I drink, therefore I can - <AUTHOR> http://www.prospect-magazine.co.uk/printarticle.php?id=10751

<comment><USER2> "Drowning your sorrows is always an option, but could there be creativity in the bottom of that glass too? Unsurprisingly, several researchers have endeavoured to find out. After all, many of the most creative pursuits - jazz, for instance, and poetry - are associated with heavy boozing. Alas, not just one but several separate studies have come to the same conclusion: drinking alcohol does not make you more creative, it just makes you feel that you are, which, as everyone knows, is the next best thing."

[http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20227073.200-raise- a-g...](http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20227073.200-raise-a-glass.html)

<comment><USER2> Also is it just me, or does that article piss anyone else on fundamental level. I'm quite a heavy drinker but suggesting alcohol is inducive to creativity is completely irresponsible. Do a quick Google and you'll find plenty of studies countering this point. I think having an understanding of the detrimental effects of alcohol is vitally important to using it responsibility. That article uses the exact kind of vague pseudo-science language and logic that can fool most people into believing it's correct. It should be the writer's responsibility to check these facts. Someone should be holding him responsible.

I don't know how Philip Hunter got his job as a "science journalist", but I'm pretty sure he didn't study any science to get there.

 _grumble_ _grumble_ I must be getting old. I've never argued on the anti-drug side before.

<comment><USER3> There a millions of people who get high every day, but there's still only one Jimi Hendrix.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The Ballmer Peak _is_ real.

<comment><USER5> For the two of you who don't know what that is.

<http://xkcd.com/323/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I've experimented with drinking for creativity in programming.

I occasionally get a good idea out of it but mostly just leads to confusing disjointed code. The difficulty lies in getting the level of intoxication right.

For those looking to try it, my recommendation would be to find an issue you can't solve sober. Make a copy that it doesn't matter if you destroy (you likely will). Then try and solve it while intoxicated.

<comment><USER7> > Make a copy that it doesn't matter if you destroy

git checkout -b icanhasdrink

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> It could also be that slightly-old-of-touch-with-reality people tend to drink, and also tend to be more creative in general. 552.

Churchill might seem an exception, but he suffered from depression (the "black dog"), and received heads of state while he was smoking a cigar in the bathtub. He also said "And you madam are ugly. But in the morning I shall be sober". One of my favourite guys.

</comment><comment><USER9> I have never known a single person in my life that drinks to get "creative". I know people that are alcoholics. One old friend just gets morose. Another is a freaking violent, unstable asshole that I try increasingly to stay away from.

I can drink a little, or a lot, or none. I'm lucky that I can occasionally enjoy drinking without it "needing" it. Smoking is the vice that I can't seem to stop.

There is nothing good that comes out of being an alcoholic. It doesn't make you more creative of loosen your inner poetic homonculus. My brother is a recovering alcoholic. For years he was the biggest ass I have ever known. He stopped drinking completely about 10 years ago and while he still can be an all around jerk, the family loves having him around now and I've actually been building a real relationship with him after 20 years.

<comment><USER10> To counter your anecdotes - I know 4 "serious" musicians, ie people who regularly write and record music. 3 of them drink, especially when working. 2 of them I would consider total alcoholics. There are none of the negative effects you mention.

However - personal anecdotes such as these are irrelevant to the core truth of the matter. The fact is, a lot of people _do_ drink, and by whatever means, it enhances the creativity of some of them. That you don't happen to know anyone of this type doesn't mean they don't exist. The article did say that such behaviour only seems visible in ~10-15% of the population.

Anyway it's not like they "drink to get creative", it's more like they're in the mood for creating things when they're slight/somewhat/heavily intoxicated, which is a lot of the time.

<comment><USER9> Personal anecdotes are a person's local data set. Its why statistics are needed, by putting lots of personal data sets together we get around this he- said/she-said bs. Essentially what I mean is that the term "personal anecdotes" is often used as a way to summarily dismiss someone's accounts.

Personal anecdotes are very much at the core of this matter. Dismissing someone's extensive personal experiences about the effects of alcoholism on their friends and families is not irrelevant.

My brother: recovering alcoholic, dry for 10 years. His father: lifelong alcoholic, died too young from an accident caused by being drunk at the time. Had lost his leg years ago in an accident. Uncle and his wife: alcoholics, not recovering. NOT the life of the party at family reunions. Good friend: known over 10 years, he drinks like a fish. Gets extremely sad at times and I worry about him, a lot. Another friend that I was seeing/dating for a while: sweet girl when she doesn't drink. However, 90% of the time she's a violent, unpredictable raging tornado of whiskey.

So while I'm glad that you know four quote "serious musicians" for whom drinking helps, I'll stick with my personal anecdotes of drinking ruining people's lives and causing them to die earlier than they should have. I'm just glad I have my brother around now.

<comment><USER10> Hey, I wasn't trying to downplay your personal experiences. They do sound harrowing and I'm sure they've shaped your opinions, perhaps rightly so.

I was simply trying to point out that neither your nor my single data points mean much in the grand equation.

You seemed to be trying to deny that alcohol can ever have this positive effect on people. I merely wanted to counter your data point with one of my own, and remind you that not only are our experiences insignificant in the final reckoning, but that the are plenty of well-evidenced cases in contradiction to what I perceived to be your thesis.

Anyway, nothing personal, and I really hope it all works out better for you and yours.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


I Bought A Firetruck - <AUTHOR> http://geckodesigns.kinja.com/so-i-bought-a-firetruck-252516685 <comment><USER3> Is there some sort of crazy game of one-upmanship in the USA as to who can drive the most impractical gas guzzler?

First it was stretch limos, then Hummers, then Hummer stretch limos. I wonder if we're gonna see stretch limo fire trucks…

Edit (since I'm being downvoted): The story is cool, I just find the fact that he's driving it daily to work completely retarded. What the hell I consider driving a car to work to be hardly justifiable at all in our trade, but a 31 year old fire truck is sending a giant fuck you to anyone else trying to reduce their carbon emissions.

<comment><USER4> > Is there some sort of crazy game of one-upmanship in the USA as to who can > drive the most impractical gas guzzler?

Not at all. It's just that in the USA, things are on a different scale, and it makes sense to have larger vehicles.

For example, a couple of years ago on eBay I bought a second-hand carrier battle group. Now, if you're not from the USA, I can already hear you objecting that "it's impractical" to drive a small fleet of ocean-going vessels on suburban streets, or that "it's wasteful" to retain a staff of thousands just to make the daily commute, or that it's "not all that great, environment-wise," to knock over city blocks every time I make a Starbucks run. And, in your country, I'd guess you'd have a point. But here in the USA, once you factor the need to carry back all the stuff we buy at Costco, you can see how the extra capacity of a carrier battle group would actually save you trips and, in the long run, be more efficient than a smaller vehicle. So, once you think it through, it actually makes sense.

It's all a matter of scale.

<comment><USER5> I had a similar experience buying a MiG-17 as my primary vehicle to commute to work 17 miles away. The DMV was initially not happy about my taking off and landing on quiet highways, but luckily they became more understanding after many letters. How much did you end up paying for your CVBG?

<comment><USER6> Guys, I understand wanting to maximize your load-carrying efficiency, but decommissioned naval vessels and military aircraft are not the way to do it.

For my commute, I chose rail instead – Budd Pioneer III-series rolling stock go for surprisingly little on eBay these days, and at least where I live, it's not terribly expensive to file the paperwork for a zoning easement to add a 700v third rail to a local stretch of freight rail (you can usually find qualified installers on Craigslist).

These rolling stock are single-operator capable, so the staffing costs can be quite low, and generally buying electric for a home rapid transit system is far cheaper than buying fuel for a home naval vessel or home fighter jet, especially if you can power down the transformers while you're at work.

<comment><USER7> Sometimes I look at my bicycle and feel small and insignificant.

<comment><USER8> Don't worry: I think the chap with the carrier battle group might be overcompensating for something :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I've always thought that an old firetruck would make a much better RV conversion platform than an old bus. The reasoning is that a firetruck (especially a pumper truck) has a suspension that is designed to carry much more weight than a bus so you would not be as constrained in what you could build on top of it.

Jay Leno did an excellent column about how amazing fire trucks are in terms of durability.

The OP said that "fire trucks" weren't designed to drive on the highway at highway speeds, which is a bit of an over generalization. The National Forest Service for example has a number of trucks in California that are tasked with driving up and down the state to fight wild fires. They not only drive on the highway, they end up with a couple million miles on them before they are retired.

In terms of practicality (there isn't much :-) but a ladder truck has the ability to put you fairly high up somewhat "away" from the truck. (although an inexperienced operator could easily tip over their truck if they weren't careful) and they have those pretty awesome hydraulic stabilizing legs. I sketched out briefly a sort of 'circus tent' RV where the tenting was connected to a ladder truck's ladder which could then extend up and allow you to stake out a tent around it. A number of issues there, from the outgassing of the truck into your tent :-) and the ladder has a specified end load that it can move around which is often less than 500 lbs so you end can't really hoist canvas, you would get away with light nylon at best.

But in terms of interesting vehicles to own I agree with the author that there is a certain cachet there :-)

<comment><USER10> My bus/RV conversion weighs about 18 tons. It has 6 ton front axle and in the rear it has an 11 ton and an additional 6 or 8 ton axle. While a fire truck has a ridiculously strong suspension, if you used that for an RV, you would get a punishing amount of vibration and shaking. I guess you could ballast it, but you'll waste a lot of fuel hauling ballast around, in addition to being dangerously underpowered in some situations. I think that a fire truck is not a good candidate for an RV conversion, unless you have a very specific definition of "Recreation" in mind.

<comment><USER11> I remember a mythbusters episode where they stuck a half a ton of clay on a regular car, and it didn't affect fuel economy. So there's that.

<comment><USER12> Rewatched and they did test with the full weight and as you said no (noticeable) change with the added weight: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LKxEkT2H8pI#t=322s>

I know that Mythbusters isn't generally hard science but you know.

<comment><USER13> Obligatory: <http://xkcd.com/397/>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> That's pretty cool, as a toy. Too bad he doesn't seem to have any use for it in that capacity.

Don't know if I can agree with him driving it on routine trips around town. Not only because of the extra gas consumption and CO2, but it also takes up a lot more room on the road, and it's a lot slower on acceleration wasting everyone's time behind him. When someone has a purpose for having a huge truck on the road you tolerate it, but if I found out I was stuck behind a slow firetruck because some guy wanted to tickle his own fancy I'd be less tolerant.

Yea, practicality isn't the end all of life, but don't be a dick.

Edit: Just wanted to add, it also puts a lot more wear on the roads especially during spring when the ground frost is melting. You might be within the law to drive it around, but your County Road Commission will not be pleased.

<comment><USER15> I'd be pissed to be his neighbor. The firetruck spews dirty exhaust, is unsafe if there are kids running around, and definitely is an eyesore. Even though there's no HOA he is probably running afoul of city or county zoning rules...you shouldn't be able to park large work trucks in residential neighborhoods.

<comment><USER16> What makes the truck more unsafe around children than e.g. a Ford Explorer or similar?

<comment><USER17> If nothing else, the fact that it would _attract_ children, whereas I've seen few kids who are interested in playing on (versus _in_ ) the Ford Explorer.

It also would have far worse visibility than a Ford Explorer.

That said, I don't think it is an argument for whether he should be "allowed" to have the truck or not. If there was evidence that people with large truck always hurt kids, perhaps; but I don't think that evidence exists.

<comment><USER18> These are good points - pollution, eye sore, blind spots, etc. I try to be really careful with it and be aware of my surroundings as much as possible. As far as the neighbors are concerned, I weighed purchasing the fire truck that I'd always wanted against possibly pissing off the neighbors. The rest of that story is history.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I just bought a warehouse. Similar - I always wanted one. I'm going to turn it into a house and put a roof garden on it and put a sweet garage in to fiddle with cars and set up some office space and generally cause havoc in there.

I could drop dead tomorrow. It's nice to tick these ambitions off, although my ambitions always seem to make it more likely that I _will_ drop dead tomorrow.

(It's in Manchester, UK if anyone wants to come and lug bricks around.)

<comment><USER20> Hey Alex, before Christmas you offered me to spend Christmas day at your place, while I turned it down for an offer from a friend I would love to repay your kind offer with some free labor :)

I get paid on Thursday (relevant for bus costs), I live in Darwen and I'm free next Sunday, so if you still want some help I would love to come down!

<comment><USER19> Hi Shane, thanks, dropped you an email.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I still want an office in a light industrial area with a concrete wall/bollards/ditch, and a roller gate, behind which I could park a 5 ton truck and/or unimog or fire truck or something (so as to make it impossible to drive through the gate). I had no idea fire trucks were even cheaper than old 2.5 or 5 ton military trucks.

<comment><USER22> Okay I'll bite. Why?

<comment><USER21> Onsite power, generators, parking for cars, a big tower for RF, satellite, security, etc. A perfect office normally _and_ set up perfectly for disaster response when the earthquake eventually hits. Being able to get $0.95/ft2 NNN on Pioneer, and taking an entire building, so each employee has 500+ square feet...

Imagine being the only place with real comms, security, and competent people (i.e. non-government), just like my friend who stayed in his ISP in NOLA after Katrina, or my office in Baghdad, or any other situation like that.

<comment><USER23> For anyone interested in the crazy live blog of the Katrina aftermath from the guy holed up in his ISP in New Orleans, start here: <http://interdictor.livejournal.com/2005/08/27/>

This is the guy you're talking about, right?

<comment><USER21> Yeah (interdictor or ikilled007 from lj)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Someone got their childhood dream!

Mine was shattered when I found out that my dad didn't drive trains (An electrical engineer is apparently not the same thing). Since then, I've ridden on many trains, but I haven't driven one (yet).

<comment><USER9> We did this <http://wplives.org/ral.html> with our kids, yes they let you actually drive the locomotive around, it was freakin' _awesome!_

<comment><USER24> Wow! ... I live in central PA and we're blessed with quite a few "steam excursions" and there's a local historical rail society too. Unfortunately, none of them allow you to "drive the train".

<comment><USER25> Come to England. Steam train driving sessions are a common way for the restored branch lines to raise funds.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Hooray for firetrucks! Back in undergrad, my fraternity owned two firetrucks, and for about a year I was in charge of them. One was a 1940s ladder (with an open cab and still-functioning ladder), and the other was a 1960s engine (closed cab with still-working pumps). Tons of fun to drive around campus... except for the time I clipped a parked car with the engine. Oops!

</comment><comment><USER27> My nightmare scenario here would be being parked somewhere near where a fire breaks out, and then having to tell people that no, I can't actually help them.

<comment><USER18> Or passing an emergency and getting flagged down. I'm hoping that nothing like that ever happens.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> This is completely immature and un-professional. I want one.

</comment><comment><USER29> I wonder if the author realizes what a waste it is to drive a big car (let alone a fire truck) to the grocery store.

We all love nature. We go out of our way to live in a place where it is more spectacular. And yet we do our best to shit on it with the damn gas guzzlers. Because, you know, it's fun!

<comment><USER30> The grocery store is perhaps a mile away, and he perhaps goes twice a week? So that's 100 miles/year, two orders of magnitude away from the national average. It's also substantially less co2 production than a flight from SFO to Hawaii.

<comment><USER31> Catalytic converters have a minutes long warm-up period beforce they approach a narrow interpretation of "effectiveness".

Oh, and since we are talking about diesels, they produce diesel particulate matter, ultrafine particles that can cause anything from cancer to nausea. Even modern diesel engines can't completely filter them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> To be fair it's not really that much more impractical than driving a HUM-V around in urban areas (which is frighteningly common), and definitely way cooler!

Does it have a built-in telescoping ladder - that could actually be quite a lot more useful than the firehose...

</comment><comment><USER33> Don't you guys have voluntary fire brigades or volunteer-driven agencies for technical relief[0] over there? Sure, you can't get _your_ groceries with one of their trucks, but driving them is still pretty fun I was told. Plus you don't have to park them in your driveway.

[0] <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technisches_Hilfswerk>

<comment><USER34> Depends on where you live. In this guy's case, it looks like he lives in a smallish Montana town, so yeah, it's pretty likely that his local fire department is volunteer-run, and joining it would be an alternate way to get this experience. Could be more commitment than he wants, though, since you typically have to take training courses, not to mention actually commit to responding to fires and other calls (a large percentage of fire-department calls are medical responses rather than fires). That's a bit different than just buying a truck. On the plus side, that could itself be interesting, and would be the way to go if you wanted to really learn to operate firefighting equipment.

Some numbers [1]: about 70% of U.S. firefighters are volunteer while 30% are career jobs, but the vast majority of the volunteer firefighters (94% of them) serve communities with under 25,000 people. Medium-sized towns and above typically have a professionally staffed department.

[1] <http://www.nfpa.org/displayContent.asp?categoryID=955>

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> It turns out there are no _actual_ aircraft carriers for sale on eBay. I am disappoint.

<comment><USER36> They just don't come up for sale too often...

<http://www.kungfo0.org/theweb/ebay/carrier.html>

Never know what you may find on ebay...

<http://www.collectspace.com/news/news-050902a.html>

<comment><USER18> I didn't make that up! I saw one a couple years ago that was for sale. I contacted the seller and asked if it came with a trailer. I just couldn't resist. He never wrote back but it WAS for sale on eBay!

<comment><USER37> rurounijones posted a link:

[https://en.wikinews.org/wiki/British_warship_HMS_Invincible_...](https://en.wikinews.org/wiki/British_warship_HMS_Invincible_put_up_for_auction_online)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> I'm coming down to Missoula for Barcamp in April. I expect a ride on this thing.

<comment><USER39> A firetruck ride might convince me to make the trip over for Barcamp...

<comment><USER18> When is Barcamp this year? I'll bring it :)

<comment><USER38> April 13th. <https://www.facebook.com/events/337629019680637/?ref=22>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Danny Hillis, co-founder of Thinking Machines (maker of the Connection Machine), bought and drove an old fire truck around Cambridge, MA, in the 1980's. I guess that was a lot harder than getting around Montana!

</comment><comment><USER41> I grew up in the mountains outside of Napa. One of our neighbors was very wealthy, and also paranoid about fires (brush fires are very dangerous in that region). He owned a fire truck aside from many other vehicles. One day an arsonist set fire to the mountainside, and he had a heart attack because of it. A new person bought up his property, and I would visit their house sometimes, and see that firetruck, not knowing the backstory. I just thought that wealthy people owned firetrucks because it was cool. :)

<comment><USER42> Nice story. Must have been amazing to grow up there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> What a great thing this would be for someone that does kid's parties or activities. I have a firefighter friend that borrowed a reserve engine for a water-themed kid event we had. He had fun for 2 hours, spraying people 100' away with water. For a while, everywhere I walked, I had a constant stream of water hitting me on the top of my head.

<comment><USER44> Someone else has had that idea; I had a quick look on eBay UK, and found this party-limo-fire-engine business for sale:

[http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Fire-Engine-Limo-business-for- sale...](http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Fire-Engine-Limo-business-for- sale-/200908610237)

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> This is so awesome. I used to make my mom drag me around town to various fire stations so that I could look at their goodies. I was obsessed with that stuff as a kid.

Congrats on doing it! I myself have a bucket list item to grab an old Crown bus (the ones that look like twinkies) and drive that beast all around the US.

</comment><comment><USER22> Maybe I missed it, but how did he get it shipped to Montana?

<comment><USER46> flatbed semi

<comment> shawn-butler That must have cost more than the actual vehicle? The "sustainable" part of my mind is competing with the "cool project" part.

I'm not sure which is going to win out yet. I wonder how competitive it would have been to send it by rail?

<comment><USER46> He does say it was more to ship than to purchase.

<comment><USER18> I've been trying to forget about that part of this - the cost of shipping SUCKED.

<comment> shawn-butler Did you investigate rail shipping? I had a collectible truck shipped by rail and it was much cheaper than OTR. It was some time ago though, but I imagine for something as large as a fire engine it might have been very cost- effective.

<comment><USER18> Yep! I briefly looked into it but was told that it wouldn't be possible to get it anywhere close to me by rail.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> Reminds me of the old bulldozer that I _very seriously_ thought of purchasing (always wanted a dozer). But in my case it was only about 5 miles away in a farmer's front yard with a "For Sale: $1,700" sign on it. Getting it home probably wouldn't have cost more than about $300.

<comment><USER48> A friend of mine bought an old excavator for $800. He spent about $1500 on fixing up the hydraulics, and used it to landscape his property. It was very rough but still went OK. When friends dropped around (like me) he would happily let us dig massive holes and fill them in again. I had a very happy afternoon digging and filling in, giggling like a kid in a sandpit.

He ended up selling it for a small profit to a guy down the road, and they just drove it there - clank clank clank down the street. I was sad the day I went around and the digger was gone.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> A fire track? I always wanted to get a tank! Gabriel, thanks for this post. I now believe that everything is possible.

I posted a link especially for you <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5433711>

</comment><comment><USER50> Maybe I missed it but did he end up shipping it? He mentions it would cost more than the truck itself, and mentioned his wife chiding him for not researching this more but no actual description of _how_ he transported it.

<comment><USER51> He explained in a comment how he ended up transporting it with a flatbed trailer:

 _"It was transported by a semi on a flatbed trailer from Ohio to Montana. I looked into all kinds of less expensive alternatives including paying someone to drive it, but I couldn't get anything reliable to pan out."_

[http://geckodesigns.kinja.com/it-was-transported-by-a- semi-o...](http://geckodesigns.kinja.com/it-was-transported-by-a-semi-on-a- flatbed-trailer-from-458587618)

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> I'm not into firetrucks myself but something from this rings really true - <USER2> you don't put aside time and (a little) money to do extraordinary things, your life will be an endless procession of the mundane.

</comment><comment><USER53> Waiting for the follow-up article: whether the pumps really work, how well they work, whether it came with a firehouse (and if not, how much those cost+shipping), and fun things you can do with a big jet of water.

Actually, I'd think you'd need a bit of training to operate a firehose (assuming the sellers showed you how to operate all the buttons and levers). But once you have all the safety aspects down, you can go out to a lake, set up an intake hose and make a cool water display. Waiting for the pics.

<comment><USER54> Fire hose isn't cheap, nor are nozzles (probably looking at a couple of thousand dollars for a 100' of 1 3/4" hose and a variable nozzle.

Using the deck gun is another matter altogether, and is not something he's likely to be able to do other than emptying a swimming pool:

Most combination nozzles on a deck gun are designed to control flow rate between 750gpm and 1250gpm at 80 psi.

A Pierce Arrow typically has a 750 gallon tank, so you have around a minute run time on the deck gun before its empty (and a fire engine pump is not something you want running dry).

You can set up hard suction (to draw from a non-pressurized source), but its debatable a) whether you can get sufficient flow at all from the vacuum alone, let alone b) while filtering the water sufficiently (because stones, mud, silt, trash, fish don't go well through a fire engine pump) at a rate to run the deck gun.

Sadly, it's not likely to happen without being hooked into a hydrant. You might be able to run a handline or two, but that's about it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> I want a plane.

<comment><USER56> Something tells me that if you got yourself a plane and then posted about it here, you'd get treated a lot more nicely than the OP.

The world has become a cynical and mean place. The guy bought a freaking working fire engine, and all people can do is whine endlessly about how impractical and wasteful it is...

But yet these same people wouldn't say the same about an aircraft, race car, or similar. Even though those are likely MORE expensive and equally as wasteful fuel wise.

Whatever, you get your plane! And you have fun with it. Ignore all these haters and cynics.

<comment><USER57> I want a jet fighter. I wonder if I could get a relatively new one. All weapons would have to be removed of course. It would be the sports car of the air. I would need to get a billion dollars first though so that I could afford top notch maintenance. This would be my expensive toy. Instead of a yacht the new "in" thing could be buying a sport jet.

In reality, I like the idea more then the reality of it. If I really had a billion dollars I would simply buy a porsche and use all my free time to do research.

<comment><USER58> A billion dollars for a fighter plane. Good lord, this actually brings into context how fucking rich Bill Gates is. This and the fact that he can give every single person on Earth a billion dollars each and still be among the richest people on the planet.

<comment><USER59> wtf happened to the math here?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER60> I still find myself staring at firetrucks. Kind of like muscle cars. I love the chunky, iconic design, the chrome, the impracticality and noise.

</comment><comment><USER61> I understand exactly where he is coming from. One of my fathers cousin decided the farm needed a firetruck and decided to pick up two. It was the first on the scene when one of our barns burnt down. Pumps didn't work so great and did a little spurt by the time the fire department came. Great memories.

</comment><comment><USER62> I always wanted a school bus. Something to build into an rv for far away hunting trips and weekend tailgate extravaganzas. I did some searching, and running buses are suprisingly cheap. Someday when I have a place to put it, I'm going to jump all over that.

</comment><comment><USER63> Jacuzzi/spa in place of the water tank(s)? Are they set up so that would be possible?

</comment><comment><USER64> "Even though it's 31 years old and technically qualifies as an antique"

What makes something technically and antique? I was under the impression that 50+ years was measure of antiqueness but I can't remember why I think that.

<comment><USER65> Depends on the state you live in. In Montana it qualifies for special license plates when a vehicle is 30 years old.

<https://doj.mt.gov/driving/license-plates/#antiqueplates>

Although by driving it to work he probably violates the 'general transportation' provision.

<comment><USER18> The problem with antique registration in Montana (and this wasn't made clear on the state website) is that you can only drive an antique to and from parades and/or car shows. I had originally planned to register it with antique plates because it's more affordable than a standard registration. That was a deal breaker though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER66> Does anyone remember the two-seater firetruck arcade game? That thing ruled.

edit: this! <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fire_Truck_(video_game)>

<comment><USER67> No, but firetrucks in GTA were always a fun ride.

</comment></comment><comment><USER68> My favorite word starts with an f and ends in a uck. It is indeed firetruck.

</comment><comment><USER69> Relevant Kids in the Hall sketch - "Quarter Life Crisis": <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yiESfUGC_Pw>

</comment><comment><USER70> "A total of $3,600 which also happened to be the hard limit my wife had imposed on this particular invaluable transaction." _cough_

</comment><comment><USER71> Isn't $3600 kinda ridiculously inexpensive given that a Civic costs over $15k? What's the insurance and mileage on that thing like?

<comment><USER72> Article says the milage is 47k, crazy low for its age.

<comment><USER10> Engine hours is where it's at. I bet the engine has been rebuilt several times.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER73> Would make a good movie title (We Bought a Zoo)

</comment><comment><USER74> so this is my favorite thing, ever.

</comment><comment><USER75> so you see we can do anything we want to ! Its much more related to the "out of the box thinking". If you can't do things you were planning since childhood how are you supposed to be creative and pursue your dreams let alone Change The World!

</comment><comment><USER76> This is awesome! My kid would be ecstatic if we drove a firetruck to the grocery store.

</comment><comment><USER77> How many people looked up "aircraft carrier" sales on ebay after reading this article?

<comment><USER78> Aircraft carrier on Ebay you say?

[https://en.wikinews.org/wiki/British_warship_HMS_Invincible_...](https://en.wikinews.org/wiki/British_warship_HMS_Invincible_put_up_for_auction_online)

The British MOD (Ministry of Defence) has an auction site for surplus equipment from shows, clothes and jeeps up to (occasionally) aircraft carriers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER79> And people think the homeless guy on the corner has mental health issues...

</comment><comment><USER80> You inspired me, i will follow my dreams and nothing will stop me.

Thank you so much.

</comment><comment><USER81> A great way to express the term "Always remember to pursue your dream."

Awesome!

</comment><comment><USER82> You could offer rainmaking as a service during dry summers.

</comment><comment><USER83> how does voting work

</comment><comment><USER84> WHAT AN AMAZING STORY ABOUT HACKING!

Seriously, HN needs to see if there is a service out there that spams these type of sites with these horribly uninteresting reddit/digg/boingboing/hurrderp stories.

<comment><USER85> > horribly uninteresting

That's _your_ opinion. And apparently the community doesn't agree with you.</comment></comment>


OS X 10.10 – Source Code - <AUTHOR> http://opensource.apple.com/release/os-x-1010/ <comment><USER2> I opened one package at random

[http://opensource.apple.com/source/IOFWDVComponents/IOFWDVCo...](http://opensource.apple.com/source/IOFWDVComponents/IOFWDVComponents-207.4.1/DVControlComponent.c)

I see this:

#include <Carbon/Carbon.h>

//#include <Resources.h>

//#include <OSUtils.h>

//#include <Components.h>

#include "DeviceControlPriv.h"

#include "IsochronousDataHandler.h"

#include "DVVers.h"

#include <stdio.h>

#include <stdlib.h>

//#include <syslog.h>

// Debug messages

It's good to know that I'm not the only one who has commented out code in their shipping code:)

<comment><USER3> This is bad practice, at best it shows a lack of confidence in what you've written. At worse it shows you don't understand what's going on.

Version control shows the evolution of design, if you are leaving in dead code you need to take a step back and think about the real solution.

<comment><USER4> I've heard this so much. Usually from people who reinvent the wheel five times over.

I've _never_ seen anyone dig through VCS history to gain a better understanding of code. And since presumably things change because the understanding evolves, I'm not even sure what the thought process is that would lead someone to do that.

You comment out code because your understanding might not be perfect, you might want the option to easily roll-back, or even have a reminder that a particular change was made. You'll remove it in the next revision or two.

So yeah. I've heard this before. It's complete and total nonsense IME.

<comment><USER5> > I've never seen anyone dig through VCS history to gain a better > understanding of code.

One of my favourite interview questions:

        A bug is found where given a specific series of user
        interactions an error is raised. You search for this error
        in code and you find that the error is raised in a very
        old module which was written in a different style from
        the main codebase by a developer who has long since left
        the company. From a quick look around you see that this
        code is very complex, and probably quite important. It's
        obvious that it will take quite a bit of time to
        understand what's going on simply by just reading the
        code in the module where this error is raised.

        Your job is to fix the bug. How do you approach this
        problem?

At my company digging through VCS (and our ticketing system) in order to gain a better understanding of code is a very common.

Edit:

I think if you're leaving commented out code for history's sake, you're Doing It Wrong. I disagree with the GP's idealism as much as you do, however. My beef with it is that if you're checking in commented code, you're obviously not reviewing your own diffs. It means you're likely to commit minor changes which were made for debugging purposes.

        // comment this, just to get this stupid module out of my way.
        //ensureNobodyDies();

<comment><USER4> Ticketing system sure. If you have the full history you'd get the original requirements hopefully, and revisions or issues along the way.

VCS. Maybe it's just a Web vs Other development thing. The history of an Action in Rails is going to be someone using mass-assignment unsafely. Or a dozen stylistic tweaks. Or implementing a pattern. Or removing it.

It's about the worst possible way I can imagine to attempt to understand requirements.

What I _do_ find helpful is "git blame", and just _talking_ to the person who implemented it. And if they aren't available, then hopefully someone who was there at the time, and involved with the feature, is. At least I have a time- frame.

As a last resort, if no one has any clue what's going on? Scrolling through VCS diffs would be an act of desperation perhaps. But I'd much rather look for tests. Automated or a Manual Test Plan. A Specification. Or just use common sense.

At the end of the day it's _most_ likely that I'm tasked with this issue because the original implementation was a scheduling compromise, or the original developer just couldn't think of how to make it simple, so they made it complex.

 _Actual_ complexity is rarely justified by requirements I find. Unless I'm the one writing it of course. ;-) Then it's absolutely the only sane way to implement it and you just need to try harder to understand. Duh.

<comment><USER5> > Actual complexity is rarely justified by requirements I find. Unless I'm the > one writing it of course. ;-)

I appreciate your humility, and I largely agree with your approach. You'd probably do quite well in my interview.

With respect to actual complexity rarely being justified, I'm presently a team lead for a system which involves fairly precise modeling of some very piecewise real world processes under very tight performance constraints. There are so many things we just can't generalize, either because there's no clean abstraction, or because abstraction comes with too much inefficiency. We try to keep our processes from smelling too much like old stale spaghetti, but unfortunately some things are just simply complex, and sometimes in the face of such complexity the most elegant and/or performant solution can make purists cringe.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This inspires me to update my script that converted opensource.apple.com into Github repos [0] (even creating the repo using the Github API). It needed more work because some of the Apple source releases are messed up and include another copy of the source tree in a directory at the root of a tarball!

I asked Github if it was OK to upload the tens of gigabytes of source that the entirety of opensource.apple.com is and I got a "Sure, why not?" response. =)

I think the last time I updated these repos was around 10.7 or 10.8

[0]: [https://github.com/Apple-FOSS-Mirror/](https://github.com/Apple-FOSS- Mirror/)

Edit: I was always wondering how I could manipulate git such that anyone could checkout my scripts and create identical git repos (same commit hashes and all) with a single command. I am somewhat hesitant to update the repos now because it would involve rewriting old commits since I haven't solved this problem yet.

<comment><USER7> That's a brilliant idea. Couldn't you test a newer version of your script against a new branch?

<comment><USER6> Yeah... once I find it on my old backups. =) Ironically, my script that produces git repos was not itself version controlled. Lesson learned (for the umpteenth time). I wasn't comfortable putting it public due to sloppiness and I didn't yet have my own GitLab server. I now have the latter and am motivated to fix the former (put the script itself on Github). =)

<comment><USER7> Let me know how you go. Contact details are in my profile. I've got way too many projects to finish right now, but I'd like to boot XNU in a VM at some point.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> For those of us who don't know what we are looking at, and just see the title of "OS X 10.10 - Source Code", is this just Darwin, or is there more here than that?

<comment><USER9> My understanding (which may be out of date) is that this is the complete OS but without the GUI layer - it is the kernel, init system, shell, and user- space CLI utilities. It does not include the GUI shell (Aqua), the GUI libraries (Frameworks in OS X terminology), or GUI applications (iTunes, Mail, Safari etc.).

<comment><USER10> It would be more accurate to say that it's most of a fairly random subset of the OS that was made open source back in the day - there's very little of newer projects (regardless of what 'layer' of the OS they're at), including ones that replaced older ones, some old stuff is gone, and I'm not sure it ever really counted as complete.

Some examples:

\- The main kernel is open source (although not 100% identical to the version in OS X), but many kernel extensions are closed source, including quite basic stuff like disk image mounting.

\- In one open source kernel extension I'm interested in, IOUSBFamily, functionality has been randomly disappearing in favor of empty .cpp files. Like several of the opensource releases, it doesn't actually compile...

\- A version of CoreFoundation (C level API) is available, but not the full thing. The Objective-C runtime is available, but the core Objective-C libraries have never been.

\- libxpc, which is rather low-level functionality added a few releases ago, was never open sourced; launchd is gone in this release, but before that it didn't compile, thanks to missing xpc headers.

\- Bootloaders: BootX from PowerPC was open source, but the x86 EFI stuff was always closed source.

\- libm is gone this release. cctools may be gone. Some libSystem libraries such as malloc and pthread were separated out in a previous release, but not open sourced; they're back now, though.

<comment><USER9> Thanks for expanding on that - it is disappointing how Apple are releasing less and less with each iteration.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Here's a diff between the 10.9 package list [0] and this one: [https://gist.github.com/anonymous/014e71ac38a4776811f7](https://gist.github.com/anonymous/014e71ac38a4776811f7)

Few changes, but some interesting things pop out, like the addition of libmalloc and libpthread and the removal of memcached and securityd.

[0] [http://opensource.apple.com/release/os-x-109/](http://opensource.apple.com/release/os-x-109/)

<comment><USER12> The removal of launchd is a bit of a bummer.

<comment><USER13> Not running 10.10 at the moment; did they switch to something else, or just not release the source?

<comment><USER14> launchd is still the launch agent for 10.10, they probably just removed the source for this version.

<comment><USER15> Ah, the freedoms of permissive licenses... better than proprietary at least.

<comment><USER16> they wrote launchd. Even if they released it under GPL, as the copyright owners, they would have the freedom to make future releases closed source.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> A great, although sad post about the state of building (booting) Darwin: [http://superuser.com/a/634080](http://superuser.com/a/634080)

</comment><comment><USER17> Bummed they didn't fix the bug I submitted in vfs_syscall. In fsetxattr when key values are too long it returns EPERM instead of ENAMETOOLONG as described in the man page :(

Bug is not present in setxattr: [http://opensource.apple.com/source/xnu/xnu-2782.1.97/bsd/vfs...](http://opensource.apple.com/source/xnu/xnu-2782.1.97/bsd/vfs/vfs_syscalls.c)

</comment><comment><USER18> The procmail source is something else [https://opensource.apple.com/source/procmail/procmail-14/pro...](https://opensource.apple.com/source/procmail/procmail-14/procmail/src/procmail.c)

<comment><USER19> For a real head trip, read Sendmail's.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Why is iOS only disclosed up to version 6.1.3? [https://opensource.apple.com/](https://opensource.apple.com/)

<comment><USER21> I believe Apple stopped releasing any source for iOS at that point. The open source projects they pull from are BSD/MIT which permits and encourages closed source usage.

<comment><USER22> WebCore and JavaScriptCore are LGPL, so they can't stop providing the source code for their mobile builds. I sent Apple a request for disclosure a couple days ago. In a week or so if I haven't gotten anything I will start escalating.

<comment><USER23> Can you not get to that stuff through the WebKit repo?

edit: Looks like you can: [https://github.com/WebKit/webkit/tree/master/Source](https://github.com/WebKit/webkit/tree/master/Source)

This is where I was digging to find whether or not JavaScriptCore would still work with WKWebView. Spoiler: it won't.

<comment><USER22> No: the mobile version of WebCore is different, and for example comes with binary object blobs (which is sufficient for LGPL compliance) for source code that Apple refuses to provide as open source. I wish I had been here earlier to correct this misinformation :/ (though I'm also glad I've gotten in the habit of not checking Hacker News after I comment). Note the libWebCore_{Sim,armv7,armv7s}.a that is provided in the WebCore source repository at opensource.apple.com.

[http://www.opensource.apple.com/source/WebCore/WebCore-1640....](http://www.opensource.apple.com/source/WebCore/WebCore-1640.28/)

It is also simply not sufficient to say "here is a repository with a lot of code in it": you have to be able to specify what exact code was used for the build (which is what I care about, as I'm constantly trying to analyze the version of WebCore on the device: I have no interest in compiling my own copy or building my own browser), and it is not the main WebCore repository's job to keep tags or branches around for specific versions of iOS that Apple distributes.

<comment><USER24> >It is also simply not sufficient to say "here is a repository with a lot of code in it": you have to be able to specify what exact code was used for the build

Does the LGPL really specify that? IIRC the license is pretty vague and that seems way too specific to hold up in court.

<comment><USER25> The LGPL references the terms of the GPL in the context of the library released under the license. For both versions 2 and 3 of the GPL, it states that build instructions must be made available [1].

[1] [https://www.gnu.org/licenses/quick-guide-gplv3.html#less- sou...](https://www.gnu.org/licenses/quick-guide-gplv3.html#less-source-to- distribute-new-system-libraries-exception)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> in recent years even MS is releasing more meaningful open source code than Apple (eg. asp.net vnext, PCL) or I'm missing something

<comment><USER27> Not sure they're releasing any OS code publicly though :-) internals still have to be somewhat guessed/reverse engineered at.

<comment><USER28> There are strings attached, but it is not that hard to get access to the Windows source code: [http://www.microsoft.com/en- us/sharedsource/default.aspx](http://www.microsoft.com/en- us/sharedsource/default.aspx)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Yeah, I'm for sure missing launchd and memcached. But I suppose they've got their reasons.

<comment><USER30> memcached is still open source. Apple's just no longer redistributing source for it (probably because it's no longer included with the OS).

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> What version control does Apple use? Is this the same that is being hosted in the linking site as well?

</comment><comment><USER7> Any idea what's up with the cert on [https://opensource.apple.com/](https://opensource.apple.com/)?

<comment><USER32> It works fine for me. AFAICT the cert they use is okey.

[Fingerprint: 92 D3 F3 46 0E BA A5 FE D5 5E C8 AE 19 59 82 57 85 FE AE 88 A5 9D F7 BE FC 47 89 38 5F BC 4A E9 (SHA-256)]

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Now will someone figure out a terminal command to turn off the MacBook Pro display for Yosemite?

Like the following: [http://osxdaily.com/2011/09/14/disable-the-internal- screen-o...](http://osxdaily.com/2011/09/14/disable-the-internal-screen-on-a- macbook-pro-or-air-in-mac-os-x-10-7-lion/)

</comment><comment><USER34> Do they not create bootable, installable images of Darwin anymore?

<comment><USER7> From memory, this is the first release of the Darwin source in ages, but [https://opensource.apple.com/](https://opensource.apple.com/) looks to have been updated.

[http://www.puredarwin.org/](http://www.puredarwin.org/) looks abandoned, and OpenDarwin disappeared long ago - [http://www.applematters.com/article/opendarwin-dies-a- lonely...](http://www.applematters.com/article/opendarwin-dies-a-lonely- death/)

<comment><USER35> > From memory, this is the first release of the Darwin source in ages

Ages? [https://opensource.apple.com/](https://opensource.apple.com/) looks like it has for a while, except for the addition of 10.10 (I grab CFLite, libclosure, libdispatch, and objc4 whenever they're made available after a release).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Does anyone know what they're using Twisted for?

<comment><USER37> A bunch of the OS X Server stuff, including calendars, feeds, etc.

<comment><USER36> Really. I'll have to dig into it to see how they're using it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> swift is not open source?

<comment><USER39> Not currently. But it's a development tool, and not a part of OS X, so it wouldn't be listed here anyway. For instance, this page has Clang, GCC, Git, etc.: [http://opensource.apple.com/release/developer- tools-51/](http://opensource.apple.com/release/developer-tools-51/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> and they fixed a few Integer overflows \- int size = inCapacity * sizeof(dictEntry); \+ if (inCapacity > (UINT_MAX / sizeof(dictEntry))) \+ return false;

\+ unsigned int size = inCapacity * sizeof(dictEntry);

</comment><comment><USER41> And the good old shellshocked bash version 3.2 [http://opensource.apple.com/source/bash/bash-94.1.2/version....](http://opensource.apple.com/source/bash/bash-94.1.2/version.h)

<comment><USER42> You have to look for the vulnerable code, not just the version string. Supposedly it has already been patched.

<comment><USER43> a patch was released for OS X versions below 10.10 only, so I would assume it should be applied to OS X 10.10: [http://support.apple.com/kb/HT6495](http://support.apple.com/kb/HT6495)

<comment><USER42> I would assume that the patch has already been applied to the shipping final version of 10.10.0; installing system packages designed for older OSX releases sounds dangerous.

<comment><USER44> Just install a newer bash with homebrew ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯

That's what I did, before Apple even released a patch for Mavericks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> does this mean we can compile Yosemite from the code here and install it on a modern Mac?

Or is this just the Darwin kernel code?

Are the aqua/user interface layer also included here?

Any CONTEXT related to this source code would be greatly appropriated.

<comment><USER46> Vast portions of code that makes it usable are missing; as someone above stated, Aqua is missing as well as core items like disk image mounting etc.

I tried many years ago to use Darwin in the "haha I can run Mac OSX but not actually buy a Mac" sort of idea - it was an exercise in hard work (as I hadn't a clue what I was doing) and what I did managed to get to boot wasn't massively useful for "real" work (a CLI with no windowing layer) like development etc. or anything you do day to day.

Quite interesting nonetheless, but not massively useful.

<comment><USER47> It's not intended to be used standalone, it's there for other OSS developers to be able to use.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> Hi Ubuntu! How do you think about this?

</comment><comment><USER49> Just by glancing over the code overall looks like a poorly structured and inconsistent code, lacking centralized coding guidelines or practices. Pretty scary for a shipping product to have code like this.

</comment><comment><USER50> This is a good step into making Star Trek law the real law.

</comment><comment><USER51> for a second there i was hoping to see that they had merged [https://github.com/fix-macosx/](https://github.com/fix-macosx/)</comment>


Reports that Bassel Khartabil has been sentenced to death - <AUTHOR> http://joi.ito.com/weblog/2015/11/13/urgent-reports-.html <comment><USER2> I hate feeling completely powerless in these kinds of situations. All I can do short of flying to Syria and taking up arms against such tyranny is upvoting this post. Absolutely pathetic.

Update: The least we can do:

[http://www.amnestyusa.org/get-involved/take-action- now/syria...](http://www.amnestyusa.org/get-involved/take-action-now/syria- release-bassel-khartabil-ua-22015)

<comment><USER3> Yeah, honestly, its shit like this other countries should go to war over. The United States was founded on free speech, not just having it, but spreading that ideal everywhere. FOSS is free speech.

We dropped bombs on Iraq for non-existant WMDs, and invaded Afghanistan over a CIA agent that was living in Pakistan, yet we won't do anything to an out of control government bent on destroying what little society it has left and is a legitimate threat to national security.

Fuck that.

<comment><USER4> How is Syria a legitimate threat to national security of the US? (not rhetorical)

<comment><USER5> Syria is a very much a threat to US interests, because it has a regime hostile to us, friendly to Russia and Iran, and it borders the Mediterranean Sea, giving competitors to the US that could be friendly to Turkey (read: Russia via Georgia) a trade and supply route to the Mediterranean. Because of this, the economics that are favorable to Turkey, in a situation where Syria "falls" to Russia, create interests that conflict with those of the US, particularly during war.

In other words, from geopolitical and war strategy standpoints, Syria is currently one of the more important countries in the world, to the US.

<comment><USER6> Ex country. Syria is a territory now. The only ways it could resemble some form of country - lets say they are unacceptable from moral view. The winning faction - no matter which - will surely go on a rampage of power consolidation with ethnic and religious cleansing in the mix :( So we have two harrowing option - yet another autocrat committing atrocities and generating suffering. Or warring camps that will commit atrocities and generate suffering.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I wish the USA would get rid of the death penalty. Completely barbaric, cruel and unusual. I still think we have the high road on our sides in situations like this.

</comment><comment><USER8> Does anyone know what specifically he was accused of doing?

If he had ties with Western intelligence his detention is understandable (I don't support death penalty in this case, nor Assad, and it would be cool if they released the guy to the West, I'm only saying it's understandable if he was active in opposition spheres). Just because a person is a "hacker" doesn't mean they weren't involved in trying to violently overturn Assad's government.

<comment><USER9> He blogged about people being arrested by state security during the protests.

It's not clear that he has been formally acussed of anything in particular beyond "treason". Detailed formal charges may be an unessecary formality in Syria.

[https://www.eff.org/offline/bassel- khartabil](https://www.eff.org/offline/bassel-khartabil)

<comment><USER8> Well.. that doesn't say he didn't have ties to Western intelligence.

But I followed the links and sent an email to Syrian ambassador for the UN appealing for Khartabil's release.

[http://www.amnestyusa.org/get-involved/take-action- now/syria...](http://www.amnestyusa.org/get-involved/take-action-now/syria- release-bassel-khartabil-ua-22015)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> There is no indication that the sentence has been carried out, AFAICT. The black ribbon on the homepage is premature.

<comment><USER11> The current black ribbon is due to Gene Amdahl's death.

<comment><USER10> Oh, right, I just noticed it farther down on the page. :(</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: OhLife for Work Teams - <AUTHOR> https://myfridayfeedback.com/ <comment><USER2> Is this anonymous? If not that seems like it will lead to only positive feedback, or feedback that isn't overly critical. And "anonymous except not really because HR can see who responded" doesn't really cut it either.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's not anonymous in any way right now. All responses have names attached to them. Anonymous feedback is a great way to start an internal witch-hunt, especially with smaller teams. With that being said, there's some value w/ anonymous surveys.

By introducing a cadence (weekly/bi-weekly) it helps surface small issues before they become big ones. Most of the time feedback is overly critical is because it's been bottled up for weeks/months.

<comment><USER2> So how do you avoid the situation I flagged where nobody gives any "real" feedback because they don't want to put a target on their back?

The small issues you are trying to prevent from becoming bigger ones are still likely in my mind to be the sorts of things you wouldn't want to put your name on because they'd come across as petty (because they are small at the time), or critical of the manager (again, putting a target on your back).

Personally, if I were a random employee I'd never put any sort of feedback like that in a system that wasn't anonymous--the risk of creating an overly negative perception of myself or putting a target on my back just doesn't seem worth it.

And if this is feedback to a manager from their team, aren't the things that might turn into witch-hunts exactly the sort of issues they need to be aware of? Typically those sorts of things are founded in some level of truth, no?

How will you convince employees that this is a "safe" tool for them to use?</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Videonot.es to take synched notes about online videos - <AUTHOR> http://thenextweb.com/apps/2013/04/16/videonotes-a-really-simple-way-to-make-store-and-share-notes-about-online-videos-as-you-watch-them/

<comment><USER2> This is awesome! Makes Coursera easier.</comment>


Show HN: Video Competition Website - <AUTHOR> Hi HN,
I created a site that allows people to create competitions from videos in YouTube: https://competitiontube.com
Anything from comedy competitions like this: https://competitiontube.com/competition/HGX20xe7ziLXpIQOQ6 to political debates: https://competitiontube.com/competition/NOW20xe7ziLXpIQOQ6 or whatever else they like (anything at all). I have a catch-all "Misc" genre for anything not fitting the drop down options when categorizing new competitions.
I created it mainly to teach myself the following technologies:
1- ReactJS 2- Redis 3- MongoDB 4- Python 5- Docker
6- Docker Swarm 7- nginx
The site is something I thought about long ago but put on the back burner until I decided to learn ReactJS and Redis.
It is very simple and has some simple rules.
1- Just like any real competition it has rounds (I limit it to 4) 2- It allows users to either pause the competition so that they could swap out videos in different rounds or allow winning videos to auto propagate upwards towards the final round 3- It allows the competition creator a chance to decide what to do in the event of a tie between competitors: allow the server to decide or they can break the tie themselves.
In cases where manual intervention is needed, i.e. they decide to change videos or break ties at the end of the round, the next round is paused and they are sent an email asking them to login and update the competition.
In all it took about a month to complete (life, family, learning, etc) but it was tons of fun. Next projects will be centered around computer vision, machine learning, and lots of other crazy ideas I have.
Please check out the site and create a competition to get a feel for what it does. If you view it from a desktop, I show the entire competition tree so it is immediately clear what is going on. On mobile it uses a sliding carousel of competing pairs. <comment><AUTHOR> Issues I have at the moment are: 1) YouTube quota for using their search API is low so if i get lots of people searching for videos and creating competitions it might raise an exception 2) In the mobile view I am having a problem with the "Pull to refresh" section underneath the competition; it gets stuck and it hard to use on mobile. I suck at GUI design and css so that might be the cause for that comments section.</comment>


Where have the light netbooks gone? - <AUTHOR> http://www.tech-no-media.com/2009/08/where-have-light-netbooks-gone.html

<comment><USER2> _something light that can easily be transported everywhere for a quick surf session_

That's called an iPhone. (Or the alternative smartphone of your choice.)

Steve Jobs predicted three years ago that nobody would want a netbook if they had a pocket-sized object that was actually usable for web surfing. And this would seem to be evidence that he was right. [1]

Today, the "netbook" market has a higher percentage of people looking for low prices and laptop-style features, rather than people looking for extreme portability. So as netbook manufacturers figure out how to deliver larger, more laptop-like machines at similar rock-bottom prices, the "netbooks" creep up in size.

\--

[1] Of course, the best way to predict the future _is_ to invent it.

<comment><USER3> As useful as the iphone and ipod touch have made pocket-surfing, for any session longer than a few minutes they are no longer the right tool for the job.

In 6 or so months, Jobs is going to sing a different tune about mobile computing. One in which the iPod/iPhone is an important 'always with you' part, but not the end-all/be-all. E.g. The iPhone means you're never at a loss, even if you're caught off-guard. But if you _expect_ to be doing some work/reading/media consumption away from a desk - a larger device with more appropriate ergonomics will be the way to go.

<comment><USER4> As soon as I expect to be doing actual work, I bring my 13 inch macbook. A netbook still requires some sort of backpack or bag; at that point I can carry a real (full-size) laptop. Comparing this with my last laptop (bought 5 years ago), it was a total pain to carry around. Back then, a netbook would have been good. Nowadays, if I ever planned to be without a laptop, a smartphone would be the next size down for me, as it's the biggest thing I can fit in my pocket.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The death of the Dell mini 9 is greatly exaggerated, as I just ordered a Vostro A90.

I finally gave in to the temptation, since it's so highly rated (in the just- works) sense as a hackintosh and since the iphone is a total non-starter for me (expensive, no keyboard, no cdma).</comment>


Lithium recovery from seawater using dialysis with a lithium ionic SC (2015) - <AUTHOR> https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0011916414006560 <comment><AUTHOR> An more general overview of possible approaches (not just applying to lithium) is also worth a read, "Mining valuable minerals from seawater: a critical review" [1].

Approaches to oceanic mineral extraction and R&D towards making it more economically viable should be of increasing interest given the changing mineral demands imposed by vehicle electrification and shifting generation. I think this is an area that should be getting a significant amount of long baseline R&D from both government and industry right now. Viable seawater recovery would not merely have major economic and environmental implications, it could have dramatic geopolitical effects too by diversifying potential key mineral inputs from limited land based point sources to "anywhere with ocean access", just as solar and vehicle electrification will decentralize energy markets, so countries should consider it not just a good economic hedge/planning but an area with strategic implications.

Worth remembering also that "viable" is a shifting baseline that depends on economic demand, just as it is with anything else (like oil for example). It doesn't necessarily have to ever be cheaper then the cheapest concentrated mineral source if value rises enough, and merely having viable techniques that could in principle be deployed may help set a price ceiling and limit the geopolitics that could be played.

\-----

1: [http://pubs.rsc.org/-/content/articlehtml/2017/ew/c6ew00268d...](http://pubs.rsc.org/-/content/articlehtml/2017/ew/c6ew00268d?page=search)</comment>


The uncertain future of emotion analytics - <AUTHOR> http://www.hopesandfears.com/hopes/now/internet/216523-the-uncertain-future-of-emotion-analytics <comment><USER2> Imagine combining: ubiquitous video surveillance, cloud based automatic facial recognition, cellphone tracking and now, as this article explains, computational detection and classification of emotion.

I have a positive bias toward technology but that combination gives me pause.

Collingridge Dilemma, used as the hook of this article, reminds me a bit of Marshall MacLuhan's The Medium is the Message. In both concepts there is a warning not to ignore the underlying technology/medium because its impact may be more powerful than any particular message or application that runs on the technology. Some of that power derives from its subtlety. We become dependent on the technology for its clear benefits but the underlying shift in society including many of the negative effects seem to sneak up on us because the technology effect is so much more subtle than the immediate and apparent message or application effect.</comment>


25% Of Jobs Are Offshoreable - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/princeton-research-finds-that-25-of-jobs-are-offshoreable-2009-10 <comment><USER2> The very notion of "offshoreable" is nonsense. Many companies could move the entirety of their operations overseas. Likewise, many jobs that actually are offshored end up creating a huge mess that requires more domestic workers to clean up.

In short, whether a job is offshoreable depends not so much on the job itself, but on management, the available talent, culture, and a whole slew of so many other dynamic factors that any kind of study pinning the notion down to a few indicators is destined to be meaningless.

We'd learn a lot more by studying specific factors that lead to offshoreability rather than just assuming a bunch of them and trying to draw big numeric conclusions.</comment>


Kdb+ on demand – (64-bit) Personal Edition - <AUTHOR> https://ondemand.kx.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> Things that seem interesting to me:

\- No longer have to do funny hacks getting 64bit gcc to produce 32bit .o files to play with m32/l32 version

\- The press release suggests per-core-minute pricing now available.</comment>


Update on Twitter's Review of the 2016 U.S. Election - <AUTHOR> https://blog.twitter.com/official/en_us/topics/company/2018/2016-election-update.html <comment><USER2> > Verify major party candidates for all statewide and federal elective > offices, and major national party accounts, as a hedge against impersonation

It would be helpful if Twitter provided a definition of "Major Party". Does that just mean Republican and Democrat?

What about Libertarian and Green Party candidates?

3rd party runs like Ross Perot?

If I don't have a political party until election time like Emmanuel Macron, does that qualify me?

What about fringe extremist candidates do they get the same treatment as their more traditional less hateful counterparts?

> the 3,814 identified IRA-linked accounts posted 175,993 Tweets, > approximately 8.4% of which were election-related.

I wonder what the other 91.6% of tweets were about

<comment><USER3> > It would be helpful if Twitter provided a definition of "Major Party". Does > that just mean Republican and Democrat?

I'm almost 100% certain they just mean Republican and Democrat. 3rd parties are (very) rarely invited to highly-publicized debates and/or granted equal air time when compared to the the Rs and Ds. Why would twitter 'elevate' them to the same level?

<comment><USER4> That's because the commission that puts together the debates is own by the Rs & Ds and purposely have worked since Perot to exclude 3rd parties.

[http://reason.com/blog/2017/04/21/the-commission-on- presiden...](http://reason.com/blog/2017/04/21/the-commission-on-presidential- debates-1)

<comment><USER5> I voted for a third party last year and I didn't even know that this case happened! Thanks for posting the link.

That said, is anti trust law and loose metaphors to markets the best they could do to attack the two party system? That, and if anti trust law were useful for anything the US corporate landscape would look very different.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> >Our partners Common Sense Media, the National Association for Media Literacy, the Family Online Safety Institute and Connect Safely, amongst others, have helped us to craft materials and conduct workshops to help our users learn how to process online information and understand which sources of news have integrity.

So Twitter, which sources of news have integrity?

</comment><comment><USER7> "Consistent with our commitment to transparency, we are emailing notifications to 677,775 people in the United States who followed one of these accounts or retweeted or liked a Tweet from these accounts during the election period. "

That's an interesting move...</comment>


Contribution of the Greenland Ice Sheet to sea level over the next millennium - <AUTHOR> https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/5/6/eaav9396 <comment><AUTHOR> "We project that Greenland will very likely become ice free within a millennium without substantial reductions in greenhouse gas emissions."</comment>


Improve Your Work Day – Rest, a Break Reminder and Pomodoro Timer - <AUTHOR> http://resttimer.com

<comment><AUTHOR> Let me know if I can answer any questions. There are trial versions available, so feel free to give the app a try.</comment>


The People Behind OpenAI - <AUTHOR> https://www.redhat.com/en/open-source-stories/ai-revolutionaries/people-behind-openai <comment><USER2> This seems rather dated, considering that Ian Goodfellow is not at OpenAI any more.

The articles also goes on about universe, which has long been abandoned because the VNC/realtime stuff does not really work well (according to them). According to r/machinelearning, a bunch of engineers on that project got laid off (cannot confirm).

<comment><USER3> Goodfellow's change is noted at the bottom of the article.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Far too long an article for people who did not accept my application. Not reading. Ever.

<comment><USER5> Who didn't accept your application? Redhat? Unless you were applying for a position in marketing, I doubt the authors saw your application.</comment></comment>


Franz: combined chat and messaging - <AUTHOR> http://meetfranz.com <comment><USER2> Just installed this via homebrew. Looks pretty good to me so far. Just a wrapper round the various web versions of the messenger services but saves me pinned tabs in my browser at least!</comment>


A New Biography of Benjamin Franklin's Early Life - <AUTHOR> https://www.newcriterion.com/issues/2018/10/finding-franklin <comment><USER2> Franklin created a daily schedule and followed the routine as per the schedule. This article explains about his daily schedule [https://bigthink.com/scotty-hendricks/how-did-ben- franklin-g...](https://bigthink.com/scotty-hendricks/how-did-ben-franklin-got- so-much-done-his-daily-schedule-explained)

<comment><USER3> FWIW, the article also mentions that in his autobiography he goes on to explain that he was able to stick to his schedule for only a very short time before he abandoned it.

<comment><USER4> He also had thirteen virtues ([http://www.ushistory.org/franklin/autobiography/page38.htm](http://www.ushistory.org/franklin/autobiography/page38.htm)) which he cycled through week by week, concentrating particularly on one of them each week. I always figured this was a bit tongue-in-cheek, though, because his definition of "humility" is "imitate Jesus and Socrates".

<comment><USER5> Man, I really can't choose between him and Twain for Most Sarcastic American Historical Figure.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I don't know what to make of this description of Franklin.

He apparently lied about his religious upbringing, claiming a Presbyterian youth, when in fact, he'd been raised Congregationalist. Sounds like this was a bigger thing in the 1700s than it would be today, but still...

Today, Franklin would probably be a Redditor, with a side of Anonymous hacktivism.

<comment><USER7> It's interesting to think about what it'd be like if we could read the tweets or Reddit posts of historical figures from the past.

And how that would change people's impression of them, especially considering how social norms have changed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> [http://freemasoninformation.com/2015/01/illustrious- brother-...](http://freemasoninformation.com/2015/01/illustrious-brother-ben- franklin-and-freemasonry/)

<comment><USER9> I recently attended a non-masons meeting that was hosted at a turn of the century Masonic Temple. The building itself was incredible, if not just a bit spooky. There were photos of members from the early 1900s to present day, but it was very apparent that the average age of the men in the photos has continually increased over time. In other words it looks like today only much older men continue their involvement and new member recruitment likewise skews 55+. My guess is their membership has dwindled significantly in the last 30+ years, at least in the US.

<comment><USER10> It has dwindled significantly from "the golden age" of Freemasonry which was the 1950's and 60's. That's in part because Baby Boomer men weren't joiners in their youth compared to their fathers. Their fathers had just fought WWII and wanted to continue the sense of brotherhood they found in the military.

But also, Freemasonry has always been cyclic for various reasons. It experienced a huge decrease in membership in the 1800's because of an anti- Masonic thread that was going through the country at the time (there was even a whole political party--the first third party in the US in fact--whose platform was to banish Freemasonry). This is where most of the conspiracy theories about Freemasonry come from.

It has started to cycle back a little in the past 8-10 years. I'm seeing more and more younger guys interested in joining.

<comment><USER8> Interesting. Assuming you are a mason do you find being a member useful/meaningful in 2018?

<comment><USER11> Yes, if you like the arts, sciences, mystery, and fellowship.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Journey in Android Development, Android Market - the good, the bad - <AUTHOR> http://www.kai-mai.com/node/179 <comment><USER2> This fragmentation problem is starting to get pretty ugly. I have an HTC Hero which, IIRC, went on sale via Sprint in October 2009 and I cannot run Google Nav or Google Goggles, or use Bluetooth tethering via PDANet because I'm stuck with 1.5 My 3 year old iPhone 2G runs almost everything in the App Store while my <3 month old Android handset cannot even run Google's newest official applications anymore? This feels like a rerun of the Windows Mobile situation to me.

<comment><USER3> _because I'm stuck with 1.5_

Well, yeah. The problem is not Android, the problem is that HTC is not keeping their Sense devices up to date. They apparently think that their proprietary theme is worth more than being able to use up-to-date apps. As a result, HTC should not call the Hero "Android", but they do. Caveat emptor.

I am sure that if you find an original iPhone and don't update the software that you won't be able to use modern App Store apps. This is the same scenario.

<comment><AUTHOR> HTC doesn't even release a SENSE UI emulator. Neither does Motorola Motoblur.

It's just not reasonable to expect developers to have access to all real devices.

All the device manufactures need to stop customizing Android UI unless they are willing to release a emulator.

<comment><USER3> Is this really important? From an apps developer standpoint, Sense and Motoblur don't really affect anything. It goes into the background while your app is displayed. If your app works in the emulator, it will work on a Sense / Motoblur device.

The problem here is that Sense is an ugly hack that deeply depends on Android 1.5 internals, and Android 1.6 and 2.0 are much better than 1.5. The result is that apps target 1.6, and Sense's dependencies prevent HTC from deploying 1.6 to Sense devics.

That's my guess anyway, it could just be that HTC is lazy about updates. I still don't have Android 2.0 on my Sapphire, after all...

(The deeper trend I notice is that hardware companies are not into incrementally improving devices. The release date comes, the product is shipped, and it's forgotten in favor of the next device. A simple firmware update that may take on developer one week to prepare is completely ignored, leaving thousands of users with a device that's not as good as it could be. Depressing.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> They also forgot the part where no-one is making any money on it. I know two of the top developers personally, and we ourselves have a pretty successful app in there. But there is nowhere near enough sales to make a living, even for the top selling apps.

It's unclear why the Android market is so much worse in this respect, I suppose having 50x less users is part of it, but I suspect there is something about the Android user which makes them less likely to buy. Downloading and installing cracked versions of the apps (and they are all cracked) is also dead simple.

In summary, great platform for users, terrible, terrible platform to make money on.

<comment><USER5> Order of magnitude, what's a top app make in a month?

<comment><USER4> Thousands.

<comment><USER6> <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1053831>

vote for this

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It's a pity Windows Mobile isn't better.</comment>


Copyfraud Is Stealing the Public Domain - <AUTHOR> http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/06/26/copyfraud/

<comment><USER2> Argh, too many levels of indirection.

The paper: [http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=787244#Pa...](http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=787244#PaperDownload)

Article on The Register, referenced by the Slashdot post: <http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/06/26/copyfraud/>

</comment><comment><USER3> Overblown. Amazon lets you sell public domain books. Big whoop.

The examples seem a little stretched too. I tried reading the original paper, but it's quite dry and 75% footnotes, but one example was a school textbook that reprints the constitution and claims copyright (over the whole work) without explicitly uncopyrighting the public domain bits. That's explicitly allowed. You can copyright arrangements and collections of public domain work, to the extent that there is original work involved in the selection.

On the whole, the summary seems to be "some people tried to use public domain work and other people complained but they shouldn't have."

<comment><USER4> "On the whole, the summary seems to be "some people tried to use public domain work and other people complained but they shouldn't have.""

Not quite. The Google book search stuff, for example, is problematic: digitizing a public-domain book, or printing a new copy and slapping a binding on it, generally isn't sufficient to grant you a copyright in the resulting work, since there is no original work involved in doing so. As a result, publishers who claim copyright in public domain works after having done nothing other than digitize or otherwise republish are making false claims regarding the copyright status of those works.

I'd personally be interested to know whether the heirs of the original rightsholder could -- even after copyright expires -- bring a suit for slander of title over this sort of behavior.</comment></comment>


Handy Light: Tethering App Camouflaged as Flashlight - <AUTHOR> http://appshopper.com/blog/2010/07/20/handy-light-tethering-app-camouflaged-as-flashlight/ <comment><USER2> I wonder how many other apps on Apple's "guaranteed-safe" App Store have hidden behavior like this? Since I can't actually audit the app code that runs on my device (like by compiling it myself), nor can I audit the OS, I guess I now have to _assume_ that any application on my iPhone is compromised. (+)

Apple should include a warning on the box to that effect.

(+) I don't actually own an iPhone.

<comment><USER3> Apps are sandboxed. They can send and receive data over http/https at will. Location sharing is much more audited in iOS 4. Your calendar data and some address book data is not well protected. Your pictures are only accessible through the camera roll UI; apps can't slurp them.

<comment><AUTHOR> Contacts (and in iOS 4, calendar data) are completely unprotected. Just create an instance of an AddressBook and go to town. Your pictures are only accessible through the camera roll UI... IF the developer is only using public APIs.

Since we can assume that there are no public APIs that support tethering setup, we can also assume that it's still possible for them to be used in rogue apps and for developers to have access to private data.

<comment><USER4> It's possible to create a tethering app using public APIs. The APIs for HTTP/HTTPS connectivity and WiFi connectivity are public.

Apple rejects apps that use private APIs.

<comment><USER5> How does Apple actually scan for private APIs?

Couldn't you write the instructions necessary to make the private API call on the stack at runtime and then simply execute an assembly jump instruction?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I wonder why this guy thought sacrificing his iPhone developer status was a good idea. If it gets 'remote killed', it was all for naught. Maybe he's going Droid.

EDIT: He's just a kid

> Hi, I'm Nick Lee, an aspiring 15-year-old web designer and programmer. I > consider ...

<comment><USER6> His app just hit the front pages of multiple high-traffic websites. It could well have been an excellent idea.

<comment><USER7> Why? Does he have something else to sell? Assuming he doesn't, he's just put his effort into learning what could be a valuable skill, but now can't work on the platform (ever again?).

<comment><USER8> > Does he have something else to sell?

himself.

If he wants to get a regular job later /or/ if he wants to launch a product later, having his name in the headlines helps quite a lot.

i don't want to say "there is no such thing as bad publicity" because there is, but in this case, enough people, I think, will feel that a tethering application is 'not evil' and that this was overall a good thing to make it a net win for the programmer.

Even if apple blocks him forever (I don't know their history... would they really say "no, f-ck you" five years from now?) and even if the apple platform remains dominant (I will be very surprised if apple continues its dominance after Jobs runs out of spare parts.) there are plenty of companies that make iphone apps that I'm sure would be happy to hire the kid.

And there are plenty of other platforms out there to work on, too.

<comment><USER9> Just ask RTM.

<comment><USER8> Who or what is RTM? Remember The Milk?

<comment><USER10> <http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=rtm>

aka Robert Tappan Morris. That's a name you should recognize. :-)

<comment><USER11> Nope. Give us the gist of it

<comment><USER12> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Tappan_Morris,_Jr>.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I wish he'd release the source, then those of us with dev accounts would be able to use it.

<comment><USER14> Here's the source to one that doesn't require flashlight shenanegans: <http://wiki.github.com/tcurdt/iProxy/>

<comment><USER15> Indeed -- any iOS developer ($100/year) can install this on their own phone, _and_ give it to friends (by using one of the limited number of test-device registrations), without jailbreaking.

<comment><USER16> It's rather annoying to give to your friends though, as you have to re-sign the code once a month and dish out binaries to everyone again. Plus, you'll run out of device codes quickly if you use your dev account to build apps for clients (whose devices you need to register too).

<comment><USER17> You just need to give a new mobileprovision file every three months, no need to update the app unless necessary.

I've always found it to be quite weird that the App Store is so closed, but a person with a developer certificate and MobileProvision can install whatever he wants and can do whatever he wants so long as the apps are codesigned. $99/yr is less than a couple coffees a month (or a good sushi plate) and way less than your phone bill, and is quite worth it for the bored hacker who wants to keep the warranty.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> God damn, it's been removed. Serious bummer to wait until iPhone 4 jailbreak to get tethering.

</comment><comment><USER19> I just attempted to buy this app. Its already been removed from the app store. Bummer.

<comment><USER20> wow! :(

I attempted to buy it but it requires iOS 4. (I have a 2G...)

<comment><USER21> Tethering on Edge probably wouldn't be the best experience anyways. =)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> iPhone tethering is allowed on my carrier, but I got the app anyway because setting up an ad-hoc WiFi network will allow me to tether my iPhone to my iPad, as well as the fact that bluetooth tethering between Mac <\--> iPhone is flaky as hell. Will be interesting to see if Apple kills it, and if they go as far as to kill it outside of the US where tethering is allowed anyway.

</comment><comment><USER23> SOCKS proxy isn't really "tethering".

<comment><USER24> True, but if you are on OS X, most of the apps will use the System Preferences proxy settings, so most of your apps will Just Work.

Of course, you'll have to get tricky to use SSH via the SOCKS proxy, but it can be done.

<comment><USER3> SSH through a SOCKS 4/5 proxy:

1\. Download and compile connect.c (<http://www.taiyo.co.jp/~gotoh/ssh/connect.c> or <http://www.meadowy.org/~gotoh/ssh/connect.c>).

gcc connect.c -o connect -lresolv

2\. sudo cp connect /usr/local/bin/connect-proxy

3\. cd ~/.ssh Add new config file as shown below (if existing, then be careful - backup/modify)

File: ~/.ssh/config

Host *

ProxyCommand connect-proxy -R both -4 -S proxy:<proxy-port> %h %p

4\. Test ssh to one of your hosts

Note: If you're not using the proxy, you need to disable the global config with a script or something to nuke it on demand.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I was able to get this app before it was removed. I followed the directions and it works perfectly on my Macbook Pro.

However, it only works with Safari. It does not work with Chrome, Firefox, or any mail protocols (POP / IMAP / SMTP).

<comment> X-Istence That is because Chrome and Firefox don't follow the system PROXY settings you will have to change those individually.

Mail.app works over the global systems SOCKS proxy as such it works without any issues what so ever.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> If true, I guarantee that Apple will use their "kill switch" to remove this app from any iPhones that have it installed.

<comment><USER27> I bought NetShare when it was briefly on the app store and it still works. Or at least it did last time I was at my cabin a few months ago with my 3G.

If they were going to kill an app, I'd assume they would have killed that. And they didn't. Or if they claimed to have killed it then they failed.

I bought this app. I'm more than willing to support the the Rebellion. I haven't actually verified that this app works as demonstrated but for a dollar it's worth the risk. I have no intentions of paying another $20 a month to AT&T.

<comment><USER28> > I bought this app. I'm more than willing to support the the Rebellion. I > haven't actually verified that this app works as demonstrated but for a > dollar it's worth the risk. I have no intentions of paying another $20 a > month to AT&T.

As a current iOS developer, I've always wondered what the financial repercussions of getting pulled from the App Store would be. I wouldn't be surprised if Apple refused to pay the kid his post-commission cut from what he was able to sell due to this kind of hidden behavior.

<comment><USER4> The kid's under 18. You need to be 18 or over to sell apps in the App Store, as per the agreement. They could choose to pull his apps, remove his account and not pay him for that reason alone.

<comment><USER28> That depends if the parent was involved in approving the agreement. When I skimmed it last year when I first signed up, I remembered there being some kind of "if the developer is under 18, have a representative of age read and agree instead" clause, but it's been awhile.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Are Twitter and Facebook Killing Blogs? (2009) - <AUTHOR> http://www.softwarebyrob.com/2009/10/15/are-twitter-and-facebook-killing-blogs/

<comment><USER2> It`s the best of times and the worst of times for blogs thanks to Twitter and Facebook</comment>


Profit sharing and why I don't want it - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/code-like-a-girl/profit-sharing-and-why-i-dont-want-it-76ad9ae77e07#.tunfyy3q8 <comment><USER2> It's impressive, how many arguments there are against simply giving people money for the work they do.</comment>


Fused Video Stabilization on the Pixel 2 and Pixel 2 XL - <AUTHOR> https://research.googleblog.com/2017/11/fused-video-stabilization-on-pixel-2.html <comment><USER2> This -- is super freakin' cool. Real value add from Google, considering everyone is on the same very mediocre Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 platform. (Please PLEASE for the love of God, Google, build your own mobile SoCs so someone can remotely catch up to Apple's 3 year lead in mobile performance already)

Credible too because Pixel 2 had such stellar picture quality in the reviews.

<comment><USER3> Chip making isn't magic. The more transistors you have the more things you can do. For example you can have more cache, more decoding units, more execution units etc. All this increase in complexity has costs which other phone manufacturer may or not want to pay for. Apple has a billion more transistors to work with. Will most consumers even notice the difference? will they pay more? Apple has a high asp so they can do it. How many other manfuctuers can do that?

<comment><USER4> > Will most consumers even notice the difference?

Well, it allows them to advance UI instead of just making it faster.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > _Fused Video Stabilization on the Pixel 2 and Pixel 2 XL_

Aside from gatekeeping, what does any of this have to do with the Pixel 2? Why is the headline not "Fused video stabilization for any Android device with a camera"?

I mean, Microsoft published inertial image deblurring using entirely unintegrated devices in 2010 ([https://www.microsoft.com/en- us/research/publication/image-d...](https://www.microsoft.com/en- us/research/publication/image-deblurring-using-inertial-measurement- sensors/)), though I swear I remember seeing a poster from them earlier than that.

(Also, I can honestly say that I've never seen a video recorded on a phone that had motion blur or shutter wobble anywhere near as bad as what they show in their examples, so those examples seem contrived, but obviously it's great to have an algorithm that can handle exceptionally bad cases.)

<comment><USER6> Needs output from what the ois is correcting too for this to work, which I don't think most ois systems output.

<comment><USER5> See, I don't believe that that is true. There might be some additional information gained there, but it's not _needed_, as evidence by a decade of publications on the subject of correcting motion artifacts.

<comment><USER7> Without knowing where the lens is in relation to the sensor, you can't correct for the time-varying perspective distortion.

Perhaps the decade of publications have never involved optical image stabilization in the loop.

What you _could_ have, however, is a simulation of where the OIS moves the optical axis of the lens to, when given the gyroscope inputs. In control theory terms, an open loop observer. But that would need to be calibrated to each model of phone.

<comment><USER5> > _But that would need to be calibrated to each model of phone._

We needn't suddenly forget that every android phone asks you to wave it around in figure eights to calibrate the compass (and then still only seems to be accurate to within +/\- 180 degrees). Making every video you take come out better on every Android device with sufficient CPU power after a few seconds of recording would be significantly preferable to "Only works on our devices, neener neener." To me, obviously, maybe not to Google.

<comment><USER8> That kind of calibration isn't the same as factory calibration of IMU, camera, OIS systems against some known ground truth.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Way too many things that are Pixel only. Does this mean that the Android open source era is over ?

</comment><comment><USER10> I knew there was quite a bit of processing going on in flagship cameras but I never expected this level. Really impressed!

</comment><comment><USER11> Cropping is still happening, and it can gobble up your content if you're not careful.

Even in their demo video of guy jumping down sand dunes, we see the destructive price of 'fused cropping stabilisation'. The most important shot of guy jumping misses the moment his feet hit sand at 2 sec in when he does his biggest leap.

It's details like these, and the clouds of sand he kicks up behind him which make an interesting shot. I like my focal length untouched, thanks anyway, optical stabilisation all the way for me.

Here's the sand dune video. [https://youtu.be/kaO7Gs-F2vA](https://youtu.be/kaO7Gs-F2vA)

I wonder if there's any manual control over crop factor in the Pixel settings.

</comment><comment><USER12> That motorcycle video near the end of the article is simply amazing.

<comment><USER13> so were the demos of Youtube video stabilization, in reality Youtube EIS is absolute garbage.

<comment><USER14> It seems to work quite well. See [https://youtu.be/0Mp5Y3UTWH8?t=93](https://youtu.be/0Mp5Y3UTWH8?t=93)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I still think most software video stabilization looks terrible and unnatural.

What's wrong with focus breathing and perspective shifts?

<comment><USER16> The terribleness and unnaturalness is precisely the problem they are trying to solve with this solution. The results look very impressive compared to previous solutions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> iPhone user looking with envy. Is anything of a similar magnitude available in a standalone software package? For already recorded videos?

<comment><USER18> > _iPhone user looking with envy._

I'm not sure FOMO is warranted, since Apple's so-called 'cinematic video stabilization' (introduced in the iPhone 6 days) is quite good. Additionally, the iPhone 6 Plus, 7 Plus, and both iPhone 8 models have optical image stabilization.

<comment><USER19> I think the whole point of the article is that simple OIS isn't enough.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Two things left to improve for mobile phone video that would massively increase image quality: increased dynamic range and higher bit rate.

Increasing dynamic range in going to be tough. The only way to to do that would be to make the pixel's electron well bigger, but phone cameras have limited pixel size. Image sensors will probably have to provide a separate stacked electron well capacitor below each pixel, instead of using the photosensor PN junction.

Also, the industry really needs a standard raw video format that allows for high-quality post exposure correction and white-balance.

</comment><comment><USER21> Something I'd like to see is a square sensor, so you can take horizontal video in portrait if you forget.</comment>