Show HN: Simple IT Asset Management - <AUTHOR> http://www.sohoassets.com/ <comment><USER2> It's a nice and slick project but it is unfortunately not offering a lot of value over, say, a google spreadsheet with a form data entry.

Each organisation have their own rules about the data they want to track, so being able to customise the fields is a major requirement.

Also, you have to provide at least a way to generate asset tags/reference following some customisable numbering rules.

Then there is the bigger issue that Asset management usually doesn't stand on its own: it's usually tied up to financial reporting (what needs to be replaced for the next budget, depreciation, etc), issue tracking (what went wrong which each equipment), HR (to whom the equipment has been allocated to), security (where is the equipment, is it patched and up-to-date, ...).

So Asset management tools end-up being part of a larger system, and they need that flexibility. Being able to import/export data to CSV is nice, but if you are left to do everything else in other tools, then you are not making it worthwhile for someone to pay for what amounts to a flat list of items.

Data As iamdave pointed out, asset collection is also a major issue: most Asset Management tools rely on some network discovery and/or collection service that must be installed on each machine.

For instance, SpiceWorks[1] is free and it's a pretty good tool that does most of what's required for a medium sized company. Then you have Open Source tools like GPLi[2] and OCS[3] and others[4] that have been around for a while and provide pretty good coverage of IT Admin needs in terms of Asset Management.

So while a good start, if you want people to pay for your service, you'll need to provide something that is more accessible/more complete/better in some metric than what is already available for free.

If I were you, I'd make everything free, then add advanced features that people may want to pay, including custom development for enterprise customers who always have special needs.

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

[2]:[http://www.glpi-project.org/](http://www.glpi-project.org/)

[3]:[http://www.ocsinventory-ng.org/](http://www.ocsinventory-ng.org/)

[4]:[http://www.open-source- guide.com/en/Solutions/Infrastructure...](http://www.open-source- guide.com/en/Solutions/Infrastructure/It-asset-and-inventory-management)

</comment><comment><USER3> Try to compete with this if you want to be serious, Collins is fantastic stuff:

[http://tumblr.github.io/collins/](http://tumblr.github.io/collins/)

Also does this integrate with any accounting software such as Great Plains? Tamit is a several million piece of crap asset and po management system that is not impossible to create a better version of. Look at both of these for ideas on how to grow your product.

<comment><USER4> Thanks for posting this. I've never heard of it before, but a brief look at its Github page/repo looks seriously impressive.

<comment><USER3> No problem! For reference, I spent almost 2.5 years buildings my company basically an identical clone of Collins, but in Python with Django / Django Rest Framework for our internal server and asset management.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Good start. I was hoping to see a bit more granularity in the details; does/will it support custom fields?

For example, I don't immediately care about PO date/owners. My PMO does, but when I think asset management, I want _facts_. What's the IP address of that one node? Where is it located? Last known status (up, offline, maintenance)?

Is there anything by way of discovering devices? Will this tool let me scan devices on a LAN or a I relegated to just entering line items into the webforms? If it's the latter, then there isn't much improvement over the 'spreadsheet' problem.

This is just my constructive feedback having gone from startup to enterprise and everywhere in between at the senior level of IT Operations, but many small shops have SysAdmins doing more than waiting for something to break to sit and key every asset (especially networked) into a tool that isn't giving them beneficial information about said assets.

It just doesn't feel like there's any benefit to using this over Excel given the demo.

<comment><USER6> There's a fine line between asset management and operational management. IP address is typically an ops issue, as is up or down status.

Probably more interesting from an asset management perspective are quality attributes like mean time to failure, which might inform purchasing or renewal decisions.

<comment><USER5> Just anecdote, based on experience but if you're in the market size the OP's product is geared towards, asset and operational management often have _considerable_ overlap.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is a brutal market. It's crowded, and Microsoft is making it a checkbox in O365.

Find a niche that you can sell into... That's way more important than the software.

<comment><AUTHOR> that is great feedback. i got a feedback for a specific niche which I think i will pivot and target.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> thanks everyone for the great feedback and responses. This was well received that there either needs to be lots of improvements or to target a specific niche within this. i've taken all the advice and will be re-using this to target a specific niche after a feedback i received through the site.

thanks again guys. this was truly helpful

<comment><USER5> Good luck to you! I hope to stumble across this in the future and see you doing great things :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> How does it compare against Snipe IT, [http://snipeitapp.com/](http://snipeitapp.com/) ? amongst others paid solutions.

What is more wanted for a tool like this is integration with in house systems.

I like the effort, but is a really uphill in this niche.

</comment><comment><USER9> Is it possible to see any screenshots without having to signup?

<comment><AUTHOR> there is no sign up required. if you click on "View Demo" you can login using the "demo/demo" account to use the system.</comment></comment>


Quantum fluctuations can jiggle objects on the human scale - <AUTHOR> https://phys.org/news/2020-07-quantum-fluctuations-jiggle-human-scale.html <comment><USER2> See previous thread: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23708779](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23708779)</comment>


Twilio SMS price halved to a penny per message - <AUTHOR> http://www.twilio.com/pricing/

<comment><USER2> First of all, I love Twilio, have used it in production apps, and will continue to use it in production apps.

Just want to give a heads up about a very big limitation of Twilio SMS: It only delivers to US and Canadian phone numbers (<http://www.twilio.com/faq/international>). If you are building an app with any sort of international user base, you will need to look elsewhere. Clickatell has an API, delivers to almost every country, but their interface, billing, and customer support are painfully terrible. (<http://www.clickatell.com/products/gateway.php>).

So Twilio, do you plan to introduce International SMS support?

<comment><USER3> We currently have it in beta. You can sign up for access here: <http://www.twilio.com/international-sms> (Note that page says 2c/msg, but it is 1c/msg in the beta as well)

<comment><USER4> I wish I had read the FAQs properly, didn't realise you couldn't send international! I signed up for your beta though, I want to do SMS messaging from the app but I have always found other services so expensive, I used to use Esendex in the UK but the plans drain cash so quickly.

I just wanted to send despatch confirmations through an ecommerce application. If you could do it for 3-4p GBP that would still be very cheap.

Signed up and ready to go on the beta though

<comment><AUTHOR> Their current international pricing matches domestic, so you'd be paying about .6p GBP. Cheap cheap.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Exactly 30 days after competitor Tropo lowered their SMS prices to a penny per message: [http://blog.tropo.com/2011/05/11/announcing-new-lower-sms- pr...](http://blog.tropo.com/2011/05/11/announcing-new-lower-sms-pricing/)

The joys of competition :-)

<comment><USER6> Just to avoid any confusion for Twilio customers on this thread, we lowered SMS pricing to $0.01/message on the evening of May 20th (yes, Tropo went first), so that is what you'll see reflected in your Twilio account. The reason there is so much buzz today is because we just announced the change today in our newsletter/blog, along with the release of the new "Apps" feature in the developer dashboard.

We're proud to keep reducing prices for SMS, first from the original $0.03 down to $0.02 back in September, and now this price cut. It's our customers and their business that make this possible, through better economies of scale that allow us to reduce SMS cost for developers while still making it financially viable for us as a business. Affordable SMS is opening up incredible use cases.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is incredible. The lowest price advertised by Clickatell is $0.012/msg, and that price can only be reached by paying for 500,000 messages or more - that is, paying $6000 or more.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> This has to be welcome news for GroupMe and other Twilio SMS heavy startups.

</comment><comment><USER8> I hate to be downbeat but I am using Twilio for my next service and I would prefer to have Twilio stay in business for the next 10 years then to lower prices to a cut rate amount.

<comment><USER3> We'd prefer to stay in business too! We're growing and as we get bigger we get better rates that we can pass on to you and the numbers still work. So you can have both: lower prices and we'll still be around in 10 years (and hopefully the next 50 years after that).

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> It is fascinating to see the market develop so fast. I have created <http://www.longnumbers.com> as an industry portal. I need feedback. Please tell me what y'all think.

</comment><comment><USER10> Any hope of reducing the outbound calls to 1c/min as well?

It's cheaper for me to use <http://flowroute.com/> \+ Asterisk directly than twilio.

<comment><USER3> We've had 3 price drops on our services in the past year, so while I don't have anything I can promise you for outbound calls, we're committed to giving you the best price we are able to provide.

</comment></comment><comment> d135-1r43 Does anyone know an European service that is as great as Twilio? All provider here in Germany suck more or less, offer a bad API and are totally overpriced.

<comment><USER5> Check Tropo.com. It accepts customers from outside the US and international SMS's are 2 cents a piece. Not all operators are supported, though. E.g. there is one operator in Belgium Tropo doesn't send to. Your mileage may vary (Germany will probably be better covered).

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Nice, now only $65 per megabyte. You could txt someone an entire Blu-Ray disk for only $3.3 million!

<comment><USER12> Yes, the prices carriers set are ridiculous. But we all still use and love SMS for some reason.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> IDK if they are aimed at the same market, but HeyWire messages are free.

<comment><AUTHOR> Completely separate market. Twilio is targeted at business applications-- sending and receiving SMS via an API. It's not meant so you can text your friend, it's meant so you can enable SMS in your app. The pricing has fallen quite a bit, it was 3 cents per message when SMS functionality was introduced in Feb 2010.</comment></comment>


How Tolkien created Middle-earth - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/may/31/drawn-into-tolkiens-world-exhibition <comment><USER2> One of the most touching aspects of the background of LotR is Tolkien's basis for Sam Gamgee:

 _" My 'Samwise' is indeed ... largely a reflexion of the English soldier—grafted on the village-boys of early days, the memory of the privates and my batmen that I knew in the 1914 War, and recognized as so far superior to myself."_

[https://johngarth.wordpress.com/2014/02/13/sam-gamgee-and- to...](https://johngarth.wordpress.com/2014/02/13/sam-gamgee-and-tolkiens- batmen/)

<comment><USER3> Seems that English society learned quite a bit from those two wars (at a steep price though). Sadly it seems those lessons are fading as the generations leave.

<comment><USER2> One small lesson being not to deploy friends from the same area in the same unit where they are all likely to be killed at the same time:

[https://www.iwm.org.uk/history/the-pals-battalions-of-the- fi...](https://www.iwm.org.uk/history/the-pals-battalions-of-the-first-world- war)

<comment><USER4> I'm not sure what you or the author of that IWM page mean - today the British Army still has a county regimental system, with the specific idea that the soldiers in a unit will have come from the same areas, have the same friends, be part of the same families, and so on.

<comment><USER5> I agree, the blurb describes in detail what a "Pals Battalion" is, but not why it was actually problematic for the communities from which that battalion originated from.

Basically, large groups of young men from the same community (hundreds to thousands), would all join up patriotically into the same battalion. After all, if they were going to join a war, they might as well join together with those that they know and already have bonds with. Unfortunately, the unintended consequences were those same entire battalions could be wiped out in a single day (like at the Somme), and now you had a community losing nearly all of it's young men at the exact same time, with hundreds of families in the same area now missing a son at the exact same time. As one would expect, the effects of this would be devastating mentally, and demographically enough so as to destroy smaller communities that had sent the majority of their sons and now no longer had fathers for the next generation.

<comment><USER4> But my point is this is exactly how Army regiments worked before, after, and today.

The units recruit from specific geographical areas.

<comment><USER6> Today they recruit much smaller numbers. Recruitment in the Great War meant _mass_ recruitment -- Kitchener's first call for volunteers in August 1914 brought in nearly 500,000 men all by itself, and nearly 2.5 million in total would volunteer before voluntary recruitment was finally abandoned in favor of conscription in 1916 (see [https://www.bl.uk/world-war-one/articles/voluntary- recruitin...](https://www.bl.uk/world-war-one/articles/voluntary-recruiting)). For comparison, the entire modern-day British Army only has about 80,000 regular troops.

Moreover, a battalion was a unit of around a thousand men, so the "pals battalions" \-- where men were encouraged to volunteer by being allowed to serve with people they knew -- ended up being drawn from _extremely_ narrow geographical areas. There were pals battalions of men who all worked in the same factory, of men who'd all attended school together, of the players from the local football club and all their fans. So when one of these battalions got wiped out, as many did in the battles of the Somme, a very specific community would suddenly more or less cease to exist.

<comment><USER7> Isn't the point (being missed?) that militarily a fighting group with close ties will fight harder for I've another, they already have a deal of camaraderie - that can be grown in months of training.

IIRC some ancient Greek states exploited romantic partnerships to increase _esprit de corps_ in cadres of men. Part of the thinking seemingly being that one wouldn't flee the battlefield and leave a sexual partner so easily as otherwise.

Of course what's good for making a fighting force isn't necessarily good for the rest of society. Or at least there's a cost to that benefit.

<comment><USER8> Why do you presume that all people from the same place are automatically friends or even like each other? When you have people with histories there's camaraderie, but there are also rivalries, stolen girlfriends, family disputes, revenges, all kinds of histories and skeletons in the closet that can cause problems later on. On the other hand, starting on a clean slate avoids this - and in my own experience at least, spending 3+ months in a bootcamp 24/7, eating, training and sleeping with the same guys creates by itself quite a strong bonds between people and a sense of brotherhood (united against the officers mostly, but still the brotherhood).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The OP is actually reporting a new Tolkien exhibition in Oxford [0] rather than comprehensively describing Tolkien's creative processes. The exhibition and accompanying coffee-table book are about the novels rather than the recent films.

I've already booked my tickets - the exhibition is the most significant for years (if not ever) and will move from the UK to New York later in the year. And then Paris.

[0] [https://tolkien.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/](https://tolkien.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/)

<comment><USER10> Do you perhaps know when & where the New York exhibition will be? I'm a lifelong Tolkein reader, and would love to see it.

<comment><USER11> The Interwebs tell me Morgan Library from January 25 to May 12 in 2019. I'll be in NYC in November; hopefully I'll make it in the spring sometime.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Entirely tangential, but the best album I've heard is Music Inspired by The Lord of the Rings by Bo Hansson. Instrumental progressive rock that, at least for me, entirely evokes a fantasy-like feeling and might even be, dare I say, superior to Howard Shores' score for the films.

Now that I think about it, Tolkien and works related to him seem to have set the bars for a few things - worldbuilding, fantasy literature, epic films, etc.; not to mention more than a few things that have been directly inspired by his works.

<comment><USER13> Never heard of this before, but from what I just listened to it sounds pretty great, very ambient.

It's kind of weird that it's so old, it was published on vinyl in 1970, and according to wikipedia, this album hit the top 40 in the UK (idk why but I just automatically assumed it was much more recent, and not well known). So, it came out right around the same time that Zeppelin was putting out their first albums, and LZ IV also had several songs referencing lotr. Makes me wonder if rock musicians who wrote lotr-themed music was a sterotype/trend in the 70s.

<comment><USER12> Glad you like it!

If I had, to I might ascribe to the fact that the 60s and 70s apparently had a resurgence in popularity of Lord of the Rings as a new generation discovered the works.

This for some reason reminded me of a video in which Larry Wall says that Hobbits embody the three virtues of a programmer: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G49RUPv5-NU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G49RUPv5-NU)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Anyone else nostalgic about the Middle Earth and early D&D artwork?

<comment><USER15> Yes. The early D&D artwork had so much more charm. The artwork they've used in the last 20 years is often very technically good, but it's also often kind of bland and generic. I usually prefer the simple line drawings of people like Jeff Dee and Erol Otus than the ultra-slick stuff you see today.

You can also see the same progression in the covers of Dragon Magazine over the years. The artwork for the first 5 years or so was often not the greatest technically, but there was much more variety than in later years when the magazine got slicker and fancier.

I think Tolkien's own artwork fits into this mold. It was very simple, but it captured a feel that is often lacking in more recent artwork, and let's not forget the immortal Hildebrandt brothers, who's style I always loved. Their character work was always amazing, but their architecture could be really bland. But ultimately it was a simple style that really captured the spirit of the books and the times in which they were done.

<comment><USER16> The art in Magic: The Gathering followed a very similar arc. Cards have absolutely amazing art today in terms of technique, but many older cards conveyed a sense of charm and whimsy that's gone now.

<comment><USER17> This is why I often end up with lots of old lands in my newer decks. I just love the way they're drawn. My friends don't get it, but to me the art is just so much _more_.

That said, the newer sets do still produce art with that charm from time to time. But it's much rarer than it used to be.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> There is so much to appreciate here. The bit about starting to create an elvish language really stands out to me in painting his passion for this world.

<comment><USER19> I think the story is rather the opposite. Tolkien began work on the elvish languages (plural, yes) first, and then started creating a mythology to fit them. The Lord of the Rings later grew out of that mythology.

<comment><USER20> Is that based on other research you've done? The article says the language predates the books but doesn't say specifically that the stories grew out of the language.

My sense is he did a lot of work in parallel and let the world find itself among many mediums.

<comment><USER21> its largely correct based on a lot of what I read. i think it may have been a more organic process of co-creation, where the language informed the world&story building, and vice-versa. But its definitely mistaken to think that he just created the languages to populate his world, as some kind of afterthought.

<comment><USER22> The fact that the elves have this one-way trip they can make over the sea to some sort of magical neverland, a central part of the plot for elves in the lord of the rings and in fact all of his stories, is pretty much only for the reason that it makes an interesting playground for linguistic evolution. He has the two main elvish languages evolve in different contexts, with one receiving influence from the other languages of middle earth and new generations of elves (think: the romance languages), and the other having more conservative influences (think: ecclesiastical latin) but sometimes influenced by middle earth elves making a one-way return trip over the sea. He explicitly talks about major parts of middle earth history being invented for the purpose of exploring the languages, not the other way around IIRC from the biographies.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Does anyone know why Fellowship of the ring sucked?(btw, I really liked a few parts, particularly Tom)

It seems so different from every other book Ive read(only hobbit-RotK).

Like did he add fluff in the forest because of publishing standards at the time?

<comment><USER9> He wasn't influenced by publishing standards to make it longer. LOTR was in fact quite long by the standards of the day and had to be split into three separate volumes as a result.

<comment><USER22> Actually it was six volumes reduced to 3...

<comment><USER17> The "books" of LOTR are just super-chapters, really. He never intended for the six "books" to be published separately; they just divide portions of the story. He was very much against publishing LOTR in separate volumes, and only did so because his publishing agent told him it would never be published otherwise. It was too big a risk for them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> When I was growing up, Tolkien's works were some of the few books sold in the church's bookstore. As I've grown older, I've grown more critical of the simple narratives in most literature, that make frequently abhorrent attitudes and acts possible. In the case of Tolkien, he literally dehumanizes the enemies. One example that stands out is the "light hearted" sequence where Legolas and Gimli hold a contest of who can kill the most orcs. These days, recognizing this type of storytelling, with all its justifications, is very often part of the problem, I try to find works that help develop more nuanced perspectives.

Edited to remove bad reference to Nanking Massacre. The point is that glorious battle stories with simple morals are prevalent, and are a big part of Tolkein's stature.

<comment><USER25> > _This was likely inspired by an event preceding the Nanking Massacre_

There is about no likelihood that Tolkien heard about a despicable war crime committed by an Axis power, involving an evil, flagrant disregard for human life, and decided to use that as material for two of his "good" characters. Nothing in Tolkien's works, worldview, or influences aligns with that sort of thought. This is the author who despised German publishers inquiring about his Aryan descent, even though, being of German heritage and a prominent scholar of Anglo-Saxon/Norse/Germanic literature, Tolkien could have perfectly flattered the Nazi mythology [0]. But in your opinion, while hating Hitler and the Nazis for treating Jews as second-class citizens (in 1938, when the persecution was not yet elevated to mass execution), he simultaneously decided, "well, this Japanese massacre of innocent civilians sounds like a fun bit of material, I'll use that"?

More realistically, the influence, as most of his influences, is in Anglo- Saxon and Norse literature, where accounts and songs of battles often make them appear almost like sport, with contests and even gamification. I suppose that is one method of mentally bracing oneself for such a horrifying activity, and for attempting to process the event afterwards. It is part of a common mindset of soldiers at war, one that even the Japanese murderers were engaging, albeit in a perverted misuse. In that view, both Tolkien and the Japanese were drawing from a (very) distantly related source, but much different in purpose, and certainly neither influenced by the other.

[0] [https://io9.gizmodo.com/5892697/whats-classier-than-jrr- tolk...](https://io9.gizmodo.com/5892697/whats-classier-than-jrr-tolkien- telling-off-nazis-absolutely-nothing)

<comment><USER24> OK, I was wrong about the very specific influence. But it's ultimately the same thing; flatten the idea of the enemy to make a sport of killing reasonable, and more entertaining stories. That may be an appropriate thing to do in the most dire circumstances, but it's still a disturbing moral choice given that "evil" most often has to be invented.

<comment><USER17> The thing you're missing is that Tolkien didn't "dehumanize" the enemy, because the enemy were literally not humans. Orcs are a deformation — a creation intended to be evil from the beginning. They have no inherent good in them, as a fact. I believe Tolkien wrote about this in some of his letters: that the Orcs are really truly evil creatures, by design, and that questioning that fact is against the purpose of their existence in the story. They're a manifestation of the evil of Morgoth.

In contrast, bad _men_ are handled quite differently. Shortly after Frodo and Sam meet Faramir in _The Two Towers_ they find themselves on the edges of a battle between the Rangers and a company of Haradrim (supposedly "evil" men from the East):

> Sam, eager to see more, went now and joined the guards. He scrambled a > little way up into into one of the larger of the bay-trees. For a moment he > caught a glimpse of swarthy men in red running down the slope some way off > with green-clad warriors leaping after them, hewing them down as they fled. > Arrows were thick in the air. Then suddenly straight over the rim of their > sheltering bank, a man fell, crashing through the slender trees, nearly on > top of them. He came to rest in the fern a few feet away, face downward, > green arrow-feathers sticking from his neck below a golden collar. His > scarlet robes were tattered, his corslet of overlapping brazen plates was > rent and hewn, his black plaits of hair braided with gold were drenched with > blood. His brown hand still clutched the hilt of a broken sword.

> It was Sam's first view of a battle of Men against Men, and he did not like > it much. He was glad that he could not see the dead face. He wondered what > the man's name was and where he came from; and if he was really evil of > heart, or what lies or threats had led him on the long march from his home; > and if he would not really rather have stayed there in peace – all in a > flash of thought which was quickly driven from his mind.

Though this is certainly the most explicit instance of a character questioning whether another is truly evil, the theme is present throughout the novel.

(Excerpt copied from "Of Herbs and Stewed Rabbit", the fourth chapter in _The Two Towers_ , pages 660-661 in the 50th Anniversary Edition of _The Lord of the Rings_ as published by HarperCollins in 2004.)

<comment><USER24> The willful creatures in the story are representations of humans just as much as talking ants in a Pixar story. Or, the story has no real relevance at all because it's pure fantasy. You can say the stories are about the humans on one side of war, but there are better examples of war novels with balanced perspectives without the fantasy elements. LoTR probably mainly rose to prominance due to the Hobbit being sold as a children's tale, the provenance my comment starts with.

Another comment includes the phrase "orc-crowd" from one of Tolkien's letters. Perhaps Tolkien (to comment on him personally this time) decided to vilify certain behaviours, which is a common enough response.

<comment><USER17> > The willful creatures in the story are representations of humans just as > much as talking ants in a Pixar story.

No, I disagree. Tolkien was emphatic that his stories were not allegories for anything at all.

If you were right, then why would Tolkien also have bad humans? Why not just make _all_ of the enemy into orcs/trolls/etc? Why have the dichotomy if not to show that _humans_ are capable of being both bad and good, thus separating them from truly evil creatures like orcs?

> Or, the story has no real relevance at all because it's pure fantasy.

Yes, that's correct. The story is pure fantasy; it doesn't serve to "teach" about anything. It's literally just a story.

> LoTR probably mainly rose to prominance due to the Hobbit being sold as a > children's tale, the provenance my comment starts with.

I think LOTR became prominent because it literally invented modern high- fantasy and created a gigantic world the scope of which had never really been seen before. The Hobbit touched on it, but LOTR really goes into far more depth about many things than The Hobbit ever did.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Op-Ed: Safari Is the New Internet Explorer - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/06/op-ed-safari-is-the-new-internet-explorer/

<comment><USER2> I have been having a lot of issues with Safari lately. When it comes to new web features, buggy support is much worse than no support. For example, flexbox on ios.

Apparently, there is a reason and its not me :)</comment>


Ask HN: Do you have to pay for the iPhone SDK for each developer? - <AUTHOR>

Is there a link to how I can get the 3.0 SDK without having to pay a second time? I'm joining another guy at my company on a project. <comment><USER2> The iPhone 3.0 SDK is available for free from Apple's Developer Connection. I just downloaded it this afternoon.

<comment><USER3> It's free if you don't want to put the program on an iPhone. Good place to start though. If you have one person with the paid SDK you can send your code to them and have them compile and submit it to the app store without having to pay a second time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> on the same lines does anyone that how it is possible for a developer to be able to do everything from downloading the development kit to creating provisioning profiles and certificates, binary and uploading it without being able to access the contracts/sales/finance report?

<comment><USER3> You might be able to do it if you have the corporate version of the developer license. I don't know for sure though.</comment></comment>


Mesosphere Launches Elastic Mesos, Makes Setting Up A Mesos Cluster Simple - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2013/11/12/mesosphere-launches-elastic-mesos-makes-setting-up-a-mesos-cluster-a-3-step-process/ Mesosphere, a startup that focuses on developing Mesos, a technology that makes running complex distributed applications easier, is launching Elastic Mesos today. This [free] new product makes setting up a Mesos cluster on Amazon Web Services a basic three-step process that asks you for the size of the cluster you want to set up, your AWS credentials and an email where you want to get notifications about your cluster's state. <comment> josh-wrale \- Does this run in a VPC? \- Is this CloudFormation-based? \- Is this Chef/OpsWorks-based? \- What is the underlying distro/AMI? \- What's your take on the difficulty involved in making this HIPAA-compliant (encryption at rest and in transit)? \- [https://elastic.mesosphere.io/](https://elastic.mesosphere.io/) is 502 right now

Sounds awesome!</comment>


My Tests Are Slow - <AUTHOR> https://truveris.github.io/articles/my-tests-are-slow/ <comment><USER2> > Too, the database state is inspected to check for any side effects.

This is such a weird sentence. "Too,"? Replace with "Also,"

[https://stancarey.wordpress.com/2011/12/01/too-its-a- strange...](https://stancarey.wordpress.com/2011/12/01/too-its-a-strange- usage/)</comment>


_ - <AUTHOR> http://alwayson.goingon.com/permalink/post/9894 <comment><AUTHOR> I've gotten used to using submit to find the reddit discussion for a page. Turns out there's no duplication-detection here on news.yc yet. Apologies. Nice that they allow editing the title.</comment>


Show HN: Kailua, Type Checker and IDE Support for Lua - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/devcat-studio/kailua <comment><USER2> This was posted on HN as I went to sleep in Kailua, after the $100k thing.</comment>


Who else publishes his startup's roadmap? - <AUTHOR> http://pinboard.in/roadmap I've just stumbled over this roadmap by some startup and now I'm wondering if anyone else also publishes the roadmap of his startup?<p>I'm using a public pivotaltracker for my own startup but this one is really inspiring. <comment><USER2> I don't because I'm a girl... :0

<comment><AUTHOR> "or her". But then some team might complain, let alone all the transgender. Can we, just for a second, assume good faith and instead inspect your wise (but girly) words?

PS: As a foreigner learning German, do you notice the small differences in German? I have a somewhat disappointed view on the matter of these pathetic and almost zynic gendering of language. What's the point of it as long as women here in Austria earn 30% less than men do? It's wrong to believe that things can change by using a different wording.

<comment><USER2> Well it does make a difference to me. So there's one data point.

I used to think like you do... some things changed my mind. At MIT they (my professors, colleagues and textbooks) always used non-gendered language. Here's a good essay by Douglas R. Hofstadter that got me thinking about the issue <http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655/readings/purity.html></comment></comment></comment>


Researcher: free WiFi should use "free" password to protect users - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/security/news/2010/11/researcher-free-wifi-should-use-free-password-to-protect-users.ars

<comment><USER2> It's an interesting concept, but having a known wireless password really won't protect anyone. I'm perfectly able to capture all of your traffic over the air and then decrypt it. If I go the other route with a MITM attack, then it doesn't really matter. Heck, I can even run my own wireless AP from my laptop and simply use SSLStrip, etc.

With that being said though, I brought these concerns up to a friend about why public APs have security, and his belief is that if it stops even one person from sniffing your traffic then it's a success.

It'd be a lot easier if most people were, at the very least, familiar with the word VPN.</comment>


Stephen Hawking: God did not create Universe - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-11161493?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter <comment><USER3> >he concludes the Big Bang was an inevitable consequence of the laws of physics

The laws of Physics then, how were they created.

Seriously with all respect to Hawkings great achievements in Physics/Cosmology this is not a question that can be answered by Physics.

When we talk about creation within our universe we're always talking about transformative action on existing matter/energy never on _ex nihilo_ creation (I don't consider particle-antip pairs, like in Hawking radiation to be _ex nihilo_ ). There is no example in science of creation from nothing except the supposed big bang (for which there are many dissenting and conflicting theories, some of which - brane theory say - are quite handy looking).

The final quote is weak, "It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going", and doesn't address the question.

It's not necessary that there was a watch factory that created my watch but it's as close to certain as one can get that that is how it was created.

Aside: I wonder, quite cynically, if Hawking has done his time, made his [massive] contribution and now is clawing for attention. Certainly these 2 last stories - God and aliens - appear to be rather out on a limb.

<comment><USER4> _I don't consider particle-antip pairs, like in Hawking radiation to be ex nihilo_

That's an odd thing to say. What do you think creates them? And more to the point what evidence do you have for this.

<comment><USER3> They're fluctuations in the vacuum in a naive sense but in Quantum Field Theory (QFT) I recall we considered the vacuum to be basically a soup of particle-antip pairs; in Bekstein-Hawking radiation one considers either that the antip falls in from the area of the event horizon or that the particle tunnels out from inside the horizon - I can't really do the full evidence bit, that's just standard physics though.

Indeed, I'm rather out of the loop now, but I don't think there's experimental evidence to support Hawking radiation yet and that there's an alteration that is more predictive in some way.

In _ex nihilo_ creation the vacuum itself (I know!) is being created, the space into which the stuff sits, the energy in fields pervading the space, the unseen dimensions (total dimensions is 10 in superstring theory, 11 in brane, IIRC) and, along with that vacuum, time is created too.

Indeed taking a standard physics approach it's hard to see how you can model change before time exists as something that doesn't exist can't change and if time isn't changing then within our physics nothing else is. Creation of the human-perceived time dimension seems to require another time like dimension if it's to be modelled in some type of meta-physics (by which I don't mean the philosophical discipline).

<comment><USER4> First off "standard physics" is wrong. Newtonian physics if full of holes, but so is QM at the edges. However, in QM you really have to take that approach that energy is only conserved _on average_ otherwise things like quantum tunneling don't work or require time travel etc. From what I can tell, conservation of energy for large system is simply the most probable event, but it's not the only option.

Secondly the only meaningful way to talk about this stuff is with math or data. When the experimental data fits the calculations you have a working theory, but you can't intuit this stuff. Talking about a "ocean of virtual particles" sounds right but it's not accurate.

<comment><USER3> I'm aware that the Standard Model is provably not accurate in many instances (that's not what I meant by "standard" and I certainly didn't mean Newtonian as I thought was plain from the context; perhaps something like exoteric is closer to my intended meaning). I don't think I attempted to pass of anything Newtonian as current thinking, indeed I thought my slightly hand-wavy dealing of QFT made it clear that I understood how such things that give rise to Heisenberg's UP allow tunnelling phenomena.

>Secondly the only meaningful way to talk about this stuff is with math or data.

I've been out of theoretical physics for some time, in any case I don't suppose that I'm going to give a treatise on Hawking radiation in a HN post (even if I could). Indeed, as I thought - and have now checked there is a variation of the theory for quantum gravity that seems to have more predictive power, but that doesn't mean that Hawking radiation is not a working theory. That would be like saying Newtonian mechanics is not a working theory - <USER2> works as a non-relativistic approximation. Just as general relativity is considered a low energy approximation of an unknown gravitational QFT.

>Talking about a "ocean of virtual particles" sounds right but it's not accurate.

I subscribe to physical laws and unfalsified theories being the best description of reality and not being reality themselves. As such, in the context, it made sense to me to consider the vacuum as particle-antip pairs as it aids ready understanding of the assumed mechanisms taking place in Bekenstein-Hawking radition.

Malcolm Browne, "New Directions in Physics" (as quoted on Wikipedia) > _"According to quantum theory, the vacuum contains neither matter nor energy, but it does contain fluctuations, transitions between something and nothing in which potential existence can be transformed into real existence by the addition of energy.(Energy and matter are equivalent, since all matter ultimately consists of packets of energy.) Thus, the vacuum's totally empty space is actually a seething turmoil of creation and annihilation, which to the ordinary world appears calm because the scale of fluctuations in the vacuum is tiny and the fluctuations tend to cancel each other out."_

Anyhow, these esoteric details aside I'm at a loss to see where this is relevant to the matter at hand?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It's always amusing to see physicists, no matter how bright, step into metaphysics without the slightest idea of what they're doing, or even that they're doing it.

The universe does not necessarily exist. Something or someone had to create it from nothing at some point (which we can call the beginning of time).

Even the concept of time is a function of a changing material universe (time is a measure of change).

Aristotle figured all this out about 3000 years ago. Even though his physics was crude, I wonder why people ignore his metaphysics? I suppose simply through ignorance and neglect, and lack of modern attention to the topic.

My brother has started an Institute for the Study of Nature (<http://isnature.org>) to address exactly these issues, and has found some very encouraging support among modern scientists, fairly thinly scattered about various fields.

<http://isnature.org/about.htm> is a good summary of this new exploration.

(He also started it after becoming disillusioned with the intelligent design movement, which has become both a-scientific and anti-philosophical. Or, at least, that's my weak understanding of what he's told me.)

<comment><USER6> "The universe does not necessarily exist. Something or someone had to create it from nothing at some point (which we can call the beginning of time)."

Not necessarily. The universe could have been existing "forever". If something created it, who created the creator? if this creator is "special" why not the universe?

<comment><USER5> Now you are using the "uncreated creator" argument of Aristotle, who proved that there must be, at the back of all creation, one unmoved mover, one uncreated creator, etc.

<comment><USER6> He didn't "prove", it's just an argument. The "all things have a mover" doesn't have to apply to the universe. (If it was proven then there would be no atheists right?). Also the "unmoved mover" could be the universe itself, why not?

I can perfectly imagine the universe being forever the same as a creator being forever (if anything the first is easier since we have no evidence of the latter).

<comment><USER5> Yes, if everyone thought very carefully and honestly about the contingency of material beings and what that implies about the existence of the universe, they'd all be at least theists. ;-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Summary of the article:

The Universe could have been created without God therefore the Universe was created without God.

Not sure how much of the bad argument is the BBC's fault.

</comment><comment><USER8> 5 hours ago (3 hours before jacquesm), I submitted the same story with a slightly different title (and with a clean URL)

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1655658>

An example of A/B testing on hacker news submission titles! Or perhaps just having a more recognized username?

<comment><USER9> Yours was probably just submitted at an unfortunate time with little user activity from the Americas.

<comment><USER8> Yes thats true, but I think it does highlight an issue with submitting 'dirty urls' (I realise this is a strong term)

Based on what has just happened, I could look for a submission that is doing ok and resubmit it with a different title when the Americas wakes up. Of course I'm not saying that is what happened its just a possibility.

Would make for a lot of duplicated stories.

<comment><USER9> There's not a lot you can realistically do about it in an automated way.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I saw on this page a link to another story titled "Hawking warns over alien beings" and it made me wonder... do most people that don't believe that God created the universe believe in aliens? And if not, why?

<comment><USER11> There are people for whom aliens fill the same "unknowable higher power" role that deities typically fill. But these people usually also believe that aliens have played some active role in life on Earth.

Hawking, on the other hand, believes that intelligent life _could_ exist somewhere else -- that terrestrial life isn't that special. That's not quite the same thing as "believing in" aliens. It's like the difference between "believing God exists" and "believing God could exist".

<comment><USER3> Is there any way to show that aliens haven't played an active role in life on Earth though? We consider terra-forming (there was a story about Darwin doing something akin to it on Ascension Is. IIRC) as a natural way we could extend our reach to other planets. If there is intelligent alien life, or was, could it not have terraformed our planet.

> Interesting parallels to various theologies and running start theories go > here <.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> "Stephen Hawking warns over making contact with aliens"

<http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/8642558.stm>

(Also from his new book)

</comment><comment><USER13> And yet nothing changes.</comment>


When the cows come home - <AUTHOR> https://www.1843magazine.com/features/when-the-cows-come-home <comment><USER2> Sure... I would love to play Stardew Valley in "real life" too but it's hard work and economically it's not that lucrative... Most of them got their land for free because it was in the family and when you look at their individual stories:

"Her biggest challenge is staying in the black; she makes just enough to live"

"The house that Gherpelli and Piana live in, and the land on which their greenhouse sits, have been leveraged as collateral for their bank loan, along with the homes of a few family members."

"He has taken up bee-keeping, with 200 hives distributed in ten apiaries around a neighbouring valley, selling his honey under the label Dietro al Monte. He needs twice as many hives to make a living."

"So far they have been able to support themselves and run their enterprise by pooling their own savings, selling their honey and drastically reducing living costs, but it is hard graft. Other than occasional forays to Turin to see friends, they spend their time working their farm."

<comment><USER3> > Sure... I would love to play Stardew Valley in "real life" too but it's hard > work and economically it's not that lucrative...

The thing is... some people have to "play Stardew Valley in "real life"" so you can have things to eat. How come their job isn't more stable and they don't have the time to play Silicon Valley App of the day Sim 2019 ?

<comment><USER4> Small time farmers are not competitive with large scale industrial farming. In general society regards this as a good thing, since industrial farming allows us to pursue jobs other than farming. I wouldn't want to live in a world where we still require 90% of the population to be farmers.

<comment><USER3> But large scale industrial farmers don't have time to play Silicon Valley App of the day Sim 2019 either.

It's been debated to death and I am not sure the benefits of large scale farming outweigh smaller units.

Now you say they "play" Stardew valley... 60-80 hours a week in the field and having to take odd jobs to pay the farm's bill doesn't sound like "playing" to me. Actually, that's really aggressive to mock people like that.

<comment><USER2> Good point, and it wasn't my intent to mock the farmers, it was aimed at the tone of the article which is like "this is a totally awesome lifestyle thing that you could totally do" while simultaneously pointing out that most of these people inherited their farmland and are still working really hard and in most cases barely scraping by.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I was intrigued so I did some research, apparently the "laser guided milker" is one of these [1]. The operation must have been a significant capital expenditure to start. Surely there's down time or equipment failure that requires traditional milking equipment to be available. Cows must be milked twice a day or bacterial infections can occur. Milking a large herd by hand is quite labor intensive.

Note how polite the cows in the video are, to not piss and shit in the stall and all over the equipment, nor kick, breaking the equipment or arms.

I grew up milking and shoveling manure on a small family dairy farm. It wasn't a bad life, just all consuming, morning and night, 365 days a year. I suppose my father had a similar goal going back to the land. That's how he'd been raised. Looking back I'm sure he was more than little disappointed how quickly my siblings and I left, and how little interest any of us expressed in taking it on. He eventually sold the herd and most of the land.

[1] [https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=tdD5LncaJ-8](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=tdD5LncaJ-8)

<comment><USER6> That's a pretty interesting machine, but as you point out far too clean!

I also noticed that the cow's teats weren't sprayed or dipped with iodine solution post-milking to prevent mastitis. Each cow should also be inspected pre-milking for mastitis, cut or damaged teats etc, and the milk diverted away from the main vat. I think there would still be requirement for human input and monitoring even with this machine.

The other thing is this machine seemed quite slow to attach to the teats. Generally, you'd want to get the cows back on the pasture quickly. This system would take half a day to milk any decent sized herd.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I mean, if someone wanted to move to the country to become a gentleman or family farmer, there's simply no better place to do it than rural Italy.

<comment><USER8> That's exactly my point. Rural Italy was really poor in the past, I imagine it's not too expensive still, and it's drop dead gorgeous in some parts.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Maybe the trick is to extend agriturismo, and offer not just the opportunity to stay on the farm grounds, but also pay for the authentic experience of traditional artisanal farm work!

<comment><USER10> Perhaps they'd be able to make living wages by putting their barn on Airbnb. It will be just like that episode of the office.

<comment><USER11> A friend worked for a horse owner who had a rather lovely guest apartment on the upper story of her barn. He stayed over there sometimes when he was working with the horses.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I hope we are not romanticizing farming. In India, over a quarter million farmers have committed suicide due to poor crops.

<comment><USER13> It's the blowback of romanticising city life. Just like these "van life" and "minimalist" trends

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> 150 cows (plus the ~75 bull calves she's fattening every year) on 12 acres? That's not a farm, that's a feedlot. I don't see anything about her manure arrangements? Somehow I suspect a different article would have been written had this farm been located in USA.</comment>


"The Semantic Web" would be better called "The Graph Web" - <AUTHOR> http://whydoeseverythingsuck.com/2008/06/memo-to-semantic-web-drop-semantic-and.html

<comment><USER2> Ah-ha a Freebase competitor.</comment>


Building Microsoft Surface Pro 3 [video] - <AUTHOR> http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/Ignite/2015/BRK3302 <comment><USER2> The Surface Pro 3 is really sweet. Main reason: the stylus and high-quality screen.

This is the closest thing to a digital sketchpad yet. I've been waiting for the Sony A4 e-ink tablet forever (and several other e-ink products that never materialized), and finally gave in to the Surface.

Unfortunately, despite being much better than what I expected, it's not great to use outdoors or in bright light.

However it _does_ blow away the Galaxy Note and basically every "capacitive pen" you can try. The Note in particular has a ridicolous pen: too small to handle, horrid lag, missed strokes, very poor pen sensitivity and high screen glare even with office lights. I re-sold mine just after a few weeks.

The Surface stylus feels just like a regular pen, which is great. There's no space in the device for it, but if you see the depth of the tablet you realize that you cannot possibly fit it in there without sacrificying the pen itself. I'm _glad_ they didn't shrink the pen.

Unfortunately the Pro 3 uses an n-trig 256-pressure levels sensor, which has a much lower resolution than the previous versions which were Wacom based. For writing/jotting down is ok, but for drawing the difference is noticeable. The lower sensitivity takes a toll when you try to customize the response curve...

I'm appalled why so many tablet vendors don't ship with a digitizer built-in. Strip that useless rear-facing camera and put a digitizer in there! You could go as far as selling without the pen by default, as long as there's an option to buy one!

<comment><USER3> >Unfortunately the Pro 3 uses an n-trig 256-pressure levels sensor, which has a much lower resolution than the previous versions which were Wacom based. For writing/jotting down is ok, but for drawing the difference is noticeable. The lower sensitivity takes a toll when you try to customize the response curve...

>I'm appalled why so many tablet vendors don't ship with a digitizer built-in. Strip that useless rear-facing camera and put a digitizer in there! You could go as far as selling without the pen by default, as long as there's an option to buy one!

Supposedly implementing N-Trig over Wacom allows the device to be thinner. This explains why Microsoft was willing to make the tradeoff. It also explains why most vendors don't use digitizers. I wish they did, but everyone is obsessed with making the thinnest device possible, even at the expense of functionality.

<comment><USER4> Unless you're some serious super-artist that does massively high res painting and lives in Photoshop or whatever all day, their sensors are fine.

The guy that draws Penny Arcade dicked around with a Surface 3 Pro and now he absolutely loves it and does a lot of art on it. No real issues reported (and any issues hes reported has been fixed quickly by Microsoft, which, well, Microsoft actually fixing issues promptly fills me with a kind of hope that I haven't had in a long long time).

Microsoft kinda feels like... the Google I wish Google was. I'm not sure how to actually describe this. A company that, yes, makes money, but also makes cool shit and I want to throw money at them to keep making cool shit.

As opposed to the post-Gates Balmer era that drove all their products (sans XBox) into the ground. Well, further into the ground. I'm not trying to flame Microsoft here, but Windows 95 is why I converted to Linux on my desktop full time, and Windows 2000 was the only sane Windows in my opinion between Windows 3.1 and Windows 8.x.

<comment><USER5> Microsoft always was awesome on hardware... from keyboards to Xbox and now the surface.

surface would be my killer portable platform of they ever have a mix of the 3 and pro 3... a small screen one with the ram and speed of the pro.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I really love the discussion about making the friction hinge, it looks really cool, though I think over engineered. I think the most elegant friction hinge design I have ever seen was on my Panasonic CF-73. It's almost 14 years old now, used every day for at least 10 of those years, and I still use it time to time, and the hinge works perfect!

Here is an image of it: [http://thumbs4.ebaystatic.com/d/l225/m/m8yCFI6LbAmeo1QDFT4iT...](http://thumbs4.ebaystatic.com/d/l225/m/m8yCFI6LbAmeo1QDFT4iTHg.jpg)

Simple, stupid, works :) Though for the surface, there is a requirement to make easy to open at first, first 20 degrees or so, which requires complexity.

</comment><comment><USER7> Did somebody already install Linux on it? I think my next laptop will either be a MacBook 12 inch or whatever this new very light apple laptop is called. Or a Surface 3. I just need to be sure it runs Linux.

<comment><USER8> There is a subreddit for this, although I'm not sure what the current state- of-the-art is

[http://www.reddit.com//r/surfacelinux](http://www.reddit.com//r/surfacelinux)

Here's a thread specifically about the Surface 3 (non pro)

[http://www.reddit.com/r/SurfaceLinux/comments/35dmup/surface...](http://www.reddit.com/r/SurfaceLinux/comments/35dmup/surface_3_so_far_not_pro/)

<comment><USER7> So the short answer is that it does not work. Lots of fiddling and they dont even get the native resolution working according to the posts.

<comment><USER9> That's the Surface 3 (not the Surface Pro 3). Apparently, some distros work on the Pro 3 fairly well (though not without issues).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> there is another video about the design of the surface: [http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/Ignite/2015/BRK2326](http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/Ignite/2015/BRK2326)

</comment><comment><USER10> Amazing talk! MSFT has done a great job with SP3.

</comment><comment><USER11> I wish more of these types of videos had transcripts. Frequently I don't have enough time to sit down and watch all of this however if there were a transcript I could quickly scroll through it and find some of the highlights..</comment>