Ask HN: In 2016, will Rails & Django be competitive against newer technologies? - <AUTHOR> Do you think Rails and Django (and the like) will evolve to remain competitive with newer technologies like Node.js, Meteor, Play, etc (not to mention, whatever's next)? Or will they largely be legacy technologies, i.e. still in wide-use but not frequently selected for the best new projects?<p>Edit: Please note that the question is not whether or not Rails and Django developers will still be in demand in 2016. I'm confident they will be. The question is will the best new projects in 2016 consider using Rails and Django. <comment><USER2> Note, I'm a complete newbie. I spent 12 months doing a Django job, and started a Rails job about ~4 months ago. Before that I followed frameworks but wasn't nearly as engaged.

The impression I get, is that in general, these languages and frameworks will age, get boring, and eventually be something used because of legacy, the existing codebases. Is this bad? Of course not! It means there will always be a wealth of well-documented, high quality software to work with.

But really, the only way to fight off not being 'boring' is by trying to always do the brand new technologies, always having a way of implementing them. Rails with Turbolinks, to pseudo-mimic frontend JS frameworks. Rails also implementing server side events, moving web sockets closer to 'the norm'.

Will they still be the hot go-to languages/frameworks 5-10 years from now? Probably not. Rails will probably feel then like PHP does now('old and safe', with better options available for most cases), and something like Go or some other incredibly thin means of maintaining a backend API to facilitate frontend Javascript frameworks. And after that, who knows. Maybe the web as pages will die 10-15 years from now, instead being replaced by something more akin to a pluggable game or OS engine. Maybe holograms. Maybe we just get robots and call it a day.

<comment><USER3> PHP does not feel "old and safe". It's probably not the right comparison point to Rails, which is more like CakePHP or Symfony, or the various frameworks influenced by Rails.

Having worked on Rails since 2005, I think the bigger problem is that it has become more complex, and harder to get started with, as the pendulum swings from eliminated.

One bigger change is probably as you state, that we will get away from frameworks whose primary responsibility is generating HTML, which affects all of these things similarly, and node.js would get caught up in the same thing.

Another big change is the pendulum swing from Object/Relational systems to Functional/BigData systems. This is a big mental shift for programmers trained in the Object-Oriented approach.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I enjoy the Indeed.com job trends for this sort of thing: [http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends?q=ruby%2C+python%2C+php%2C+n...](http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends?q=ruby%2C+python%2C+php%2C+node&l=)

I'm a Ruby/Rails developer (and I run MemphisRuby) and while I seriously enjoy working with Rails I don't expect it to be as popular ten years from now.

Rails is still tremendously good at what it does and I don't think it's likely that another framework or language is going to beat it _at its own game_. The real question is whether or not the things that Rails does best will continue to be important in the marketplace.

We've already seen parts of Rails's core competencies carved out by other tools: Erlang/Node/Go enable saner async programming. Backbone/Angular/Ember enable rich web applications. Scala/Clojure/Go/etc. on the "fast compiled backend services" front. Even PHP is keeping pace with the times (Composer, Laravel) just enough to keep its adherents from having a real reason to jump ship.

Ruby and Rails are still pretty much as good as it gets for rapid development of web applications (the backend parts of MVC, anyway), and there's a growing Ruby niche for configuration management (Chef, Puppet, etc).

Personally I find my investment in learning and working with Ruby has been a great way for me to experience a much wider variety of technologies and architectures than I would have otherwise. Thanks to Rails work I've learned tons about AMQP, Postgres, Chef, Backbone, JavaScript, CSS, Ansible, DNS (bind), and more that I just wouldn't have had the same exposure to in a slower-paced development environment.

Your ending line about "still in wide use but not frequently selected for the best new projects" is a bit complicated. Certainly any language stays in wide use once it falls out of fashion and its projects categorically move to the "legacy" phase, but "best new projects" is a bit much. A lot of what we might think of as the 'best' projects are driven by fashion just as much as technical merits.

<comment><USER5> +Java (dwarfs the others)

[http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends?q=ruby%2C+python%2C+php%2C+n...](http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends?q=ruby%2C+python%2C+php%2C+node%2C+java&l=)

<comment><USER6> [http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends?q=ruby%2C+python%2C+php%2C+n...](http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends?q=ruby%2C+python%2C+php%2C+node%2C+java%2C+.NET&l=)

;)

<comment><USER5> [http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends?q=ruby%2C+python%2C+php%2C+n...](http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends?q=ruby%2C+python%2C+php%2C+node%2C+java%2C+.NET%2C+c&l=)

ruby, python, php, node, java, .NET, c

:)

<comment><USER4> [http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends?q=ruby%2C+python%2C+php%2C+n...](http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends?q=ruby%2C+python%2C+php%2C+node%2C+java%2C+.NET%2C+c%2C+excel&l=)

You forget how many people get paid to specialize in Excel :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Yes and no. I think:

1) Rails (I don't know Django) will continue to be the quickest way to have a quick full-stack demo/MVP. It is opinionated, and has tools like railsapps that let you customize it. So you can have a solution that includes bootstrap, authentication, stripe-payments, etc., almost completely out of the box.

2) Rails will continue to be plagued with the problems (security, slow dynamic language) etc. but it will always have workarounds like jruby, celluloid, rails-api, in-memory-models (I wish this was more common). The community is vibrant enough to keep plugging along and fixing the gaps.

3) I don't think it's a coincidence that the two most influential frameworks (Rails and Sinatra) were written in Ruby.

4) Eventually people's MVP will move to something like Scala, following the example of Twitter and LinkedIn. Static languages that encourage functional behavior improve speed and safety.

5) Play is interesting. I am checking it out now, and seeing how I can move a rails app to it.

6) Node serves the lowest-common-denominator in my opinion (it caters to non- polyglots). I use it for certain things (a workflow for prototyping phonegap apps, and client-side tooling) but I personally think it is way overhyped. However it definitely has a place, and will continue to have one.

7) If Rails does someday "die" that's okay for dhh's legacy. His framework is spiritually part of whatever comes next and raised the bar as much as Seinfeld did for television.

<comment><USER8> > the two most influential frameworks (Rails and Sinatra)

You admit that you're a Ruby developer, so you must see that this is slightly blinkered. Influential on what? There's not much Rails brought to the table which was entirely unique, it was just a very good MVC framework in a pleasant language that came along at the right time. And lets not forget that development on Django (which was also very influential), began long before Rails appeared on the scene.

Sinatra I've only heard of in passing, but in the Python world, web.py, Tornado and flask have been also been very significant.

<comment><USER9> > You admit that you're a Ruby developer, so you must see that this is > slightly blinkered. Influential on what?

On frameworks in other languages, both in terms of design/motivation and expectations; one indication of this is the frequency of phrases like "sinatra style framework" or "rails style framework" to either (a) describe an existing web framework for a different langauge, or (b) describe what someone is looking for in a web framework in a different language.

I'm not sure I've ever seen the same thing with Django, web.py, or Tornado. I've seen it with Flask, but its been basically a subset of the times I've seen it with Sinatra (that is, I've seen things like "Sinatra-style framework" and "Flask/Sinatra-style framework", but not "Flask-style framework" on its own.)

<comment><USER8> I've heard "Rails style" about as frequently as I've heard "Django style".

I've never heard "Sinatra style". In fact, when someone first mentioned Sinatra to me, they explained it as "like a web.py style microframework, for Ruby". This was a conversation between two Python developers though, so it makes sense we'd be more familiar with the Python ecosystem. But that's as much a Python-centric bias as your original comment seemed Ruby-centric bias.

Incidentally, I don't think Flask has all that much in common with Sinatra.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Rails and Django have moved from the obscure into the mainstream. 5 years ago if you wanted to hire a Django developer it was pretty hard. It's still way harder to find Django developers compared to PHP devs.

As a company, if you push yourself into a corner with newer tech like Node, Meteor, etc. you may come up against hiring issues. Not only that, but Rails and Django are also evolving with time so they too get better with time.

The "age" of a technology isn't the only reason why it gets selected, it gets selected because of a number of factors including features, programmer availability, programmer expenses (in terms of both time and skill), proven track record, etc. Usually age is a plus point in many ways.

Rails and Django will certainly be around and competitive. However, if you're asking from a programmer salary perspective then yes, there will be many more Rails and Django programmers by 2016, so moving into more edgy tech might give you a USP, but you may also end up without a place to work in. Maybe knowing Rails/Django + "shiny new tech" is a better combo ?

<comment><USER11> > Rails and Django have moved from the obscure into the mainstream.

For prototyping, maybe (and even that is arguable).

In practice, I see a lot more companies moving away from these frameworks toward JVM-based frameworks than the other way around.

These frameworks simply don't scale past the size of a small project.

<comment><USER12> Built with Rails: Github, Groupon, YellowPages, BaseCamp, Scribd, Shopify, Posterous, Airbnb, Urban Dictionary, Bleacher Report, Kickstarter...

These are not small projects.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Play doesn't belong in that list (it's really just a Java-version of the basic request/response cycle design that plagues Django and Rails, Scala or not).

Django is sadly hampered by two fairly complex problems. The first, is their insistence on backwards compatibility and stability. While it's becoming obvious that the basic design of Django creates serious problems when moving away from the request/response cycle, it's a very hard problem to fix if you can't fundamentally change core assumptions within the framework. Second, Python 3 (sans Tulip) just isn't up to snuff for asynchronous coding. Twisted is a mess, Tornado is far too simple.

The Rails team seems more willing to break with the past between releases, but its still hampered by Ruby's inherent performance disadvantages.

Ultimately, while none of these frameworks are disappearing any time soon, it'd be fair to say that many engineers, particularly those working at the edge of the industry, are choosing things like Node, or Go.

<comment><USER14> How exactly do you write a web app that doesn't process requests and return a response?

<comment><USER13> It's less that requests don't return a response than that a request and response is not assumed to be a clean transaction.

<comment><USER14> That doesn't make any sense. Can you give some examples?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Frameworks evolve and adapt to changing needs. But they try to stick to their core design philosophies. Django's philosophy is quite general[1] and might stand the test of time.

Some of the reasons Rails and Django might fall into legacy could be the due to the underlying language itself. If Python continues to be affected by GIL related multiprogramming issues or lack of stronger types, then the associated web frameworks like Django would also be affected. Then there are always non- technical factors like hype and community interest.

Currently, Rails and Django have crossed a certain critical mass in adoption, they are effective for a majority of web programming usecases and have a thriving third party developer community. So my guess is that it would be pretty much a solid choice in 2016 as well.

[1]: [https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/misc/design- philosophi...](https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/misc/design- philosophies/)

</comment><comment><USER16> I don't see anything "in the pipeline" which would be able to compete with Django in its core domain. Not even Rails, whose main advantage over Django are larger adoption and some better tooling (IMHO).

Certainly not Node.js. The tooling isn't there yet, the javascript language is still a barrier for maintainable code and the asynchronous model as a default comes with very high complexity costs.

Play requires Scala, and I just don't see typical web folks switch to Scala (an otherwise great language) in droves.

Clojure? Really? Yes, Lisp is great. But it's not going to get popular in 2 years and it seems to require some intellectual fortitude that is probably harder to find on the job market than Django talent.

</comment><comment><USER17> I've said this before here, but to me Django occupies a very different place from a lot of the more recently developed frameworks. And as lame as it sounds, a big part of it is in the large, complicated content-heavy site (go figure, it was developed in a newspaper environment).

Sure, Django can be used to build single page sites and flow-heavy web apps. But that's not its strength. Just as you end up having to do a lot of custom programming to make Meteor or Node/Derby work for a site with 15 different content types and multiple backend administrators, but that's not their strength.

</comment><comment><USER18> Rails was released in 2003, and 2013 is almost over. So the question is "in 2 years, will Ruby on Rails still be popular and competitive" \- yes. VERY much yes. In 10 years, we can debate that, but in 2016? No way!

</comment><comment><USER19> I think one notable thing to observe with any of these frameworks is that backends as REST APIs with a javascript heavy front end are becoming more common.

Many of these frameworks won't disappear but I think adapt to the newer trends.

Whether we like it or not java is still here and used, I don't see why rails and django won't be.

The whole point of software is it evolves. These projects both have enough of a following to receive updates to fit those new paradigms.

They may not be as suited for something built from the ground up for that specific use case, but that doesn't mean they will disappear.

<comment><USER20> I worked on a project not long ago that used Rails to serve up purely JSON via a REST API and the front-end was all Ember and Coffeescript. (Coffeescript because an intern started prototyping part of the UI in it, and we all figured it'd be fun to learn. I'm not sold on it though.)

We designed our JSON model differently than Ember Data expected, though, so we basically had to make our own Ruby GEMs and EmberData adapter. But with those in place it's fairly easy to use Ruby as just a back end.

<comment><USER19> Exactly. I think a lot of web developers could easily find a transition to that model.

There's a lot of great libraries out there for this use case. Not surprised you had to do a bit of customizing though.

I think over time this will be come easier if not baked in to the frameworks themselves.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> The framework choice is not an independent evaluation, you have to take into consideration the accumulated experience level of prospective engineers you can grab within your reach. That's why actually all of the mentioned frameworks will be alive and going. It is increasingly hard to go exotic, if you are thinking of growth and agility. Otherwise you can paint yourself into a corner where recruitment is impossible and a big rewrite is inevitable.

</comment><comment><USER22> What is the perspective of longtime PHP/Wordpress/Drupal developers on this? I've done WP and Drupal briefly before doing Rails, basically all the time. But since then I've also built things in Sinatra and JS frameworks, too.

For awhile, I didn't touch Rails but went back to it and was pleasantly surprised that even though I enjoyed using Sinatra and Padrino, the weight that Rails's magic adds is counter-balanced by convenience that is most welcome to developers.

I contrast this with Drupal/Wordpress, in which the version upgrades make the platforms easier to build out for clients, but not much easier to develop for, in terms of either developing plugins or customizing the install (not sure with Drupal, I quit at around v5).

To me, it seems like Rails is adding some things I may never use, but those things seem to be optional...And from 3 to 4, they did cut back on some magic- hacks, such as the magic-finders that were too susceptible to security flaws.

I think a big part of why Rails may have better longevity than previous uber- platforms is because of its focus on testing. So it's quite feasible that Rails can always adapt (by being more modular) without causing unmitigated chaos in the developer ecosystem.

<comment><USER23> As someone who put all his cards in Rails for a few months to develop an app - to find out my company wanted it rewritten for lamp stack -- I am extremely LUCKY that I found Laravel-- it is Rails in all it's glory minus some popular gems, --but it's growing (500+ packages already) and Laravel 4 is just awesome to work w/ ... If it weren't for laravel, I'd drop php altogether..though for enterprise Symfony would be worth a look -but I currently don't need anything beyond Laravel.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I think that Rails has a lot of life left because it be influenced by the new techniques that are being pioneered in other frameworks. In the same way that Rails inspired frameworks in other languages - new technologies like node and meteor can inspire Rails too.

For example, at aha.io we use Rails, and wanted to get the front-end performance of a Javascript-heavy app, but by taking advantage of what we know (which is writing ActiveRecord models, Rails controllers and ERB views). So we borrowed a technique from Meteor and made our views reactive - using Rails for the view rendering. That way we get the best of both worlds: the code only needs to be written once in Ruby, but the performance and reactivity is like an app that has a Javascript front-end.

This is just one example, but there lots of similar examples (think about the increasing use of functional programming styles). The incredibly rich ecosystem around Rails means that stuff just gets done faster - the ecosystem has done most of the work for you. Apart from Django, every other framework is still playing catchup.

<comment><USER25> >we borrowed a technique from Meteor and made our views reactive

Do you have any links or resource to share on that style?

<comment><USER24> I intend to extract the code from our project so we can share it, but haven't gotten around to it yet. It is a combination of Faye (for real-time updates), Rails for view rendering, and some clever Javascript that efficiently merges DOM changes. The last part is the key - it makes it efficient to update large parts of the screen without flickering, or needing to reattach JS event handlers.

The beauty is that it supports even the most complex reactive update use- cases. E.g. reactively updating sort order of a list for one user when another user renames an item in the list. The key benefit though is that you allows you to just write Rails code - there is no need to write Javascript for each new reactive view.

<comment><USER25> Sounds interesting. Love to see it when you release it, better yet do a talk somewhere that gets on confreaks, then I'll see it!

It seems like a conf worthy talk.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Play is not "beyond" Rails, it is merely an other community (Java/Scala) that catches up with Rails.

Node.js is a joke, I see more and more people "get it". It sure serves a purpose, but the language not being for general purpose, the syntactical problems of JS and the single-trick concurrency model don't make it fit for true disruption.

Meteor might be a contender for "next level" (currently it is build on Node i think, but that might change one day), I also consider Yesod (Haskell) and some of the web stuff on Clojure to be good contenders.

I think it will not be merely a new FW that changes the scene, I expect it to be a new language along with that.

<comment><USER27> _Play is not "beyond" Rails, it is merely an other community (Java/Scala) that catches up with Rails._

In many ways, it is beyond Rails. For instance, it offers type-safe URLs and builds upon the Akka actor framework (allowing you to schedule asynchronous tasks, make reactive web applications, etc.).

<comment><USER28> > builds upon the Akka actor framework

This is really where Play shines. I wouldn't bother with Play for a basic CRUD app, it makes you do too much grunt work yourself (e.g., authentication). But when you have a backend built on Akka and want to build a reactive, event- driven front-end Play makes it trivial.

Akka is the key. Its actor model just makes _reasoning_ about concurrency so easy because of how it deals with state. Add in remoting and clustering and you've got a highly scalable, event-driven clustered backend without too much extra work on your part. Play fits into that sort of ecosystem quite nicely.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> It's worth noting that Rails has adapted to compete with alternative Ruby frameworks that arose to deal with Rails issues (both general and specific use cases), and has merged with one of the alternatives. Insofar as either Ruby the language or the main Ruby implementation are issues holding Rails back, both have evolved considerably and continue to, and several alternative implementations capable of hosting Rails have developed.

Rails has quite a bit of life left. Sure, with more choices of frameworks available, there'll be fewer cases where it's the only viable choice for a project, but it will be competitive for some time.

</comment><comment><USER29> I feel like this isn't asking the right question. The answers you're going to get are going to be a combination of a) people's perception of what Rails and Django can do and b) people's perception of what the future of the web.

So, let's first look at what Rails and Django can do. Ruby and Python are both slow languages compared to Java, Go, C, and even JavaScript (thanks to companies pouring a lot of work into it). However, computing power is increasing. In the Ruby and Rails world, there has been good work on JRuby, Puma, etc. to help concurrency and move away from the process-based concurrency model. I'm less familiar with Django here, but Python does have frameworks built for concurrency.

Now let's look at Node.js, Java, and Go. All three have good support for handling multiple connections within the same process (via. eventing, threading, and goroutines). Rather than taking up a process per connection, they just add a little bit of RAM overhead and get to stay in the same memory space with cheaper context switching (or none in an evented system). That deals well with long-running processes that would otherwise block a process, tie up RAM, etc.

So, Rails is improving its support for running in a threaded environment and while I don't know as much about Django, Python does have other options addressing this issue. But as it stands today, alternatives have a speed advantage and somewhat by-default operate in a better way for concurrency.

Now, if we're looking toward the future, what do we need this for? We don't need this for things like serving CRUD. If you're trying to keep lots of connections for a chat application waiting for a response, that can be better served by alternatives. However, it should be noted that 37signals does chat via Rails. When thinking about the future, you should think about what is happening in the application and how that affects things like context switching, RAM usage, etc. I don't want to predict the future. If you want to, think about how applications may work that would be better served by systems that don't rely on process-based concurrency.

As some unsolicited closing advice, I find that a lot of people spend an inordinate amount of time worrying over their tools. They want to pick the one set of tools that will last for eternity. Just as your laptop will age and be replaced, the code you write will. Obsessing over tools keeps many from doing anything. There's a lot of low hanging fruit. I'm guessing you see things you want to build - things you could improve upon. Don't worry about having to modify, extend, and do things differently in the future if it's keeping you from doing anything today. Tools are just that: tools. They aren't your product. They're meaningful. Using a better tool is more enjoyable and can create a better outcome. But don't obsess about it trying to guess the future and insulate yourself from future work. Build!

<comment><USER30> This is a great answer!

Although I personally believe that with present-day framework performance spanning multiple orders of magnitude, the lower-performance frameworks have a _substantial_ amount of ground to cover before I personally would consider using them. Higher-performance frameworks have, for my use-cases and in my opinion, reached or nearly reached parity in developer efficiency while providing significant pain-reduction on the performance and scale side. In other words, why not enjoy both performance and efficiency?

That said, everything is evolving, so whatever we see today is subject to change. As you said, our answers to this question will be a matter of opinion and belief about what will happen in the future.

Looking forward with only the context of today's technologies, I personally believe that WebSocket and the various protocols built on top of it may eventually supersede the conventional HTTP request-response conversation. To me, this would mean simpler and more direct communication between client and server, putting the two on equal footing with respect to the conversation semantics (the server can take the lead, for example). It's something I have been wanting ever since I replaced an old client-server app with a web application in the late 1990s with a boggled sense of "Why am I shoehorning an application on top of this hypertext document fetching protocol?"

So when building an application today, I like selecting platforms and frameworks that have natively implemented WebSocket.

But echoing your point again, it's impossible to know what else will come up in a few years' time. Unless your system needs to survive for a very long time, technology is too unpredictable to expend that much worry on the long- term future.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> [http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=clojure%2C%20ruby%20o...](http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=clojure%2C%20ruby%20on%20rails%2C%20node.js%2C%20golang&cmpt=q)

</comment><comment><USER32> I dunno, is C still "competitive" with newer technologies? ;)

<comment><USER33> C isn't a framework.

<comment><USER34> C is to low-level OS-independent programming as Rails is to web programming.

<comment><USER35> No it's not.

Ruby/Rails is the past decade's version of VBScript/ASP3. It's not a foundational technology. As huge of a fanboy as I am of Scala/Play, the C comparison would be as unjustifiable with those as well.

<comment><USER36> Yeah, it's probably more appropriate to say that Javascript, HTML and CSS are to web programming what C is to low-level programming.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Yes, because they are perfectly suitable to a great deal of use cases (websites with interesting things), and provide a huge amount of functionality that you do not get with the other ones.

</comment><comment><USER38> with Play and Laravel catching up, its hard to see Rails surviving long...</comment>


Useful Information for Developers About Personal Names  - <AUTHOR> http://www.w3.org/International/questions/qa-personal-names

<comment><USER2> Related: "Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names"

[http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods- programmers-b...](http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers- believe-about-names/)</comment>


Ask HN: How do you find a good therapist? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> One method: Use psychologytoday to find 3-6 that seem decent close to you, and then do 3 sessions each with ideally 3+ therapists, and then continue with your favorite. Reasoning for that is that apparently your "strength of therapeutic alliance (i.e. how much you respect and trust the therapist and their methods, are willing to open yourself up to them, and feel that opening up received in a way that resonates with you)" is the biggest predictor of outcomes.</comment>


Firearms Dealers vs. Burgers, Pizza, and Coffee - <AUTHOR> http://flowingdata.com/2016/06/14/firearms-dealers-vs-burgers-pizza-and-coffee/ <comment><USER2> I'm a bit curious where the data on the pizza and coffee locations comes from. AggData, it seems, but I don't know a great deal about them.

The gun store figures also includes pawnshops--and if they include other ATF licenses, that might include private resellers or dealers as well as places like Academy or Walmart (in some places).

I kind of feel like there should be some kind of difference between a small- town pawnshop and a place like Military Gun Supply ( [http://militarygunsupply.com/retail/](http://militarygunsupply.com/retail/) ).

Of course, that does somewhat go against the notion that every town, suburb, and city in America has armories of automatic weapons just being given away to anybody who looks to be in a sour mood.

<comment><AUTHOR> > that might include private resellers or dealers as well as places like > Academy or Walmart (in some places).

Asking a family member (who's a police officer and private dealer), pretty sure it does include anywhere with an ATF license to sell firearms... So in some ways the map may be exaggerated.

I agree, it'd be more interesting to see where all of the automatic weapon sales are.

<comment><USER2> Automatic weapons are _expensive_ , because they require tax stamps and other various legal work to own and operate.

To the best of my knowledge, legally-owned and purchased automatic weapons simply aren't used in crime. It'd be somewhat like hitting somebody with a Learjet: sure, you could do it, but there are a lot cheaper ways.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry, I misread your previous comment... I'm a bit more caffeinated now.

> legally-owned and purchased automatic weapons simply aren't used in crime

Yeah, there's a problem with a lot of the news articles released mislabeling semi-automatic weapons as automatic. Even the more broad/vague "assault weapons" are hardly used (i.e., 1-2% of crimes).</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Do You Need To Be A Jerk To Be A Successful Entrepreneur? - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2012/09/09/do-you-need-to-be-a-jerk-to-be-a-successful-entrepreneur/ <comment><USER2> 'Martin Luther King, Jr. told us that "human salvation lies in the hands of the creatively maladjusted." Turns out he knew something about entrepreneurs.'

Good line to end on...

I think it depends on who's judging that entrepreneur. It takes someone who at times may seem like a jerk to push talented people to create something you can sell.

Sure you can cite the Steve Jobs/Steve Wozniak relationship as an example of that. But I think the John Lennon/Paul McCartney relationship is also interesting to look at. Though Paul and George were surely talented musicians who liked to jam and play live shows..it was Lennon who really pushed them to be mainstream and wanted to establish themselves as stars. Lennon himself was noted for being a jerk to his loved ones (had a son he basically abandoned, treated his first wife poorly, got into aggressive disagreements with the people around him).

My point is, I think the typical talented person does things because its their passion and they purely enjoy doing it. The talent may not understand why the "entrepreneurs" do things the way they do it, perhaps the talent can even feel exploited and think the entrepreneur is a jerk as a result. At least that's my take on it..

</comment><comment><USER3> Who submitted this garbage? Oh it was Garbage, we only need A players posting here in HN.</comment>


Kindle – The Sleeping Social Network - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/life-learning/amazon-kindle-the-sleeping-social-network-96ea85eb1df4 <comment><USER2> Some of this is being addressed via the W3C Annotation work, [http://www.w3.org/2014/04/annotation/](http://www.w3.org/2014/04/annotation/). We can have open annotations on closed content.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Plenty of interesting ideas given by the author. I wonder how likely it is that someone at Amazon reads this and starts a similar effort.</comment>


Multi Multi-Factor Authentication - <AUTHOR> http://blog.authy.com/multi-device

<comment><USER2> Thanks for posting this, I've tried to switch over to authy time after time, but the one thing that has always held me back was that I couldn't have it on two different devices. I usually put my auth on my iPhone / iPad, mainly because I've run into the issue where a restore would wipe out my credentials completely, so it's better to be safe than sorry.

</comment><comment><USER3> great news today. congrats!</comment>


Digg-nation is huge! Community is more powerful than money or technology - <AUTHOR> http://dondodge.typepad.com/the_next_big_thing/2007/08/digg-nation-is-.html

<comment><USER2> I've noticed that everyone that gets on digg the first time seems to write a follow-up post about how much traffic they got. I'm guilty and did the same when I got on digg the first time two years ago.</comment>


Competing With Amazon on Amazon - <AUTHOR> http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304441404577482902055882264.html?mod=googlenews_wsj

<comment><USER2> full article link: [http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405270230444140457748...](http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304441404577482902055882264.html?mod=googlenews_wsj)

<comment><AUTHOR> Also:

Even if you click the link (say two times) from HN (the link that I gave) you run into paywall problems.

To fix you have to open a new browser and search for the title and click over from google.</comment></comment>


An idea for making self-driving cars safer: Reprogram humans - <AUTHOR> http://www.latimes.com/business/autos/la-fi-hy-driverless-car-safety-20180817-story.html <comment><USER2> This reminds me of the book The Glass Cage where the author talks about technology-centric design and human-centric design. I must agree that we shouldn't be changing humans to work with self driving cars. Cars should change humans and improve them as they are, not require us to behave in a certain way (or else risk getting run over).

</comment><comment><USER3> The brain itself has no nerve endings and brain surgery is sometimes done while the patient is conscious - so physically reprogramming humans should not be painful.</comment>


'A Terrible Slaughter Is Coming' – The Atlantic - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/10/a-terrible-slaughter-is-coming/381157/ <comment><USER2> "9,000 ISIS terrorists". Geez, I wonder how many it would take before it'd be called an army.</comment>


Rent a Minority - <AUTHOR> http://rentaminority.com <comment><USER2> I've stated this multiple times on HN. As a minority, I've not witnessed any discrimination in my 12+ years in the US/SV. While my experience might be an anecdote, I still find claims of discrimination based on minority status a little hard to believe in silicon valley, taking the experience of my friends and family into consideration.

However, I do find women, regardless of race/religion, to be more subjected to discrimination and harassment.

Additionally, the response to [1] in the FAQ by the site author is the most unadulterated form of (reverse) racism that continues it's meteoric rise in acceptance in the media. Tragic!

[1]: "I AM A STRAIGHT WHITE MAN AND I FEEL EXCLUDED BY THIS. CAN YOU MAKE YOUR SITE A LITTLE BIT MORE ABOUT ME, ME, ME?"

<comment><USER3> Discrimination isn't always blatant. Sometimes it's more ignorant. As a minority here's some ways I've encountered forms discrimination and racism.

* People ask "What are you" (As my ethnicity isn't super obvious).

* If they don't believe me I'll next get, "No really, where are you from" .

* Been asked if I speak Korean and Spanish (two separate occasions) because they needed a translator (not Korean or Hispanic at all) .

* Been on a few dates where they've said "Normally I'm not attracted to Hispanic men" (Not hispanic!) .

* Went to a bar (that served normal bar food). After sitting down, overheard from a group nearby "Does it smell like rice in here?"

<comment><USER4> Unfortunately I primarily see failings on your side _to be tolerant_:

Isn't it fair that others may mistake your origins and are interested in them ?

Is it good or bad that you "clearly" look like someone from place X from earth or that people put you origins in the wrong place? Should they surpress their curiosity? Moving somewhere on earth is so easy today, getting rid of your dna totally not

The last one isn't nice though and I'd wish I was so carismatic that others always reacted in a positive way towards me, but they don't. We are all subject to the judgment of others, may it be positive or negative

<comment><USER3> > Unfortunately I primarily see failings on your side _to be tolerant_:

Well fuck you too. I used to tolerant to all these micro aggressions (that I listed above) for at least 20 years. But now they just piss me off.

The color of my skin is not a conversation starter.

I'm not a sideshow freak here to satisfy your ignorant curiosity.

You want to talk about my origins? Ask permission.

How do you do that?

Talk to me like a human. Ask me about my childhood. Ask me what my favorite authors are. What's a good pizza topping. Get to know me first. I'll share my origins to anyone who actually shows some love.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> [http://rentaminority.com/hire-us/](http://rentaminority.com/hire-us/)

 _So, yes, this is a joke. Obviously. You can stop getting angry now. Or get angry, but get angry at what Rent-a-Minority is angry about. The site is a #satire on a type of tokenism that is particularly rife in the tech and media world._

<comment><USER6> It's damn funny. But a site full of white people like HN will be way too uncomfortable to laugh at this.

<comment><USER5> I'm white. I and my two white sons found it hilarious.

Your remark, on the other hand, not so much.

<comment><USER6> >I'm white. I and my two white sons found it hilarious.

That's good. I'm glad we can all enjoy laughing at minorities together then.

<comment><USER7> Please don't do this here.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Rarely did bring a title such a broad smile to my face. And it turned in roaring laughter when going through the page.

Absolute brilliant :)

<comment><USER9> I'm sure it will satisfy both sides:

One who see's corporations only disingenuously adopting formal policies to hire minorities, only doing it in marketing and for public appearance to appease other white people, rather than offering minorities meaningfully positions of power.

And the other who see these policies as ineffective and bowing down to special interests groups without providing any meaningful benefit to the minority group while simultaneously harming the parent company by hiring people based on their appearance rather than intrinsic value they provide the company.

Attempting to eliminate biases by force or social pressure is always going to be fraught with risk and aversion.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Some of the stories on the stories page [0] are pretty egregious, but some of them are just how the brain works.

When you meet or see someone, you automatically try to categorize people. For now at least, that includes trying to figure out gender and ethnicity. Many of our parents or grandparent had very distinct prejudices. Also, for better or for worse, ethnicity still has a huge impact on someone's circumstances.

It was only a couple years ago that someone finally pushed back on the question "where are you from" to me. Before that, I would never have thought of it being objectionable. I also think context is important here. There's nothing wrong with finding out the ethnic ancestry of your friends, but maybe it's not an appropriate question when you first meet someone.

I'm sad to say that I don't actually know many of my Indian coworkers full names, simply because they are so different from people I was raised around.

0\. [http://rentaminority.com/stories/](http://rentaminority.com/stories/)

<comment><USER11> >someone finally pushed back on the question "where are you from"

As someone who absolutely hates the place I am "from" and pretty much everything about it this questions always made me uneasy.

<comment><USER10> That's understandable. It still helps give context to you as a person. I understand that may be lost on someone who first meets you, and it may be too much to explain on initial context.

<comment><USER12> It's better to have no context than misleading context.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Pretty much a blatant rip-off of: [http://livingcivil.com/disturbing- craigslist-ad-for-renting-...](http://livingcivil.com/disturbing-craigslist- ad-for-renting-a-nigga/)

</comment><comment><USER14> From the FAQ:

>I AM A STRAIGHT WHITE MAN AND I FEEL EXCLUDED BY THIS. CAN YOU MAKE YOUR SITE A LITTLE BIT MORE ABOUT ME, ME, ME?

> I'm sorry that your feelings are hurt. I have listened to your feedback and, > in response, am currently working on rentamajority.com. Stay tuned. In the > meantime, thank you for your interest in maintaining the status quo. I mean, > 'equality', it's overrated, right?

This part seems uncool to me. It's posturing straight white men as very self- absorbed, and precluding any concerns or opinions they might have about this, dismissing them merely for being a straight white man. Which seems quite hypocritical, right?

<comment><USER5> My read on it is that is it anticipating this kind of response or reaction in advance and telling you up front "Yeah, no." It is actually pretty common for white men to come in and derail conversations in a really terrible way and make it all about their feelings. (Not all white men do this, but it is a thing and it causes a lot of problems in internet discussions.)

Though I think the way women and POC typically respond is part of the problem. They often fully cooperate with the derail by all piling on to reply to him rather than sending the message that "the entire world does not revolve around you" by refusing to let the entire discussion revolve around that one guy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> It's hilarious, and to be honest, I wouldn't be all that surprised if there was a startup tone-deaf enough to actually form around the concept.

"Booth babes" are still a thing, stupid and sleazy as that is.

<comment><USER16> "booth babes". what is wrong with women with a sex positive attitude profiting from their hard work?

Perhaps the question is: why are there no booth bros. Well, there are, they're just not in a booth. They're standing bare chested in front of Abercrombie tries to get the lady folk through the door.

Sexiness is sexiness, it is human nature to be attracted to the physically fit, millions of years have literally hardwired our brains to act a certain way. It is nothing to be ashamed of.

<comment><USER17> I don't think there is parity with how frequently men and women are objectified, as you imply. I'm also sure that like most people their job choice is mostly to do with needing to make money, not their personal attitudes about sex.

People shouldn't put down women who work as "booth babes". Nothing wrong with it, everyone needs a job, not everyone is drowning in opportunities, but criticizing their presence at tech events is legitimate. I can't imagine being a woman and seeing that in a supposedly professional setting.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> This adversarial discourse doesn't help anyone.

EDIT: Instead of downvoting, why not provide your view of how this is helping anything?

<comment><USER19> > _...why not provide your view of how this is helping anything?_

Because humor is a good mechanism for talking about topics we might not otherwise talk about, but should be.

By "adversarial discourse", do you mean the site or the HN comments?

<comment><USER18> The website seems to implicitly say that white men equals bad and any attempt made by white men to improve the situation must be half-hearted and just a PR stunt. Thus all the sarcasm. This view is not unique to this website (if they are even trying to make this claim in some form) but runs through a lot of these initiatives.

Lately, I have even witnessed people complaining that most donations come from white men charities and that this is bad (with some people even suggesting they should refuse those donations to make a point), which seems completely nonsense.

How far does it have to go for these attempts to raise awareness of a problem to turn into racism themselves?

<comment><USER20> > _The website seems to implicitly say that white men equals bad_

vs

> _Lately, I have even witnessed people complaining that most donations come > from white men charities and that this is bad_

So... you complain that the website is generalising, then go on to imply that a clear outlier is also the general case?</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Maryland Debacle Shows Why We Must Get Football Out of Our Universities - <AUTHOR> http://www.forbes.com/sites/stevensalzberg/2015/10/11/get-football-out-of-our-universities-take-it-private/ <comment><USER2> It is somewhat odd that Americans should prefer their minor-league football to be university-branded. However, I don't see that changing anytime soon.

</comment><comment><USER3> Maybe it shows why Maryland should get rid of football but on the whole football makes money and supplements academic programs. Suggesting that since Maryland did a bad job, we should get football out of all our universities doesn't make sense.

<comment><USER4> From the article: "Yes, I know the arguments on the other side. "Football makes a profit," some claim. To that I would say, so what? Universities could make a profit running a casino too – should they do that?"</comment></comment>


The Bipolar Lisp Programmer - <AUTHOR> http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.lisp/msg/a9a5a462915e94bd <comment><USER2> Read this some time ago, and disagreed with the depressive look at things.

I often go through phases where I don't feel like doing anything. That's more than made up by the fact that when I do feel like working, I work harder and faster than 20 people.

Peaks and troughs are not a problem so long as you learn to deal with them.

Daniel

<comment><USER3> I have the same problem, but the _dealing_ with them is the hard bit. Depression isn't the sort of thing that you can easily shrug off or power through, and the inability to do so can make for a nasty, self-reinforcing cycle.

What makes it worse for programmers is that our work is essentially creative in nature; progress is not defined by the number of bricks laid or the length of the ditch dug. It isn't possible to switch off your mind and just work at the task; you need to come to the compiler with your 'A' game.

On top of this, it really isn't possible to tell your clients that their projects are going to arrive N weeks behind schedule, because you're depressed. Well, it is possible, but not if you want to keep them.

One of the ways I deal with things, is to try and do maintenance tasks that generate 'little successes' throughout the day. So, even though my code isn't working the way I want it to, getting something else done tends to help get me back in the right frame of mind. Doing simple sysadmin tasks, or just spending half an hour tidying up my office a bit, or making dinner for a friend... it all helps out a lot.

Climbing has also been a big boon for me, because it's a very mental sport, can offer a string of 'easy successes' through bouldering, and provides some much-needed exercise and social interaction to the day.

But until I found ways to help myself deal with things, I could spend months off-line. Depression can be a very real problem, and for people who don't have good coping mechanisms, it is utterly crippling.

<comment><USER4> Who are you? Are you my twin? I have exactly the same problem with programming, do the little tidying up actions almost reflexively now, AND I climb as well. Absolutely love that climbing all in your head.

Joking aside, I'm a sophomore in college now, and I closely approximate the 'brilliant failure' model (a little arrogant to say that though!). High school was a breeze, but suddenly you can't not do homework anymore. Classes are not going well and either the depression started first or the lazy/bored attitude did; either way, it's a death spiral. Takes a ridiculous amount of brain power to stop it.

Hm that was an impromptu rant, sorry.

<comment><USER5> I suspect that the "brilliant failure" model is a bit of a Barnum profile (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forer_effect>). I suspect most reasonably smart university students feel that way at some point in their careers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm not sure if this is so much 'lisp character' as it is the character of people working on or in something esoteric, challenging, and powerful.

</comment><comment><USER7> Slight drift: Tarver's current project accompanied by a fascinating read. www.lambdassociates.org/FPQi.pdf

</comment><comment><USER8> First time reading this. I found it completely amazing.

</comment><comment><USER9> is there any other kind?

<comment><USER10> Yes. Visit a Lisp user group near you and you'll encounter a variety of personalities.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20012>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=78739>

<comment><USER12> That's fair, but it was the first time I'd seen it. I found it enjoyable and insightful, and I'm not exactly new to this internet thing.

<comment><USER13> To add on to that, both those posts are many days old. I've seen this before and I still voted up this post, just because I like it so much. I think there might be a need to relax rules about duplicates, when they appear many days apart.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> It is interesting how highly posts dealing with depression get ranked here. Must mean most here fit the bipolar lisper, making this post kinda ironic.</comment>


Crap, iTune store is down - <AUTHOR> https://buy.itunes.apple.com/financeOverflow.xml Couldn't sign in. <comment><USER2> It's been up and down all day - very irritating :(</comment>


Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 makes it clear: we need to rethink black boxes - <AUTHOR> http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/mar/09/malaysia-airlines-flight-mh370-black-box <comment><USER2> I'm seeing a lot of armchair criticism aimed at the air travel industry about how these aircraft should be able to be tracked more effectively given "modern technology" and they reference things like broadband in cars, WiFi on flights, etc.

What they seem to ignore is that many of these things only work effectively on land in populated areas. Drive your car out to the South China Sea and let me know how well the in-car broadband works and if you are able to send and receive an SMS using your phone.

There was an article on reddit questioning why we can track a rover on Mars but not a commercial airliner on Earth. Our ability to track something is a lot easier when things are going right. When something catastrophic happens, whether to a 777 out over the ocean or a rover on Mars, suddenly tracking the objects becomes a lot more difficult.

That said, perhaps there are technological innovations that could allow us to more easily pinpoint and track black boxes from downed airliners. I'm just not sure what they are. Any ideas?

<comment><USER3> Aren't satellites an obvious choice for this sort of thing? The link doesn't need to have the kind of low ping you expect for online games, and for low- latency communication they can use radio/radar - but that seems like it would have enough bandwidth for black-box style data, wouldn't it? Or does satellite communication generally suffer from problems with cloud cover, etc, even at the altitudes commercial airliners fly at?

Though, once the black box is in the ocean with the rest of a plane's wreckage, I can't imagine satellites would help :)

<comment><USER4> I pointed this out somewhere else, but satellites aren't particularly helpful because you won't be able to transmit to them _when you most need it_ , which is when there are problems with the plane. It's still highly likely that you're still going to end up with planes going 'off the grid' so to speak.

You could lose power, stopping you from transmitting telemetric data. Or there could be a cabin depressurization or breach that cuts off the antennas (or destroys them entirely). I'm not denying there are benefits to streaming telemetric and flight data continuously for non-major mechanical failures and general analysis - but when we're talking about a catastrophic event that brings down a plane?

In such an event you're going to be sending people to look for the wreckage anyway. Whatever data you're streaming isn't going to tell you the whole story - it'll end up looking exactly like the data does today: perfectly normal, and then nothing. I can see that in a 24 hour news cycle people want to know what happened when it happened. It perhaps understandably freaks people out to learn planes can just 'disappear' without explanation. But streaming telemetric data isn't going to help with that, because the only way we can stream such data over oceans (which make up most of the world's surface area) is with satellites, and they're simply not reliable enough for it to be worth anything.

<comment><USER5> Real time telemetry via satellite could definitely be useful in some situations. The Air France crash could have been prevented if somebody on the ground had taken a look at the data from the plane, realised that the junior pilot has been pulling up the whole time, and made the crew aware of it. That was one of the worst crashes in history and there was never even a problem with the plane. All they needed to save the flight was for somebody to point out that the plane was stalling due to a bad control input by one of the pilots.

There are certainly cases where the telemetry link would fail as the aircraft ran into trouble, rendering it useless, but there are undeniably cases where it could save hundreds of lives

<comment><USER6> > The Air France crash could have been prevented if somebody on the ground had > taken a look at the data from the plane, realised that the junior pilot has > been pulling up the whole time, and made the crew aware of it

There are something like 10k commercial flights in the air at a given time around the world. How would that somebody on the ground know to look at that particular plane's telemetry?

<comment><USER7> This is the least difficult part of the whole scheme. A program looking at all incoming data and picking out extraordinary data (in AF 447's case, for instance the stall warnings) to flag for a human operator to inspect would help greatly. There'd be a lot of false alarms but still vastly less work than looking at telemetry of every plane ever. (And even if - 10k is around the number of employees of one mid-size airport - hardly undoable if you wanted.)

<comment><USER8> > A program looking at all incoming data and picking out extraordinary data > (in AF 447's case, for instance the stall warnings) to flag for a human > operator to inspect would help greatly.

Look at what happened in flight AF447. Everything occurred in a matter of minutes. Even if what you mentioned were to be in place, there would be virtually no time for an operator to do anything about it. And probably such operators would have to go through textbook questions because such regulations would be imposed on them by the FAA.

That's why we have several pilots in every aircraft, to mitigate the risk of human failure. Having more operators outside of the plane are not going to help much. If you want to put more engineering power, it's more software in the plane that is the right way to go for safety, as demonstrated so many times before.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I totally agree with making black boxes more advanced to phone home and such, but this line annoyed me:

"Your iPhone is more powerful than the evidence-collecting computers in the cockpit. Simple changes could mean faster answers for plane crashes"

You're talking about the _black box_ for a airline jet. This thing is supposed to survive plane crashes; not just being dropped a meter off the floor, but smashing into the ground going _100 's of meters per second_. The design constraints in those conditions include, assuming the plane is now a ballistic fire ball smashing into the ocean: operating temperature well above even industrial components to survive the fire, mechanical strength to withstand hundreds if not thousands of g's during impact (at this speed the ocean is the same as solid rock), and then float in the freezing ocean for days if not weeks until it is recovered. I'm not sure if black boxes are guaranteed to float or not, but if they are designed to sink, they must then withstand tens of atmospheres extra pressure for a sustained period of time.

The secret is that smartphone processors have been more powerful than safety critical processors since their inception with the IBM Simon [1]. The RAD750 [2], NASA's _only_ "current generation" processor, began to fly in 2005 with a whopping single core with a 110Mhz core clock and an older manufacturing process than that of processors used for early 2000's era smart phones. When technology is moving so fast that Intel is building a new multi-billion dollar factory every few years, safety critical device designers don't give a shit about how fast they are. They care that they can get a level of confidence in the stability and reliability of the processor, that it has _years_ of data on life time, and then that it can be manufactured by an array of suppliers. That cannot be guaranteed by cutting edge technology, no matter how many bits or fancy virtualization features you throw at it. For the black box, this means _every_ component in the design must survive and _operate_ (an IC can survive the hundreds of deg C in a reflow oven but it sure as hell won't work if you send current through it) at or close to those conditions.

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

[2] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAD750](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAD750)

<comment><USER10> Replacing black boxes is not a good idea. Black boxes work when everything else has broken. We trust them to report when unimaginable edge conditions are breached.

We should instead _supplement_ our sturdy but silent black boxes with a chattier partner. The new device would not survive a catastrophic breakup. Nor would it receive the omniscient breadth of data trusted to a black box. Instead, it would (1) receive a subset of flight data (e.g. location, alerts, and pilot inputs) and (2) immediately send them to a ground-based datacentre. These data would back up air traffic controllers' radars in real time. They would also assist in locating fallen planes and their more comprehensive black boxes.

<comment><USER11> > We should instead supplement our sturdy but silent black boxes with a > chattier partner. The new device would not survive a catastrophic breakup. > Nor would it receive the omniscient breadth of data trusted to a black box. > Instead, it would (1) receive a subset of flight data (e.g. location, > alerts, and pilot inputs) and (2) immediately send them to a ground-based > datacentre. These data would back up air traffic controllers' radars in real > time.

It seems to me you've described ADS-B[0], which this plane had and which will become a requirement in US and EU soon. Looking at sites like flightradar24.com, which use ADS-B data, it would seem most airliners already use it. The only difference from your requirements is that ADS-B doesn't broadcast any information about pilot inputs.

According to records from one of the sites which use ADS-B, the signal from this plane just stopped [1]. This could have happened because of a severe failure in flight, or maybe because the plane descended below cruising altitude which happened to take it out of receiver range. In either case, it shows that the proposed scheme would be of limited use and it might not have helped in this particular case.

[0] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_dependent_surveillanc...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_dependent_surveillance- broadcast)

[1] I'll search for the source when I get back to my computer. It was discussed in /r/aviation.

<comment><USER12> What he's describing is closer to ACARS, which already exists but has very low bandwidth.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I love how the article compares a black box to an iPhone.

A flight data recorder is one of the worlds most indestructible pieces of technology, whose main function still works having been smashed into the land, undergone a fireball, or dropped to the bottom of the sea.

An iPhone breaks when you drop it from three feet and becomes little more than an expensive piece of junk (as do all modern, touchscreen smartphones).

Good luck getting a satellite or cell signal a few fathoms under the sea, near no cell towers.

<comment><USER14> I agree. The fact that they pulled a black box up from the bottom of the Atlantic after sitting on the bottom of the ocean for two years show how durable those things are.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> This plane, like most other commercial jets, already had ADS-B onboard which transmits quite a bit of flight data. This is where most of the data on flightradar24.com comes from. In the case of the Air France flight it was way out in the ocean away from ADS-B receivers. There is already a plan to include ADS-B receivers on more satellites to help the ocean coverage problem.

None of this solves the issue of sorting out what happened during a catastrophic failure. It's likely any transmission based system will fail is such situations. The only reliable way to have real time information is to use external sources, e.g. high resolution radar covering every point on Earth, that isn't cheap nor politically easy.

<comment><USER16> Agreed. And ADS is mandated in commercial aircraft. It's part of the system that prevents aircraft from colliding with each other in the air (TCAS/ACAS).

But as I understand in this situation they were not out of ADS-B range nor were they out of radar range. While ADS-B requires the aircraft to transmit, radar does not.

An example of an in-flight breakup happened in 2002 when China Airlines 611 which broke into 4 pieces about 40km off of an island. Looking at the radar returns they found the aircraft broke into 4 large chunks and they were able to tell where items would be due to the radar tracks.

I'm really not sure what's happened here but my hunch is that the incident happened at the boundary of one or more countries' radar systems. So Malaysia needs Vietnam and/or Thailand and/or Cambodia and/or China to turn over their radar returns so that everything can be lined up correctly.

If it was all within one radar system you would have a location pinpointed within an hour.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I think one of the lessons of Air France 447 is that our existing black boxes not only work, they work extremely well. So it's not so much that we want to replace our current black box technology so much as we want to augment it. A live satellite feed is an obvious choice here, but I'd argue that a secondary backup black-box (presumably 100% solid state these days) located in a part of the airplane that's likely to float would be a good idea.

<comment><USER18> Is there any part of a plane likely to float with a black box attached to it? I can't find data on Google, but I'd guess they're pretty heavy?

<comment><USER17> There were certainly parts of Air France 447 that floated. I think the largest piece may have been a section of tail. I don't know if there are parts that reliably float in the case of an accident over water but I'd guess that tail sections and winglets are good candidates.

<comment><USER18> I was thinking about the added weight of a black box though. My possibly naive assumption is that they're heavy because they're so robust, so would need serious buoyancy. I can't find a weight for them though so I might be wrong.

<comment><USER17> That may be true of existing black boxes, but a purpose-designed solid-state black box wouldn't have to be very big. Especially if it was optimized for surviving impact with water rather than, for example, a mountain.

In fact, I was just thinking about how you could probably put a miniature blackbox in every single airline seat. Airline seats are already designed to float, and you'd only need one of them to be recoverable. Such a black box might not be capable of storing everything traditional black boxes do, but if it managed to capture a last moment GPS position it might make it much easier to find the regular black box.

<comment><USER19> > Especially if it was optimized for surviving impact with water rather than, > for example, a mountain.

I think that's a distinction without difference. At 500mph, the water might as well be rock.

<comment><USER17> I'm not at all certain that's true at the extremes for which black boxes are designed. A difference between thousands of Gs and tens-of-thousands of Gs wouldn't matter for the airplane fuselage, but it might matter for solid-state electronics. I don't know if you'd get that kind of force differential between a water impact and say, slamming into a solid granite wall. But I'm to ready to discount it.

But even if we assume that there really isn't a meaningful difference in the physics of a ground vs. water impact, I think there still might be an advantage to having your conventional black box optimized for maximum survivability and having an auxiliary black box which sacrifices some degree of survivability at the extremes in exchange for improved discoverability after an accident.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Let's start estimating the technical challenge here (we're supposed to be techies, after all).

Bandwidth: quick googling shows that a flight data recorder records between 64 and 256 12-bit words a second, i.e. 1-3 kbps. Browsing [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bit_rate](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bit_rate) shows that another 2-8 kbps is needed for voice recording (from one microphone). Let's call it 10 kpbs all together.

Number of simultaneous connections: there are around 20,000 (ballpark) airliners in the air at the peak time each day.

Compare this to the rather old Iridium satellite network: 2400 (uplink) baud rate, 1100 calls simultaneously per satellite (of which there are 68). Not quite enough, since airplanes are not evenly distributed over the Earth or under the satellites, but not outrageously far from our requirements.

Cost: several billion dollars (under 10, I think) have been invested into building the Iridium network, and their operating expenses are around 100 million per year (they are a public company).

Clearly, it would not be unrealistically expensive, in the world of 500 million dollar airliners, to build and maintain a network of satellites to record all black-box voice and data in real time.

<comment><USER21> Why use satellites? There is plenty of long-range terrestrial radio tech that could do the job. Land-based and or even cargo ship based listening posts would be much cheaper. Aircraft-to-aircraft comms could also potentially do the job.

Granted, aircraft fly high in the air, but there are no line-of-sight problems as with terrestrial radio links, so even high frequency comms are possible.

<comment><USER22> Keep in mind that over-the-horizon radio communication is subject to the vagaries of the ionosphere and is not totally reliable. Further, there is a day/night difference, and a dependence on latitude. Line of sight at 30000 feet is about 200 miles, so there are huge areas where everything is over your horizon.

<comment><USER21> But don't _most_ actual aircraft flight paths tend to stay near land? For those flights that must go over that horizon, couldn't they fail over to a lower freq / lower bandwidth channel, when needed; while still keeping near real-time status updates?

Or connect via another aircraft who is further behind them but on a similar flight plan.

Here is probably one of the worst flight paths for this type of potential comms [http://flightaware.com/live/flight/UAL888/history/20140310/0...](http://flightaware.com/live/flight/UAL888/history/20140310/0540Z/ZBAA/KSFO)

I had intended to use that to support my notion that aircraft tend to stay near land. I've flown that route several times and each time we flew an arc that kept us near or overland. Like this, but never in Russian airspace. [http://flightaware.com/live/flight/CCA985/history/20140309/0...](http://flightaware.com/live/flight/CCA985/history/20140309/0800Z/ZBAA/KSFO)

Man, these guys are all over the place. I may have to reform my ideas about flight paths.

<comment><USER22> Well, for the ones that travel within sight of land, we don't have much of a problem. And that may be "most". But "most" flights don't end in disaster. It is the ones that spend long hours over the horizon that are of the most concern.

A significant number spend lots of time more than 200 miles from land. And "land" here means some land with a data link endpoint.

With respect to airplanes forming some sort of mesh network, consider the bandwidth requirements throughout this link.

<comment><USER21> >With respect to airplanes forming some sort of mesh network, consider the bandwidth requirements throughout this link.

Right, but all that is really necessary is groundspeed, altitude, and equipment number. That gets you enough information to find a crash / forced landing site quickly, and to know where to search for wreckage. So, even for those parts of the flight path that are "dark" It still may be potentially superior to low-bandwidth satellite links.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> What's the actual problem here? How many fatal crashes of commercial airliners with black boxes have ultimately not been root-caused? I don't think it's very many. Is the problem that it doesn't happen quickly enough? Is the fear that another plane might crash for the same cause while people are still investigating the first one? I'm not sure this is based on anything rational.

<comment><USER24> _How many fatal crashes of commercial airliners with black boxes have ultimately not been root-caused?_

I am not sure what you are trying to say.

The blackbox is like your log file on a server: _the flight recorders (flight data recorder and cockpit voice recorder) in aircraft,_ (wiki). So if you want to know what happened to the aircraft, whether after a fatal crash or after a hijack or after emergency landing, the blackbox is ultimately the best source. Don't forget there is a legal responsibility.

It is totally rational.

<comment><USER23> I'm saying that if black boxes are sufficient to root-cause the vast majority of commercial airline crashes, what problem are we trying to solve by "rethinking" them? The only one I can think of is speeding up the process, but it's not clear that that's _actually_ a real problem rather than just disappointing to someone in the news industry who wants answers within a few news cycles.

<comment><USER25> Yes I think you're on to something. The complaint is how long it takes to have a definitive answer. But I'm not sure how significant a problem that is. For relatives and friends it may create a little closure but probably not much given it doesn't change the main issue. It's _possible_ that there could be data collected that, if modified on other planes, would reduce or remove the chance of a similar tragedy. It doesn't seem though like that is the case in any disaster to this point.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I'd also like to see, along with the cockpit voice data recorder, a video recorder of the last n minutes of the cockpit. Much accident investigation revolves around trying to reconstruct what the pilot was doing, looking at, etc. This would make it much simpler and more accurate.

<comment><USER27> I was hoping you'd chime in on one of these discussions, given your history in the aircraft industry.

What are your thoughts on the rather knee-jerk articles as of late that seem to think that some form of streaming technology is somehow absolutely imperative, and how might that compare to the tried-and-tested flight recorders given what we know from AF447 sharing periodic updates as to its status?

<comment><USER26> My knowledge of what is and isn't practical with streaming technology isn't much better than that of a layperson.

I do find the aviation industry to be sometimes peculiarly behind the times. For example, a few years ago, I wondered online why airports did not have constant video recording of the runway and taxiways. Such would have been enormously helpful in solving many accidents, such as the SST crash.

But an airline pilot argued with me, saying that such would be cost prohibitive and thoroughly impractical. I was baffled by such statements, given that every 7-11 had constant video surveillance.

I do follow air crashes and the subsequent investigations, the engineer in me just cannot resist. The investigations are so thorough these days that it's pretty rare that the cause and chain of events are not thoroughly understood. The only issue is sometimes it takes years, which can get pretty frustrating for people (including me) who like instant answers. The mitigating factor is accidents are now extremely rare. I don't think that the cost of a live streaming system is clearly worth it.

The black box system has turned out to be probably the biggest single factor in improving safety ever devised. They work great, and the aviation industry is (naturally) very conservative about changing things that work.

<comment><USER26> A lot of accidents happen on the runway or shortly after. Video will tell a lot of things that telemetry won't - visibility, runway incursions, just where the airplane lifted off, ice on the wings, fire or smoke, any missing parts (!), open doors, working lights, bird strikes, etc. It can also be a backup if the telemetry is lost, such as speed, position of the flaps, problems with the landing gear, etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> what yakov says isn't fully accurate. there are 4 voice channels that sum up to around 50kbit. and the fdr recording data is specified at around 12kbit. check the bea working group document

ironically part of my master thesis is about blackboxes and satellites. iridium has been working with some company about the topic(i think, i wish i remembered the details, but you can just google them). but generally iridium is slow right now(that might change but when i say slow i mean less than 4kbit slow), and i think the main reason why it's still there is because it covers the poles.

rolls royce actually already deployed a thing that transfers data through satellites, so you can actually get live engine data. this is almost ironic since their engines seem to be so crappy that a significant portion of them requires replacement according to qantas.

inmarsat on the other hand is much faster. you have to consider though, in a lot of regions you have way more planes than you have bandwidth. also inmarsat is already heavily used by ships(which from what i heard have a lot of virus infested windows pc's sending bogus junk). there is no way

the main issue is that we can easily have way more planes than we have bandwidth per spot beam

[] [http://www.bea.aero/en/enquetes/flight.af.447/flight.data.re...](http://www.bea.aero/en/enquetes/flight.af.447/flight.data.recovery.working.group.final.report.pdf)

[] [http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/transport/10...](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/transport/10146289/Rolls- Royce-regrets-A380-engine-explosion.html)

[] [http://www.rolls- royce.com/about/technology/systems_tech/mon...](http://www.rolls- royce.com/about/technology/systems_tech/monitoring_systems.jsp)

[] [http://www.inmarsat.com/about-us/our- satellites/](http://www.inmarsat.com/about-us/our-satellites/)

</comment><comment><USER29> We really don't. Satellite uplinks don't have enough bandwith for every plane's black box data, and the data we would get wouldn't be useful, since you need the data when things go wrong, and I doubt you'll maintain a connection when everything goes wrong. Furthermore this article illustrates why I try not to read the news at all. The journalist has absolutely no idea what he's talking about - which is the norm for most stories. Film streaming is done from an on plane cache and in air WiFi is more often than not provided by ground cellular networks, falling back to satellite, which is unusable most of the time.

</comment><comment><USER30> The issue here is a monetary one.

How many planes go down each year? A few. How many planes are never found (black boxes). One per 10-15 years?

An airline, or a company that builds planes would have little to none problem explaining to the judge that benefit-cost analyse make no sense: too much money would be spent for too little benefit (I know lives may be at stake, but that won't convince the judge).

Couple years ago I read an interesting article about the way Boeing builds their wings and the way petrol compartments are organized inside such a wing. It went on to explain that in particular external conditions of air, at particular speeds, with particular climbing angle and with particular temperature of aircraft coat, there is a chance of petrol ignition. The only "problem" is that according to their calculation, the probability of all conditions being right is 1:17,000,000. While re-engineering the wing and then applying changes to each aircraft would go north of a billion dollars. Therefore, they have not upgraded their aircrafts and no authority went after them surely because of tiny chance of an accident occurring.

We are all flying a ticking time bomb to some extent. The chances of something going wrong are comparable to putting a parrot before your keyboard. How much time will it take a parrot to hit a combination of keys writing "parrot". It may be one billion years! Or five minutes...

<comment><USER31> "I know lives may be at stake"

What lives are at stake? An enhanced black box won't prevent accidents, and, with very few exceptions, it won't help us find out the cause of accidents. I think your take on the "cost-benefit" analysis made the most sense.

Your 1 in 17 million scenario is interesting - how many times per flight is that scenario evaluated, or is that per flight? If per flight, and suppose we have about 20,000 Boeing flights a day, then we would have a Boeing explosion every 3 years. (Adjust the numbers based on how many Boeing flights there are) - I would say it's worthwhile making the change there.

<comment><USER32> I think the chances that the conditions are right are 1 in 17 million, however the chances the fuel ignites is also extremely low.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> "Your iPhone is more powerful than the evidence-collecting computers in the cockpit."

My iPhone 5s is arguably "more powerful" than the Hasselblad 501cm[1] I currently have sitting next to me. The iPhone has a built-in light meter, flash, and GPS. It can take more than 12 photos without reloading.

But, the Hasselblad was designed to satisfy a different set of criteria than the iPhone. And, for those criteria, it's absolutely perfect. If I want to Instagram something I'll use my iPhone[2]. If I want to shoot a photo I can print at sizes measured in _feet_ , I'll use my Hasselblad.

Is it possible that the airplane black box needs a 21st century rethink? Sure. But to dismiss it in the article subhead does a disservice to everyone who reads the article.

[1] not my blog and not my photos, but representative of the camera: [http://blog.mingthein.com/2013/07/27/fd-shooting-with-the- le...](http://blog.mingthein.com/2013/07/27/fd-shooting-with-the-legends- hasselblad-501cm/)

[2] Actually, I'm one of those people who only uploads photos taken with a 'real' camera to Instagram, but you get the idea.

</comment><comment><USER34> Certainly, at least for those planes fitted with satellite Internet uplinks, a status report every two minutes or so would be technically feasible and not terribly expensive?

<comment><USER17> Air France 447 actually had such a system, although it was not designed to fulfill the same role as the black box.

Here's Wikipedia on the subject ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_France_Flight_447#Automated...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_France_Flight_447#Automated_messages)):

An Air France spokesperson stated on 3 June that "the aircraft sent a series of electronic messages over a three-minute period, which represented about a minute of information. "[32][33][Note 2] These messages, sent from an onboard monitoring system via the Aircraft Communication Addressing and Reporting System (ACARS), were made public on 4 June 2009.[34] The transcripts indicate that between 02:10 UTC and 02:14 UTC, 6 failure reports (FLR) and 19 warnings (WRN) were transmitted.[35] The messages resulted from equipment failure data, captured by a built-in system for testing and reporting, and cockpit warnings also posted to ACARS.[36] The failures and warnings in the 4 minutes of transmission concerned navigation, auto-flight, flight controls and cabin air- conditioning (codes beginning with 34, 22, 27 and 21, respectively).[37]

<comment><USER34> Interesting. From the linked article, it looks like coordinate data was transmitted as well as telemetry. Given the high speed of airliners, ocean currents, and travel time for rescue ships, even minute-by-minute transmissions wouldn't solve the problem of pinpointing the exact location of wreckage/survivors.

<comment><USER17> In the case of AF447 the flight control system knew something was wrong. In a situation like that increasing the rate of messaging automatically might be a good idea, and could probably be implemented entirely in software. It probably wouldn't help in the case of catastrophic air frame failure out altitude however.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> While the author may me making some technological comparisons that need a bit of vetting the basis premise is good.

Given how much these planes cost it does seem reasonable to have real time telemetry. Yes it is hard. Yes it is expensive. But no where do I read it can't be done. In fact I think a lot of technological innovation has been driven by people saying "Nope...you can't do that.".

Where is the incentive to provide real time telemetry? More crashes? This is one place where I feel the FAA does have quite a bit of responsibility.

</comment><comment><USER36> Whenever there's a big disaster, people want to find technical solutions. But the real problem is not even plane crashes at all. It's car crashes, heart attacks, suicides, murders, and other preventable disasters that aren't so newsworthy but can still be helped. We all know air travel is much safer than walking or driving and also expensive, partly to pay for that extreme safety. Adding more expense to make such a safe thing even safer is wasting money.

</comment><comment><USER37> Great discussion. I now understand more about the objections to replacing a black box with satellite streaming data . The two major objections seem to be 1) a catastrophic event could bring external communications to an immediate end and 2) the high data density could make it impractical to link it all to a satellite.

As to the first objection, any catastrophe would be preceded by the cause of the catastrophe. This is what one would hope to capture. I'm not sure if that covers every possible case but I it could be of great value to have instant access to events just prior. As to the second objection, intelligent systems can make useful decisions about which data to transmit and about how long a burst of information should be sent.

Anything that can be done to reduce the time needed to locate passengers who are injured or trying to survive on the ocean or in difficult conditions deserves a look, in my opinon.

<comment><USER7> > it could be of great value to have instant access to events just prior.

Why is it a significantly larger value than having access at worst two years later? No plane went down due to the same problem while they were looking for the AF 447 black box.

> Anything that can be done to reduce the time needed to locate passengers who > are injured or trying to survive on the ocean or in difficult conditions > deserves a look, in my opinon.

Passengers might survive reasonably successful ditchings, after which currently-fitted ELTs activate and transmit location as you expect. An event that results in ELTs not activating is generally not survivable in the first place.

<comment><USER38> Well, for example if it was design issue they could pull all effected aircraft immediately, rate than waiting for the next one to crash over and and getting the blackbox then.

<comment><USER7> In practice, that's just not an issue these days.

Most crashes are due to human error or complex system problems that often include already known issues rather than a single thing failing catastrophically. Airbus put out a maintenance bulletin about pitot tubes freezing before AF 447 crash, and cockpit/crew management, concentration and problem solving while startled, and computer mode confusion were all known. The most recent example of one solid hardware problem are the 787 batteries and thanks to QA systems we know they are problematic but, fingers crossed, so far they haven't gotten bad enough to kill people. If a 787 goes down you know this will be the first thing looked at even without instant access to logs.

A new airplane entering production with a flaw that will go unnoticed until it suddenly starts crashing planes en masse is just incredibly unlikely. On balance of probabilities, we're better off focusing on existing known problems rather than coming up with super high tech monitoring schemes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> A combination of Enhanced Ground-Proximity Warning System (EGPWS) [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ground_proximity_warning_system](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ground_proximity_warning_system) and Deployable Flight Incident Recorder Set (DFIRS) [http://www.drs.com/Products/c3a/DFIRS.aspx](http://www.drs.com/Products/c3a/DFIRS.aspx) might be an option. The DFIRS deploys when a pilot ejects from a F/A-18 Hornet. Using EGPWS in a civilian aircraft the system only triggers when a crash is imminent.

An alternative would be to eject the DFIRS when subjected to high acceleration like an Airbag in a car. In a large proportion of crashes, the nose of the jet hits first.

</comment><comment><USER40> The black boxes are fine. ACARS/ADS-B are usually helpful, just not in this case, so far as we know.

There is already a perfectly capable technology in place: the 406 MHz ELT. If it turns out the the (probably two) ELTs did not transmit, we need to think about why.

Things can go bad quickly on a commercial jet. No one has time to manually activate the ELT before a sudden impact.

At least one of the ELTs is required to activate automatically in case of an impact. A hard landing is enough.

So why did at least one of the ELTs not activate? here are some possibilities:

1) It did, and we don't know about it. The media is so ignorant about the details of technological systems that they don't know the questions to ask, cannot understand the relevance of technical details, and would not understand the answers in any case. Welcome to the idiocracy.

2) An ELT activated, but was not picked up. Very unlikely. If an ELT activated aboard MH370, the satellites would almost certainly have received the signal and passed it on.

3) The aircraft hit the water intact, and the ELTs were destroyed before they could activate.

We can't do anything about the stupidity of the media except to educate ourselves, stop consuming media garbage, and hope that, eventually, the human condition will improve.

If option (3) is correct, then we can also do nothing. Any force sufficient to interfere with the safe operation of the aircraft by competent pilots should also have been sufficient to activate an ELT.

If the ELT did not activate, it means that the aircraft was flyable. We cannot adjust the sensitivity of the ELTs to activate on flyable aircraft, because the rate of false activations would be unacceptable.

Apparently, we also cannot eliminate the impact of flyable aircraft with terrain by pilot training; quite the contrary--the phenomenon seems to be increasing.

Improved autopilots are also not the answer. Of necessity, an autopilot must relinquish control to human pilots in many circumstances where anomalous data is received. This is the circumstance in which it is most likely that the human pilot, taking control of a partially disabled aircraft, often at night and over water, will crash a flyable aircraft into terrain. There has been a growing series of such accidents.

So, no, we do not need to rethink "black boxes". They do their job very well. We also do not need to rethink the ELT--it is a very reliable technology except when people crash a flyable aircraft.

We may want to continue to upgrade the packet data rate between the aircraft and its base, but that is already the plan.

We also cannot upgrade the autopilot, because we cannot yet create artificial intelligence that can deal with a chaotic system like a partially disabled aircraft.

We may want to think about giving pilots better ways of seeing an overview of their situation. Mandatory AOA indicators and external-view situation indicators would be a great start.

Probably also rethinking reflexive media coverage of aviation would be good. Our need to know immediately does not trump the well-thought-out engineering of commercial airliners, and pandering to our self-absorbed search for meaning and quick fixes, particularly when none is available, is likely degrade, rather than improve, the human condition.

</comment><comment><USER41> From what I understand, what makes this (probable) crash unusual is that nothing was received from the plane. Modern airliners send out all sorts of signals over several channels. The data that sites like FlightTracker uses are part of it.

In the case of the Air France crash, telemetry data was sent out in the good 15 minutes it took to go down. With this flight - nothing. One moment it was sending data saying all was well, the next it simply disappeared from the screens. Extremely unusual. If there was a sudden disintegration of the aircraft, there's a good chance an internet-based device would go offline too.

I believe the black box has a signal that will let it be found but it only has a range of 1-2km - less underwater.

</comment><comment><USER42> I don't know if this is practical or not. Have two or more compartments on a plane filled with dozens of small highly reflective buoys. Each with some sort of radar reflector, either passive or active, that searchers could light up with radar and it would emit back a strong signal. In event of a breakup their container is designed to scatter them everywhere or in a more controlled situation the planes systems could release them. Ofcourse they will drift in the air and in the ocean currents but you could analyse then statistically along with knowledge of wind and ocean currents to at least narrow the search area in a situation like this one.

</comment><comment><USER43> The topic has been proposed periodically in the past ([http://spectrum.ieee.org/aerospace/aviation/beyond-the- black...](http://spectrum.ieee.org/aerospace/aviation/beyond-the-black- box/0)). There are already systems in the market.

What is perhaps more boggling is that you just need a last seen GPS coordinate or set to help find the boxes and the plane - a GPS packet if you might call it. Similar emergency transmitters are already available for yachts and boats.

The mystery of MH370 may uncover a number of simultaneous problems or deficiencies of procedure.

</comment><comment><USER44> Even if you know exactly where the airplane broke up, finding debris can be very difficult:

* There often aren't many big pieces left after a breakup at 550 MPH.

* The debris is falling 7 miles, so where it actually lands is pretty random and dependent on the shape / weight of the debris. Lower density debris probably travels further.

* Most debris sinks when it does get to the ocean.

* The lower density debris that floats moves in currents.

* You can't search at night, so the floating debris might move considerably before you can start searching.

</comment><comment><USER45> Does anyone think this air crash investigation will be anything like the [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aerolinee_Itavia_Flight_870](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aerolinee_Itavia_Flight_870) investigation? It also exploded over sea, pieces were found. First they thought it exploded due to a missile from a military jet. Then some engineers found out that the explosion was a bomb in a rear airplane toilet.

<comment><USER24> No one know yet. Until they found the aircraft and the blackbox, they can only suspect. There are reports of passengers checked in with stolen passports but the government and the airline think the possibility of terrorism is low. Let's hope we can discover the missing aircraft soon.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> Before you waste time with better data logging, please install an ejection seat, parachute, and a built-in life support system. That's much more useful than sensors that record the demise of the passengers to satisfy the bloodlust of news corps.

Or rationally, don't change a damn thing. Airliners are fine. Any other form of transportation (maybe with the exception of trains) is many times more deadly and we cope with that risk just fine.

<comment><USER47> > That's much more useful

Not really. The hard part is knowing when to use such a system. In most of the catastrophic crashes I've heard about no one knew they were in danger till they were dead.

> to satisfy the bloodlust of news corps

That's not what it's for, that's horrible thinking. It's for determining what happened so we can prevent it from happening again!

> Any other form of transportation (maybe with the exception of trains) is > many times more deadly and we cope with that risk just fine.

Because of those same data recorders you denigrate! And now that we've reached a plateau of sorts, it's time to move to the next level.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> I presume that the "black box" is located somewhere in the plane that is likely quite inaccessible to the crew and/or terrorists that may wish to disable it. It's a sealed box, and I would presume that the crew would not have the tools to open it and that it is unlikely to have a simple "on/off" switch with which to turn it off.

But… COULD it have been diaabled? Why have no "pings" been picked up as yet?

</comment><comment><USER48> I presume that the "black box" is located somewhere in the plane that is likely quite inaccessible to the crew and/or terrorists that may wish to disable it. It's a sealed box, and I would presume that the crew would not have the tools to open it and that it is unlikely to have a simple "on/off" switch with which to turn it off.

</comment><comment><USER49> Plane designed to carry more than 20 passengers: Require three modified spot satellite transmitters, self activating on power loss, one on each wingtip and the top of the rudder. They should self release after immersion in 5 feet of water and be buoyant. $1000 to install, $100 a year. Cheap insurance.

</comment><comment><USER50> You'd think Boingo would have explored this from the start with their Wifi connection.

Even though it's consumer-facing, I'm sure they could have reserved a small subset of bandwidth to experiment with realtime flight data.

</comment><comment><USER51> It truly is shame that the aviation industry keeps itself at a pace of in ovation once a decade.

</comment><comment><USER52> The solution is streaming the data at all times. The idea of a black box is an antiquity - something used as a backup to the stream, perhaps.

Hold on while I go patent the shit out of this (yeah right, fuck the USPTO if they approve something so obvious).

</comment><comment><USER53> i would like to know how NASA received the data from the Space Shuttle Columbia in 2003. Can we use the same technology for commercial aircraft ?

</comment><comment><USER54> How would you remotely shut one off?</comment>