Emerald cockroach wasp - Reproductive behavior and life cycle - <AUTHOR> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emerald_cockroach_wasp#Reproductive_behavior_and_life_cycle <comment><USER3> > Over a period of eight days, the wasp larva consumes the roach's internal > organs in an order which guarantees that the roach will stay alive, at least > until the larva enters the pupal stage and forms a cocoon inside the roach's > body.

Instances of 'inborn intelligence' never cease to amaze me. How in the world do the larvae _know_ in which order to eat the organs?!

If you have an instinct that is pretty low-level (say, pulling your hands away from a hot object), you could argue that your biology has been selected by evolution to respond in a particular way to that stimulus. I can also understand adults exhibiting a higher-level of intelligence - they could have learned it from their community or from direct experience. But tabula rasa minds exhibiting complex intelligence is just mind boggling.

<comment><USER4> Suppose you have two variations of a gene; one produces larvae that prefer the taste of a vital organ, and eat that one first. The other variation prefers the taste of a less important organ, eating that first and eating the important organ only when it has exhausted its preferred option. If the second one is on average 5% more likely to complete its growing before the roach dies and its food supply rots, the second variation is likely to displace the first.

Why would larvae eat only one organ at a time in the order of taste preference in the first place? Well if two variations of a gene exist, and one produces larvae that are not picky and damage many organs while feeding, while another produces larvae that are picky and thereby confine their damage to.one organ at a time, then if the second behavior is more successful it will begin to replace the first.

The central.message of modern Darwinism is the accumulation of small changes can lead to big evolutions. Obviously I cannot say what the exact mechanism of this instance was but what I gave are examples of the types of incremental changes that may have contributed. Your incredulity is based on a straw man argument: you ask how does the animal know what the right order is, as if that had to come all at once ex nihilo.

<comment><USER5> Let's first start by verifying that there actually exists such behaviour - there are no citations for larvae lifecycle part in Wikipedia and I couldn't find any reference in papers.

Maybe larvae just consumes a little of every organ it can get to. The whole story about it consuming non-essential organs first seems quite fishy - <USER2> many of those do cockroaches have anyway? Even if that's true, after eating away few organs you pretty sure to get organism failure no matter what order. Doesn't seem very smart strategy to me.

<comment><USER6> This would be the article you're looking for...

[http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1748-1090.1993....](http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1748-1090.1993.tb03531.x/abstract)

You'll need a Wiley Online Library membership to read all of it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Wow. When I was a kid I was fascinated by watching bugs for hours, I even kept (and fed by capturing mosquitoes) garden spiders with their eggs in a plastic box, just to watch the spiders catch the prey and the egg hatch those dozens of litltle spideys.

But the one mysterious bug that I knew nothing about was this one. My parents couldn't tell me what was it, nor it appeared in any of my books and magazines...but I was completelly fascinated to see it carrying roaches around at my grandma's front yard. At the time I thought the green fella was hypnotizing the roach then "riding" it to it's place for dinner.

You can't imagine how happy I am to finally learn the name of that bug and what in the world he did with the roaches, thank you!

</comment><comment><USER8> Creepy video here <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hxe60BcHbUA>

Parasitoids have fascinating life histories. I'd thoroughly recommend the book "Parasitoids: Behavioral and Evolutionary Ecology" by Charles Godfray.

</comment><comment><USER9> With photo at: [http://scienceblogs.com/loom/2006/02/02/the_wisdom_of_parasi...](http://scienceblogs.com/loom/2006/02/02/the_wisdom_of_parasites.php)

<comment><USER10> The comment thread on this article is over 200 posts. Mostly a heated creationist vs evolunist debate, but there is some interesting reading in there. It is hard not to ponder how such a complex set of behaviors came to be through natural selection alone. However, one comment that I found particularly on point is posted below:

"I have a suggestion for how this evolved. The initial sting to the cockroach would obviously make the cockroach's escape part of its brain light up like crazy. If the wasp then goes to find the most active part of the cockroaches brain, i'd imagine this would be the escape area. I believe there are simple rules which build up to create complex systems. These simple rules, like the active neuron sensor, help to create shortcuts to how a creature evolves. If you look at the recent darpa challenge, involving the teaching of a car how to drive across unfamiliar terrain, it managed to convince the team it was working by using just the rule of keeping the grass equally distant on the right and the left. It hit a bridge and swerved so the guy onboard had to grab the wheel! But the point is simple rules can lead to complex seeming actions." Posted by: Rob Levy | February 4, 2006 4:28 PM

<comment><USER11> The hard part is proving that this, or any other evolutionary scenario, is what actually happened.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> _Researchers believe that the wasp chews off the antenna to replenish fluids or possibly to regulate the amount of venom because too much could kill and too little would let the victim recover before the larva has grown._

I don't understand either of those explanations. Do roach antenna have fluids in them? How does chopping off antenna regulate venom which is already in the roach's brain? Does anyone get this part?

<comment><USER12> OK this video (which is quite good) seems to answer it:

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m-p_4mp- RtA&p=E330837E95B...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m-p_4mp- RtA&p=E330837E95B3725D)

The clipped antenna leaks roach blood. Now I'm off to bed for some sweet nightmares.

<comment><USER13> Wasps are amazing creatures. well over 100,000 species of them are parasites. Here's another complex insect parasite video involving caterpillars that stowaway in ants nests and the wasps that lay eggs in them, from Attenborough's Life in the Undergrowth BBC series: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GCo2uCLXvhk>

Also other species hijack acorns growth to lay offspring within, and are then in turn preyed upon by other wasps: [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CzXccvoJThI&NR=1](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CzXccvoJThI&NR=1)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This is what evolves when you can't keep food fresh. Thank you Jacob Perkins. (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Refrigerator#History>)

</comment><comment><USER15> I have to say, the world around us has some scary creatures in it. This, of course, being one high on that list. Definitely fodder for some terrifying nightmares.

</comment><comment><USER16> Can someone with state-of-the-art knowledge of biology explain how in the world something like this could have evolved?

It was my rudimentary understanding that Lamarckian inheritance had been debunked; how else then could such precise knowledge of a cockroach's neurological functions have been passed on to the subsequent generation from the primary generation whence such a technique was first employed?

<comment><USER17> I don't have state-of-the-art knowledge of biology, but you'll note from the article

 _While a number of venomous animals paralyze prey as live food for their young, Ampulex compressa is different in that it initially leaves the roach mobile and modifies its behavior in a unique way._

This suggests to me that the ancestors of this wasp would simply paralyze the roach and lay eggs inside, and this behaviour evolved from that.

<comment><USER5> _This suggests to me that the ancestors of this wasp would simply paralyze the roach and lay eggs inside, and this behaviour evolved from that._

That would be backwards evolution.

From the scienceblog link:

 _Amuplex is not technically a parasite, but something known as an exoparasitoid. In other words, a free-living adult lays an egg outside a host, and then the larva crawls into the host. One could easily imagine the ancestors of Ampulex as wasps that laid their eggs near dead insects--as some species do today. These corpse-feeding ancestors then evolved into wasps that attacked living hosts. Likewise, it's not hard to envision an Ampulex-like wasp evolving into full-blown parasitoids that inject their eggs directly into their hosts, as many species do today._

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> This reminds me of phorid flies, the natural enemy of the fire ant. The larva of a phorid fly eats its way into the head of the ant, decapitates the ant by dissolving its neck with enzymes, then cocoons in the head. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fire_ant#Natural_predators>

Nature is beatiful ;-)

<comment><USER19> The ant's first mistake was attaching it's head with a membrane...

Obviously ants are one of the most successful creatures in the world, but a membrane!? Wow.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Okay, now that you know... just start counting the number of times other people discover this for the first time and feel the urge to post it either here or on Reddit. Not that I blame you at all, this is pretty amazing stuff...

... but my count is 5.

</comment><comment><USER21> I recommend the book "Parasite Rex" by Carl Zimmer for those who are fascinated by this sort of thing. The book discusses several interesting and creepy parasites.

</comment><comment><USER22> This is as close as is gets in real life to the movie 'Alien'. Was Ridley Scott inspired by this in some way?

<comment><USER23> I believed that _Alien_ was inspired by _The Voyage of the Space Beagle_ , but Dan O'Bannon (the screenplay writer) denied it: "I didn't steal Alien from anybody. I stole it from everybody!"

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alien_(film)#Origins>

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Yet there are still too many roaches out there.

</comment><comment><USER25> DO NOT WANT.

</comment><comment><USER26> I think I dated one of those in high school.

</comment><comment><USER27> I, for one, welcome our new Emerald Cockroach Wasp overlords.

<comment><USER19> So long as their stingers remain unable to penetrate the human skull or spinal cord, we're safe. Once they figure out how to do that though, every man for himself!</comment></comment>


Older People Need Geriatricians. Where Will They Come From? - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/03/health/geriatricians-shortage.html <comment><USER2> Old people don't have different diseases from the rest of the population--just more of them. Thus family practice doctors, internal medicine doctors and the large variety of medical specialists will be adequate.

<comment><AUTHOR> Not quite, in the same way that there are diseases with high prevalence in pediatric populations, similarly in geriatrics. Dementia, cardiovascular and cerebrovascular disease, osteoarthritis, prostatic disease, and many others come to mind.</comment></comment>


Falling Home Prices Could Be a Good Thing - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/10/upshot/popping-the-housing-bubbles-in-the-american-mind.html?smid=fb-nytimes&smtyp=cur&_r=0 <comment><USER3> At the risk of sounding brusque, don't just read the headline of this article and then comment because the headline doesn't mean what it reads like on the surface. It's not "house prices are falling and this could be awesome." Instead, the article's thesis is:

> So instead of looking at homes as investments, what if we regarded them like > a TV or a car or any other consumer good? People might expect home prices to > go down instead of up. Homebuilders would probably spend more time talking > about technology and design than financing options. Politicians might start > talking about their plans to lower home prices further, as they often do > with fuel prices.

The article is going over a paper[0] that asks what would happen to house prices if houses were treated as disposable consumer goods instead of a means of storing wealth. It also points out, correctly in my opinion, that such a shift would be monumental (if only because everyone would have to do it at the same time).

0 - [http://realestate.wharton.upenn.edu/research/papers/full/802...](http://realestate.wharton.upenn.edu/research/papers/full/802.pdf)

<comment><USER4> The cost in urban centres is the land, therefore this is a flawed approach. The land does not erode (unless you live on a cliff).

<comment><USER5> Is it though? - the reason the land costs more is because of two things - geography (ocean views, doesn't flood etc) and the infrastructure available. The second one is what adds to land value in cities - it's a network effect.

Like everything the cost of infrastructure is changing and the rate of change will increase - self driving cars will be a big factor, telecommuting, internet shopping etc. Water and electricity are others - electricity is probably also changing due to Tesla and others.

You could say the cost of land is directly due to the network it is embedded in. If the cost of network construction decreases then land prices will decrease.

edit: and of course social relationships are the other network effect - <USER2> city lifestyles are an example of this

<comment><USER4> Yes land is the main cost. And yes I agree it's the infra that confers the value.

Yes and because the state builds the network we should tax land. Land speculators spend nothing when they see their land rise in price, it's all other people.

So to phrase it differently to hopefully meet in the middle: the land is the cost, but I'm not talking about how much it costs to buy some mud, wherever that may be. The cost is the cost per acre at a given location.

You also reference future changes. Perhaps, but we are in the here and now.

<comment><USER5> I think those future changes are happening now. Personally I live miles from anywhere and yet have a high tech job and telecommute. Granted I'm in the minority at the moment, but this will become more common. I suspect we are at peak land value, however time will tell.

<comment><USER4> You work in IT, this is not "the norm". Neither of us know how quickly remote work will play out, IMHO not quick. We've seen a concentration in urban areas since the original days of predictions of this, so prepare to be confounded again.

We are at peak land value because it was built on credit issuance to the boomers, who are about to start selling down. This is why we have ever lower rates and QE, to counteract this force.

<comment><USER5> > You work in IT, this is not "the norm"

it will be soon - all jobs are becoming IT jobs, and thats why we're on hacker news for the future not investment advice.

> who are about to start selling down

yes, this is going to be interesting when this happens. Have you heard others saying this? I've said it a few times and have been met with blank stares.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The average home price in 1950 was ~8,450$ or $84,151 today. Suggesting even 200k as a reasonable median seems excessive.

PS: Medain income was $4,237 in 1950 which works out to $42,195 today. So, it's not like the average american is all that much better off.

<comment><AUTHOR> Definition of an "average home" changed though, which is why real estate industry uses $/sq.ft.

Beyond square footage there are also expectations on the innards of the residence - e.g. try to find a new construction listing that does not have "designer appliances", "hardwood floors", "cat-5/6 wiring" and a ratio of bathrooms/bedrooms closer to 1.5-2/1 vs 3-4/1 that was common decades ago.

<comment><USER7> to further the point, many young couples would never accept the home they grew up in or their grandparents had with regards to square footage, number of bathrooms, and such.

then comes the status of living in certain neighborhoods, having a house of certain style and size, let alone kitchen outfitting.

people have been marketed into the poor house

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Land is expensive because the banks will advance huge amounts against your future income. They have no constraint on this as when they advance credit they do so by creating it.

When wages go up, mortgage lending goes up (and by a multiple). The banks hoover up all productivity gains.

NYTimes might want house prices to go down but they have to take on the banks if they mean it.

Incredible that anyone could disagree with this, really, but downvote away.

<comment><USER8> Really sad you're getting downvoted, as this is one of the smartest answers in the thread that identifies the main reason for rising house prices.

Anyone denying the effect of banks is missing an important point. I suggest looking at positivemoney's articles or videos on youtube for an explanation of this process, it's pretty clear.

<comment><USER4> Hacker news cannot exist if one attacks usury.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> In the US, homes are the best way for the middle class to create wealth because the government essentially subsidizes this transfer. The entire financial system and tax code are designed to support this. There is no other country in the world where you can just get a loan that leverages you up 10:1 . This is where the cycle begins. Home prices have to go up now, otherwise these loans go underwater and we get another financial crises like the one we saw in 2008. Then, the tax code effectively gives you free money to do this trade. If you don't take advantage of it, you're probably missing out. Finally, this is why we always like a bit of inflation. Inflation devalues that loan and pushes the price of your house up. Falling home prices would be a disaster for America ... we've already seen this scenario less than 10 years ago...

<comment><USER10> The entire point of the article is that this way of thinking is outdated. Yes, we have long considered homes as primary investments and as the best way to grow wealth, and yes, we have had falling home prices bite us in the ass before. But these things are not set in stone, and a world where houses are just one of many goods we own and consume would work out just fine too, and perhaps it would work even better.

We can change the tax code, and home prices don't have to drop suddenly like they did in 2008 and put people underwater. They could simply plateau.

<comment><USER11> Changing things isn't so simple. Homeowners aren't going to be very keen on voting for politicians who run on devaluing their homes or making them pay thousands of dollars of extra taxes every year.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Falling home prices is absolutely a good thing. When home prices are too high, it prices out regular consumers, only professional investors and landlords can afford them, they take economic rent, it's a drag on the economy and cost of living, and hurts the working class.

It's pretty easy to see in places like Vancouver, and while it's not as bad in many other places, it's still insidious.

</comment><comment><USER13> I'm in the process of researching alternatives to conventional housing. It's a fascinating area to research. The alternatives, particularly with regard to new building systems and modes of living, are available at reasonable cost. The road blocks in the way are breaking with tradition/mindset and filling the gap with regard to rent seeking revenues both public and private, but mostly public in the form of property taxes.

I see us being on the cusp of a change in attitudes and the way we value housing.

<comment><USER14> I had a colleague at a previous job who was living in a boat. He once told me tnat the costs to rent a place in the harbour, to maintain the boat and the utilities were about 400 euros/month, which is about the rent he'd pay for a small studio in Barcelona. The rents arec cheaper there but maybe in New York or San Francisco one can save lots of money like that.

<comment><USER15> > I had a colleague at a previous job who was living in a boat.

Sounds like fun! Do you know what kind of boat (e.g. motor boat, sail boat, yacht) and how much he paid for the boat?

Looking at sail boats, they're surprisingly expensive for a reasonably sized one (e.g. seafaring).

<comment><USER14> I _think_ it was a sailboat. He told me it was relatively cheap (10-20k euros) but maintaining it was costly.

<comment><USER16> There's that old saw about a boat being a hole in that water that you throw money into.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I read the article and it just glosses over the political difficulties, which will be extremely hard to overcome. Basically, when the most engaged citizenry also happens to be homeowners, legislating any measure that reduces home values will be akin to political suicide.

Even while it acknowledges the hypothetical nature of its arguments, the article doesn't consider negative factors - like the massive number of middle class middle-aged homeowners, whose mortgages will be underwater in case home prices were to drop. Is there going to be bailout of all of them? If not, we are looking at a repeat of 2008. If yes, who foots the bill?

Maybe, this idea would have been interesting at the beginning before homeownership was entrenched with the personal wealth. Now? Not so sure.

<comment><USER18> Prices don't need to actually drop in dollar terms. They can drop slowly in real terms. That would be sufficient. No 2008-event necessary.

<comment><USER17> You mean, rate of inflation being higher than rate of house price increases? Sounds good in theory, but how do you pull it off in practice in a somewhat free market like US?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> > By the paper's calculations, a home in the San Francisco area should cost > around $281,000.

This makes very little sense to me - San Francisco is surrounded by water on three sides and borders other towns/cities on the 4th, so how does one account for the demand of new housing once the existing housing is built?

In other words, let's say we increase density sufficiently, so that we flood the market with new homes (apartments for SF) and drive the price down to 281k. As time passes and population increases, with a fixed land supply, you'll need to build denser. But you have people already living in the homes you'll need to tear down. How do you force enough of them to move so that you always maintain enough housing stock to keep prices low?

It has been done with marginal success in non-market economies. For example, in USSR, when new apartment buildings were to be built where older ones currently stood, government simply ordered people to relocate to "improved" new apartments, usually located in undesirable areas of the city. This is hardly fair.

A US version of that could use eminent domain powers, but I somehow doubt the people of the city would support that.

Another question is whether people will want to live in that level of density. Eventually, you'll have price stratification based on height and access to sunlight. In NYC, you already see sunlight or lack of it as a significant pricing factor. Street noise is another factor.

That said, it doesn't mean there isn't some sort of sane middle ground. SF could use more development, just like the westside of LA, but it won't result in $281k price point.

<comment><USER20> "The people of the city"

It depends on what proportion of the city owns their home. If most people are renters, of course they want the price of housing to go down! If there's one good rallying cry against capitalism as an effective means of societal advance, it's rent seeking and the conflicts it causes.

I bring it up every time this topic comes up, but NYC is not the only way to make a "big city". Tokyo is nice, high density, but there are trees all over the place. All for 1/5th the rent of SF.

A well designed big city is not one that just has taller buildings. It has better service distribution, so there are, overall, less cars. There aren't just a grid of avenues (that's too convenient for cars!), but many roads that are smaller.

Building development is not allowed to block out sunlight from other buildings. Street noise is handled by making only a couple large avenues, with most streets being extremely small and low-traffic. Yes, it makes traffic worse for some people. Don't have as many people driving all over.

<comment><USER21> [http://www.economist.com/node/13415153](http://www.economist.com/node/13415153) [2009]

[http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2012/08/lost- dec...](http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2012/08/lost-decades) [2012]

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_Decade_%28Japan%29?wpro...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_Decade_%28Japan%29?wprov=sfla1)

<comment><USER21> So, the fact that Japan spent two decades in an economic flatline after the collapse of an asset (specifically, property) bubble has no influence on the current price of property?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I wonder how much of the "shrinking middle class" is attributable to rising house prices in the desirable areas that these people live.

<comment><USER23> The number of desirable places with good wages has declined.

We're struggling with this. Dean Baker has at least the start of a theory. His BookTv is here, soon ( it was on air yesterday, so they haven't posted it yet ):

[https://www.c-span.org/video/?421857-2/dean-baker- discusses-...](https://www.c-span.org/video/?421857-2/dean-baker-discusses- rigged)

<comment><USER24> His books are freely available online. His latest book is _Rigged: How Globalization and the Rules of the Modern Economy Were Structured to Make the Rich Richer_

[http://deanbaker.net/books/rigged.htm](http://deanbaker.net/books/rigged.htm)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> The real solution is to entice global companies like Google and Facebook to start building employment centers in areas like the Midwest. Having so many rich engineers competing for the same houses is what is causing prices to skyrocket. There's no excuse for contemporary companies to keep pouring more and more money into the Bay Area, when they could easily work remote.

Divert the demand to other geographic locations, and then you'll see the supply loosen and prices soften.

<comment><USER26> > The real solution is to entice global companies like Google and Facebook to > start building employment centers in areas like the Midwest.

Why should they do that when the best engineers want to live in the Bay Area? The talent can come to them.

<comment><USER27> I know many engineers at those companies. After a baby or two, everyone starts complaining about crazy home prices.

<comment><USER26> Everyone complains, but few actually leave, and there are many more willing to move to the Bay Area to replace those who do leave.

The major tech companies aren't stupid. If they could benefit significantly by opening offices in the midwest or anywhere else they don't currently have offices, they would have done it by now.

<comment><USER27> "aren't stupid" .. agreed to some extent. But I don't buy the no talent outside the bay area theory. Wonder if something else is afoot.

I'll give you an anecdote .. Google has an engineering office in Waterloo and Amazon has one in Toronto. Both have quite a few former expats who wanted to be closer to their Canadian families. There is demand.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> It is somewhat difficult to take seriously a paper that includes a statement like

" _Vacant land sales are rarely observed in the United States,..._ "

I haven't gone through the economic model described in the paper, but it appears to be a traditional, static, linear thing that has a few issues.

If you want to live somewhere with fewer regulations, there are plenty of opportunities. Just avoid these things:

[http://kotv.images.worldnow.com/images/6723723_G.jpg](http://kotv.images.worldnow.com/images/6723723_G.jpg)

And probably:

[http://www.precisebuildings.com/images/uploads/build/400/dsc...](http://www.precisebuildings.com/images/uploads/build/400/dsc_0017__large.jpg)

And keep in mind these may be your neighbors:

[http://worldonline.media.clients.ellingtoncms.com/img/croppe...](http://worldonline.media.clients.ellingtoncms.com/img/croppedphotos/2016/04/01/trash_house310_2-lead_t240.jpg?9b075e176a263354460210e5f64f6db9d4623575)

<comment><USER28> What are the first two pictures?

<comment><USER21> The first is a pen for raising fighting chickens. The roosters are in cages; you need to keep them separated or they will (obviously) fight. Not all fighting chickens are raised for cockfights, but in largely-unregulated areas of the US, many are. The fights are illegal and rather unsavory, and tend to attract characters who are rather unsavory themselves. Not the kind of thing you want for neighbors.

The second is a building for raising commercial chickens. In my experience, they smell worse than cattle feedlots but better than hog packing plants.

The third is an oddity: many people seem to store their wealth in the form of junk in their yards. Not sure how that's supposed to work, actually. You'll occasionally hear of someone in a metropolitan area being forced to clean up, or having the city do it for them. This is not the case in the regulation-free rural areas.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Could be? For anyone outside the boomer generation falling housing prices would be a godsend.

Millennials are starting to get priced out of entire cities, and it's generally the ones with the most jobs available.

It's starting to look like "millennial" will become an insult meaning someone with no job and no money, hilarious given that it applies to an entire generation.

<comment><USER30> i'm not a boomer and that wouldn't be good for me. it wouldnt be a godsend to cities either, with plummeting revenues (schools would be especially hit hard). home prices fell not long ago, and that was bad for nearly everyone.

home prices and jobs kind of come together, not always but mostly. its sort of like wishing no one would eat at your favorite restaurant so you wouldn't have to wait in line, only to see it go out of business.

millennials will have to do better than wishing people ahead of them get dragged down so they can jump ahead.

<comment><USER31> I disagree. One, property taxes didn't go down materially in my jurisdiction despite housing prices dropping precipitously. Two, schools have already been hit hard with horrible admin teams and the rise of open-enrollment. Three, jobs don't have as much of an affect on home prices as they once did. That is, investors|flippers|NAR shysters| and the government control far more of the housing market prices than we give credit for.

I am not a boomer, but they have been in charge for a while and have really messed things up.

<comment><USER30> "One, property taxes didn't go down materially in my jurisdiction despite housing prices dropping precipitously"

the housing crisis happened and cities were broke.

"Two, schools have already been hit hard with horrible admin teams and the rise of open-enrollment."

has nothing to do with the fact that schools would be hurt by falling tax revenue.

"Three, jobs don't have as much of an affect on home prices as they once did."

even if true, doesnt change the fact they are still linked. san francisco would become a whole lot affordable if the tech industry closed doors tomorrow. however, those wanting to go to san francisco for a job but couldnt afford the housing would find themselves with a less compelling need to go to san francisco.

i agree boomers messed up things quite a bit, but that has little to do with the fact that falling house prices have been proven to be bad for nearly everyone.

<comment><USER32>
      the housing crisis happened and cities were broke.

There's a finance paper from the Federal Reserve which describes exactly this issue [1].

      We identify five main channels through which the housing market affects state
      and local tax revenues:  property tax revenues, transfer tax revenues, sales
      tax revenues, and personal income tax revenues.

      We find that property tax revenues do not tend to decrease following house
      price declines.

      We conclude that the recent contraction in state and local tax revenues has
      been driven primarily by the general economic recession, rather than the
      housing market per-se.

[1] [https://www.federalreserve.gov/pubs/feds/2010/201049/201049p...](https://www.federalreserve.gov/pubs/feds/2010/201049/201049pap.pdf) (PDF)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Houses can basically last an arbitrarily long amount of time and still remain functional. With most things, like a car, there is some nebulous end of life where its value is effectively $0, and the value of that thing will steadily decrease over time until it reaches that point. Because houses hold their value, people can sell houses when they don't need them, which makes it an investment. Of course value of housing and land change over time - the fact that there's a market ensures that - and of course people want to sell something for more than they bought it for if they are planning on selling. Housing as an investment is so intrinsic to its nature I don't see how to avoid it.

<comment><USER5> I'm not sure if that's true - houses depreciate the same as cars. What does appreciate is the house on its location, often old houses go for land value, sometimes less if they haven't been maintained because you have to factor demolition costs in.

<comment><USER34> I mostly agree with you, but want to note that there are exceptions to land appreciating. You can look at neighborhoods in cities like Detroit or Buffalo where the house and land have depreciated to almost nothing.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Can I join a startup- advice for a non-coder?   - <AUTHOR> Here's my dilemma: I'm new to the tech industry and dream to work on an idea from its early stages. I'm not a coder (although I can understand code) but have great people skills- I communicate well, can make friends easily, have no problems networking, I can manage people, organize projects, have many business ideas (yeah, I know ideas are nothing without execution, but it's still good to have them), have good marketing skills and a excellent business sense and can do a great job of selling products/ideas that I'm passionate about.  While I know enough Java, PHP, SQL to be dangerous, I don't really have a desire (or maybe ability?) to be a hotshot coder.
My educational background is an MS in IT, a conversion degree focused on project management, web development, DB management and similar subjects, with a BS in Finance and a year of law school.  In February I got my first tech job, as a QA for a 100 person company- I chose a QA position for several reasons: 1. it was what was available and student loan payments were due and 2. It is a good way to see a tech company from many sides (I interact with devs, product and marketing on a daily basis).  I'm doing well- learning quickly, receiving excellent reviews and taking on more and more responsibilities.
My strategy is focused on learning more about the industry while networking and launching my own non-tech business to get some entrepreneurial experience and hands on practice.  I've been building a base of contacts by attending various Meetup events as well as co-organizing and hosting ad publisher's meetup (meetup.com/sfadpub).  I'm working with some friends to launch a t-shirt company; we're about 2 months from going "live."  The hope is to build enough knowledge and contacts to be able to take advantage of an opportunity when one comes up.
Is there more that I should be doing?  Should I bite the bullet and focus on improving my coding abilities (at the expense of my networking activities and the time I spend learning about marketing, business development and other areas that are my strengths)?  Do ideas/companies in the very early stages even need someone like me?
Any advice would be greatly appreciated! <comment><USER2> This site tilts heavily towards the devs, but there are definitely skills that you can develop to make yourself valuable for a startup without being a technical guy. #1 -- pick an industry you are passionate about and network, get a job in a major company in the space, learn the ins/outs of the industry, etc. Then you can either start your own biz or you'll be a valuable resource for a tech company looking to break in and needs domain knowledge and contacts.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm in a similar position. I know enough about coding to hack together basic scripts and manage a tech project, but my main interests and skills lie in marketing and business stuff.

If I were you, I would focus completely on marketing/sales. If you can demonstrate that you know how to drive traffic and convert it into customers, that can be an incredibly valuable asset to an early stage startup.

I've landed several lucrative consulting gigs working for cool startups who had lots of brilliant coders but had no idea how to get customers. Startups, especially those with only tech cofounders usually have no shortage of engineering talent, especially if the application they are building is relatively simple. But they have a huge shortage of marketing/bizdev talent, and that's where you come in.

Email me (email in profile) if you want to talk more, there are a lot of opportunities out there for people like you and me if you know where to look.

</comment><comment><USER4> I definitely suggest you attend Startup Weekend, because you can use it to try on different roles without fully committing to a startup. The fact that you can understand code and technical issues, without being a developer yourself, positions you really well in my opinion. If you want to be really early, consider being founder. If not, a role like community manager (1st marketing person often) could be a great fit for you... that usually includes customer service, sales, marketing, and a lot of the non-technical jobs rolled into one. You can decide where to focus later.

I've done it 2x now (Pelago, Twilio) and it's possible. Like everyone in the startup, you mostly have to be crazy dedicated to working hard/smart as needed, and build amazing trust with your team.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for pointing me to Startup Weekend, sounds like a great event-it seems the SF Bay Area weekend was in August- how often do they hold these weekends?

<comment><USER5> I've done two now (Redmond & Portland) and I would highly recommend going to one if your just starting to get involved in startups. I learned an incredible amount at my first one.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I would say try to go with sales if you can. I'm one of those developers that believes that non-technical people don't belong anywhere near management in tech companies. This means that I'm biased, but definitely not alone in this belief. Also, by technical people, I mean people that are regularly actively involved in the development of the code.

Hoverer, if you feel that you have a decent "network" in the local tech community, I would also advise just asking people you trust there for advice. They would know you better than anyone here and could give you more personalized, in-depth feedback.

</comment><comment><USER6> Ignore anyone telling you you're not going to be able to offer something unless you can code. Think about the type of business opportunity you want to get involved with and use your networking skills to get you there.

For example, I'm co-owner of a consulting firm that provides b2b services. The right person with the right connections in the right industries for us is infinitely more valuable than a coder. Had you popped up on day one with those qualities, you'd be in on the sales side.

You look like you may be well geared up to program/project management. That's not a day 0 job but certainly something that some people might want in order to move from minimum viable product to something more filled out. There was an excellent article here yesterday about scaling (sorry, can't find the link), maybe that's something you could look at being 'that guy' that helps take a company from 2 to 20.

<comment><AUTHOR> is this the article you're referring to? [http://www.markpeterdavis.com/getventure/2010/09/data- synerg...](http://www.markpeterdavis.com/getventure/2010/09/data-synergy- scaling-information-companies.html)

<comment><USER6> No it isn't, sorry - but interesting find anyway!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It sounds like you could do well in sales (software companies typically only have two substantial departments: engineering and sales), or if you come up with a good enough idea, you could probably run your own startup.

Feel free to send me an e-mail (see my profile) if you'd like to talk more.

</comment><comment><USER8> It sounds like you want to get in early on a startup, and if you're not a developer the only guaranteed way is to be a founder.

If you can handle the risks, being a founder coincidentally also has benefit of increased responsibility, greater control, and more equity. Nice bonuses in my opinion.

Learn by doing!

</comment><comment><USER9> Hey man,

So I'd consider myself having a very similar skillset. Same sorts of interests, etc. What I basically do, is learn a few things to keep me going with money (I launched iPadCaseFinder.com, sold that 2 months later for $x,xxx -- and I've done this with a few different products).

I'm basically just using that to fund my ideas, like you, I have a lot of ideas. Find a designer, find a programmer, map it all out, get your informal marketing plan done. Talk to people, get them fired up, have a basecamp going to track everything.

You can be a single founder, you can get something so great, that techies WANT too be a part of.

But hey, maybe not the path you want to take ;-)

</comment><comment><USER10> Sure. I know I certainly need someone like you for my start up to help launch version 2 when it's finished. I admit, I've been too passive in searching out the right person because I fear it's too easy to get someone who isn't good. While I think I can tell pretty well who is a good programmer, I really have no confidence in determining if someone is a good marketing/bizdev guy.

<comment><USER3> Haha, let's interview each other's candidates. I can easily determine whether someone is talented at marketing or just BSing but I have trouble identifying the truly excellent programmers vs talentless hacks who are just regurgitating what they learned in intro CS.

By the way, cool startup. Get in touch if you have any questions about marketing it, I used to do pretty decent volume promoting a browser-based space MMO.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I would focus on the marketing and project management side and use your other skills to help you. While coders/developers are very valuable to tech startups there is just a valuable position in project and product management which requires a blend of skills. The ability to talk to developers, do some basic marketing and design and then manage a product from start to finish.

</comment><comment><USER12> IMHO you don't need to actually do coding to build a great web-app anymore. These days with the kind of tools and frameworks (springsource.com, jquery.com) and CMSs (refinerycms.com, drupal.org, firerift.com) can allow you to build a fairly powerful web app in next to no time. Couple this with the advent of Google App Engine and other cloud based app servers, the whole pain of setting up a linux server and configuring an app server on it is gone.

Already, you don't need any operational skills any more to host a production grade web-app (think load balancing, failover, etc).

The key I have realized is to depend less and less on outside technical help and more and more on yourself and your own technical tinkering abilities.

Once you've deployed your first app and have managed to get at least a few repeat users you will be surprised how many developers will be ready to help you further.

Just dive in with the implementation.. you will be surprised how much can be executed in a day by just doing it.

<comment><USER13> I disagree with that. We got really good tools today but writing software is still quite hard, not because of the imperfections of our tools but because the essence of software development is hard. If you're not good (yet) at coding, chances are that you will run into an insurmountable problem before you can release an initial version, unless your web app is doing something really trivial, in the technical sense.

<comment><USER12> great software is not (merely) built by writing code but by having a rock- solid ten-group co-founding team. But unless you'll were together in university, chances are a team would come together by looking at what each one has already done and not what each one has talked about. Not all insurmountable problems need to be solved by the founders - they can get a specialist on contract for that.

Since the OP can read and understand code, I still feel that is sufficient to get the first app out of the door.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Check out this article: <http://spencerfry.com/whats-a-non-programmer-to-do>

</comment><comment><USER15> I feel like you know this is the right game plan already.

I'm in a similar situation and look forward to the HN responses.

Good luck!

</comment><comment><USER16> I am actually in a very similar position and would love to hear what the HN community thinks.</comment>


Intel Initiates EOL for the VCA2: Three Xeons on a PCIe Card - <AUTHOR> https://www.anandtech.com/show/15790/intel-initiates-eol-for-the-vca2-three-xeons-on-a-pcie-card <comment><USER2> Full blown Xeons on a PCI-e card?

Lately, I've been wondering as to why we don't see computers physically built more like old workstations, with processors on cards plugging into I/O backplanes. The modern incarnation might be CPU+RAM on a PCI-e x32 card, and a simple "motherboard" with power and PCI-e. (Does 32 lane PCI-e exist? I've never even seen photos.)

<comment><USER3> More like 3 iGPUs with some extra baggage the CPUs on those aren't accessible directly in any way and not used for what needs to be offloaded from the fixed pipeline encoders/decoders and even that might be offloaded to the main CPU.

<comment><USER2> Not directly accessible? There's ethernet ports on the card, and the article mentions you can SSH into them.

<comment><USER3> The SSH is used to manage the images running on the VCA's you aren't adding CPU's to the host.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> "AVC transcoding at 30 FPS" sounds a lot less useful than what you can get from an NVIDIA consumer or Quadro card via NVENC. Very weird, and multiple Xeons doesn't sound cheap.

Am I misunderstanding the product?

I know Intel is coming out with a discrete GPU, which will probably have plenty of video encode hardware to compete with NVIDIA (esp since game streaming at 4K is quite popular).

<comment><USER3> It can do 40+ 1080p streams in real time per "card" and Intel provides the software.

<comment><USER5> Each card has 3 E3-1585L CPUs, each with 4 cores (8 threads).

Intel's white paper ([https://www.intel.com/content/dam/www/public/us/en/documents...](https://www.intel.com/content/dam/www/public/us/en/documents/white- papers/cloud-computing-quicksync-video-ffmpeg-white-paper.pdf)) says up to 12 per CPU.

The card uses 235W.

A consumer security DVR can record 16 channels at for $100.

I found a TI chip from 2011 that could encode 6 streams at 1080p30, about 10W for $100.

The biggest advantage I see, as you pointed out, is the fact intel did all the software work and it's practically drop in.

<comment><USER3> Quality is a big factor especially for broadcast bitrates, QuickSync has superb quality even at low bitrates better than even Turing NVENC which is top notch and much much better than Pascal.

I doubt the Texas Instruments chip you found can do transcoding, it probably can only encode/decode.

44 streams of 1080p30 for h264 to h264, ofc you can select any resolution and frame rate you like.

[https://www.intel.com/content/dam/www/public/us/en/documents...](https://www.intel.com/content/dam/www/public/us/en/documents/product- briefs/vca-2-visual-compute-accelerator-product-brief.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This thing is sweet, and I wish the idea was still around, but it's obvious these specific cards are awful now and just produced as a symptom of Intel fucking the market on core counts.

Tangentially, I've been asking for a modular mac pro for years-- and this card is closer to the current Mac Pro as far as right ideas go.

</comment><comment><USER7> How did these work? The article says you could ssh into them, so they all had their own RAM and ran their own individual os? I don't think the CPUs were multi socket capable.

How did they boot? Network? So the pcie connection was essentially just for networking?

<comment><USER8> Google: PCIe Non-Transparent Bridge

they're independent systems with a special PCIe switch that looks like an end device to all participants and allows shuffling data around at PCIe performance

(the NTB function is integrated on some Intel processors AFAIK, but it may also be a separate chip)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> If one needed more cpus, the advantage of "just more servers" vs this card I'm guessing is the extraordinarily lower latency and bandwidth available via PCIe vs some other interconnect?

<comment><USER3> These are used for live video encoding and editing mostly for broadcast.

I don't think they've been in wide use outside of the sports broadcast industry but I might be wrong.

The main component that is used isn't the actual CPU but the IGPs Intel has one of the best video encoder cores out there right now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> It has power input and ethernet ports so one can ssh into it, so does it at all need the host on the PCIe bus?

So, can I just plug power and ethernet into it and boot linux?

<comment><AUTHOR> It may need some support from the host if it doesn't have any local persistent storage.

<comment><USER10> netboot + tmpfs root would be good enough for me

<comment><AUTHOR> Judging by the prices Xeon Phi coprocessors fetch on eBay, I'm not really optimistic about finding these floating around.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Thoughts about Rails from a Django guy - <AUTHOR> http://lenni.info/blog/2010/07/thoughts-about-rails-from-a-django-guy/

<comment><USER2>
        I subscribe to the view that the template language is
        for designers and should only allow safe constructs.

As someone who does both design and programming, I hate template systems that do this with a passion. I don't want to have to learn _another_ language just so I can write templates. Especially when that language makes me jump through hoops to do various simple tasks the designers didn't anticipate--which is the case with every such language I've used.

Erb is one of the nicer templating systems I've used. I've never had any trouble getting it to do exactly what I want it to do, and I've never had it behave in a way I didn't expect--which is another advantage to having it just use Ruby.

It doesn't have anything on Haml, though.

<comment><USER3> It's funny the author put templating as one of the things he dislikes about rails, especially when the Django templating system is probably one of the worst (of all templating systems out there). They invented their own pseudo language for templating so anything more complicated requires you to write your own special helper functions. I remember back in Django 0.9 (which is still fairly recent), I had to write template library code to do a nested loop over a data structure.

Why couldn't they just write it in python instead of inventing strange keywords like "ifequal"? Every time I use django templates, I have to look up documentation on how to do something as simple as string/number comparison. When I write Myghty templates, I'm writing python on top of html and it just feels so much nicer this way.

<comment><USER4> I agree this was frustrating initially. After a certain number of django projects most of the django devs I know use the heck out of it's modularity. If the templating system is driving you insane drop in Jinja2 and go. If it just needs to be tweaked then implement the template command yourself.

I felt confined and frustrated with Django until I realized that it was built with the intention that developers should just crank code on top of it. And not just page code - anything that you need. It's more than just an end product that is just configured, tweaked and templated. Of course ruby similar in the same way... But in comparison to java and .NET web frameworks this was a big change.

 _Why couldn't they just write it in python instead of inventing strange keywords like "ifequal"?_

I think they were trying to get away from the horrid nastiness that had become php or before that cgi. Yet they still wanted to provide options for designers. It definitely has a learning curve and requires the programmer to just roll with it and adopt the "django way". At least until you figure out you can just move to another templating system.

[http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.2/howto/custom- template-t...](http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.2/howto/custom-template- tags/)

[http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/ref/templates/api/#topi...](http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/ref/templates/api/#topic- template-alternate-language)

<http://djangosnippets.org/snippets/2063/>

<comment><USER3> Shouldn't the included templating system be the one everyone uses? It doesn't make sense to include a templating system if everyone will eventually just replace it with something better. Even though there are alternative rails templating systems out there, I would say a good 80% of the projects out there use the default "erb" mechanism for templates -- it's simple, it's ruby, and it works. Capitalization or minor string manipulation in erb doesn't require one to write a template filter function somewhere else.

It's also interesting that in Django 1.2, they pulled away the nastiness of "ifequal" and "ifnotequal". Also, I don't buy their argument that the Django templating system is easier for "designers". Most designers whom I've worked with also do designs in other frameworks and Django's system is no more foreign than jsp, asp, or erb.

<comment><USER4> _Shouldn't the included templating system be the one everyone uses?_

Agreed. I think they know that this is a weakness. I'd expect it to improve over time. In a similar fashion to them addressing ifequal and ifnotequal in 1.2.

 _Capitalization or minor string manipulation in erb doesn't require one to write a template filter function somewhere else._

Personally I'd prefer defining it once somewhere. Then use the function everywhere. Even with the initial code cost.

I think this is from past bad experiences. I once "repaired" a million plus line of code enterprise app that had misused some open source code that did date and number coercion (similar to django.contrib.humanize but for ASP). Needless to say the code was a mess and nearly the same code had been mixed in all over the place. The template code, the backend business logic and the asp C# files. After a few days of regexing then testing then fixing then searching then repeating. And then dealing with all the edge and special cases - I'll take a simple defined template function. All that being said - my example is a gnarly enterprise example involving bad code monkeys. So take it with a grain of salt - it's likely that the story isn't applicable to a lot of people here. But still - lesson learned. In the future designers can request template improvements and I'll deliver.

<comment><USER3> Well, anyone can still write crap code with Django, it doesn't require an enterprise C# language to produce crap. Django templates still have logic that needs to be tested & debugged so the template filter functions don't alleviate all the pain either. Plus, the concept of template filter functions is available in pretty much all web frameworks out there, but it's more painful to use if the templating language forces one to write a filter function every time you need to wield the python language.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The difference between ActiveRecord and Django models, is ActiveRecord _reads_ the schema. When you're developing, having an ORM create tables and add colums willy nilly is fine.

DataMapper took this approach initially, and was basically unusable in production because all it could do was create and drop tables. They've since added a handy upgrade method, and even ActiveRecord style migrations.

Personally, I like keeping the model and schema separate. I rarely need a giant list of columns at the top of my model. Luckily, Rails 3 will work great with DataMapper or Sequel (two fine alternatives to AR) if that's how you want to roll.

<comment><USER6> Just clarifying, Django models only create the initial tables/columns of a model after running the `syncdb` command. If you add fields later on, you'll need to write the SQL to add the columns yourself (<http://code.djangoproject.com/wiki/SchemaEvolution>). It won't try to be smart and automatically migrate your db for you.

I haven't used DataMapper in a few years, but I remember their initial approach was to be smart and automagically add/remove any required columns/tables willy nilly.

<comment><USER7> Just to clarify even more, you should be using South (<http://south.aeracode.org/>), the first thing on that list, and you usually don't have to write the SQL yourself.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Just like Rails has some drop-in "fixes" (i.e. the admin) that don't come with the core, Django does as well.

Dependency management: pip requirements files. Migrations (which the author doesn't like, but are pretty useful on a non-trivial project): South Various other goodies: django-extensions

There are constant debates over whether XYZ should be in the core (see: South), or at least better discoverable, but if you're going to use a framework seriously it's worth it to evaluate as "framework + its stable and commonly accepted extras".

</comment><comment><USER9> Interesting. Both are great frameworks. My thoughts are:

I like how django lacks all that directory structure and you can easily use a single file for your models.

Django templates are way more powerful and safer than erb / haml, etc.

I wish there was a port of django templates in ruby. If so my preferred environment would be sinatra + datamapper + django templates.

<comment><USER10> <http://ruty.rubyforge.org/>

Ruty hasn't really been maintained, but it is pretty close to Django's templating system. Apparently, there's even been a little work to get it together with Sinatra ([http://github.com/eladmeidar/sinatra- mvc/blob/master/app/hel...](http://github.com/eladmeidar/sinatra- mvc/blob/master/app/helpers/ruty.rb)). I haven't used Sinatra, but I have played with Ruty and it's pretty nice and supports things like Django-style inheritance. It's a pity it never took off and this isn't a complete answer to your desire, but it might be an interesting place to look around.

<comment><USER9> oh very cool thanks for the link.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> As a full-time Rails developer I think some of these gripes are valid.

I have tried to get away from AR for a long time, with other ORMs such as DataMapper or Sequel, and more recently Mongoid. The AR in Rails 3 has adopted some of the good bits from both DM and Sequel, so that might make it more pleasant to work with.

In terms of templates, HAML/SASS are popular alternatives to ERB. For the admin backend; there are plugins for it.

</comment><comment><USER12> About two years ago I tried a lot of different frameworks and languages to find which one would suit me best. After having tried various PHP frameworks, J2EE, Perl I arrived at Django/Python. The plan was to continue on to Rails after Django, but I loved Django so much that I couldn't imagine that Rails could be any better. Seems like I was right ;)

Like the author, I too think Django's default directory structure doesn't work very well once you start doing bigger projects. But luckily, everything is so loosely coupled that you can change the directory structure entirely without too much work.

<comment><USER13> As somebody who has used both Rails and Django commercially I can safely say that I prefer Rails over Django even though I like Python more as a language.

This guy marks several advantages of Rails as weaknesses.

Migrations for example. In Django you have to migrate manually, or lose data. Lack of migrations is not an advantage.

Templates. The Django template language is one of the worst in existence. It is utterly inflexible and hard to use. It is slowly getting better: now you can use `if a == b` instead of `ifequal a b`. Why not go all the way to a usable and powerful template language?!

<comment><USER14> > _As somebody who has used both Rails and Django commercially ... In Django > you have to migrate manually, or lose data_

If you've been using Django "commercially", then how come you haven't heard of South? ... <http://south.aeracode.org/>

Everybody in the community that wants migrations is using it.

> _Why not go all the way to a usable and powerful template language?!_

In Django components are more decoupled than in Rails. You can replace that templating engine.

Also, Django's templating system is really not that inflexible or hard to use ... quite the contrary, it comes with many things out-of-the-box that aren't standardly provided by other web frameworks ... like the ability to cache page fragments.

<comment><USER3> It's kind of odd that the default subsystems that come with Django are always replaced with something else -- why doesn't Django include some sane defaults instead?

<comment><USER14> This implies that Rails has "sane defaults".

From my experience that's hardly the case ... ActiveRecord (pre 3.0 at least) sucks big monkey balls compared to Django's ORM. And Rails also doesn't have anything like the forms API in Django.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> _> migrations: I can see how this could come in handy but in my case this was yet another extra thing I had to keep tabs of_

I only use django and have never-not used migrations for a project. Thanks god for South. <http://south.aeracode.org/>

<comment><USER16> I'm confused. South is all about migrations...

"South brings migrations to Django applications." -<http://south.aeracode.org/docs/about.html>

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> there are drop in admin options for rails similar to what django provides as well as a i massive number of templating engines including ones like liquid which address the concerns in the article.

as a general rule, i think you should probably do more than 1 simple project before evaluating any framework or language.

<comment><USER18> I use both django and rails frequently, and I've been looking for a rails version of django's admin forever. Do you have any links?

All I've seen are things like activescaffold, but that's not even anywhere near being comparable.

<comment><USER19> Typus is excellent, only drawback is weak documentation + the authorization/authentication system lies outside your application. It's extensible enough to add in analytics pages, etc. I use it in every project.

<http://github.com/fesplugas/typus>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Node.js is changing the game, Ruby and Rails are just the new Cobol.

<comment><USER21> Comparing Node.js to Ruby on Rails is as useful as comparing apples to oranges. Node.js is not a web framework. Node.js has a wonderful paradigm for evented programming, but that does not mean you can not also have evented programming with Ruby or Rails. Take a look at <http://github.com/igrigorik/async-rails> or things related to <http://github.com/eventmachine/eventmachine></comment></comment>


Amid Bitcoin's Bloodbath, Silence from Silicon Valley Press - <AUTHOR> http://www.realclearmarkets.com/articles/2015/01/16/amid_bitcoins_bloodbath_silence_from_silicon_valley_press_101490.html <comment><USER2> BTC volatility is nothing compared to the bloodbath that just occurred in CHF:

[http://www.bloomberg.com/quote/CHFUSD:CUR](http://www.bloomberg.com/quote/CHFUSD:CUR)

Yeah, it's "only" 20-30% move (depending on currency cross) but in highly leveraged FX markets even 1% can wipe people out.

Personally I never cared about Bitcoin "value". In my mind it is a great medium of settlement and not a store of value (which it might also be; given long enough outlook).

First we need to grow the Bitcoin economy to a decent size and then we can talk about "price stability". Transaction volume at the moment grows rather slowly. The rest is just speculators.

<comment><USER3> _but in highly leveraged FX markets even 1% can wipe people out_

The CHF spike _did_ wipe people out.

For example the world's largest currency broker FXCM; [http://uk.businessinsider.com/fxcm-currency-broker- news-2015...](http://uk.businessinsider.com/fxcm-currency-broker- news-2015-1?r=US)

(okay they're not entirely wiped out, only $300MM in the red...)

<comment><USER4> To clarify, the CHF _spiked_ in value. People who lost had bet against it.

<comment><USER5> People who bet against it were careless.

The money was under evaluated by the BNS for years. This was bound to happen.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> If we look at bitcoin for what it _is_ (the technology and theory behind it), it hasn't lost any real value. If it did (e.g., if a major flaw were discovered in the technology to render it useless), then people wouldn't still be trading bitcoin. We have to remember that for every bitcoin sold (at any price), someone on the other side of the transaction is still _buying_ those bitcoins. If it were truly "dead" or indisputably flawed, trading would come to a halt because there would be no bids for something truly useless.

Instead, what we're looking at with the recent price decline is simply a reflection of how people _feel_ about bitcoin - and in this case, that opinion has everything to do with factors that are irrelevant to the technology (failed exchanges, criminal activity, etc). If bitcoin were a public company, of course those kinds of things would matter (it doesn't matter if public opinion is wrong; it can still ruin your business), but since bitcoin's usefulness and underlying value do _not_ rely on public opinion, it remains unaffected at the core by any of these recent events.

<comment><USER7> _We have to remember that for every bitcoin sold (at any price), someone on the other side of the transaction is still buying those bitcoins._

Actually, "an exchange made it look like someone bought a coin." [https://willyreport.wordpress.com/](https://willyreport.wordpress.com/)

Bitcoin probably can't ever prevent good old insider manipulation, because every exchange affects every other exchange due to arbitrage. A price jump of $20 on BTC-e will swiftly travel to Bitstamp and everyone else. So if BTC-e decides to do something similar to what Mt. Gox did, there's nothing stopping them. All it takes is one shady popular exchange.

Bitcoin's dependency on exchanges is its greatest strength and weakness. Without exchanges, you probably wouldn't be able to sell bitcoins locally except in a sporadic way. There wouldn't really be an agreed-on price. But with exchanges, herd dynamics are always in full bloom, and you won't ever escape them.

EDIT: People buy and sell bitcoins at current market rate, and current market rate is defined by exchanges. That means if an exchange decides to make their own price artificially jump up, then everyone else's price will jump up too. That means bitcoin's price will be defined partly by whatever insider manipulation is going on at the time.

<comment><USER6> Bitcoin doesn't depend on exchanges any more than your HN karma might depend on exchanges, yet karma still has value in its own sphere - with or without an exchange rate. Anything that _can_ be traded _will_ be traded on a market if there is demand for it. All of that (everything that happens due to market forces, manipulation, etc) is irrelevant to bitcoin as a technology.

<comment><USER8> People have a habit of concentrating on the sizzle, not the steak.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> There is no blood. Bitcoin isn't viable (yet!) as a long term store of value but anybody that thought that it was should outsource their financial services to Nigerian princes for a better long term return on investment.

If and when bitcoin will be usable as a long term store of value we'll be a decade down the line at least, and if it hovers around $10 by then then I think it should _still_ be considered a small miracle. The hardest challenge that bitcoin has is not to stabilize as a currency (because it isn't) but to simply stay alive. So far so good on that front.

<comment><USER10> To me what you suggest sounds somewhat conflicting. If bitcoin might be a good store of value in the future, it might be a good investment today. Which means good store of value, but a big dose of risk.

I guess other way to say what you are trying to say would be: "Bitcoin is a very bad store of value for those with a low risk-preference."

<comment><USER11> "store of value" has a standard usage in this area, and you aren't using that definition.

To be a good store of value means that you have predictable recovery, which is the opposite of what you are say. BTC may or may not be a good (high risk) investment at the moment, but it isn't a good store of value.

<comment><USER10> Ok, so store of value means low risk/low volatility, good liquidity.

<comment><USER11> Or at least reasonable & predictable liquidity, yes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I find all these elaborate theories for why the price has fallen, a bit ridiculous.

Here's my simply hypothesis.

1\. People got bored waiting for legitimate uses for Bitcoin that aren't in some way or another black market trade. I'm one of them.

2\. The recent online black market busts made even those who were just betting on Bitcoin being a black market currency, uneasy.

<comment><USER13> 3\. People like me who were just in it to profit off swings ended up guessing wrong; now stuck with overpriced coins have decided to pack it up and call it a day. Really, my time & money would have been better off just being in the S&P 500 index. I'll never lose track of my coins' private keys, but I'm done trying to chase quick money.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> It's weird, because I feel like there is a story on the general volatility of bitcoin. There's also a story on the general incompetence (as much as I can say this as being completely unqualified in running a financial institution) of the companies running exchanges and the like.

I don't get why that stuff isn't being covered more in detail (the headline writes itself: "When will bitcoin exchanges stop screwing up?"), but the fact that some guy invested a bunch of money in BTC when it was worth 3 times as much? Get in line with literally everyone else with assets in it.

</comment><comment> vertex-four > subject to decline every time the compute power to "mine" the Bitcoins got > cheaper

But the network reacts to that by making it more difficult, and thus more expensive, to mine. That's very much not the reason bitcoins become less valuable - assuming the same amount of money being poured into newer/faster mining equipment, it'll always cost the same to mine a block.

</comment><comment><USER15> The short-term market price doesn't have a lot to do with it's long-term viability. Liquidity is relatively tiny hence shocking volatility.

Anyone's bitcoins only represent a loss on a particular day if they actually choose to sell them or spend them. Same goes for people gloating when the price is up.

There's 3,600 bitcoins per day being generated creating a significant downward pressure on the price. But reward halving is ETA July 2016, marking a significant change in supply and probably the day-to-day price.

I can understand the schadenfreude for anyone who has watched people become very wealthy and watched other presumably greedy people subsequently 'lose' tons of money.

The majority of my holding will be likely to sit for 10 years or so and I will admit I was wrong if I've made a significant loss and I probably will sell them off. People can have their schadenfreude then. In return, I'll agree not to gloat if the price sky rockets.

<comment><USER16> Volatility is the result of several factors and liquidity is only one of them. For example, the oil market is very large and liquid, yet still fairly volatile. Volatility is obviously undesirable for anything that is intended to function as a reserve of value. This is why, for example, there is no discussion of oil being a reserve of value, or a currency. As for the example above, greater liquidity in the Bitcoin market will not automatically make it less volatile, or lower volatility enough.

Bitcoin's volatility is structural (it goes well beyond the issues with the exchanges). Effective currencies have several mechanisms designed to protect their value and minimize volatility: Bitcoin lacks them and hence it's structurally fragile and volatile. So, Bitcoin cannot represent a reserve of value. Stable preservation of value is a key characteristic of a currency (this is one of the reasons inflation is monitored by central banks, for example), hence, if Bitcoin cannot work as a reserve of value, it cannot work as a currency.

Perhaps, other crypto currencies, in the future, may be structured with more robust mechanisms and work better.

<comment><USER17> >> Effective currencies have several mechanisms designed to protect their value and minimize volatility

Yes, government manipulation. I think many of the btc enthusiasts miss the point. You can't have a huge important currency without _guarantees_. Goverments have armies and taxes and so provide these guarantees. No world government/control of btc = no btc becoming the "global currency".

<comment><USER8> To be fair, Bitcoin is the first form of international money to come into existence without government decree. These are still uncharted waters.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> There is only one relevant graph and it's the bottom of these two IMHO

[https://twitter.com/Hello_World/status/555454120258457601/ph...](https://twitter.com/Hello_World/status/555454120258457601/photo/1)

<comment><USER19> Fascinating! Are you suggesting an increase in use as a currency or just an increase in trade as a commodity?

<comment><USER18> To be honest I am not really qualified enough to have an opinion on that. All I have is my layman intuition being generally interested in cryptorotocol.

But in my opinion you see it growing because a lot more are thinking about the blockchain protocol rather than the currency. But it purely based on a hunch not actual data.

<comment><USER20> All that volume isn't from regular folk, it's probably from miners. Miners could decrease if its no longer profitable for them to continue or sink more $$ into capital

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Why's everyone pretending bitcoin is dead now? It simply dropped in price in a short time, it's not like it has never done that before...

<comment><USER14> That's a bit disingenuous. Bitcoin's price has dropped over 75% over the past 12 months, in a constant decline.

Despite a lot of VC money pouring into BTC startups, there just doesn't seem to be any traction. My guess is that Mt. Gox irrevocably destroyed faith in the system for the "common user", because even the biggest exchange couldn't bother with hiring some security people (well, at least bitstamp seemed like that, what exactly happened at Mt. Gox is still a mystery to me).

<comment><USER22> As a non-bitcoin user, it seems to me that the value of the system as a medium of anonymous transaction is mostly irrelevant to the current price. As long as its stable enough for that, the only "problem" with the bitcoin price crashing is for speculators...

<comment><USER23> > As long as its stable enough for that, [...]

It isn't stable enough for that. The price has moved +30% within a few hours [1]. That's easily short enough to cause problems for both merchants and consumers. For consumers, they risk the bitcoin price falling after they've purchased bitcoins, but before they've purchased something with them. And even if you succeed in buying something with your bitcoins before the price has gone up in bitcoin terms, the store owner might lose if he doesn't cash out the bitcoins he has earned before the price falls.

There are plenty of risks to non-speculators. But in fact, the speculators, by providing liquidity, _help_ the non-speculators enter and exit a bitcoin position quickly and with minimal losses (tight spread). Were it not for the speculators, services like Bitpay couldn't exist. Speculators continuously incur risk holding bitcoins, and market makers literally take on the risk of holding bitcoins, transferring this risk away from the consumer and merchant (who can quickly enter and exit the bitcoin market because there are constantly people willing to sell and buy bitcoins (among them market makers and price speculators)).

TL;DR: Have you thanked your local speculator lately?

[1] [http://i.imgur.com/zV6Iyte.png](http://i.imgur.com/zV6Iyte.png)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I'd love to see a good article on the subject rather than some jackass trying to rub salt in peoples' wounds.

</comment><comment><USER3> Congrats to Adam Kessler for discovering that Bitcoin is volatile.

But how could this sharp minded journalist miss the _real_ silicon valley scandal that nobody writes about?

Coffee is hot, millions of investors get burned _every day_!

</comment><comment><USER25> Merchants lose about $500 billion/year to transactions fees, chargebacks, fraud and equipment fees. Want to know what the inherent value of Bitcoin is? Then think in terms merchants desire to avoid payment processing fees in a 3.6 trillion dollar marketplace. Guys like Draper, with wealth sufficient to absorb significant paper losses to volatility, are playing the long game and betting on bitcoin reducing transaction fees globally.

</comment><comment><USER26> Regarding the price that people are willing to pay for Bitcoin, what has become relevant is how people judge, not merely other people's willingness to pay, but other people's estimate of how others might be willing to pay. Relevant here is the Keynesian beauty contest, a reference to a practice in which towns used to give awards to those who could get guess who the prettiest girl in town was, with "prettiest" being determined by the other people in town:

"It is not a case of choosing those that, to the best of one's judgment, are really the prettiest, nor even those that average opinion genuinely thinks the prettiest. We have reached the third degree where we devote our intelligences to anticipating what average opinion expects the average opinion to be. And there are some, I believe, who practice the fourth, fifth and higher degrees."

(Keynes, General Theory of Employment Interest and Money, 1936).

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

</comment><comment><USER27> "I think the technology used to implement the Bitcoin payment system is fascinating - public ledgers and crypto and block chains will all be game changers. Bitcoins themselves? More of a necessary component to creating a new financial system."

Another article that seems to suggest that the blockchain has value with Bitcoin. I've heard others (pmarca in particular) promote this view, and I think it's far from validated. At the moment, BTC is the most important incentive to mine, and mining is the most important factor in establishing the blockchain's security.

It's true that, in the future, we might be able to come up with other incentive structures to encourage mining (the Bitmessage protocol is one such example). But if we want one blockchain, and we want it to be as secure as possible, how could we ever come up with an incentive that is as universally desirable and infinite as money?

<comment><USER28> There's a common view that Bitcoin's proof of work is the only way to maintain a secure blockchain. That view is the product of a herd mentality of people who have bought bitcoins and want them to increase in value, so anything that could prevent that must be wrong. This Bitcoin maximalism leads to false conclusions, and it should be avoided.

Plenty of non-Bitcoin blockchains are secure.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> > Their value was always in Fantasyland and subject to decline every time the > compute power to "mine" the Bitcoins got cheaper, which it does every day.

The creation of new bitcoins is limited by the network adjusting the difficulty in case new bitcoins (blocks) are created too quickly.

The network hash rate has increased enormously over the past few years, by several orders of magnitude. Yet the average number of bitcoins created per 10 minutes is still only 28.7920673077, or around 15% above the target value of 25.

This is measuring from block 210,000 to the current block (339,357). This period has taken 780 days, so far, so the average number of blocks per 10 minutes is: (339357-210000)/780 / 24 / 6 = 1.151682692 (or 15.168% above the target of 1 block per 10 minutes).

</comment><comment><USER8> Yet another article from someone who has an obvious personal issue with Bitcoin. For some reason, Bitcoin destroys objectivity in journalists.

Remember when Bitcoin crashed from ~$32 to near zero and everyone said that Bitcoin was dead? I do. THAT was a crash. Even I gave up on Bitcoin for a few days. The author of the article missed a chance to detail Bitcoin's crashes and its recoveries from those crashes.

Even if Bitcoin goes to zero because the network gets attacked, the blockchain itself is now just as much part of network technology as any other protocol.

Digital cash ain't going anywhere, be it Bitcoin or an improved version of the idea.

</comment><comment><USER29> The Bitcoin crash is similar to crashes in other financial markets and is a signature of self organized criticality:

[https://charlesmartin14.wordpress.com/2015/01/16/the- bitcoin...](https://charlesmartin14.wordpress.com/2015/01/16/the-bitcoin- crash-and-how-nature-works/)

</comment><comment><USER30> If you have no stakes in Bitcoin, you don't care. If you believe Bitcoin will succeed, you want positive press. If you believe Bitcoin will fail and you are still invested, you want positive press to get out as well as possible. Nobody really wants negative Bitcoin press.

<comment><USER31> There are those who understand the implications but didn't get any bitcoins. In their opinion it's too late to buy right now, so they are just waiting for "the next thing" wishing Bitcoin all the worst. So there is quite a bit of negative press. Not much from rational sources though. Rational agents fit your description.

<comment><USER32> And there are those that think Bitcoin is the holy grail and the only shot at electronic currency thats worth any effort. In their opinion anything else is just a nuisance in Bitcoin's glorious path to world domination, not fascist at all!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Maybe these publications are hesitant to comment because they realize they're not economists. They write and think about products. If we concede for the moment that, as product, Bitcoin is sound then we are left with what Bitcoin's role in the economy is. This is uncharted territory and lots of people have already been burnt being overly optimistic or pessimistic about them. But no one knows.

Because of this uncertainty, Bitcoin has had a major PR problem since the moment it went mainstream. And since the perceived value of a (quasi-)fiat currency means a lot, it has been a net negative for the future of Bitcoin. It has suffered under the weight of tremendous doubt, however slight.

</comment><comment><USER34> This guy has the causality wrong. Bitcoin gains value when there is press coverage.

The drop in value is BECAUSE of the decline in press coverage, not the other way around!

</comment><comment><USER35> Maybe the Bitcoin Foundation should lobby Congress for a bailout. The blockchain is too big to fail!

</comment><comment><USER36> Welcome to market reporting ... the S&P 500 has dropped about 5% in the last month. And in my newsfeed I find "up 2%" from a dozen places.

Now this is not a lie. That particular day the S&P was up 2% (and it does indeed mention that the days before it was down 3% and 1%), but the point I'm making is there was little mention of downward market movement the days before.

It's weird. In every other reporting it's bad news that sells, and you have trouble finding good news. In market news only upward (or very large downward) movements get mentioned.

</comment><comment><USER37> An article makes the front page of HN that uses "epic FAIL" in a non-sarcastic way?!

</comment><comment><USER38> The maximum number of bitcoins is capped at 21 million. The current number in circulation is around 14 million. Now, my intuition tells me (but I might be wrong) that if a currency is used to pay for goods (and not just for speculation), the value of the currency in circulation should roughly match the total value of the goods that can be exchanged with it. If this is true, and the total of e-commerce sales is now (completely ballpark estimate) around $1.4trillion, then in a world where all online transactions are made in bitcoins, the value of a single bitcoin should be of approximately $100k. That means that in the process of a widespread adoption of bitcoin as a real currency for online transactions, its value should rise from the current $200 to $100k, a factor of 500. And this is a huge problem, because any currency that is used for buying goods must have a value that is consistent (and possibly slightly decreasing) in time, otherwise nobody really wants to use it. It's completely foolish to part from a bitcoin in exchange for a phone today, when at some point in the future that same bitcoin will be valued 3, 10, or 500 times more.

Bottom line: the bitcoin is trapped. The more goods can be bought with it, the more its value rises, the less people are actually willing to use it. And this cycle will go on forever, as the total value of goods will keep increasing at a high rate, while the number of bitcoins increases at an progressively lower rate until it stops completely at the cap of 21 million.

</comment><comment><USER39> People don't like to publish much while they're still smarting from losing large amounts of "money". It helps that Bitcoin wasn't just an asset, it was an _ideology_ : that the deflationary shrinking-resource represented by coin mining was _necessarily valuable_. People don't like questioning ideologies like that: it threatens their entire sense of how the world can be a good place at all, it feels from the inside like a nihilistic pit of darkness.

<comment><USER40> I'm more of a buttcoiner myself, but all this past tense "bitcoin is done" reeks of "foregone conclusions" and I don't think that's wise.

I will say that it's possibly less of a crime that the self interested unbridled optimism of its advocates.

<comment><USER40> remember! all these downvotes are actually good for bitcoin!</comment></comment></comment>


SpaceX Jason-3 Live Webcast - <AUTHOR> http://www.spacex.com/webcast/ <comment><USER2> Of course Murphy's Law is in full effect, as the video on the drone ship cuts out right before the first stage lands.

On another note, I really like the orbital animation they're using, it reminds me of Kerbal Space Program. The ballistic arc turning into an orbit is a really good visualization for laypeople, I think.

<comment><USER3> They are saying over at r/spacex that it crashed on landing

<comment><USER3> I love this comment from over at r/spaceX

"Schrodinger's rocket: simultaneously landed and not landed at the same time." \- retiringonmars

Edit: someone opened the box...it crashed Edit2: What's up with the downvotes? Are you not supposed to re-post a quote?

<comment><USER4> also this: [https://twitter.com/underyx/status/688798317770354695](https://twitter.com/underyx/status/688798317770354695)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> From webcast just now: - Landing was on target - hard landing - landing leg broke - not standing upright.

footage later (in a few hours)

<comment><USER5> After watching the Florida landing a number of times, and taking into account that this maneuver is made more difficult by the fact that at its lowest thrust setting just one engine has more thrust than the booster weighs, trying to reach 0,0 velocity at a point and time, where the point is moving (the platform is rising and sinking in the swells) is likely not possible.

As I understand it, deep sea oil drilling platforms provide stability by using a very large "keel" under the platform with air pumps to keep the overall displacement relatively constant so that the platform's position relative to the drill is maintained (the drill being in the sea bed). The SeaLaunch vehicle that Boeing built has similar sorts of compensation strategies.

And that is a problem in that if you have to recover to land, you limit the missions where you can recover and that will impact the bonus of recoverable stages.

One wonders if there is some way to adapt a technique the Navy uses for landing helicopters in rough seas, where the helicopter "hooks" the deck and then applies a net positive collective to hold that line under tension, then the line is winched in bringing the helicopter down to the deck. Meanwhile the helicopter has matched the pitching of the deck because it is pulling against the tether at that point. A very complex system and I cannot fathom the challenge of building something like that on an autonomous landing barge.

<comment><USER6> Got any videos of that Navy technique? Can't say I've heard of it, and a few minutes of Youtube searches don't find anything. I have been in helicopters landing on ships at sea, though not in rough seas, and they didn't do anything particularly special. The helicopters did have landing gear with suspension and shock absorbers, though. I wonder how much shock absorption capability the F9 landing legs have, and if they can add in some more.

<comment><USER5> [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tAbm2XDpx9w](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tAbm2XDpx9w)

The video above shows the technique being practiced. I actually saw it as part of a show on small helicarriers that the Marines use, probably the show "Firepower" or "Wings" there was a period of time when I was researching military equipment in support of an RTS game design and I went through hours of documentary type shows to understand the capabilities around modern (late 20th century) weaponry.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Does anybody know why they would re-try the barge thing when they've already got a once-proven way of landing on a pad? What is the benefit of being able to land on a barge? (which to me seems to be a _lot_ harder than landing on land, after all, now you have two craft to coordinate, one of which is only nominally under your control (lat, long, the rest is very much subject to change due to the action of the ocean).

<comment><USER8> Depending on the target orbit, it is often simply not possible to propel the first stage back to dry land. Today's Vandenberg launch into polar orbit was just that.

<comment><USER9> They said during prelaunch news conference that for this mission, falcon 9 had plenty of oomph to get the first stage back to the pad (payload mass is low), but couldn't because of environmental assessment not being ready.

<comment><USER8> [https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/688844190826942465](https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/688844190826942465)

"Ship landings are not needed for flexibility or to save fuel costs. Just not physically possible to return to launch site" \- @elonmusk

One party or another has the wrong information _shrug_.

<comment><USER9> Elon Musk explained why they need drone ship landings at all, once they have proved they can land on land: because some missions require landing downrange.

I explained that Hans Koenigsmann said 27 minutes 57 seconds into NASA's Jason-3 prelaunch new conference that they have to try to land the Jason-3 booster on drone ship instead of land because they don't have environmental approval at this time for Vandenberg AFB in Califiornia.

<comment><USER9> [https://youtu.be/Set_IES7VZE?t=1672](https://youtu.be/Set_IES7VZE?t=1672)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> A leg broke while it was landing on the barge.

[https://twitter.com/SpaceX/status/688799901463883776](https://twitter.com/SpaceX/status/688799901463883776)

</comment><comment><USER11> YouTube link: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ivdKRJzl6y0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ivdKRJzl6y0)

<comment><AUTHOR> There are two YouTube links, from the SpaceX page:

SpaceX webcast will go live here and on YouTube at about 1:15pm ET/10:15am PT. For our full hosted webcast, use this link [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ivdKRJzl6y0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ivdKRJzl6y0) For views of rocket, launch countdown audio and telemetry info, use this link: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vkz_lclGXNg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vkz_lclGXNg)

<comment><USER12> The spacex.com video page uses livestream which seems to require flash for desktop browsers.

Easiest fix would probably be to embed the youtube video instead.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> video locked up right before landing....

<comment><USER13> I'm thinking there may have been a video delay and it locked up because the landing might not have gone well. i.e. Taken out the video hardware. Just a guess... hoping to be wrong.

<comment><USER6> My more conspiracy-minded thoughts have wondered about this. Yeah, it's probably a satellite connection and they can be flaky, especially at sea, but isn't it awfully convenient that the feed cut off mere moments before a bad landing? SpaceX PR is quite good indeed...

<comment><USER14> They've put out videos of past landing failures. No reason to think they'd be shy about this one.

<comment><USER14> And here it is:

[https://www.instagram.com/p/BAqirNbwEc0/](https://www.instagram.com/p/BAqirNbwEc0/)

It's pretty amazing, and a bit sad. They landed perfectly, and then the bad leg collapsed after.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> What does it mean that a leg broke? Correct me if I'm wrong cause I'm no expert, but I'd assume that there'd be some 'emergency' backup legs to address this kind of event?

What does "not upright" mean? Did it crash? Or is it simply in limbo, leaning, at an x degree angle?

<comment><USER16> Every extra part is extra weight, needing extra fuel, which in turn needs extra-extra-fuel because of the weight of that new fuel, and so on. There is very little redundancy on a rocket.

It's unknown what exactly 'not upright' means just yet.

<comment><USER15> Fair enough, how about some robotic arms on the drone ship ?

<comment><USER16> Now you have two problems. But I wonder if something much simpler, like a net, wouldn't make more sense. As soon as the rocket touches down, the net extents and wraps the rocket, keeping it upright.

<comment><USER15> What would be the two problems?

How would you envision the net though? A net does sound simpler but I have a hard time picturing it

<comment><USER16> Robot arms are a complex control problem all on their own. To catch the rocket they'd have to be very fast, and very precise. At the same time, the rocket's control loops already have only a very small margin for error. A small miss by either system and you have a much higher chance of failure.

In terms of a net, I imagine something that's lying on the deck under tension between four bendy rods. When the rocket is close enough, the rods snap over to the other side, furling the rocket in the net and holding it more or less steady.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> In case someone comes back: Video of landing and leg failure: [https://www.instagram.com/p/BAqirNbwEc0/](https://www.instagram.com/p/BAqirNbwEc0/)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Liftoff still 15-20 minutes out.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> It'll be back on in ~40 mins after coast phase for spacecraft separation.

<comment><USER18> Did you mean the landing will happen after ~40 mins?

<comment><USER12> No, boostback and (attempted) landing was ~10 mins.

GP is in reference to the polar orbit insertion burn for the stage that's in orbit.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Edit: Not sure now

</comment><comment><USER19> What is the point of this company? What benefits do I get from government spending my cash on the company? None.

If I want Mars experience, then I'll go to some shitty place in Nevada, which is much cheaper + human body is accustomed to Earth. I really don't get the fascination with SpaceX.

<comment><USER15> This is u: [https://s-media-cache- ak0.pinimg.com/236x/c6/22/62/c6226219c...](https://s-media-cache- ak0.pinimg.com/236x/c6/22/62/c6226219cf75186c90c7e025c42e1eef.jpg)</comment></comment>


Meditation: Sadly my only weapon against the attention economy - <AUTHOR> https://ahelwer.ca/post/2020-08-29-meditation/ <comment><USER2> > I doubt I could list even three things I'd read or experienced the entire > preceding eight hours. At this moment I feel very bad. I know one of the > ~30,000 days in my life is gone. And I didn't get anything out of it.

This resonates — I have trouble pursuing hobbies and being motivated. Thinking this is one of 30k days on this Earth at least puts some scarcity back into the game.</comment>