9>
      Name                  Estimated Employees Total Funding
      Palantir Technologies                 920  $301,000,000

They were Elves once, taken by the dark powers. Tortured and mutilated. A _ruined_ and _terrible_ form of life. And now... perfected: my fighting Uruk Hai! Whom do you serve?

Sarumannnnnnnn...

</comment><comment><USER10> Intel & Samsung are two of only 6 "VCs" with more than 3-coincidences, from a dataset ~70 entities.

</comment><comment><USER3> i can understand why they're investing in companies like palantir. and hardware like pure storage seems like it could be useful too; similarly cloudera/mongo for data handling. but why have tendril got so much? [http://www.tendrilinc.com/](http://www.tendrilinc.com/) or apigee? [http://apigee.com](http://apigee.com)

<comment><USER11> Tendril: the CIA might have a use for smart power networks that could detect non-authorized devices (bugs) drawing power.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Hmm I interviewed there for a SE Data job.

</comment><comment><USER13> 10gen- Is it safe to use mongo?

<comment><USER14> Yes...you should only be worried if they added some anonymous background job replicating your mongo instance somewhere else for 'support' or something.

<comment><USER15> You mean like this one? [http://www.mongodb.com/press/10gen-announces-mongodb- backup-...](http://www.mongodb.com/press/10gen-announces-mongodb-backup- service)

<comment><USER6> Hehe. Oops...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> disgraceful to see fellow entrepreneurs and coders working to kill other humans. hope your parents are as "patriotic" as you when they watch CIA drones kill children and women for oil.

<comment><USER17> You should do a little research into how this whole energy/technology/computing/internet stuff came to being.

Steve Blank gives a good talk about the "Secret History of Silicon Valley" \- [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTC_RxWN_xo](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTC_RxWN_xo)

You'll note that at the end he kind of says "but everything got better and we're all driven solely by the capital markets and they know best - don't worry be happy! Pay no attention to the g-men behind the cur.."

<comment><USER18> Very informative video. Thanks for sharing!</comment></comment></comment>


10 years ago the world met the First Android phone. It didnt have headphone jack - <AUTHOR> https://www.pcworld.com/article/3308157/android/first-android-phone-t-mobile-g1-10th-anniversary.html <comment><USER2> holy crap how did i forget my G1 didnt have a headphone jack? i used to know EVERYTHING about that thing</comment>


Building a Brain on a Silicon Chip - 200K neurons linked up by 50 million connections - <AUTHOR> http://www.technologyreview.com/computing/22339/?a=f <comment><USER2> I'm a bit puzzled by these attempts at simulating the brain. I work in neuroscience, but very far from this field so I'm most probably at the worse point of the (estimated knowledge / actual knowledge) graph on this topic. The people working on these projects are incredibly smart, and are certainly aware of the following caveats, since they've been thinking about it for years. I'm actually posting this comment hoping that someone will jump in to prove me wrong.

This looks like a cargo cult to me.

Not "cargo-cult science" as denounced by Feynman where some nutjobs tried to make telepathy or astrology look scientific. This is real, serious work, with a sound methodological grounding.

I'm afraid that they are actually building a "cargo-cult" brain, because they actually are at the wrong spot of the aforementioned graph too. Think of AI in the 70's. AFAIK, we know far too little and the field is still too fragmented to build a reasonable model of the meso- and macroscopic structure-function of the brain (I'm actually unable to tell where one start and the other ends, assuming the distinction between both concepts isn't a false dichotomy).

You cannot emulate a brain out of the box. You have to simluate the whole embryologic developmental process (which is half directed (mostly at the population scale), half random (at the microscale), but it's actually more complicated) before you can start to educate it, assuming you built something functional. Once again, we know, at the same time, a lot and close to nothing about these development.

Brain simulation could be, oh the irony, a good target for genetic programming/engineering :-).

<comment><USER3> At the very least it would provide interesting FPGA technology.

I think most engineers recognize that the brain has a lot of unknowns.

When you say "educate" what exactly do you mean? We can train neural networks now to, say, recognize handwriting or other behavior. I think we are just after a system that can learn anything in general, say take a chess program and then give it checkers. Or Magic: The Gathering.

Also, the field seriously needs people like you. It seems like there are at lot of engineers who are into the brain and want to build stronger AI but not many biologists who want to do the same.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> _The FACETS group now plans to further scale up their chips, connecting a number of wafers to create a superchip with a total of a billion neurons and 10¹³ synapses._

I just thought that they were going to have some serious problems with yield at that kind of scale, but then it struck me that that's kind of the beauty of it: it doesn't really matter if a couple of neurons don't work - if it's anything at all like a brain, it'll be remarkably failure-tolerant.

(based on my admittedly limited knowledge of brains, simulated brains and semiconductor engineering)

<comment><USER5> ... And if it's anything at all like a brain, it'll be quite bizarre.

I really recommend this book - The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat by Oliver Sacks ( <http://www.amazon.com/Man-Who-Mistook-His-Wife/dp/0684853949> ) to change opinions of brains and people.</comment></comment>


New all-in-one blog widget combines brag badge, analytics tool and social bookmarking buttons - <AUTHOR> http://www.weburbanist.com/2007/06/26/romlet-widget-about-to-go-live-now-accepting-beta-test-bloggers/

<comment><AUTHOR> Be sure to check out the Romlet on the sidebar of the site that is linked to - though that's just one version (the other can be seen in preview format on Romlet.com)

</comment><comment><USER2> Can't wait for the initial release!

</comment><comment><USER3> IXm canXt wait for the release!

</comment><comment><USER4> check this out for sure!</comment>


Facebook attacked. Payed out biggest bug bounty ever - stp-ip https://www.wired.com/story/facebook-bug-bounty-biggest-payout/ <comment><AUTHOR> I can't be the only one who thinks $50000 is extremely unimpressive as a figure for a bug that lead to a data breach at Facebook? Why would any researchers ever go to Facebook first and not e.g. a foreign government that needs info on dissidents? I'm pretty certain that Facebook is making an educated calculus here, but it seems like a flaw like that would be worth at least _one_ engineer's yearly wages..</comment>


Ask HN: Help. My startup is failing - <AUTHOR> So long story short, I copied a SaaS that's doing well in a niche. I thought why not just copy their customer validation (the founder sounded really insightful and convincing in videos detailing how he interviewed customers for 9 months before starting the company), release a "me too" MVP for a start, and try to recruit beta users and iterate from there.
Well it didn't go very well. For the past couple of weeks, I blasted off thousands of cold emails and made dozens of cold calls (but never got to a decision maker), and now I'm a little stuck as to how to move forward. Those tactics didn't work; I recruited a few of inactive users, one even told me he regretted wasting his time signing up (due to various reasons, like dead links on terms and privacy policy and no "about" page). I've since fixed those.
I've LOVE to talk to customers, and I'm even open to shelving the current MVP, but no one wants to talk. On my cold calls, everyone were brash and standoffish and trying to get rid of yet another salesman, so how do I talk to them?
My next strategy is to start a blog, write an eBook, and start giving webinars, hopefully somehow to attract customers to my site first, and then try to have a conversation later. As of right now, traffic is essentially dead, so there's nobody to talk to and learn from.
Help moving forward? <comment><USER2> It is hard man, very hard. I struggled for 9 years. I failed 3 startups. I can only hope the best for you.

I went through all the things you say. I stopped doing cold calls. It is the worst thing that happened to me. Very demoralizing and devastating. Sucks my energy and will of live.

Later I fully focused on SEO for the locale market. 6 months later, one day a lady from Sanofi Pharmaceutical called me. They were in hurry to find a local partner for conducting an online proctored exam and somehow I got my first customer within a few business days.

Once you have 1 good customer, you should try to expand over. Here is my advice for this case: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19866334](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19866334)

PS: If you wonder what our product is: [https://www.testinvite.com](https://www.testinvite.com)

<comment><AUTHOR> Wow. I'm very glad you persisted and kept going. How do you keep your morale so high? The thing about cold-calling is, I've done it before in the past -- I mean, who hasn't worked at a call center before?

But it doesn't feel the same when you're selling YOUR own product. Where every rejection feels like you're a failure, you're failing, and everything you've invested into your company doesn't matter.

I'm still struggling to get my first customer, but just like you and the other comment suggested, I'm definitely working on my SEO, content marketing, inbound marketing.

Do you have any tips besides just optimizing SEO? That feels a bit like a crapshoot based on luck.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Do you have anyone in your network that can test out your MVP, and actually use it in their company? What I found in the beginning, if the MVP you released is kind of crappy, which it should be, is that it's difficult to get people to make the time investment needed to test it out and give valuable feedback. When it's someone you already know they are more likely to actually commit the time.

Also, at this stage I don't think you should measure success by how many users you get but rather by how happy your users are. I think zapperdapper is spot on with saying you need to find one customer who loves your product. Once you have that customer try using her to find out how to reach similar customers. Which online communities do they belong to? Where do they get their industry news? Can she recommend your SaaS to other potential customers? Can you maybe attend industry events? What sales language does she respond to? In her own words how does she describe her problem and your solution?

Also, if you post a link here, maybe HN can help out?

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't know anyone in my network who could test it out, hell at this point I'm willing to pay someone just to earnestly test it out and provide feedback that I'm so hungry for.

I'm definitely looking into industry events/trade shows, I don't have the resources for a booth, but I can probably walk around with a tablet demoing my product to prospects. I'm also part of an industrial online community, but I can't just spam my app there, as it's invite-only and I don't want to get banned.

My link is [https://rebrand.ly/dr6a8h](https://rebrand.ly/dr6a8h).

Sorry for the shortened URL, I'm trying my best for my site not to be indexed by Google in case prospects search for my site.

<comment><USER4> My humble opinion here:

1- the "cut out the insurance middleman" is just huge and don't tell me what your site is about

2- "EZ dental membership software for managing your new/existing in-house dental plan" \- Got a bit confused as to what EZ dental is, as I thought this should be actually OK Dental. Also still don't know what is it that you are selling

3- "Sign Up for free" \- for what? what is it that you are selling? who are you?

4- Now I see the screenshots with the stats and below it some useful information and understand more what you are offering.

I suggest you hire a professional designer to re-design your landing page as it is so confusing, size of fonts is just too big in places, I had to spend way too much time to even understand the niche you are targeting.

If you are targeting dentists, then go where they are online/offline. I would find a forum/webpage where there are a lot of dentists and buy an ad there. Alternatively just visit them and see if they are interested.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Read "Fanatical Prospecting" by Jeb Blout. You'll need to make more than a few dozen calls - more like 100 per day. Every day. Keep doing it and you'll learn. Severe amounts of rejection are just part of the job. Shrug it off and keep making your calls.

Hunter.IO will help you find decision-maker email addresses. MixMax.Com and similar services will alert you when your cold emails are opened. Keep your emails short and to the point.

Blogs and ebooks are fine - everyone does them - "inbound marketing" is the easy way because you're not going through the pain of rejection. However, this is not the easy way. You'll spend a lot of time of SEO and online promotion. It's way easier to just pick up the phone / email and call.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. I'll refuel my morale for now and get back into it soon. I'll make more calls. I use Mailgun to track my email opens/clicks, so I'll also keep doing that.

<comment><USER5> Hey, just to give you a prod:

"I'll refuel my morale for now and get back into it soon."

This is the procrastinators dream ticket. :-) It's well known that simply getting started on the task makes it easier. What's stopping you from making five calls right now? I know you don't like it. But if you want this to succeed - this is the price you must pay.

Do it now :-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Inbound marketing first. Create great content. Setup a landing page. Start writing blog posts. Start creating videos, presentations and other stuff. The goal is to build a brand even if small.

When you are just starting out, no one knows who you are or what your product is all about. So instead of trying to tell people, let them find you/it. Nothing wrong with making phone calls btw but don't only do that.

<comment><AUTHOR> Absolutely. I'm already starting a blog and pumping it up with content, hopefully I can capture some leads with a MailChimp form too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I would go back to fundamentals. Do you have ONE customer that LOVES and NEEDS your solution? If not, start there.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm trying to get there. I have direct competitors who love and need their solutions, so these people definitely exist, I just need to reach them. And perhaps differentiate even more to get them to switch.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Apart from the morality of copying the idea, sounds like the original founder knows his market and how to find the people, you don't. Maybe he is more passionate about the product he is creating, that can be a huge factor. But ultimately, from the sound of it, seems like your MVP is just very subpar.

<comment><USER7> Is copying an idea a moral issue? For example, is copying the idea of "a restaurant" or "a hotel" morally questionable?

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> How is yours better then the others? Push that

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm not sure it is, I think we have an easier UI (less-steep learning curve) and better pricing structure (competitors have high setup fees + high monthly, we have a results-based revenue model).</comment></comment>


Malaysian Flight MH370: Join the Satellite Photo Search - <AUTHOR> http://www.space.com/25068-missing-malaysian-airliner-satellite-photo-search.html?google_editors_picks=true

<comment><AUTHOR> It's kind of like a video game. A really dull, poorly designed game. But if you win, you win big! It got better once I got to some images taken during daylight hours.</comment>


Maersk reinstalled thousands of servers and workstations to fix  NotPeyta - <AUTHOR> https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/maersk-reinstalled-45-000-pcs-and-4-000-servers-to-recover-from-notpetya-attack/ <comment><USER2> For me, the most surprising thing is that Maersk was able to carry on during those 10 days without any IT:

> "We only had a 20% drop in volume, so we managed 80% of that volume > manually. [...] Customers were great contributors to overcoming that."

That makes me think that either a) IT isn't _quite_ as essential as we software people like to think, or b) the full potential of automation hasn't been achieved yet.

<comment><USER3> They still had a loss on $200-300 million, after everything. When it happend there was stories about how workers switched to using WhatsApp on their own phone to communicate.

<comment><USER4> ...and forced to close down Slack. That is painful! :(

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I can't imagine the stress and working conditions those "in the trenches" IT folks dealt with over those ten days.

Hopefully they all got rewarded with, at minimum, a few days off to relax and recover after everything got sorted out.

<comment><USER6> As someone in IT, they probably didn't get anything, maybe a friendly smile and a handshake.

<comment><USER7> now the company has realised it can essentially work without IT, I suspect their reward might be a severance package a few months down the line

<comment><USER8> The article says that Maersk is taking the opposite approach. Quoting the CEO, Jim Hagemann Snabe:

"And this was a wake-up call to become not just good —we actually have a plan to come in a situation where our ability to manage cyber-security becomes a competitive advantage."

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> They should have used containers.

<comment><USER4> Since I am getting sick of this joke: no we don't! :P

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Being a (former/retired) IT Exec this kinda thing used to keep me up at night!

Sadly, most C-level folks don't understand that even gold-standard cyber security is far from perfect, and IT can't do much against dumb, careless users.

<comment><USER11> But in this case they had not patched their windows machines for a vulnerability that Microsoft fixed months before. It was really a case of dumb, careless IT.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Wow, that is a monumental effort. We can't even get a critical software patch in less than three months. I would be very curious to see what their new infrastructure defense plan looks like now compared to the old

</comment><comment><USER13> The real cost of continuing to run Windows.

<comment><AUTHOR> No, Linux is not immune: [https://arstechnica.com/information- technology/2017/06/web-h...](https://arstechnica.com/information- technology/2017/06/web-host-agrees-to-pay-1m-after-its-hit-by-linux-targeting- ransomware/)

<comment> yjftsjthsd-h In an article from late 2017:

> kernel 220.127.116.11, which was compiled back in 2008.

Next you'll tell us XP is vulnerable. Like, Linux isn't 100% immune, but it has a head start.

<comment><USER11> Linux had its fair share of major vulnerabilities. Starting with heartbleed.

<comment><USER14> Heartbleed was a bug in OpenSSL code running on any platform, including Windows.

<comment><USER11> IIS doesn't use OpenSSL. It mostly affected linux boxes.

<comment><USER14> Sure, because most people using e.g. Apache run Linux, but it doesn't make sense to count it as a "linux bug" any more than it makes sense to count e.g. Ruby bugs as Linux bugs, or .net CLR bugs as Windows bugs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Does anyone know which software they use to roll out so many systems?</comment>


Technology recruitment in an early start-up - <AUTHOR> http://inter-sections.net/2008/09/03/technology-recruitment-in-an-early-start-up

<comment><USER2> If its all about personal relationships (and I agree it is), maybe this dynamic is missing speed-dating and eHarmony types of services?

<comment><AUTHOR> Actually, I know some people who have tried to do that here in London. Seedcamp even labelled their event "speed dating for entrepreneurs"... That's a huge flop with most technical people, though, as they are allergic to the commercialism of it (and too cynical about it to turn up).

<comment><USER2> Its a good point, without the possibility of getting laid, the whole speed dating thing is probably lame.

But, eHarmony, for instance, is a matching service - and at least some folks trust that it is helpful, and that is big. I see services like: <http://paradigm5.com/> \- which is a semantic match-making service for professionals. I am consulting on a similar project for an economic development organization, and see tremendous potential.. if it works just good enough.

Even without automated matchmaking, VC's often pair up business guys they believe in with a technical team that fits the bill. This could be a paid service. And this is about more than having the VC in your network, its also about having the expertise to properly pair people to execute.

Imagine the utility if you are a technical co-founder, and you are presented with a plateful of opportunities that match your skill set. Then you are empowered to narrow down your choices from there.

Networking will always serve its purpose. But, surely, there are venture scenarios where matchmaking, done right, would be a more efficient alternative that spending the resources required to expand your own network?</comment></comment></comment>


Amazon Transcribe Medical – Real-Time Speech Recognition for Healthcare - <AUTHOR> https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/amazon-transcribe-medical-real-time-automatic-speech-recognition-for-healthcare-customers/ <comment><USER2> Mozilla DeepSpeech has come quite far and has a very similar streaming interface for transcription. I wonder if on-prem will win the day due to patient privacy concerns?

<comment><USER3> I assume providers will still need a BAA with Amazon to use this, so from a privacy standpoint it shouldn't be that different from an on prem solution (ie there are clearly defined legal rights associated with this data).</comment></comment>


Show HN: Prezlr - Helping you do better remote presentations - <AUTHOR> https://email@example.com/introducing-prezlr-helping-you-do-better-remote-presentations-15f3e551f580 <comment><USER2> nice tool.. especially useful when you need to make presentations when you are on low B.W connections! Mogambo Kush Hua!!!</comment>


AI thought-leaders interviews - <AUTHOR> https://goodailab.com/humansofai/home <comment><AUTHOR> This is an upcoming series of interviews of thought-leaders and community builders in the AI space. Until now: Brain, Allen institute, xnor.ai and many more to come weekly.</comment>


Make a Public Lab Spectrometer (2017) - <AUTHOR> https://publiclab.org/wiki/economist <comment><USER2> One thing to bear in mind with these kind of DIY spectrometers is that typically you only perform a wavelength calibration (e.g. you can transform from pixel number on the detector to wavelength). That's reasonably easy to do with a CFL bulb and some known spectral peaks.

What's much more challenging is accurately measuring colours, or the relative intensity of certain spectral features. The problem is that your image sensor has its own spectral sensitivity which you usually don't know. This also means that you can't really quantitatively compare spectra between spectrometers because the sensors will be different.

Most of this time this isn't much of an issue, but suppose you want to measure the spectrum of some tungsten halogen lights around your house (or the sun). You won't see the characteristic blackbody curve. You'll see the spectral response of your detector with some absorption lines on it. It shouldn't matter much for e.g. differentiating between two species because you'll have the same instrumental reponse for each.

A fairly simple way to do this is to use a tungsten bulb with a known colour temperature. You can use the blackbody equation to generate the expected spectrum and work out the transform between your spectrometer and the calibration lamp.

If you want to do spectroradiometry (measure the absolute intensity per wavelength), you need to know the power spectral distribution of the lamp too. In the real world you'd need to buy a NIST-traceable (or equivalent) calibrated lamp.

</comment><comment><USER3> It hurts me to know that I can't cheaply buy a spectrometer, colorimeter, spectrophotometer, densitometer, spectroradiometer, turbidimeter, or similar. There are toys sold with essentially the same level of complexity that go for roughly 1% of the price. It seems that silly games are far more popular than chemistry labs.

Consider a 3-channel colorimeter. You need a pair of tri-color LEDs, a squareish glass test tube, a power source (a USB cable or battery holder), a chunk of black plastic, and a multimeter. In place of the multimeter, a USB interface can be had via a very cheap chip. Let the user move the tri-color LED, and you get a turbidimeter too.

The whole OLPC XO laptop, with that custom screen and support ASIC, cost only about $188 to make.

The problem is popularity. Almost nobody wants to study science. Meanwhile, we can get Pokemon Power Action Pikachu for $19.95, or Nerf Laser Ops Pro (2-Pack) for $41.25, Boxer (Interactive A.I. Robot) for $64.99, and so many other useless things.

<comment><USER4> I wonder what kind of experiments/projects you will do with given instrument.

My company tried to sell "cheap" (as in ~1000/1500 USD) VIS/NIR spectrometers, but it was very hard to actually find some viable market.

You can actually find modules[0] that will give you quite a good performance for given price. Electronics needed to run those devices are quite complex, but I even seen some open hardware boards available that might be half decent. Still, you are going to be in territory of 500 USD even in fully DIY build.

[0] [https://www.hamamatsu.com/eu/en/product/photometry- systems/m...](https://www.hamamatsu.com/eu/en/product/photometry-systems/mini- spectrometer/micro-spectrometer/index.html)

<comment><USER3> I'd teach AP Chemistry. It's useful for teaching AP Biology too. The equipment, with some application-specific packaging and instructions, might also work for: aquarium keepers, gardeners, pool owners, beer brewers, people on well water.

Full DIY builds are cheap for a colorimeter, photometer, and turbidimeter. One can make all three for about $30, not counting labor and a computer.

The trouble is manufacturing volume. Sadly, not every student takes AP Chemistry. I realize that the manufacturing processes with low per-unit cost (casting, forging, blow molding, extrusion...) all have high set-up costs. This really is my complaint: if people cared about learning science as much as they cared about pointless toys, the production volume would let us have these things at prices ranging from a few dollars (simple colorimeter) to a hundred dollars (stuff with decent lenses and moving parts). The affordability of low- end cell phones makes it clear how low prices could go. I know you're having trouble due to the costs associated with low volume, but to an ordinary purchaser your price looks like a rip-off.

FYI, there are about 320000 people learning AP Chemistry, of which about 9600 are homeschooled and thus unlikely to reuse equipment from prior years. Assuming the equipment in schools needs replacement every 20 years, perhaps 25000 could be sold per year if the price were low enough to not be a budget problem. I'm thinking you'd have to knock about 90% off the price, and I suspect that 25000 per year is nowhere near the volume you'd need to justify the set-up costs of high-volume manufacturing processes. I may be wrong though... maybe you can get a good deal on plastic molds or custom aluminum extrusion dies or molds for some sort of casting process.

<comment><USER2> >I know you're having trouble due to the costs associated with low volume, but to an ordinary purchaser your price looks like a rip-off.

Yup, being a hardware engineer makes you appreciate just how cheap some things are. Bear in mind that our motivation to develop our instrument was shock at how much the incumbents were charging! I think getting to O($500) for a quality instrument without high volume would be fairly doable with some clever design work. Getting to O($100) yes, if you could make the entire optical bench as a MEMS product and you have scale on your side (this has been done partially by SCiO).

A big limiting factor is that there aren't many perceived use-cases beyond "science". The big consumer one that everyone touts is food inspection, but outside a few very specific uses, it's a gimmick to most people. Maybe for avocado ripeness... It's also not ready for primetime yet. The real markets are places like astronomy where people don't hesitate spending thousands on glass and silicon. Brewing is another. You want hobbies which are taken up by data nerds.

The other problem is that spectrometers are overkill for a lot of stuff. Colour measurement for instance - (calibrated) colorimiter ICs are incredibly cheap. For applications where you need the resolution you either need an experienced user or software to automatically interpret the results.

There are some other off the shelf solutions: Hamamatsu make a low resolution spectrometer that's good enough for general demonstration - costs a few hundred[1]. AMS make an 18-channel "spectral" sensor which costs $10 (ish?). There have been a few Kickstarters which are trying to address this e.g. the SCiO [2]. That's about the closest we've got so far to a mass market spectrometer and it costs $299.

The problem as you say is: how many schools can afford even $100 on a device which may only get used once or twice a year? Holding a transmission grating up to your eye will solve maybe 90% of the needs of most teachers. It's enough to show different line emission from a bunch of lamps. The public labs spectrometer would do for the other %10.

[1][https://www.consumerphysics.com/scio-for- consumers/](https://www.consumerphysics.com/scio-for-consumers/)

[2][https://groupgets.com/manufacturers/hamamatsu- photonics/prod...](https://groupgets.com/manufacturers/hamamatsu- photonics/products/c12880ma-micro-spectrometer)

<comment><USER3> I don't think MEMS is required. For $60 you can get a 2 TB hard drive. It contains platters that are several inches in diameter, and there is a swinging arm that is a couple inches long. All these parts move with incredibly tight tolerances. DVD writers are $26, and Blu-Ray writers are $120. Those are an even better comparison, with moving optics.

Food inspection is silly unless that is your job. People who keep aquariums, particularly saltwater ones, are a more likely market.

18 channels sounds great for most school labs. It's enough for a crude graph of chlorophyll's absorption and/or florescence. It might even be enough to distinctly identify the four main sources of color in spinach leaves. Repeated sampling at about 10 Hz would be plenty for all the labs involving reaction rates; most could be done with 0.1 Hz. For example, a popular lab involves measuring the changing rate at which Crystal Violet is destroyed by lye. Some less-demanding popular labs involve measuring the amount of copper in brass (as copper nitrate via nitric acid) or the molarity of blue food coloring in drinks.

<comment><USER2> Do you fancy chatting further about this? I've been toying with writing a hacker's guide to spectroscopy, and it would be interesting to know what sort of experiments schools would find useful. Feel free to get in touch at josh at iayc dot org.

> Food inspection is silly unless that is your job.

Nevertheless, that's what the majority of the consumer devices are going for. Ripeness detection, "quality" measurements (eg measuring brix) and so on. SCiO also mention things like pill identification and body fat measurements. This is the problem: these are all gimmicky things that get VC funding but aren't all that useful in the real world.

This is the AMS sensor btw [https://www.digikey.co.uk/product- detail/en/ams/AS72651-BLGT...](https://www.digikey.co.uk/product- detail/en/ams/AS72651-BLGT/AS72651-BLGTCT-ND/9486614)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I bought an older version of this for a student of mine to get her started on her dive into optical measurement. It's a nice simple kit and helps demystify some of the technology.

She ended up building a nice polariscope for measuring microfluidic flows of viscoelastic fluids.</comment>


Microsoft offered to aid employees affected by Trump's DACA decision - <AUTHOR> https://www.recode.net/2017/9/5/16255490/microsoft-satya-nadella-offered-aid-employee-worker-trump-daca-dreamer-deport <comment><USER2> Microsoft has around 36 employees on DACA, and they will do whatever it takes to help them. All good. At the same time they will do everything -- behind the scene -- to keep 5000+ of their H1-B employees from India/China remain on H1-B visa for next 70+ years of their life [1] [2]. The reason being, an H1-B employee is tied as an indentured servant to their employer. If you are an H1-B employee here is how it works:

You get sick, you cannot work, you get fired; your get laid off; you have to sell your car, sell your house, pull kids out of the school and get out of the country.

I'm an H1-B employee working in US for past 12 years waiting for my Green Card. Since last one year I'm suffering severe health issues and is on high dose of pain killers just to make sure I can show up at my work. The day I can't, I lose my legal status, and my family will get deported. My kids, who are born here will also get indirectly deported. So, not surprisingly they love employees like that, and will never speak for them.

Also, the Kids of an H1-B employee who are not born in US, gets deported once they cross 21 years of age, since the H1-B employee cannot claim those kids as their dependent. The cruel part is, even DACA does not help these kids, because, to be eligible for DACA, that child should have been in US illegal [3].

So, for me, Microsoft is one of the most morally bankrupt IT companies out there.

[1] [https://www.cato.org/blog/no-one-knows-how-long-legal- immigr...](https://www.cato.org/blog/no-one-knows-how-long-legal-immigrants- will-have-wait)

[2] [https://twitter.com/RepKevinYoder/status/890640332387303425](https://twitter.com/RepKevinYoder/status/890640332387303425)

[3] [https://www.cato.org/blog/congress-should-help-young- legal-i...](https://www.cato.org/blog/congress-should-help-young-legal- immigrant-dreamers-too)

<comment><USER3> FWIW, Microsoft did announce their support for HR 392 earlier when Congressman Jason Chaffetz introduced it. HR 392 removes the per-country GC caps, with the aim to remove the decades+ wait for immigrants from populous countries.

Your general point about tech leaders who shed copious tears on social media for Dreamers stand.

<comment><USER2> Of course they did. There is no way they cannot provide a letter when asked for their support for H.R.392.

The point is their PR machinery (like, the articles seen now on DACA) or the lobbyist would spend zero time for their H1-B employees.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I fail to understand why people object so much to enforcing border policies now days.

I feel bad for any children impacted, but their parents chose to illegally immigrate. It sucks they are punished for it, but enforcing the law to preserve the way of life for its legal citizens should be a governments top priority.

Legal immigration options exist, and legal immigrantz amd refugees should be welcomed with open arms. But if you don't take those options or don't meet the criteria you can't complain you aren't able to stay.

</comment><comment><USER5> They provide immigration support to anyone who's not a permanent resident or citizen so this isn't particularly surprising. But I guess its worth getting some press.</comment>


An Internet without marketing advertisements. Is it possible? - <AUTHOR>

Remember back in the 70's and 80's before cable TV? We only had channels 3,6, and 7. We loved TV but couldn't stand the commercials every 5 minutes. The internet has turned into one big TV commercial. Websites are now 10% content and 90% ads. It is so sad that we let this get out of control. Don't get me started on social networking and how they exist to be the big TV commercial just to make boatloads of cash. <comment><USER2> I completely disagree. Internet ad supply far outstrips demand due to proliferation of UGC and other "non-premium" content. If you look at the prices of ads on any given ad exchange, particularly those with large amounts of long-tail inventory like Google AdX, CPMs are in the pennies versus ~$10-20 for television and newspapers. Additionally, just look at video ads. In an ad- supported, long-form online video (like Hulu), you see significantly fewer advertisements than the equivalent program on cable TV.

Finally, look at search ads. You think it's not worth seeing a couple of inconspicuous (yet often fully-relevant and targeted) text ads in return for Google's products? Same thing for Facebook...</comment>


Including a man page in your Ruby Gem - <AUTHOR> http://shairosenfeld.com/blog/index.php/2011/04/ruby-gems-and-man-pages/

<comment><AUTHOR> I never really considered adding a man page last time I released a command line tool as a gem, I just stuck to -h, but I'll definitely give it a go. Seems easy enough!</comment>


A cure for cancer, Alzheimer's, depression? FDA smacks down wild CBD claims - dfeojm-zlib https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/07/a-cure-for-cancer-alzheimers-depression-fda-smacks-down-wild-cbd-claims/ <comment> dfeojm-zlib CBD is great... as long as you can trust/verify what you're getting.

Personally, I buy 100% CBD isolate from a reputable mfgr that proves their product's purity with a mass spec plot. Then, I add it to a high oleic food- grade oil to make a sublingual tincture of _known_ dosage. Rubbing a tiny amount of CBD on the skin is purely placebo effect, and such products should be banned because they're fraudulent.

<comment><AUTHOR> And what benefits do you get from buying 100% CBD isolate and mixing it with high oleic food-grade oils and ingesting said tinctures? I'm genuinely curious.

</comment></comment><comment><USER2> We have a dog who is 13. We have him a good quality cbd pill for general inflamation and anxiety. Very good results.</comment>


The Climate-Friendly Vegetable You Ought to Eat - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/30/dining/kelp-seaweed-recipes.html <comment><USER2> Kombu, dried kelp, makes a nice soup base and is readily available in oriental markets. Fresh or fresh frozen kelp would be interesting, but I have not seen it in the market.

</comment><comment><USER3> TL;DR/spoiler: it's kelp</comment>


The 2015 MacBook previews a future that's not quite here - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/apple/2015/04/the-2015-macbook-previews-a-future-thats-not-quite-here/

<comment><USER2> A x86 laptop with a retina screen and 8 hours battery life, in a package that weighs in at 920grams, I find that more exciting than the Apple watch. That is the kind of progress that made me fell in love with tech.

The keyboard seems to be good enough to do coding and other productive work. This MacBook might be the perfect little mobile machine to do some coding on the go.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Most reviews regard the USB-C situation (only one port) as a huge problem. I can't remember the last time I had more things plugged in than my power plug and my iPhone and that use-case should be a non-issue with the new Macbook.

I'm a bit more worried about the Intel M CPU but it sounds like it performs alright. Lately I think my bottleneck was RAM or network speed.

<comment><USER3> I use my MacBook Pro for work, where I am always connected to power, video, and a USB keyboard and trackball. With USB-C compatible hubs at $79 it doesn't sound very appealing to me.

The latest MacBook sounds like it is largely good for Apple more than good for the customer. They seem to have simplified their manufacturing requirements a good deal, homogenizing the look with iPads and shedding ports and fans. But the cost is crappy performance. The only real benefit I see to this device is the retina display.</comment></comment>


Large explosion in Beirut - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/borzou/status/1290675854767513600 <comment><USER3> Unconfirmed reports that a fireworks depot fire caused a secondary benzene explosion. src: [https://twitter.com/mattparlmer/status/1290679715892690945](https://twitter.com/mattparlmer/status/1290679715892690945)

<comment><USER4> I've also seen reports of grain silos in the area being destroyed; grain is an astonishingly powerful explosive.

<comment><USER5> Grain is a pretty poor explosive because the upper and lower explosive limits are so close (yes I know that's not traditionally a metric we use for solids), it needs an oxidier and the volume of byproduct for volume of input is relatively low.

But large amounts of grain and oxygen are often found together in confined spaces so that makes it more explosive in practice than most things that people who work in offices and don't deal in bulk goods come into contact with.

<comment><USER6> Can you elaborate what "upper and lower explosive limits" are, please.

Also I don't understnd how it could be explosive at all, sudden oxidation of large (that is, low surface area to volume), non-dry particles seems unlikely. Flour etc. may be another matter, but a blast like this... flour?

<comment><USER7> Most grain elevators have incredibly large quantities of dust (basically flour) lying around, it's just unavoidable when you're moving that much grain around.

If it's too dry, there's a risk of static/friction/electrical ignition.

If it gets wet, you can have anaerobic bacteria build up heat in a compartment that, when exposed to oxygen, ignites.

Grew up on a farm, have a fair bit of experience messing around with grain bins. Our local elevator had a fire due to the former condition, and our neighbor's barn burned down due to the latter.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Another angle of the explosion - [https://twitter.com/FadyRoumieh/status/1290672517733064705](https://twitter.com/FadyRoumieh/status/1290672517733064705)

<comment><USER8> A user has compiled this synced compound video:

[https://twitter.com/AnalysisTwd/status/1290698045802373122](https://twitter.com/AnalysisTwd/status/1290698045802373122)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Another angle with huge mushroom cloud [https://twitter.com/ConflictsW/status/1290669902035132418](https://twitter.com/ConflictsW/status/1290669902035132418)

<comment><USER10> worth reminding everyone that mushroom clouds occur with large conventional explosions, not only nuclear explosions:

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

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Anyone know why this has been flagged?

<comment><USER8> This seems ideal as an HN post to me - generating fruitful discussion and bringing in various viewpoints and areas of expertise. And the fact that it's a current event means that people have a bit of leeway in speculation: we all have the same limited source of information (on the ground video).

<comment><USER12> I agree. This has components of science and policy. There are people in the community who can contribute valuable insight.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Looks like this [0] is the place, judging by the angle from video [1] (take the building with the red cupola south of there and the building in the harbor as reference).

[0] [https://www.bing.com/maps?osid=e851aed9-b5df-495a-89e8-5c53d...](https://www.bing.com/maps?osid=e851aed9-b5df-495a-89e8-5c53df3828fe&cp=33.902165~35.514249&lvl=16&style=a&v=2&sV=2&form=S00027)

[1] [https://twitter.com/JeonggukJeon__/status/129068971722728243...](https://twitter.com/JeonggukJeon__/status/1290689717227282434)

<comment><USER14> Yeah, Nick Waters from Bellingcat thinks the same:

[https://twitter.com/N_Waters89/status/1290681231693275136](https://twitter.com/N_Waters89/status/1290681231693275136)

See also this tweet:

[https://twitter.com/N_Waters89/status/1290688278094647298](https://twitter.com/N_Waters89/status/1290688278094647298)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Looks like a fuel air explosion to me; perhaps the fireworks factory popped a large LNG tank, which flowed out until it hit an ignitable diffusion; which then blew the rest of the tank farm open and caused the next front.

</comment><comment><USER16> Does anyone know what kind of explosion this might be?

<comment><USER17> One article I read said it was near a place where fireworks were stored. But who knows for sure yet.

<comment><USER18> This video shows fireworks, then a second explosion [https://twitter.com/SVNewsAlerts/status/1290674216623366144](https://twitter.com/SVNewsAlerts/status/1290674216623366144)

<comment><USER19> Oh, wow. I hope the videographer didn't sustain major injury. What a spectacular human disaster.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> What was that red material?

<comment><USER21> This is what I've been trying to work out, but am having problems Googling for suggestions. The only things I've in the past read as causing red smoke are highly carcinogenic/toxic hypergolic rocket fuels (hydrazine?), but I'm having a hard time imagining anyone storing a cache of that sort of thing anywhere near a built-up area.

The form of the explosion here points in my mind to something significantly more explosive than fireworks (fireworks result in white smoke too, no?) - <USER2> nitrates are involved, that might certainly point in a better direction.

<comment><USER22> I've read a number of reports saying that there was a large amount of sodium nitrate stored at the port (some sources say ammonium nitrate).

<comment><USER21> Just read this too, and it's looking like it's just under three times what Timothy McVeigh unleashed in Oklahoma City.

This kind of unnerves me a little.

Seemingly, a couple of tons of this not-entirely-impossible-to-get-ahold-of- chemical could seriously screw up national infrastructure.

We've had decades of fairly organised terrorism here in the UK, so perhaps I should know better, but it's a bit of a shock to realise that a 'manageable' quantity of otherwise fairly standard chemical stock is capable of producing something as dramatic as this.

<comment><USER20> Isn't the sale of nitrates highly regulated in most countries?

<comment><USER21> Most, yes, but then I'm unsure how complex it'd be for a well off and invested actor to play a 'shell game' with a few containers and get one of them filled with nasties into a major metropolis after a circuitous route.

The nitrates in question here apparently ended up in Lebanon after coming from Brazil via Mozambique.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


How I built a keyboard by hand - <AUTHOR> https://jacklew.is/keyboard/ <comment><USER2> Have to give a shoutout to keyboard.io - [https://shop.keyboard.io](https://shop.keyboard.io). Backing this project and watching the process and creation of this keyboard has been very rewarding. They are creating band new keycaps, not just modifying the inlays - but the full custom shapes as well. Watching the process of getting mass fabrication setup in China has been especially interesting as well.

One quality example blog post: [http://blog.keyboard.io/post/148699005129/day-420-hinges- and...](http://blog.keyboard.io/post/148699005129/day-420-hinges-and-feet-and- keycaps-and-pcbs)

<comment><USER3> Wow, $330 for a keyboard. I love the passion and the thought they put into it, and I expect that for the small quantities they expect to produce that is the right price to sell it at, but at the same time it seems to cross into the unsustainable price point.

<comment><USER4> People pay thousands of dollars for a virtual weapon in online games. That a week later, is deemed worthless by the next expansion release. I think you're vastly underestimating what people will pay for, if you think $330 is in the realm of "too much" for a hand made keyboard.

<comment><USER3> I need to be clearer, it isn't "too much" for a keyboard, the question I have is if it is sustainable. Or put another way will the keyboard.io folks ever get the chance to make a 'model 2.0' ?

This is my reasoning on that. As a bespoke item it carries a premium price for folks who value its design points.

A short anecdote; I have a pair of Roger Sound Labs studio monitor speakers that I _love_ , probably paid twice what similar high end studio speakers cost but the folks at RSL were passionate about speakers and made the kinds of quality choices I would make when building speakers myself. That quality is evident in that here it is 30 years later and the speakers still sound _great_ and still as they did when I bought them. Sadly, RSL no longer exists.

I think about that and similar vendors where I have gone out of my way to pay a premium to get a product that isn't working so hard for profit margin that it has compromised the durability or quality of the product. Those vendors are fragile.

If they make a really high quality product with the best components and engineering margins to insure decades of service, you only buy one unit and your done. Others will buy the same unit, but once the market is saturated you are stuck, you aren't selling any more, you still have bills and staff to pay. You need to either move on to a different thing, or shrink dramatically in size to be the maintenance organization.

A Bosch engineer was talking to me about predicting whether or not a particular spare part would be available 100 years from now. For things like machine tools, there are lots of them that have been in service for 100+ years. However, if you collect old computers, you know just how hard it can be to find parts to repair an S-100 machine like an Altair or IMSAI, or Apple II or PET parts. Forget finding a new set of DTL transistors for a PDP-1. Even the Alto project that kens and company are working on, that machine is 20 years old and you can't buy new disc packs for it or r/w heads for the drive. (both considered 'consumable' parts by the Alto)

So at the end of the day, can a company like keyboard.io survive by "only" charging $330 for a keyboard that they have nominally already sold to 2,000 backers. What is the total addressable market for that keyboard? 5,000? 10,000? And it serves a market (desktop computers) which is in steep double digit declines.

Even with big budgets such niche products find themselves lost (I've got a Microsoft 'commander' here you can play with :-))

My thinking then on this artisanal keyboard is whether or not they made the right choice by going to China. It seems like something you will sell a few thousand of, tops, and if you can make/keep all of the tooling in house you can control your supply chain fully.

Anyway, while I can't go that high for a keyboard, I know folks who will. I won't be surprised to find out they are already backers of this project. But from a long term "these guys will be impacting the way we think about keyboards for the next 30 years" I don't think they have set themselves up for even a shot at that. For that, it would have to sell for $1,000 each. That would give them the extra runway to develop additional fabrication capabilities in house and push the envelope on all sides.

<comment><USER5> I think you underestimate the market for high end keyboards. Kinesis has been doing this for a while for example and they don't seem to have a problem sustaining themselves or coming up with new versions. I bought a Kinesis Advantage 10 years ago for $350. They recently announced the Kinesis Advantage 2 for a similar price point. [http://www.kinesis- ergo.com/shop/advantage2/](http://www.kinesis-ergo.com/shop/advantage2/)

I'm sure it's not a huge market but it's enough to sustain a company that wants to focus on making premium accessories. I don't think keyboards are going anywhere anytime soon. Sure, the consumer market is shrinking but the average computer user was never going to spend $300 for a keyboard. People spend that when they do serious amounts of typing all day, and there doesn't seem to be a decrease in the number of people that need to type for a living.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is a very impressive effort! And I can't help but think it recalls an old heroic trope wherein the development of the true hero involves wandering off to forge one's own sword, (a theme which was more recently picked up on in Star Wars). I hope it encourages others not to necessarily settle with the blister pack handed to them.

<comment><USER7> ObTVTropes link: [http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/AMasterMakesTheir...](http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/AMasterMakesTheirOwnTools)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is a fairly common sort of occurrence in the mechanical keyboard hobby community. The geekhack forums are filled with useful info and links to kits for this sort of thing.

<comment><USER9> Yep - great to see someone follow through on it as well, I've got a pack of 110 Gateron Browns in the drawer wondering when they'll see the light of day. My 3 manufactured mechs and full-time job will probably mean they stay there as well unfortunately.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Welp, might as well hop on the bandwagon, and share mine as well. [https://imgur.com/a/SP4Ng](https://imgur.com/a/SP4Ng)

I used a pre-made PCB, so not quite as hand made as the OP's, but it's something I'm still quite proud of.

<comment><USER11> That looks neat! Do you have a link for the PCB?

<comment><USER10> Yeah, here's where I bought it: [https://mechanicalkeyboards.com/shop/index.php?l=product_det...](https://mechanicalkeyboards.com/shop/index.php?l=product_detail&p=536) and here are the instructions: [https://deskthority.net/wiki/Phantom_instruction_guide](https://deskthority.net/wiki/Phantom_instruction_guide)

<comment><USER11> Great, thank you!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> OP should talk to [https://twitter.com/adereth](https://twitter.com/adereth) (see: [http://adereth.github.io/blog/2014/04/09/3d-printing-with- cl...](http://adereth.github.io/blog/2014/04/09/3d-printing-with-clojure/)) and have pure fun together.

ps: [https://twitter.com/adereth/status/784870134502465536](https://twitter.com/adereth/status/784870134502465536)

<comment><USER13> Thanks for the mention! For anyone interested, all the source and models for the Dactyl keyboard are available here: [https://github.com/adereth/dactyl- keyboard](https://github.com/adereth/dactyl-keyboard)

There's also a talk I gave a Clojure/conj about it here: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uk3A41U0iO4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uk3A41U0iO4)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your work! I love the dactyl (my main board is an Ergodox). If/when I finally get a 3D printer, I will definitely build a Dactyl.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Cool to see a keyboard without a big spacebar. I've thought that that would be a good way to put multiple additional modifier keys on your thumbs, for things like controlling the arrow keys from the homerow without overloading the standard modifiers.

I even purchased the [Japanese version of my daily keyboard][1] to try this out. Haven't planned the functions or made the switch yet though.

[1]: [http://i.imgur.com/9LaxboJ.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/9LaxboJ.jpg)

<comment><USER15> We do have very similar tastes :-) I have the exact same one, only with a trackpad and PS2 connectors, because it was so cheap it made sense to reuse my old PS2/USB converters. Thinkpad keyboards are a rare and expansive luxury these days.

The fast tab switch keys next to the arrow is something I need in every keyboard or laptop, to the point I won't buy if there is just the inverted T without any key I can remap to fast-tab switch.

I love this keyboard, what I find disconcerting however is the Japanese writing. I would like to replace all my caps by brand new english caps.

<comment><USER16> A reminder for people considering it: the trackpoint on these is an old version with a lower resolution/sensitivity. If you have multiple displays there's a high chance you won't like it. Even on a sufficiently high res display, it can be somewhat disappointing.

If you want the newest trackpoint you'll need to get the new chiclet usb one[0]. There's a jap version too.

[0] yea, with the inferior (for many) layout unfortunately ;c

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I think that most people go with waterjet or laser cutting their keyboard plates. The SwillKB Keyboard Plate and Case build really helps with the design: [http://builder.swillkb.com/](http://builder.swillkb.com/)

<comment><USER18> To get OP out of hand filing all those corners I started researching the current year price of a 14mm sq punch (greenlee style) and then gave up and tried 9/16in instead, prices have gone up a bit since my dad was making vacuum tube projects with greenlee punches...

Its probably cheaper to watercut than to buy and use a punch (and hope for perfect alignment)

The problem with lasers is heat distortion that is a huge amount of cutting and the odds of it not turning into a pretzel are not so good.

A weldment with CNC carved rows and columns welded together hopefully into a square array is not ridiculous. In fact its probably the cheapest option. And you could use a nice aluminum and then anodize it some crazy cool color. If not aluminum and tig welding, maybe a somewhat less ambitious steel and silver "solder" (brazing, really) would be more realistic.

<comment><USER19> i was thinking 'water jet' too, but i think your welding process is potentially just as nice with a lower bar of entry (assuming you have a tig sitting next to you). you'd have to find a really friendly water jet shop to set up such a small run. if you had a mill, even a little one, you could take aluminum flat and cut channels so that the flats interlock. at that point you could just put down some tacks or even use fasteners.

if we want to lower it further, i think your brazing suggestion is good to. brass is easier to braze with a small hand held propane torch than steel i think. also more local hardware stores carry products like stay-brite and appropriate fluxes for copper alloys.

is there way to use half thickness so the top tab grabs on two edges and the bottom guys on two others?

<comment><USER17> It's possible to get waterjet cutting in low quantities with small setup charges. We have a good number of people ordering custom keyboard plates and cases from us at Big Blue Saw.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> This is neat, and I don't want to diminish that, but when I saw the headline "...from scratch", I wasn't expecting that the starting components would include "a full set of keys".

I'm reminded of an old Disney cartoon (maybe WWII era ?) where goofy invents artificial rubber. The catch is that it requires rubber tires as an input.

<comment><USER21> There are many projects where people have built their own keyboards.

Do you know of any where the people built their own switches?

<comment><USER22> I've seen a fair number of folks in the mechanical keyboard community (admittedly rather small already) that customize their switches. For example, a common mod for mechanical switches is to replace the springs in the switch housing, which affects how much force is required to depress the switch. Others replace the stem, which is the colored part of the switch, changing its feel (tactile vs linear, smooth vs course).

Given that, would you consider someone building their own switch as someone who's created a custom switch from these components? e.g. I've read of folks putting Zealios stems in Gateron housings with 80g+ springs to create their ideal switch type.

<comment><USER9> Yeah, have seen a lot of people mod their switches, but not seen someone create them from scratch - think customising them and blending components steps it up a notch, but isn't any more "from scratch" (although, in my opinion, getting the switches bought in is as "from scratch" as is logical).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> > If you wish to make apple pie from scratch, you must first create the > universe. - Carl Sagan

I see a lot of builds similar to this on /r/MechanicalKeyboards, but which use pre-made cases or other kits. This is more "from scratch" than many, due to hand-cutting the case.

Every time I see one I get the itch to try it myself. The guide he links to makes it seem tedious, but relatively straightforward.

</comment><comment><USER24> Wow, drilling and filing all of those holes by hand makes me glad I've discovered laser cutters. That's dedication!

</comment><comment><USER25> Neat project. I'll stick with my Unicomp for now, though. As much fun as it would be to build this, and to say that I'm typing on a keyboard I built, even the MX switches don't feel quite as satisfying as the click of a Model M, and I'm not making buckling-spring switches myself: sure, it might not be too hard, but even if it isn't, you have to make a ton, and then you have to make the keycaps.

Queue keyboard hackers arguing over whether buckling-spring is really better than MX.

<comment><USER26> I've run into quality issues with Unicomp recently (my last one only lasted 18 months). I'm now using a keyboard with Cherry Greens (CODE 104 key), and it's pretty darn close, but not the same (plus a bit quieter, which my wife likes).

Regardless of which is better, feeling familiar is nice. Those of my age who grew up using Apples are likely to prefer the Matias switches; I grew up with an IBM keyboard, and the Cherry Green is the closest I can find that isn't made by Unicomp.

<comment><USER25> Hey, I grew up with dome switches. I've tried the MXes, and they just don't feel right to me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Jesus H. Christ what a lot of negativity from a neat project. And the same quote from Carl Sagan is a nice asshat touch from people that probably don't make anything at all ever.

Great work op, don't let these pedantic asshats keep you down.

</comment><comment><USER28> I mean, sure, this is pretty neat, but par for the course with the excellent projects posted every day at sites like deskthority.net and geekhack.org. I'm surprised this one made the front page. It's neat but not the first of its kind.

There are folks on these sites who are re-creating IBM capacitive buckling spring keyboards "from scratch": new molds for all the components. Also, keyboard.io is a keyboard project complete from scratch (except for the switches) from some friends.

Kudos to the OP for building a keyboard! It's great fun and very instructive. Head to the forums I linked above if you'd like to see more.

</comment><comment><USER29> This is probably the only project which goes about building a backplate from household tools, rather than having it milled.

</comment><comment><USER30> [https://www.reddit.com/r/MechanicalKeyboards](https://www.reddit.com/r/MechanicalKeyboards)

</comment><comment><USER31> First keyboard built by hand for me was a ZX Spectrum 16k keyboard replacement made of door bell buttons. It was back in 1986 if I remember well. Result was a matrix of about 1m/50cm. We've actually broke the keyboard of our teacher computer because we were a full classroom playing Jetpack on it. All class has participated - of course with teacher's help. hehe...

<comment><USER32> Did it have those obnoxious rubber keys like the original? :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> shameless plug:

If you're looking for more keyboard build logs, I wrote one about my custom keyboard. [http://thume.ca/2014/09/08/creating-a- keyboard-1-hardware/](http://thume.ca/2014/09/08/creating-a- keyboard-1-hardware/)

<comment><USER34> Interesting read!

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> I made my own keyboard in college for the simple reason that I couldn't afford to buy one. You couldn't get one at Goodwill for $1.99 in those days :-)

I salvaged the keys from some IBM device. Drilled a bunch of holes in a fiberglass board, mounted the keys in the holes, connected them in an XY grid with diodes, and used a 6800 processor to poll the grid to see which key was pressed, and send the corresponding ASCII value to a serial port.

It was a simple design, and worked well. Later, I connected a 6845 video controller chip, some code, and a display, and voila! a VT52 clone.

Sadly, the thing got lost in one of my many moves.

</comment><comment><USER36> Thanks for posting this, looks like it was a fun build.

What's the split keyboard you previously had, shown in the background of the first photo?

<comment><USER37> Looks like an Ergodox (Infinity?) with full hand case.

<comment><USER38> Definitely an Infinity Ergodox, the full hand has the I:C logo on it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> So he built part of a keyboard. The best application I see of this, other than a startup for retail or Wall St keyboards, is for secure input. A secure keyboard has to (a) be immune to code injection, (b) no leak anything over power supply, (c) be TEMPEST shielded, and (d) optionally encrypted input directly to input subsystem in CPU if anything else on I/O bus is untrusted.

For this, the keys can usually be second-hand but everything else is custom. Mainly the MCU, power filter, material around it, etc. One might similarly do a wireless keyboard that encrypted its transmissions.

</comment><comment><USER40> Inspiring!

I currently own a number of ergonomic keyboards. Kinesis Freestyle 2 at office, Microsoft Sculpt Ergo at home and I've discovered my ideal keyboard would be a mix of the two.

Would love any ideas on how a custom keyboard could reasonably (time wise) be designed to combine the best aspects of both keyboards:

\- separated halves of the Freestyle2,

\- wireless bluetooth for both halves instead of the wire the Freestyle2 requires,

\- curve like the Microsoft Sculpt Ergo keyboard.

\- Ok with either full keys or scissor keys.

<comment><USER41> Separated halves is the easiest of your requirements. That is a pretty well solved problem in the keyboard community (see ergodox, etc.).

Having the halves communicate wirelessly is a bigger challenge, but still potentially solvable. The easiest solution would be to have each half register as a separate board. Then because it is wireless you have the issues of batteries and charging and stuff.

The curve might also be tough, especially when combined with the wireless part. The easiest solution would be to have a plate cut, heat it up to soften it slightly and then bend it into the curve that you want. There would probably be a lot of trial and error involved in that though, and it may be faster (though a lot more expensive) to design the final 3D version of it in a cad program and have it milled as one big block.

Standard cherry-style keys will be much easier to source than scissor keys.

This geekhack thread might give you some ideas: [https://geekhack.org/index.php?topic=70221.0](https://geekhack.org/index.php?topic=70221.0)

<comment><USER40> Awesome, thanks!

Some inspiration:

\- As a prototype... I'm wondering if the MS Ergo Sculpt keyboard could be cut in half and rewired.

\- Maybe two keyboards with two sets of wireless dongles could communicate via the same 2.4 ghz wireless dongle from "their half".

\- Maybe even 1 battery each.

That's a great link, thanks I'll see what might be possible.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I'd be interested to see how comfortable the grid layout is.

The only keyboard I used like that was the Sharp MZ80K. It was unfun, but that used square and flat keycaps too.

<comment><AUTHOR> My main keyboard is an Ergodox, so non-staggered keyboards are what I'm used to. Plus, the grid layout made it a lot easier to build.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> How about a porcelain or plaster board that fits your hands precisely. They did that in the soyuz, but not for hands, and for other reasons too.

<comment><USER43> I have thought of making ceramic electronic components. A keyboard would be a great start.

<comment><USER43> If done carefully some of the wiring could be painted on as an oxide and then reduced to the metal in the firing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> It was obvious from the title and its posting on hacker news that this would be some kind of slick 3-D printer article. I was, very happily, wrong. Bravo for a much more interesting take on this project.

</comment><comment><USER45> That's cool. I supported an IBM/PC clone keyboard firmware developer in the 1990s. Having an open source USB based firmware has really changed the game as it was a nightmare to clone the IBM XT/AT keyboard controller with all it's quirks.

</comment><comment><USER46> I've built a similar keyboard, called atomic keyboard, I love it, even if it was pretty pricey.

</comment><comment><USER47> Does anyone recognize the metallic split keyboard in the background? I have been looking for a high quality wired keyboard with separate left and right panels and hoping I don't need to build one (plenty of other things to build!)

<comment><AUTHOR> It's an Ergodox Infinity with full hand mod, it's a kit keyboard sold through Massdrop. You get the PCBs, switches and caps and assemble them. I would look at the Ergodox EZ if you want a pre-made one.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> That looks like a mini USB extension cable not a micro. Neat project though

</comment><comment><USER49> Looks like a preonic. Nice work. :) I couldn't type on a ortholinear keyboard at all... Switched back to a happy hacking :)

</comment><comment><USER34> Saw this on /r/mk. You did a very nice job on the keyboard. How is it typing on an Ortholinear-like keyboard?

</comment><comment><USER50> i wonder why people still use teensy boards, when similar chinese boards can be bought for a couple dollars each instead of $20.

<comment><USER51> Cheaper shipping / faster arrival for quantity = 1? QA/binning done by manufacturer instead of you?

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> What is rollover going to be like on a project like this?

</comment><comment><USER53> Exist a whole of crazy sub-culture about this:

[https://www.reddit.com/r/MechanicalKeyboards/](https://www.reddit.com/r/MechanicalKeyboards/)

[https://geekhack.org/](https://geekhack.org/)

[https://www.massdrop.com/mechanical- keyboards](https://www.massdrop.com/mechanical-keyboards)

I'm almost build one, because I need a replacement for my MS ergonomic Keyboard:

[https://geekhack.org/index.php?topic=79603.msg2053482](https://geekhack.org/index.php?topic=79603.msg2053482)

In short, MS hate me. He refuse to build a mechanical keyboard and also build the most nice Ergo (to me) but each iteration is far less durable. My actual one have several keys fade-out, and the palm rest is kaput. The original one, was rock-solid:

[https://www.amazon.com/Microsoft-A11-00337-Natural- Keyboard-...](https://www.amazon.com/Microsoft-A11-00337-Natural-Keyboard- Elite/dp/B0000642RX/ref=sr_1_7?s=pc&ie=UTF8&qid=1476133766&sr=1-7&keywords=microsoft%2Bergonomic%2Bkeyboard&th=1)

(I have see it at around US 300!)

So, I'm in the weird spot of:

\- I like this keyb too much

\- I can buy a more durable, but PS-2 antique, version

\- I can buy a more up-to-date but cord-less (hate to recharge stuff!) and I'm confident it will break faster

\- I can buy from the mech community, but do you remember? This community is CRAZY, and the options get weird and weirder!

\- I can buy a commercial gaming keyboard and make my life easy. But I wanna ergo.

\- I can build it myself, but do it curved is challenging, and I need to buy a custom keyset, so I need to convince like 20-30 people to do it so it not cost a eye.

Yep, this _is_ nuts. I'm already > 1 year holding off this project, waiting for a reasonable compromise

(Not get wrong: I can settle for less. Is not that I can't, is that I _wish_ a nicer option!) \---

The options in this space (Ergo+ Mech+ NOT CRAZY) are very limited. VERY.

You can get stuff like

[https://shop.keyboard.io/](https://shop.keyboard.io/)

or even more popular

[https://www.massdrop.com/buy/infinity- ergodox](https://www.massdrop.com/buy/infinity-ergodox)

But that keyb is a example of how crazy people are. Note that is not only a weird layout, have less keys than a normal keyboard.

I could buy it instantly if a least is a "normal" tenkey-less.

Right know, is _SUPER-HOT_ to make the keyboard with the less possible amount of keys, where 60% is like the most popular, like this

[https://www.massdrop.com/buy/kbp-v60-plus-mini-mechanical- ke...](https://www.massdrop.com/buy/kbp-v60-plus-mini-mechanical-keyboard)

This mean a lot of material to DIY is biased torwards 60%.

<comment><USER54> Get the antique and replace the electronics. Seems like the most reasonable middle way. I'm happy to help you if you need assistance with that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> Very cool, but to anyone considering this endeavor, I gently suggest buying a Poker2 instead.

<comment><USER56> I wouldn't, notice the different key arrangement.

<comment><USER55> I was referring to building a keyboard in general, not the ortholineal layout.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> Oh these emacs users

</comment><comment><USER58> Great job!

</comment><comment><USER59> To anyone nitpicking, unless the headline has been changed since submission, the author actually says they built it "by hand", rather than "from scratch".

<comment><AUTHOR> I changed it after the initial feedback.

</comment></comment><comment><USER60> If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch...

</comment><comment><USER61> Spoiler: Did not build from scratch, used keycaps and keyboard switches.

<comment><USER62> This complaint makes me uncomfortable on behalf of the project creator. He didn't set out to create switches from scratch, he wanted to create a keyboard. You didn't care that he used a prebuilt microcontroller or USB cable.

Switching from keycaps to some substitute wouldn't be technically harder to pull off, it would just reduce usability. Same for switches -- the input/output of these switches is created with keyboards in mind, other switch choices including a homemade version would be possible, but he didn't set out to create 100 switches, he wanted to make a keyboard.

<comment><USER39> He built a keyboard without the keys or switches. That would be the most useless keyboard ever made until... he obtained pre-made keys and switches from a keyboard vendor. The gripe stands despite this being cool. A more honest description would be he made part of a keyboard or maybe the frame of one.

<comment><USER62> All the switches do is close a connection between two wires. He could have used bent paperclips and taped cardboard on top of each one for the keys. Would you be happy then?

<comment><USER39> That would be a fully-custom keyboard. So yes.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>