Ask HN: Speed up HTTP Post, desktop app - <AUTHOR>

I want to speed this up.
I was playing around doing HTTP post, using normal desktop app, in C#.
All I am trying to do is send a few lines of code (200-500 LOC) using HTTP post, to my server, where I have a server side PHP code, that uses this code, generates some result and sends it back.
The results again are just some <100 LOC.
Now, the time taken varies A LOT. It goes from anywhere between 2 seconds, to 30 seconds and sometimes the message is just simply LOST.
I know this because, I do have a timer that calculates the time taken as well.
Now, I think this should be pretty simple to solve, right? Except, I am finding it hard to find... And I am new to doing HTTP like this, outside a browser....
Now that raises questions, if the only reason this is happening is that I am using HTTP ffrom C# inside a desktop app, instead of a browser seems absurd to me, but I keep thinking along those lines...
Oh, FYI, this is pretty similar to what I am doing....
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/debx8sh9.aspx
Check out the C# one.
Except, "postData" in my case is autogenerated by some other code, and is usually anywhere between 200-500 LOC approx. and the "response" is my results, which is some 100 KLOC.
This reminds me, how do I make the above link display as a link, when I submit questions, or respond to something in HN ??
I think the above link should be showing as a simple text.... <comment><USER2> I would suggest you to ask the question at a programming forum/QnA site like Stack Overflow - <http://stackoverflow.com>

<comment><AUTHOR> Oh, yeah. I should do that.

But I figured people working on web stuff can be found here. So...</comment></comment>


If you drive an expensive car you're probably a jerk, scientists say - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnn.com/2020/02/26/world/expensive-car-drivers-study-scli-scn-intl/index.html <comment><AUTHOR> _A new study has found that drivers of flashy vehicles are less likely to stop and allow pedestrians to cross the road -- with the likelihood they 'll slow down decreasing by 3% for every extra $1,000 that their vehicle is worth._

Science!

<comment><USER2> I would have expected the rate at which drivers are less likely to stop be parabolic rather than linear.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I have the opposite view.

"Noblesse Oblige."</comment>


A CEO's Guide to Emacs - <AUTHOR> https://blog.fugue.co/2015-11-11-guide-to-emacs.html <comment><USER2> I think helm is the new thing that replaces ido:

[https://github.com/emacs-helm/helm](https://github.com/emacs-helm/helm)

Ace Jump is pretty incredible. All editors and IDE's should be required to implement it. Here's a video demo:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UZkpmegySnc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UZkpmegySnc)

Easy Motion does the same thing in vim: [http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=3526](http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=3526)

<comment><USER3> Helm is terrific. I switched to it from ido in the past 6 months and it's really increased my efficiency. In particular helm + projectile allows me to _really_ quickly switch between projects and navigate to the file I need. I remapped some of the most-used emacs commands to their helm equivalent's and haven't looked back:

      (global-set-key (kbd "C-x r l") 'helm-bookmarks)
      (global-set-key (kbd "M-x") 'helm-M-x)
      (global-set-key (kbd "M-y") 'helm-show-kill-ring)
      (global-set-key (kbd "C-x b") 'helm-mini)
      (global-set-key (kbd "C-x C-f") 'helm-find-files)
      (global-set-key (kbd "C-c g") 'helm-git-grep)
      (global-set-key (kbd "C-c C-.") 'helm-git-grep-at-point)
      (global-set-key (kbd "C-x C-d") 'helm-browse-project)

My one complaint is getting used to C-z to drill into a directory when navigating the file system with helm-find-files. I haven't et figured out a way to map RET to do anything other than open the selected directory in Dired.

<comment><USER4> Does TAB not work for you to drill into a directory? I never have to use C-z in helm-find-files, just a simple `C-x f`, type a few characters, TAB expands the directory, and ENTER opens the file or directory.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Nobody is going to read this since this post is over a day old, but:

Emacs searches not only ~/.emacs but also ~/.emacs.d/init.el (and probably more) places for its init file. So you don't have to mess around with symlinks, you can just have a synced folder that is your ~/.emacs.d and have init.el be at the top of that folder.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is a nice intro guide to emacs, but I think it goes without saying that if your CEO decides to learn emacs from scratch, you are in big trouble.

I say this as a dedicated, daily user of emacs and co-founder of a startup. Realistically it takes a year to get the hang of emacs to the point where you are more efficient in it than in other editors. The last thing I want my CEO (and friend and cofounder) doing is battling a weird Drop symlink issue with his .emacs file.

But I do agree that org-mode is amazing :)

<comment><USER6> I don't think it goes at all without saying?! Are all CEOs obliged to use MS Office, arguably inferior editing experience to pure text editing, or be doomed to yakshaving their dotfiles?

<comment><USER7> Emacs out of the box works.

Unfortunately there is a misconception that you need a 10kloc init.el to be productive. Worse still are the opinionated configurations targeted at newbs.

<comment><USER8> emacs out of the box _most definitely_ does not work well. You could say that vim works out of box -- most vi people don't end up customizing their editors up the wazoo like emacs people do at least.

(By the way I say this is as an emacsian)

<comment><USER9> If you're an emacsian, I'm not surprised that you think emacs needs customization for your use. As an emacsian, years ago I decided to stop customizing it, and guess what? Works great for me. So, as you can see, opinions about this differ.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Although I am not a CEO (but a marketer), I have a similar setup using Acme. I do all my note-taking inside Acme and have my plumbing logic set up so that all documents/JIRA issues/etc. are a single click away.

I think there is something to be said about using a few (if not one) text- centric tool to get stuff done: it's much lower on your cognitive load and wears you out less.

<comment><USER11> I would love to see some of your Acme setup. Emacs and Acme are my two favorite editors, but using Acme is a little less feasible for me due to not having found a proper (3-button + trackball) mouse to use with it. While I was using Acme, though, I did get most of the way there using the mod keys to simulate clicks.

<comment><USER10> >Acme is a little less feasible for me due to not having found a proper (3-button + trackball) mouse to use with it.

I use Evoluent at home and HP's 3-button mouse on the go ([http://www8.hp.com/us/en/products/oas/product- detail.html?oi...](http://www8.hp.com/us/en/products/oas/product- detail.html?oid=403895)): while Evoluent is more ergonomic, it's too bulky to be portable.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> CEO's Guide to Vim:

      1. Press `Escape` key
      2. ":q!"

Jokes aside, text files are a wonderful medium. Not everything can be expressed easily as text, but I highly recommend using it to everybody for whatever can. Emacs may not be the best tool for less technologically literate individuals (for this Atom or Sublime Text are very good), but the format is certainly very useful. I think people should look into using the command line more, as it can be much more productive after a period of learning.

</comment><comment><USER13> Reading this gave me flashbacks. Horrible, horrible flashbacks.

I used to live in emacs - for years. Browsed the web with it, controlled music playback (via mpd) with it - everything. Nowadays, imo, a combination of Spotlight, tmux with a hotkey drop down terminal, Evernote, and JetBrains IDEs gets you 90% of the way there.

At some point you realize that work requires orders of magnitude more time thinking, reading, and communicating than it does typing. Optimizing your work environment for finger travel just doesn't make sense.

<comment><USER14> Mm, I don't actually see anything about finger travel in Josh's article. The main advantages he talks about are "no more context switching", "taking everything with you and keeping it forever", and that he likes being able to fullscreen emacs as a complete workflow with no external distractions. You have to admit, these are not as easily done with a multi-program, IDE-heavy workflow.

<comment><USER13> From the article:

> I have a dual monitor set up at my desk. One of them is in portrait mode > with Emacs full screened all day long. The other one has web browsers for > researching and reading; it usually has a terminal open as well. I keep my > calendar, email, etc., on another desktop in OS X, which is hidden while I'm > in Emacs, and I keep all notifications turned off.

You don't need emacs to do this. Fullscreen a JetBrains IDE and install the Org4Idea plugin.

I beat the JetBrains drum a lot, but emacs/vi users don't realize how much functionality is integrated and keyboard-driven in their products - and, importantly, it's built-in (no plugins) and sanely pre-configured. "I thought only emacs could do this" was my reaction when I switched.

<comment><USER15> Doesn't Jetbrains require Java? And, isn't Evernote a web service we don't know the ultimate fate of yet? I am just barely competent using Vim, and I am in the process of learning Lisp before I explore Emacs as an option. I just don't think the services you purpose as substitutes really fit the bill; they are simpler to use, especially at the beginning, but long-term I don't think they are replacements.

<comment><USER13> > Doesn't Jetbrains require Java?

It's 2015. That's a concern for practically nobody.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> > If you like the new and shiny and want to get straight to work without much > investment of time and mental cycles, it's likely not for you.

After I discovered Spacemacs, I somewhat disagree with this, because you get so much funcionality in a well thought package, you don't need much customization at first.

</comment><comment><USER17> I was a bit surprised when I saw the link to the Nix package manager; it seemed rather out of context. I wonder if he just googled Nix and copy-pasted the first result?

<comment><USER18> I think he Googled "*nix" and Google ate the asterisk.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Jetbrains IDE is great. I use Eclipse for Java. But emacs is my go to editor.

It has his weak points but I find myself always keeping it fired up and using it for any text editing that doesn't require a large IDE.

I just wish there was a site to setup Emacs as the ideal IDE for say:

\- Javascript \- Python \- Django ...

<comment><USER16> there is: [https://github.com/syl20bnr/spacemacs](https://github.com/syl20bnr/spacemacs)

There is a Django layer in it, you can start runserver witha keystroke, open settings.py with another keystroke, run all tests, etc..

<comment><USER20> Seriously, people should stop over customizing their .emacs.d . I use mostly default (community) config from Spacemacs and it works just fine. You can use both vi keybinding and emacs keybinding at the sametime in Spacemacs. I reduced 2k+ lines init.el config to about 200 lines in Spacemacs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Wow. The site loads the text with javascript simply to achieve a fade-in effect. With noscript enabled it's simply a blank page.

Fuck this trend in web design, and fuck this site. I hate how javascript-heavy the web has become. Why do I need scripts enabled to read a page of text?

<comment><USER22> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9238739](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9238739)

<comment><USER23> Bikeshedding, which your link complains about, is offering opinions on minutia instead of addressing the actual problems that actually need discussion.

Expressing concern about the trend the web is going - executable code instead of open documents - _is_ a primary concern if we want to preserve what's left of the open web. It's important to call out social problems like this so people get accurate feedback[1] about what is and isn't acceptable behavior.

[1] see B. F. Skinner and his box (operant conditioning)

<comment><USER22> > the actual problems that actually need discussion

That's some mouthful you've come up with to avoid involving "the article", which is the blindingly obvious context for top-level comments on a link aggregator.

> It's important to call out [...] problems like this

The HN admin seems to disagree.

<comment><USER23> > top-level comment

What? This doesn't make sense.

> That's some mouthful you've come up with to avoid saying "the article"

I'm not referring to the article. That "actual problem" was in reference to the parent comment about requiring readers to execute javascript to read text.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


AMD releases APPML source code, creates clMath library - <AUTHOR> http://developer.amd.com/community/blog/2013/08/13/amd-releases-appml-source-code-creates-clmath-library/

<comment><USER2> Even though these libraries are open source, it cannot be built without their proprietary, binary-only "AMD APP SDK" [1], only available for Linux and Windows. Bummer.

1\. [http://developer.amd.com/tools-and-sdks/heterogeneous- comput...](http://developer.amd.com/tools-and-sdks/heterogeneous- computing/amd-accelerated-parallel-processing-app-sdk/downloads/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Actually it needs any OpenCL SDK, not AMD APP SDK specifically. If you were building for an Altera FPGA or an NVidia card you would use their OpenCL SDK. OpenCL is typically a LLVM frontend and backend for the hardware in question (or something similar). What they are releasing is in fact all the source for their FFT and BLAS implementations. They aren't opening up the compiler here, just the software that runs on top of it. The compiler itself probably has lots of stuff in it they consider competitive advantage so it will probably be a little while before they open that.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I noticed this today as I was searching around for some opencl image routines, and thought it was of general interest to the community. I really think this is an awesome thing, and the availability of a high performance open source BLAS that can be compiled to a wide array of OpenCL capable hardware is just great news.

</comment><comment><USER3> I have recently started using ViennaCL ([http://viennacl.sourceforge.net/](http://viennacl.sourceforge.net/)). It has an Boost uBLAS-like interface and has backends for OpenMP, OpenCL, CUDA and uBLAS.

It is in very active development and the community is very nice and helpful.

I think there also doesn't exists something similar, i.e. a lib which can easily do the calculations on both the CPU and the GPU (via OpenCL).

<comment><USER4> There is also VexCL [0] and Boost.Compute [1]. Both are quite capable. I myself am working on something similar - it is called Aura but still a long way to go [2]. ViennaCL, VexCL and Boost.Compute focus on maximizing programmer productivity. Converting existing code from i.e. Matlab to accelerator hardware is trivial using these libraries and you get excellent performance quickly. Furthermore, NT2 doesn't get nearly as much publicity as it deserves [3]. Not only does it provide an incredible number of functions ready to use, but it also exploits the vector processing capabilities of modern CPUs. These capabilities are too often ignored by developers or left for non-optimal compiler optimizations to exploit.

In my own library Aura, I focus on maximizing performance (over developer convenience). The target audience are developers of real-time applications that need every last drop of performance from their hardware, while still maintaining a sane and cross-platform API. I strive for a Boost.Asio for accelerator developers. Aura has a already a rudimentary wrapper for clFFT, clBLAS is in the works. So the idea is to, for each platform, utilize optimal vendor-supplied library functions and combine them in a coherent interface.

[0] [https://github.com/kylelutz/compute](https://github.com/kylelutz/compute)

[1] [https://github.com/ddemidov/vexcl](https://github.com/ddemidov/vexcl)

[2] [https://github.com/sschaetz/aura](https://github.com/sschaetz/aura)

[3] [https://github.com/MetaScale/nt2](https://github.com/MetaScale/nt2)

<comment><USER3> Thanks a lot for the links! Btw., the VexCL author is also active in the ViennaCL community.

Atm., I want to re-implement some of the functionality of Theano but in C++. Esp. I also want to implement deep neural networks. And I want my code in a way so that I can easily switch between different calculation backends later on, like using the CPU or multiple CPUs (hopefully with vector processing), or some GPUs (e.g. via OpenCL) or even some multiple-machine cluster.

I found many libs doing one of this very well but only very few libs which supports multiple backends like ViennaCL. For example, Boost.Compute only supports OpenCL but not the CPU. VexCL, as far as I understand, also does not support CPU calculations.

In what state is Aura? And would it be a good fit for my needs?

<comment><USER4> I didn't know about Theano, thanks for the hint. I have been focused on C++ libraries only, apparently missing a huge body of work.

CPU is supported through OpenCL by these libraries. Remember, OpenCL code can run on CPUs. As for Aura, it is pre-alpha, not a lot of functionality there yet, I'm still figuring out the interface. So not usable yet, but keep an eye on it, it will be.

<comment><USER3> Oh, I wasn't aware that OpenCL also can run on the CPU, I always thought that it is GPU-only, thanks for pointing that out! How fast is that? Is that comparable to uBLAS or ATLAS or so? Can that scale to multiple CPU cores? Does it use SSE or similar technics? Or does that depend on the implementation? What can I expect in common desktop PCs?

<comment><USER4> I'm not overly familiar with OpenCL on the CPU myself, I only know it works. But people are doing this [0,1]. Whether or no it uses SSE/multiple cores depends on the specific OpenCL backend that is used. But it should use both multiple cores and SSE. I know Intel does this for both their Phi and regular CPUs.

For me, the most important thing in both CUDA and OpenCL is the programming model. It allows us to describe data parallel problems and related data (in)dependence explicitly. Compilers should be (and already are) able to generate efficient code from this. It is not as nice as it could be, we have to write kernels by hand etc. But there are libraries that make our lives easier (we discussed them earlier). And there is also C++ AMP which tries to integrate better. Yet still, while we have all these options and we can solve most of our problems with more or less effort and elegance, I believe there must be something better out there: the right way to describe data parallel and task parallel problems as well as concurrency etc. Maybe the FP guys are on to something, I don't know. I'll be on the lookout.

[0] [http://www.pds.ewi.tudelft.nl/fileadmin/pds/homepages/shenji...](http://www.pds.ewi.tudelft.nl/fileadmin/pds/homepages/shenjie/papers/Shen_PDP2013.pdf) [1] [http://comparch.gatech.edu/hparch/papers/lee_plc2013.pdf](http://comparch.gatech.edu/hparch/papers/lee_plc2013.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> as cool as this is, it was dated august.

it's still (practically) impossible to do a proper LINPACK benchmark with open source tools on AMD GPUs, although this is a step in the right direction, and more importantly, a big blow to CUDA.

<comment><USER6> How exactly is this a blow to CUDA though? NVIDIA has been shipping CUDA versions of BLAS and FFT (see CUBLAS and CUFFT) for years now.

<comment><AUTHOR> While CUBLAS is available out there, it is not something that can be run on such a wide array of hardware. This is probably of great interest to startups wanting to do things on things on FPGA's and mobile devices. They now have a well optimized open source math library to use as potential building blocks, and it has an Apache License. CUBLAS is only good for NVidia cards. So I actually think this could be a big deal, and could potentially reduce the popularity of CUDA over time.

<comment><USER7> I sure hope it does. I have paid entirely too much for my predecessor's CUDA lessons through the premium NV charges for their cards.

Unfortunately, I'm pretty sure NV is entrenched at this point. My AMD card and my resolution to port everything I needed to use lasted about 3 months, and that was without any CUBLAS dependencies :(</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The economics of Bitcoin - <AUTHOR> http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2011/04/the-economics-of-bitcoin.html <comment><USER2> Here's my thinking on how this will play out.

There's a finite number of people in the world. Each of them hears about Bitcoin for the first time exactly once. At this point one of two things can happen -- either they say "What? That sounds stupid" or they say "Well, that sounds pretty stupid, but there's a _chance_ it might take off, so I might as well be an early adopter and acquire a bunch of 'em".

People in Group A can be safely ignored for now. People in Group B serve to drive up the price of Bitcoins, since they say "Shit, if I spend a few tens of dollars now then I could be a zillionaire in the future!" The Group B people also now become Bitcoin evangelists, assiduously spamming and astroturfing all over the damn place in an effort to convert more people to the Bitcoin fold.

The trouble is, eventually you run out of new people. People who made the initial decision to join Group A are very unlikely to have second thoughts and jump on the speculative bandwagon six months later, since they'll later on say "Well shit, I'm not gonna pay a hundred bucks for what I could have got for five bucks a few months ago". And of course the penetration of the Bitcoin meme outside tech geek circles is likely to be incredibly low, since most people won't even understand what the hell it's supposed to be about, let alone how to use it.

Anyway, like every speculative bubble in history it'll burst when you run out of bigger suckers. This will probably happen fairly soon due to the the limited size of the target market, but not before everybody gets sick and tired of hearing about it. End result: a lot of wasted CPU cycles and a reasonably small transfer of wealth from the gullible to the canny. Life goes on.

<comment><USER3> Don't you get annoyed at how much money bankers make just because they control the infrastructure of transferring account balances around?

I like it because I think it's a clever solution to rampant government/institutional corruption..

<comment><USER2> Banks make money primarily by borrowing money from people who have it and lending it to people who need it -- this is a sensible business model regardless of what kind of currency you're using.

<comment><USER3> I think the banks could make plenty of money without forcing me to deal with paper checks.

My point is, there are lots of other reasons to use bitcoin.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Like many other people, I was skeptical about the need for bitcoins.

The thing that finally made me think BitCoin could potentially have value is internet weed dealers.

Let's say there are three people, A, B,C. A sells weed (or other illegal substances) over the internet. Previously, they'd have to accept a currency that can be easily tracked. Now, they will only accept BitCoin.

B wants to buy weed. B exchanges USD for Bitcoin with C, a bitcoin miner, and then trades BitCoin for Weed with Person A. A then converts his bitcoins back to dollars, either selling them himself, or selling them to C.

Once there is a market for weed denominated in bitcoin, bitcoin has real value, and markets for all kinds of legitimate activity can sprout up.

Of course, this is all a form of money laundering, but at least the value is rooted in something.

</comment><comment><USER5> The restricted nature only serves to ensure that people don't produce an infinite amount of them, which would destroy any value they have. However, rarity doesn't create value, it only helps to preserve value due to the absence of any single authority that can devalue it. The actual currency value derives from what you can do with it, namely purchase services or products.

Currently, that's where I see a lack. There seems to be more interest in trading the currency than using it for products or services. For a universe equal to $5 million, there's not much to buy. I'm a bit wary of putting my app for sale on the shrooms-and-heroin page, y'know?

</comment><comment><USER6> Agreed. Marx called from 1844; he wants his "Labor Theory of Value" back.

Simply because something is rare, doesn't mean it is valuable.

<comment><USER7> Though if it's rare, it can stay valuable, once it becomes so.

<comment><USER2> And how many times in history has this happened? Maybe once, if you want to count precious metals and stones... though these have a certain aesthetic appeal, and in any case have been considered valuable for all of recorded history.

Every other valuable asset in the world is either useful or backed by a recognised government.

<comment><USER7> Doesn't need to be a government. Just a trusted party that provides conversion into other assets.

<comment><USER2> In which case you have a currency backed by the underlying assets of the trusted party. A "one free donut" voucher from Krispy Kreme is almost as good as owning a donut, since I'm fairly confident that they'll be able to produce the donut upon demand. Whether "donut vouchers" deserve to be called an asset separate from "donuts", however, is pretty debatable -- the value of one is clearly tied to the value of the other.

This is, of course, nothing like Bitcoin, which isn't backed by any actual assets of any trusted party. In fact, it is entirely incompatible with the massive inflation which is Bitcoin's most appealing feature for its early adopters.

<comment><USER7> Why should massive inflation be an appealing feature for early adopters?

<comment><USER2> Sorry, I meant massive deflation.

<comment><USER7> Makes more sense. Thanks.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Drop the Supersonic Aircraft Ban - <AUTHOR> http://www.wsj.com/articles/drop-the-supersonic-aircraft-ban-watch-business-boom-1465769638 <comment><USER3> Given that supersonic travel has zero effect on time spent in the airport - which is a large fraction of travel time when flying domestically - I just don't think that the cost/benefit math comes even close to working out for most people. Especially for the famously cost-conscious airline industry [0].

If the premise of this article were true, then lifting the ban would be a major legislative priority for the airlines and likely already be lifted.

[0] [https://books.google.com/books?id=7E-c6ni5MfYC&pg=PA107&lpg=...](https://books.google.com/books?id=7E-c6ni5MfYC&pg=PA107&lpg=PA107&dq=Bob%20Crandall%20olive%20story&source=bl&ots=Say2jSbu--&sig=4xhyzJFpGt6fbW- ZenVJHRqM5_s&hl=en&ei=tgNXTpC6E4fC0AHQnISQDA&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=8&ved=0CFcQ6AEwBw#v=onepage&q&f=false)

<comment><USER4> With coast-to-coast travel, time spent in the airport is a much lower fraction of travel time. That's why the coast-to-coast flights make sense for supersonic travel.

We don't know if the cost/benefit math works out until people are able to try.

<comment><USER3> Coast-to-coast is definitely the best case scenario. I recently flew SEA->ATL, and it took 4.5 hours at mach ~0.7. So with airport time, let's say ~6 hours total.

Even ignoring differences in sub/supersonic flight (i.e., being unrealistically conservative), doubling my cruise speed to mach 1.5 would've increased fuel consumption by 4x while bringing my total travel time down to around 4 hours. So it'd be (probably significantly more than) 4x the cost just to reduce my travel time by 30%. Again, that's for the "best case" of coast- to-coast travel.

<comment><USER5> > So with airport time, let's say ~6 hours total.

How'd you manage to spend (average) only 45 minutes in the airport on each end? Even pre-TSA, I never managed to go from front door to jetway that fast.

<comment><USER6> Depended heavily on the airport layout and how close you want to cut it on the departure side. Avoiding checked bags is a significant timesaver.

I missed a few flights doing this but pre-9/11 it was definitely possible (but not advisable) to get to a smaller airport 30-45 minutes before departure and make the flight.

On the arrival side, back in the good old days (mid to late 90's?) with no checked luggage I could get from the arrival gate to Hertz #1 club gold rental car pickup (when it was in the terminal A garage) at SJC without breaking stride - probably 5 minutes max from the aircraft door to car door.

<comment><USER7> Post-9/11 it was often possible to make weekday morning flights at OAK arriving only 20 minutes before. (I did it a number of times!) Self-print Southwest boarding pass, almost no security line, everything is 3-4 minutes' walk from everything else.

Nowadays OAK has been expanded and the security lines are longer (and they have body scanners, which I opt out of, which also then takes longer).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Even if the noise problem has been fixed, supersonic travel has another huge problem: Fuel consumption. Concorde positively guzzled fuel compared to the jets of its day, and this (among other things) made it uneconomical to operate. The authors of this article never even touched this topic. Has it improved considerably?

<comment><USER9> You're right; let's go nuclear:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear- powered_aircraft](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear-powered_aircraft)

<comment><USER10> I actually would think that could be done "safely". No sarcasm. I am expecting that if fusion ever becomes a reality we will go with electric motors which will certainly always be sub-sonic.

<comment><USER11> If you vary the inlet and outlet geometry of a ducted fan you can have your fan running at subsonic, while the plane moves supersonic.

<comment><USER12> You could also heat the airstream after the compressor.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The WSJ is probably thinking about the supersonic bizjets being proposed for the 1%.[1] Bizjet passengers get to bypass the main TSA lines.

(Well, more like the 0.01%. Aereon's proposed price is $110 million for a 12 passenger supersonic aircraft. It's only Mach 1.6, while Concorde was over Mach 2. If you have to ask about operating cost, you can't afford it.)

[1] [http://www.aerionsupersonic.com/](http://www.aerionsupersonic.com/)

<comment><USER14> most "private jets" are "fractional" timeshares, so you don't have to pay the full $110 million. See [http://NetJets.com/](http://NetJets.com/)

still, it's also "fractional" 1% anyway, 1% doesn't get you in a private plane. Evidence that we live in the time of oligarchs, they call the fast plane they want to get noise approval for _BOOM_

and BTW, for those thinking about it, even when you "own" it, the cost of every flight is much more than 1st class tickets.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> This is a really bad and superficial article.

They try to dismiss the idea of a sonic boom as a product of the imagination of a crazy environmentalist. But the sonic boom is a well documented and completely uncontroversial fact.

Then they try to set up a strawman by implying that the main concern is architectural damage and therefore if there is no architectural damage everything would be ok. But there is still the concern of health and quality of life damage to humans. Imagine if you lived by a major airport and you had to hear a sonic boom every couple of minutes.

Then the idea that modern materials and light-weighting would significantly reduce the sonic boom is rather unlikely. A passenger plane will have a limited benefit from lightweighting, because you cannot light-weight the cargo. You will probably get much quieter sonic booms if you have small business jet style planes, but it would still be there. Fighter planes are entirely too small and too expensive to be business jets and they still create quite a noticeable boom.

There has been a lot of research on how to minimize booms. It has not really resulted in anything acceptable. But, hey, if someone makes a supersonic passenger plane with a sonic boom that is too quiet to cause any issues, sure we should change the law.

But to change the law based on stary-eyed belief that the magic of lighweighting will make everything ok is just stupid.

</comment><comment><USER16> Firstly, I wasn't aware there was a ban on supersonic flight. I thought Concorde was banned simply because it was too noisy, not because of concerns over sonic booms.

Secondly, reading [https://www.faa.gov/about/office_org/headquarters_offices/ap...](https://www.faa.gov/about/office_org/headquarters_offices/apl/noise_emissions/supersonic_aircraft_noise/media/noise_policy_on_supersonics.pdf), I have the impression that the FAA already is working towards lifting this ban. Quote (2008):

 _We anticipate that any future Notice of Proposed Rulemaking issued by the FAA affecting the noise operating rules would propose that any future supersonic airplane produce no greater noise impact on a community than a subsonic airplane._

Given that, I expect that, if a manufacturer shows up with a supersonic plane that fits that bill, the FAA almost has to allow it to fly over the US.

<comment><USER17> The noise of the engine is not that big of a problem as the sonic boom. This one is loud and becomes annoying and distracting pretty fast. In fact this is why Concorde routes were over the ocean: there was nobody to complain there about the sonic boom.

<comment><USER18> Quoting from the link:

> Current research is dedicated toward reducing the impact of sonic booms > before they reach the ground, in an effort to make overland flight > acceptable. Recent research has produced promising results for low boom > intensity, and has renewed interest in developing supersonic civil aircraft > that could be considered environmentally acceptable for supersonic flight > over land.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Drop the silly security theater and the need to be at the airport hours in advance of the flight. That will do a lot more for speeding up airtravel than enabling supersonic flight for the happy few and it will apply to _all_ flights.

<comment><USER20> People keep repeating this, it sounds terrible.

I'm at the airport 30 min before departure from a small domestic airport, 1h before departure for a domestic flight from a large airport, and maybe 1.5h, max, before departure for an international flight. For none of them do I expect more than 5 minutes of security.

Unless I'm flying to the US in which case the security charade takes hours.

This is a TSA problem not a general problem with air travel.

<comment><USER19> It is a problem because the _actual_ checks take minutes but all the delays turn those minutes into hours. And probably those hours translate into opportunities to bypass the various checks.

<comment><USER20> By "5 minutes of security" I meant all the queuing for bag drops, security checks etc, not just the actual check.

By delay you mean standing in line, waiting for the security check? From what I hear the time in security has become worse in later years in the US, what is the reason for that? Less staff at checkpoints? More thurough checks?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Several years ago, I read Erik Conway's "High Speed Dreams", and learned about an important feedback loop that operates in the SST world.

What happens is, you design an SST, figure out the noise profile, and are horrified. You pour a ton of research effort into making it quieter. The aero engine industry adopts your awesome quieting technology across the board, subsonic aircraft get much quieter, people's expectations adjust, and for all your effort, your SST is still the noisiest bird in the sky. Because you're this huge outlier, you get a lot of negative regulatory attention, which manifests in the form of flight-path and operating-hour restrictions.

You can make SSTs quieter, but they'll never be the quietest.

This isn't about sonic booms directly, but it's absolutely relevant, SSTs still have to take off and land, and you can't use engines with those giant fans on the front and hope to perform.

The technical solution, if it exists, is to come up with an engine-quieting technology that somehow _only_ works for high-thrust low-bypass SST engines. That will break you out of the loop. AFAIK, no such technology exists.

</comment><comment><USER22> I thought another problem was that there is no market for shorter flights if they are still too long to do in a single day?

To give an example - Concorde's 3h flight time from London to New York was perfect, because there were people actually interested in going to US/UK for a day for business and coming back the same night. But Concorde wasn't very popular on longer routes, because if you were going to spend 6 hours on a plane you might as well spend 12 and fly overnight, getting some good sleep, and saving yourself a tonne of money.

<comment> rm_-rf_slash Agreed, and this is why it makes sense to allow the Concorde to (noisily) zoom over the Atlantic while not necessarily subjecting flyover state Americans to sonic booms from New York to LA.

As for the longer flights, the 16 hour Los Angeles->Sydney experience is hellish. Depending on the price, I would certainly shell out to get there quicker.

<comment><USER23> In business or first, I wouldn't describe trans-Pacific flights as "hellish." More like long and boring. But you almost certainly get into range issues with supersonic on those routes. A longer non-stop flight in a premium class is probably going to be preferable to a flight that has to stop in, say, Anchorage to refuel.

<comment> rm_-rf_slash I wouldn't be complaining if I didn't fly coach.

<comment><USER24> So you'd be willing to pay more for a faster flight but you aren't willing to pay more for a better class of seats?

<comment><USER25> Yes.

I can live with a cramped seat for 4 hours, plus I get an extra day at home on each end in place of travel time. And I don't end up at a hotel at 10AM waiting for my room to be ready.

<comment><USER23> >plus I get an extra day at home on each end in place of travel time.

That seems optimistic. East coast US to western Europe (which is the 3-4 hr scenario you mention for supersonic flight) you're cutting a get-in-late flight (or a redeye) to an SST leaving in the morning to arrive in the evening. Which isn't gaining a day.

Returning, you can already get a direct flight from Europe that leaves in the AM and arrives early PM. An SST still isn't gaining you a day.

Theoretical long haul routes over the Pacific potentially gain you more but now you're potentially sitting in seats for 8+ hours and it's pretty much a guarantee that no carrier is going to offer that sort of flight with cramped seats.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I'm guessing that the people wanting this are going to charter smaller planes, where you walk into a small airport, the clerk at the desk says "Good morning, Mr Warbucks", and you walk out the back 2 minutes later onto your chartered plane.

Things like the cost and TSA don't apply to these people, they just want to get across the country and back in a single day, and still have time to check on how their minions are operating their interests outside of the NYC - <USER2> region.

At least, that's what I would want if I could affort it :-)

<comment><USER26> I got to ride the company plane once at my previous job, and that's pretty much exactly what the scene was, other than having to show my work badge since the clerk of course didn't know a minion like me.

That plane (a turboprop) "only" went about 300 MPH or so (on a longer trip), rather than Mach +, but to get from the Sacramento area to the east bay, you make pretty good time - about 15 to 20 minutes in the air.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> The US military uses the river that runs behind my rural property as kind of a track for some kind of supersonic flight.

I've heard them for years, with periods of daily activity, but never seen one, for by the time I hear the sonic boom they are gone from view.

I don't understand why the military is allowed to do this but nobody else.

<comment><USER28> Because it's the military, obviously /s

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> There is a Concorde that is being returned to service, although not in the US. So I guess we'll be able to see with first hand evidence whether or not business will actually "boom".

[https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/sep/18/supersonic- bre...](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/sep/18/supersonic-breakthrough- concorde-could-fly-again-within-four-years)

<comment><USER30> As far as I'm aware, Airbus have shown no interest in paying for the type certificate to be reinstated (they withdrew it after AF/BA withdrew them). Without that, there's no question about it flying.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Where's the team on Boom[0] on this?

[0] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11346947](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11346947)

</comment><comment><USER32> The cost of speed rises exponentially while the returns are linear. This is true even in subsonic flight, but above mach 1 the penalties are prohibitive. No gas turbine, jet fuel powered aircraft will ever make this commercially viable without being subsidized.

<comment><USER33> Most of the components of the cost are at most cubic with speed, not exponential. Fuel consumption is quadratic with speed and power required is cubic (roughly).

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> For those that need to get around the paywall

[https://www.google.dk/search?q=Drop+the+Supersonic+Aircraft+...](https://www.google.dk/search?q=Drop+the+Supersonic+Aircraft+Ban%2C+Watch+Business+Boom)

<comment><AUTHOR> Or you could click on the "web" link at the top of this page...

<comment><USER34> Or, when using chrome, prefix the URL with a '?'

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Growing up near a few Air Force bases (Holloman/White Sands and Kirtland) you'd occasionally hear sonic booms. They'd do quite a number on sliding glass doors with tons of visible wobble.

</comment><comment><USER36> This first part of this talk is relevant-- about the viability of SST and subsonic commercial flight actually being "good enough": [http://idlewords.com/talks/web_design_first_100_years.htm](http://idlewords.com/talks/web_design_first_100_years.htm)

</comment><comment><USER32> Another factor is that with advances in global communication is that it may be hard to justify the need to physically go from JFK to LAX at mach 2 just to conduct business.

<comment><USER37> >is that it may be hard to justify the need to physically go from JFK to LAX at mach 2 just to conduct business

My experience is that these types of trips are less about business, and more about glad-handing and greasing wheels.

Those are two things which are difficult to do on Skype.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> In terms of regulation, wouldn't it make more economic and comfort sense to enable sleeper-only flights where everyone lies down, ala Japanese capsule hotels? Tight spaces are much more comfortable when I'm lying down than when I'm sitting.

<comment><USER39> These used to exist (and still do on some flights). I flew on Singapore Airlines from LAX to SIN when they still had their Airbus A340-500 flying nonstop in about 18 hours between Singapore and Newark or Los Angeles. The whole plane was just 100 seats, business, lie-flat only. Frankly with the odd wide seating they have, you could have easily put 140-150 in there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> My old car was a humble Honda, but the fact that it had their F1 Technology filtering down into the engine made it a really great car (9000 RPM redline + VTEC cam switching). I could see a modernization of cross atlantic/pacific flights from military technologies filtering down into private/passenger jets.

Yes, you have to pay more but at my stage in life I am willing to trade money for more time.

I'd rather pay double for a flight for a doubling in speed (business speed) than a doubling in comfort (business class.)

A 5 hour flight from NYC to Asia would be amazing!

</comment><comment><USER41> Please don't. Think about the environment. Let the industry focus on fuel efficiency rather than speed. If the ban is lifted, a lot of R&D money will go into speed.

<comment><USER42> It seems that industry has already been focused on fuel efficiency and consequently speed has decreased significantly in the last decades [1]

[1] [https://slice.mit.edu/2014/03/19/airtravel/](https://slice.mit.edu/2014/03/19/airtravel/)

<comment><USER4> The slower speeds waste a non-renewable resource--time. Extra time spent travelling is time that we can't get back.

<comment><USER43> That's only true if you can't make any use of the time while you're at the airport or in the air. You absolutely can, even if you're 'only' reading a physical document.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> i can't be arsed to circumvent the need to sign up or subscribe... but ban?!?! are we misremembering what happened somehow?

what happened was a total stagnation in that direction due to lack of demand. they already had to charge a premium for concorde...

</comment><comment><USER45> I remember hearing the boom from the STS117 space shuttle in San Diego when it was landing at Edwards back in the summer of the 2007. Shit's loud, even at 100 miles.

</comment><comment><USER9> This is Peter Thiel's hypothesis in action: that the world of things sees little progress due largely to regulation.

<comment><USER24> Peter Thiel has a lot of hypotheses tho [https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2016/06/09/paypal-co- fou...](https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2016/06/09/paypal-co-founder- peter-thiel-address-white-nationalist-friendly-"property-and-freedom)

<comment><USER46> Wow, the ending - with friends like Milo, who needs enemies?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> I wonder if this is a sign of initial efforts by Boom ([http://boom.aero/](http://boom.aero/)) to turn public interest and policy in favor of supersonic?

</comment><comment><USER24> I feel like this is one of those things we can afford to let China get ahead of us on, and if it works good, if not, it didn't cost us anything.

</comment><comment><USER48> Since when was "Concorde regulated out of existence"?

Wikipedia says it's simply because of economical reason it was retired: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concorde#Retirement](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concorde#Retirement)

Not every failure is an anti-free-market conspiracy.

<comment><USER49> I have no love for this article, but everyone should be able to agree on a couple of points: (1) Cutting the size of the potential market by an order of magnitude can be the difference between economical and uneconomical. (2) Limitations on negative noise externalities should be implemented based on actual noise produced (dB, or whatever), not on whether the aircraft is supersonic per se.

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> > if fusion ever becomes a reality

The whole world changes. No more wars over oil.

<comment><USER10> Wars are over ideology.... :(

<comment><USER51> I can't recall even a single war in the last hundred years that was over ideology.

Almost all wars used a lot of ideology in the propaganda to motivate the soldiers and workers, but the actual reasons for starting them pretty much always come down to gaining or ensuring control over resources, or realpolitik - incite a conflict that we get some advantage in the global game, so that some strategic oil line doesn't get built, or overthrow their government so that their trade policies are the way we want.

<comment><USER10> 1) ISIS Taliban (Religious Ideology Iraq and Afghanistan) (We haven't gone to war with other Oil Rich Countries and Afghanistan doesn't have oil)

2) Vietnam (Cold War Communism) don't see an oil attachment))

3) Korea (Cold War Communism) don't see an oil attachment))

4) I would argue WW2 Japan and Hitler was an ideology more then a grab for oil. Killing of Polish, Homosexuals, Jews and Russians was not for oil

5) WW1 - [http://www.historyhome.co.uk/europe/causeww1.htm](http://www.historyhome.co.uk/europe/causeww1.htm) Too long to comment on this but it was certainly not about oil

I find the wars for oil in the conspiracy realm. People will say the American Revolution and Civil War was over commodities but I HIGHLY disagree i.e. French Revolution happened over the same ideology.

War fought specifically around oil (Iraq Kuwait) I fail to see other examples. [http://www.businessinsider.com/nine-wars-that-were-fought- ov...](http://www.businessinsider.com/nine-wars-that-were-fought-over- commodities-2012-8?op=1)

<comment><USER52> To your point (4), I would counter that while WW2 Hitler was certainly ideology, WW2 Japan may indeed have been oil. Remember that the UK & US were squeezing Japan's oil access (90% of oil came from US imports which we blocked) and their only option was to assert themselves militarily and conquer the East Indies for oil. The rest is escalation.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causes_of_World_War_II#Competi...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causes_of_World_War_II#Competition_for_resources_and_markets)

<comment><USER53> > WW2 Hitler was certainly ideology

Lebensraum?

<comment><USER10> Definition

Lebensraum (German pronunciation: [ˈleːbənsˌʁaʊm] ( listen), "living space") refers to conceptions and policies of a form of settler colonialism connected with agrarianism that existed in Germany from the 1890s to the 1940s. One variant of this policy was supported by the Nazi Party and Nazi Germany.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> I wish HN would ban or at least officially frown upon posting links that are behind a pay wall. How can you reasonably discuss an article you can't read?

<comment><USER55> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10178989](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10178989)

<comment><USER54> Mea culpa, thanks.</comment></comment></comment>


Kodak Reference Handbook (1945) - <AUTHOR> https://archive.org/details/KodakReferenceHandbook <comment><USER2> With todays standards that documentation seems alien. It is insanely well worked through.

A glimpse at those docs makes me wonder how much knowledge is just lost due to the plug-n-play 3 page manual era where every project seems like a kinda reboot of the knowledge when the prior engineers left.

<comment><USER3> To me, it looks like a basic overview-level book on photography, with a focus on Kodak. Aside from the recipes and datasheets, the general information is nowadays available in Wikipedia with a bit less structure but way more detail (e.g. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spherical_aberration](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spherical_aberration)).

I'd consider it an introductory textbook on photography, not documentation.

More importantly, this seems to be an external, public book, not internal documentation for engineers documenting the in-depth stuff that wasn't public. _That_ would be interesting to see!

<comment><USER4> Yes, this was for photographers and lab techs who were buying and using Kodak gear and supplies. Every darkroom had one of these, or one very much like it. Nowadays you have to look online and download pdf's for this sort of thing.

I have an Ektar 203mm lens in Kodak Supermatic shutter, the upgraded version of the anastigmat listed here. The Ektars were Kodak's top-of-the-line lenses and it still works pretty well on my field camera.</comment></comment></comment>


Google's 3D Maps destroys Manhattan - <AUTHOR> http://www.loopinsight.com/2013/05/22/googles-3d-maps-destroys-manhattan/ <comment><USER2> This is blog post is just a single sentence with clearly written as flamebait. People interested in this story are better off going straight to the referenced article[1] (though even that reads more like a smear campaign than an interesting and informative piece - but at least it it's not just one sentence long).

[1] [http://appleinsider.com/articles/13/05/22/googles- new-3d-map...](http://appleinsider.com/articles/13/05/22/googles-new-3d-maps- destroy-manhattan-in-the-wake-of-apples-flyover)</comment>


Learning from 20 years of personal analytics - <AUTHOR> http://blog.stephenwolfram.com/2012/03/the-personal-analytics-of-my-life/ <comment><USER2> As someone who's trying to optimize his life better, what strikes me the most is this part of the post:

      For my consistent experience has been that the more
      routine I can make the basic practical aspects of my life,
      the more I am able to be energetic—and
      spontaneous—about intellectual and other things.

This reminds of the book Uncertainty that I'm reading. Very interesting indeed.

<comment><USER3> "Be regular and orderly in your life like a bourgeois, so that you may be violent and original in your work."

Gustave Flaubert, Letter to Gertrude Tennant (December 25, 1876)

<comment><USER4> This is a wonderful apologia for the needy/homely lifestyle... conserving energy for something important.

And the flipside of course: pity on the extravagant, wild, dress up and party lifestyle: a way to comfort yourself if you don't have anything deeply rewarding to do.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The scope and scale of this data is breathtaking! However... it strikes me that the best that he could do with this data was plot it and say "oh, I remember those events". I wouldn't feel like all of that effort was worth it, if I were him. What did it DO for him? Apparently very little.

<comment><USER6> Some people just _like_ data, the way others like walking on the beach or playing football or reading a book. Some things just don't "do" a whole lot for you except entertain or inform you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is amazing. I think the quantified self movement is going to be huge. With more personal tracking gadgets (fitbit, jawbone, nike fuel), measurements are going to become more and more seamless, passive, and complete. Not only will you get historical insights into your blind habits, but you can finally have an objective feedback loop on your behavior, and make necessary adjustments.

But one of the biggest challenges is going to be privacy...

<comment><USER8> Privacy will be one challenge, but I think seamlessness (as you mentioned) is currently the bigger challenge.

I'm a runner, so diet is important. For 9 months I tracked everything I ate. Weighed portions, counted calories, logged everything. The data was insightful. I learned that I need to eat 3,300 calories a day to maintain my weight, with a range of +/- 300 calories.

After 9 months I stopped tracking things because it became time-consuming. Partly was because I learned what it "felt" like to be full, but mostly because tracking it all was really annoying. If all of that could be automated somehow, I'd love to have a spreadsheet of data which I could graph and chart. "At 8:16am, you drank 7.8oz of Orange Juice, totalling 108 calories." Cool, my O.J. container and glass measured that automatically, and uploaded it to my database!

But right now doing it is extremely manual. All of Wolfram's amazing data comes from some sort of automated system he setup once and never worried about. A pedometer. A script chewing through 20 years of archived emails. That form of automation doesn't exist for many types of data people would like to collect, such as food intake, or blood sugar testing for diabetics.

Inventing these non-invasive automated sensors is key for society-wide personal data collecting. Otherwise most data gathering will be sentenced to the dedicated few, rather than the busy many.

<comment><USER9> My grandparents are diabetic, and I've long imagined an implant that could measure blood sugar levels and report it back when they sit down at the computer or pick up a device. NFC is used in subdermal implants today, it could be done. My grandfather has a pacemaker, perhaps it could be a combined function. The problem would be getting blood samples without actually causing damage to vessels, but I am no medical researcher so I don't know all the hurdles.

I agree with you that measuring is the most intensive task of tracking personal statistics. I can enter how many servings I had of what in any fitness tracker website, but what if I had 1.3 servings? What if I had .2 servings (just a taste)? How do you estimate that without measuring it first? And if you're measuring everything on a scale, where has the fun gone in life? What's the difference between medium intensity running vs high or low? If I biked at 15mph it might be medium, but what if I kept that 15mph steady up steep hills? Or what if I kept 15mph down a hill without pedaling? We're built for rough estimates and are amazingly adept at convincing ourselves we're right.

I have enough difficulty with time tracking at work either breaking my productivity or cutting into my limited "me" time, and that's just a petty little thing. I usually end up estimating at the end of the week then fixing discrepancies that always come up.

<comment><USER10> woah, "NFC is used in subdermal implants", is that already being done? I've googled and seen it as something on the agenda, but have no idea if people are already doing it?

<comment><USER9> Well, if you define RFID as a near-field communication. This could be a matter of debate, I guess. Obviously it's well-known for having your pets "microchipped", but there's also this:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microchip_implant_(human)>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> If you're curious about the setup he uses there's more here. <http://stephen.wolfram.usesthis.com/>

<comment><USER4> I am looking forward to moving into a house so I can have that noisy hot supercomputer in the basement on Gigabit Ethernet / wifi to the living room.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> If this sort of thing interests you, check out Kevin Kelly's Quantified Self collaborative project.

<http://quantifiedself.com/>

</comment><comment><USER13> wow, so he was and is writing a minimum of 50 up to 200 emails per day ? Insane, that would take up my whole day, but since hes mostly managing his company his job probably is mostly about writing stuff to people, but still amazing to keep that up for so long.

<comment><USER14> Wow! Just wow! So, he's reading about 500 emails per day, and writing over 100 emails per day, and spending about 10 hours per day on the phone, and has an average of 10 meetings per day... those numbers just don't add up. The meetings are obviously held over the phone, and he's apparently writing and reading emails while being in those meetings, but I still don't understand it. Are all his emails one-liners that don't require any thought or research? Is he some sort of genius multi-tasker? How can it possibly work?!

<comment><USER15> He says a lot of the emails were automated--system status emails during the launch of alpha and so on.

<comment><USER16> Those are the inbound emails, not the outbound.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> For anyone that wants to track their own typing, check out the whatpulse project: <http://whatpulse.org/>

My typing (<http://whatpulse.org/stats/users/210575/>) seems to match his in frequency, around 10 million per year.

<comment><USER9> My first thought on that is "people will just _install_ a keylogger?"

Then I read their privacy policy and it makes specific note of "we don't log keys, just keystrokes". It must be the truth, they repeated that entire paragraph twice in their privacy policy.

<comment><USER17> Haha, well they get that a lot. You can monitor network traffic if you like, they don't track your individual in-order keys.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> My side project <http://AskMeEvery.com> helps with personal data tracking. It asks you a question of your choice (ie how many phone calls did I have, how many commits, anything) every day and graphs your responses over time. Might be useful if you're interested in this.

<comment><USER4> Why would you ever ask a _human_ how many commits someone made? # of phone calls I can almost understand, but we should be beyond that as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> When I was reading James W. Pennebaker's "The Secret Life of Pronouns," I started consciously collecting as much personal data as I could for this exact reason. I'm 23 and I've got most of everything I've ever done on a computer since I was around 14 logged. I started thinking about the amazing insights that all of this data can reveal to me in the future. Every IM conversation, email, blog entry, text message, tweet everything I've liked on Facebook. I can only imagine in 20 years, having a psychiatrist ask me what my childhood was like and being able to show them a piechart of how many times I complained about something to someone.

</comment><comment><USER20> I would love for all of the little tools and scripts he uses to keep track of this data to be released publicly. Half out of curiosity (how exactly does he do it?) and half out of interest in doing this myself. Although his post doesn't seem to make any important conclusions from the data, I'm sure that there are some really interesting correlations, patterns, etc.

</comment><comment><USER4> > one can type and use a mouse just fine while walking on a treadmill, at > least up to—for me—a speed of about 2.5 mph.

Anything you can do while typing and talking on the phone isn't much exercise. This seems far more annoying and inefficient than simply taking a 10 minute 5-6mph jog on the treadmill around the block before lunch.

</comment><comment><USER21> If this kind of thing interests you, I made an app that graphs last.fm song listens in the same way as Wolfram's graphed his emails.

I find changes in listening habits correlate well with big life changes.

<http://markhansen.co.nz/scatter.fm>

<comment><USER22> I see that you're making the API requests on the client side (a good idea because of last.fm's API restrictions), but you should really consider caching them server side.

It takes quite a while to fetch all plays if you have a lot, and currently, if you want to share the graph with your friends, they would have to wait too.

<comment><USER21> Yeah, I hear ya, it takes ages to load my data too. If there's a way to cache on the serverside without running into the API throttling, I'd love to do some caching.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> If you are interested in seeing this sort of data for yourself - it is exactly this experience we are building at BrainPage.

Leave your email on <http://signup.brainpage.com> \- we'd love your feedback as it gets ready.

</comment><comment><USER24> This kind of data would be so cool for body related things

\- Calory intake per day

\- caffeine

\- minutes exercised

\- blood pressure

I could imagine in the future this would be quite feasible. The biggest barrier probably isn't technological, rather the resistance to the idea of injecting/carrying a little digital monitor

<comment><USER25> Many people, myself included, are keeping exercise data with sports-tracker / Endomondo type apps. It quite nice to have this history.

And I'd love an app that collated calls, email, meeting data from varous points over the longer term. I guess for most people this will be Facebook.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> All of this data is already going into our computers. I bet people would pay for a slick app/service that visualizes it well, like RescueTime but more holistic.

</comment><comment><USER27> I wonder how he reliably recorded the phone call data?

<comment><USER28> The same way I do it - itemized phone bills :P

<comment><USER27> Good point didn't occur to me!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> How do you scan 230,000 pages of paper?

<comment><USER4> Auto-feed, like how a printer consumes paper.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> i can measure so i can mess with it. What did the person learned more then if he would have asked collegues and his fam members. Humans are imho the more important data filters and aggregators. I prob.missed the point.</comment>


The Youth Unemployment Bomb - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/07_52/b4064058743638.htm

<comment><USER2> "For decades, Mubarak coped with Egypt's youth unemployment problem by expanding college enrollments. "

It sounds like this has been a problem for many years and is more of a symptom of the style of government than our current economic situation.

" employers might choose to reach past today's unemployed, who may appear to be damaged goods, and pick from the next crop of fresh-faced grads."

I think this really depends on what the unemployed are doing. I'v been unemployed for the last 6 months and I've been working harder on my own projects than when I was actually working. I can put all of these projects on my resume because they directly relate to my industry. If you are just sitting at home playing Xbox, you might have a problem.

"He feels betrayed that he has been unable to find work in his chosen field, "origins of religion.""

Students going into college should really check to see what kind of a demand there is for their degree..otherwise there will be disappointment. This will happen in any economy, not just a bad one.

"If the purpose is to create jobs, as opposed to just filling them, loosey- goosey may be exactly what's needed. Entrepreneurship—with all its guesswork and improvisation—could be the most underexploited means of reducing youth unemployment."

I think this is a great idea, but many people just aren't cut out to start businesses.</comment>


Arguing about species: Is it evidence, or ego? - <AUTHOR> http://johnhawks.net/weblog/topics/taxonomy/species-argument-evidence-ego-2017.html <comment><USER2> To argue about species is to argue about definitions and to argue about definitions is to create paradoxes.

For example: A and B (and C) are the same species when they can produce offspring creates these questions:

\- What if A and B produce infertile offspring

\- What is A and B can reproduce, B and C can reproduce by A and C can not?

We humans and our need to put lines on continuous stuff, we keep ourselves busy with such futile things.

<comment><USER3> Just because an abstraction isn't perfect or it can be misused doesn't mean that it can't also be vitally useful in many circumstances.

<comment><USER4> Exactly. But endlessly bitching about the precise border is a waste of time, because all of our abstractions (including words in every language) break if you zoom in too close on them. People need to learn to live with soft, fuzzy boundaries on concepts.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Especially for prokaryotes, how to define what is a species is an active problem in the philosophy of biology. IIRC, Laura Franklin-Hall at NYU has written about this ([https://as.nyu.edu/faculty/laura-rebecca- franklin.html](https://as.nyu.edu/faculty/laura-rebecca-franklin.html)). In a research setting this is far from a trivial question. One lab's E.coli may show different characteristics than another lab's, even if they are the same strain.

<comment><USER6> Philosophers have been pondering on the definition of 'human' (and other categorizations) for at least 2000 years.

The relation with this problem is that you can offer the following attempt at definition: "it's human if the direct ancestors are human". Of course, it fails ;)

Another attempt is via attributes (fe, "if it has a head, arms, legs, and an IQ of at least X and DNA that has ..., it's human"). This also quickly fails.

I think the current consensus amongst philosophers is that a binary categorization is impossible in these cases. ie, whatever the definition, you will either exclude things you want to be included and/or include things you don't want in there.

<comment><USER7> What are the current edge cases for 'human' and 'non-human' which makes the line so blurred that our common sense is no longer sufficient to judge, and we need to invoke philosophy, and further philosophy without input from biology?

<comment><USER8> There are a set of questions about when human life starts. Is it when the sperm touches the egg? When the zygote forms?

There is no firm answer, and the choice depends on one's philosophy. The US Supreme Court - and in this case I am suggesting that the courts are a sort of applied philosophy - took input from biology in deciding Roe v. Wade.

Medical ethics, again a form of philosophy, says that human embryo experimentation must not continue past two weeks, based on input from biology. That's when the central nervous system starts to form, and marks the end of when the embryo can split into twins. It was also not believed possible to keep an embryo alive outside the womb that long, but now it's possible. [http://www.npr.org/sections/health- shots/2017/03/02/51628089...](http://www.npr.org/sections/health- shots/2017/03/02/516280895/embryo-experiments-reveal-earliest-human- development-but-stir-ethical-debate)

If the definition of human is related to DNA, then is cancer human? What about immortal cell lines? Parasitic cancers like Canine transmissible venereal tumor?

Were Neanderthals human? Denisovans?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The selection pressure will be towards more and more species since it has more clickbait potential: "New human ancestor species discovered in Africa", "Ecologists discover 10,000 new bacterial species in a hydrothermal vent", etc.

I really don't see any pressures currently in favor of "lumping". I guess just inertia.

<comment><USER8> I ... don't think you have much experience with the issue?

"Until the late 1980s, as many as 32 subspecies were recorded; genetic study of mitochondrial DNA[35] found many of these are too similar to be recognized as distinct at a molecular level. Following the research, the canonical Mammal Species of the World (3rd ed.) recognizes six subspecies, five of which are solely found in Latin America" \- [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cougar#Subspecies](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cougar#Subspecies)

There is a continuous question of if a given "species" is really a distinct species, and thus protected under the Endangered Species Act, or if it's a subspecies or hybrid. There is political pressure to lump, because of the cost of protecting a species. Some examples of lumping:

"Extensive studies conducted by researchers at the Denver Museum of Nature and History have shown that the Preble meadow jumping mouse is not a distinct species from other common mice and does not deserve protection under the Endangered Species Act." \- [http://www.citizenreviewonline.org/jan2004/rodents.htm](http://www.citizenreviewonline.org/jan2004/rodents.htm)

Is the grey wolf really a distinct species? [https://phys.org/news/2016-07-gray-wolf-endangered- species-g...](https://phys.org/news/2016-07-gray-wolf-endangered-species- genomic.html) .

"The Fish and Wildlife Service (Service) under the authority of the Endangered Species Act of 1973 (Act), as amended, proposes to remove the plant Echinocereus lloydii (Lloyd's hedgehog cactus) from the Federal List of Endangered and Threatened Plants. Lloyd's hedgehog cactus was listed as endangered on October 26, 1979, due to threats of collection and highway projects. Recent evidence indicates that Lloyd's hedgehog cactus is not a distinct species but rather a hybrid. Therefore, Lloyd's hedgehog cactus does not qualify for protection under the Act." \- [https://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/FR-1996-06-14/html/96-15124.ht...](https://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/FR-1996-06-14/html/96-15124.htm)

<comment><USER9> Interesting, thanks.</comment></comment></comment>


LivingSocial Claims 'Straight Up Fiction' in Research Report - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.wsj.com/corporate-intelligence/2013/02/21/memo-livingsocial-ceo-claims-straight-up-fiction-in-research-report/

<comment><AUTHOR> LivingSocial response to original report:

[http://www.privco.com/livingsocial-receives- emergency-110m-c...](http://www.privco.com/livingsocial-receives- emergency-110m-cash-infusion-from-existing-investors-to-avoid-bankruptcy)</comment>


Ask HN: What are some recommended blogs/techtalks on OOP and design pattern? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> I can suggest [https://blog.ploeh.dk](https://blog.ploeh.dk)

Focused on OOP design and some FP design.

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks!</comment></comment>


The state of Android development in 2013 - <AUTHOR> http://thetechblock.com/state-of-android-development-2013/

<comment><USER2> Surely this will improve with time as you said. The dev tools will only get better as Android continues to grow and enter into new markets like appliances, cars, etc.</comment>


Show HN: A site for code reviews - <AUTHOR>

Create a review as you would on pastebin, then any line in a review can be clicked to leave a comment. Comments appear under the line they reference and can be hidden by clicking the red tabs on the left or right. You can optionally toggle all comments by clicking the speech bubble at the top of the review. You don't have to have an account to create a review or leave a comment.
I plan on adding multi-file reviews as well as version control access in the next few releases. After that I plan on making some IDE plugins to allow users to send code directly to the site via their IDE.
Let me know what you think. (I haven't done a lot of IE testing yet so there could be some issues there)
https://codetique.com <comment><USER2> It might be just me but initially I had trouble working out how to hide the comments. It wasn't blatantly obvious to me what would happen when I clicked on the red tab. It might be helpful putting "Show" or "Hide" in the title of the tab?

<comment><AUTHOR> That's a good idea, the current titles for them aren't all that useful.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> One minor problem I found is that when commenting, the submit button shouldn't actually submit if the captcha is blank -- otherwise the entire comment gets lost as the page is reloaded. Otherwise, the site looks great!

<comment><AUTHOR> Oh good point. I completely forgot to check that.</comment></comment>


We need an international police force to fight cybercrime - <AUTHOR> http://betanews.com/2011/09/12/we-need-an-international-police-force-to-fight-cybercrime/?awesm=betane.ws_1wb&utm_campaign=&utm_medium=betane.ws-twitter&utm_source=direct-betane.ws&utm_content=twitter-publisher-main <comment><USER2> I agree that "online crime will continue to grow stronger and we might risk losing all the great benefits the Net has brought to us". But an international police presence is just another incarnation of a large and complicated "security patch" with a human element - patch it and pray it works. The legal implications and the countless variables (e.g., distinguishing legitimate vs illigitimate users - and more importantly the source of the latter - is just too monumental a task!) Geez, we have enough trouble as it is trying to stop the drug cartel - and at the very least we know the 'who' and the 'where' (relatively speaking).....</comment>


FAA Approves Boeing's Battery Fix for 787 - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/autopia/2013/04/faa-approves-boeing-787-battery-fix/

<comment><USER2> Before you fly on a 787, please note that the battery fires aren't the only early problem to hit that aircraft; it seems they have a problem with cracked windshields, which (unlike on conventional non-composite airliners) are bonded to the composite airframe rather than bolted into metal frames:

[http://www.airliners.net/aviation- forums/general_aviation/re...](http://www.airliners.net/aviation- forums/general_aviation/read.main/5657266/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Neither the airliners.net discussion nor the New York Times article seem to think this is a serious problem.

example on airliners.net: "The cracks are on the outer glass surface, which is non-structural. The glass is used as a wear surface since it resists scratching and pitting much better than the acrylics that are used for the main structural part of the window. So a "broken window" is not a big deal at all."

nytimes: " "Even considering that the 787 is a new aircraft, which tends to come with initial glitches, we are not seeing a higher incidence of reported problems compared to other aircraft," Mr. Yamada said."</comment></comment>


Ruby 1.9 compatibility: a three step ladder to bliss - <AUTHOR> http://www.elctech.com/articles/ruby-1-9-compatibility-a-three-step-ladder-to-bliss <comment><USER2> Flagged. At no point should a blog post ever have stick figures shooting at each other in the masthead.

<comment><USER3> They can shoot each other all they want, but audio is crossing the line.</comment></comment>


Yahoo to cut 2000 jobs - "we were facing an impending catastrophe" - <AUTHOR> http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303302504577323281769682236.html

<comment><USER2> <body> "nullnull" ...

lol</comment>


Blockchain Promises a Third Wave of Social Media - <AUTHOR> http://www.trustnodes.com/akasha-great-social-media-experiment <comment><USER2> _Though it seemed for a period that Reddit /Facebook ended the constant migration, the cool kids are once more on the lookout for a new coffee house as it has become clear the current platforms have many intolerable shortfallings._

Yeah, I guess there were people stupid enough to think Myspace was forever too, but that's not your entire demographic! I bet all the cool kids can't wait to switch over to the newest social media platform. Oh wait, all the cool kids are still on IRC, email, and personal websites.

 _The pre-alpha version is to be released sometime this month when we can all see how this works in practice, but from Alisie's description, the platform is a mixed combination of Medium, Twitter, Reddit and Facebook all in one._

Medium, Twitter, Reddit, and Facebok all in one?! Sounds legit.

 _Combined with the quadratic voting mechanism we mentioned earlier, the entire project becomes very interesting._

Yeah, I always felt like using the same voting system as bees would improve my social media experience. Super interesting.

The people who use Reddit, Facebook, and Hacker News(!) aren't desperately looking for an escape. They don't care. They have and have had plenty of places to switch to. They only care enough to get angry and then do nothing. That's what social media is. Getting mad about things and then doing nothing. If you actually care, do something besides up vote an angry post.

</comment><comment> aaron-santos I took some notes on social networking on the blockchain about a year ago during the big Reddit upheaval surrounding sub banning, the voat migration, et cetera. I see blockchain based social media as an eventuality for a subgroup of the population. The Akasha website[1] is unfortunately very short on details.

I'm not convinced quadratic voting is a solution at all. If user account creation has a fixed cost then there is always a number of upvotes for which it's more cost effective to create alts and upvote en mass.

The real solution is moderation as a form of patronage. There's a demand for moderation in all social media, the supply however is limited in Reddit's case by a volunteer-only force and other systems by salarying an in house staff. Fee based moderation by subscription turns into a signal selection mechanism.

If advertising isn't the signal you want to select for, subscribe to moderation feeds that block those accounts/posts. If you want to block racis(m/ts) subscribe to moderation feeds that block that content. Aggregate and remix moderation feeds at will and let a market develop.

[1] - [http://akasha.world/](http://akasha.world/)

<comment><USER3> Hello Aaron,

First of all thank you for taking the time to check out our project! Indeed the website feels a bit outdated atm as it was designed for the project announcement[1] and alpha signup, but we will change our website when we enter the alpha phase (Oct/Nov most likely).

We progressed quite a bit since the website release/announcement and we are now weeks away from sending pre-alpha invitations to the people who have signed up on our website.

The challenge you are pointing with regards to quadratic voting and proof of identity is indeed an interesting one and difficult to solve. Fortunately there are many bright minds in the Ethereum ecosystem and beyond who are working on this specific issue.

For us, especially in the pre-alpha/alpha stage, the quadratic voting is mainly used to support the authors with ETH for their contributions with minimal cognitive effort for the supporter - in a couple of clicks you could send anything from 1 cent to $1 for example.

There could be weird side effects such as a sea of alt ids created with the purpose of trolling, but it is worth mentioning that there are some costs associated with broadcasting these new identities on the blockchain so in some sense "trolling" will involve money.

That alone should discourage trolling to some extent, but again without real data and real people using the system this is just a theory. We will know more once the dapp is out in the wild :)

[1] - [http://blog.akasha.world/2016/05/03/unveiling- akasha/](http://blog.akasha.world/2016/05/03/unveiling-akasha/)

<comment> aaron-santos Thanks for the reply and good luck in your endeavors!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Hello everyone,

AKASHA founder here.

Looking forward to hearing your thoughts, happy to answer your questions!</comment>


Voicybot – free Telegram bot that converts all voice messages to text - <AUTHOR> Hello everyone! I've built a Telegram bot that converts all voice messages and audio files it gets to text. It's already installed at over 7300 chats and it has converted over 72,000 voice messages so far. You can get it and see the statistics on the official website: voicybot.com.<p>Let me know if you have any questions :) Hope you enjoy it! <comment><USER2> If it meets the guidelines, this might make a good 'Show HN'. Show HN guidelines: [https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html)</comment>


ShowHN: I built a Reddit.com Realtime mashup - <AUTHOR> http://www.scrolldit.com/?r=/new

<comment><USER2> Cool.

Although my first reaction was surprise at how awful the default front page of reddit is (I do use reddit but I don't subscribe to the pic- and meme-heavy subreddits).

How about text snippets for the text links?

<comment><AUTHOR> Just pushed out a new version with support for text snippets! Expect it within 10 minutes :) You like it?

<comment><USER2> That was quick! But... it's not working here. What I meant was, instead of just the title, also output a snippet of the linked page (similar to what Facebook does when you post a link).

<comment><AUTHOR> Mmm, I need to rely on external JSONp services, since I've to code everything clientside to keep it scalable. I'm not sure how I could fix this, anyone an idea?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Subreddit example: <http://www.scrolldit.com/?r=pics/new>

Everything is clientside javascript. Amazon Cloudfront is used as hosting (See [http://aaronblohowiak.com/using-amazon-s3-and-cloudfront- to-...](http://aaronblohowiak.com/using-amazon-s3-and-cloudfront-to-host-a- stat)). So scalability issues are impossible.

Works great on iPad/iPhone/Android. Any feedback?

<comment><USER3> looks down to me, I just see the Loading new posts ? is it slow ?

<comment><AUTHOR> Could be that your connection is a bit slow. It preloads the images (in order to fetch width & height) before it renders them. On slow 3G connections it could take a minute. I advice you to use wifi. Does it work after F5?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The new content pushing in from the top displaces content you may currently be looking at. If you are reading a text snippet, or starting an embedded video and new content comes in it's easy to lose where you were as the content pushes down the page and changes the columns as well.

<comment><AUTHOR> That is true. I haven't found an elegant solution for that, do you've a good idea? I thought about only loading new content when the 'scrolldit' logo is visible for a user.

<comment><USER4> Perhaps you could preload the content but not push it into the page. Then provide some kind of a visual indicator that new content is available. A slider on the side of the page that grows with the current position moving down the bar as more new content is available. You could then push that content into the page as they scroll up from the current position. This gives the user the benefit of knowing that there's new content available without the page shifting around the content they are viewing.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks ktsmith! Will note it down and see what's possible.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Very cool!!!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! Feel free to suggest new features :)</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Pomodoro Timer gadget? - <AUTHOR> Anybody can recommend a timer gadget that can be purchased which has a set of preset times and the alarm can be set/reset by simply pushing a button?<p>(e.g. https://www.amazon.ca/gp/product/B0002U72LS/ref=ox_sc_act_title_1?smid=A3DWYIK6Y9EEQB&psc=1) <comment><USER2> I use [https://www.amazon.ca/Polder-100-Minute-Mini-Timer- White/dp/...](https://www.amazon.ca/Polder-100-Minute-Mini-Timer- White/dp/B005014HB2/ref=sr_1_2?s=kitchen&ie=UTF8&qid=1477230229&sr=1-2&keywords=polder+timer) though it doesn't have multiple preset times.

I also find it helpful to run [https://freedom.to](https://freedom.to) during my poms.

</comment><comment><USER3> You don't need any timer but self-discipline.

The Practicing Mind: Developing Focus and Discipline in Your Life Master...Book [http://amzn.to/2e0p4CY](http://amzn.to/2e0p4CY)

</comment><comment><USER4> god those who use Emacs. org-pomodoro us really cool</comment>