So You Wanna Buy a Telescope: Advice for Beginners (2015) - <AUTHOR> http://www.scopereviews.com/begin.html <comment><USER2> I disagree with the astrophotography thing.

Even with a telescope your human eyes are limited to planets and the moon, that's it. Forget about seeing galaxies with the naked eye, unless you have a 1-meter diameter telescope. All other objects are basically points of light. Artificial satellites are really fun to see, but also points of light.

But a 2006 DSLR (EOS400) that I found in the garbage, connected to a cheap newtonian telescope can capture 1000X the detail your own eyes can see. Is your telescope too small? no problem. Just increase the exposure or ISO, you cannot do that with your eyes.

I've seen comets moving in real time. Tracking satellites, resolving detail on the ISS, the moons of Jupiter and Mars, incredibly detailed nebula, and a freaking quasar, all this from my window in the middle of the city, with the highest light-pollution.

One advice I have is, try to get a scope that's no more than 15 kg. More than that, and it's a hassle to move.

And get a computerized robotic mount. They are expensive (~800 us$), but awesome. No point of getting a 15-century instrument today.

<comment><USER3> There's astrophotography and then there's astrophotography, however - and you get drawn deeper and deeper into it.

I have a few scopes, but mostly use an 8" celestron schmidt-cassegrain - it's a decent all-rounder for astrophotography, particularly as I mostly do deep sky stuff.

I started with a simple T-adapter and a DSLR, and of course, you start as you describe playing with the exposure, the iso - but then you want to see fainter objects, and the noise starts being a problem, so you learn about computational techniques for frame stacking and noise reduction, but those have their limits, and the results you're getting are so-so, so...

You buy a peltier cooled CCD. You upgrade your mount because you aren't satisfied with the level of backlash you're getting. You get a star tracker. You learn several suites of astrophotographic software before settling on three.

Now you're taking images of deep sky objects, but they just don't have that certain something - so you go and buy filters - hydrogen alpha, OIII, RGB, and more, and you start getting some images you're impressed by - but... wouldn't it be great if you could just capture a bit more of that dim halo... maybe I should buy a bigger telescope. Maybe I need a dome to keep conditions more constant. Perhaps I should go on holiday and lug my telescope, counterweights and all, to the other side of the planet, and hang out up a mountain.

No, this is madness. So long as you stick with what you describe and don't go down the slippery slope as I did. With the setup you describe you can still do neat stuff like observing the Galilean moons and plotting their ephemerides, and take stunning photos of the moon and even the sun with a simple solar filter.

<comment><USER4> About capturing a bit more fo that dim halo, I always wondered... Wouldn't a secondary scope (with similar characteristics) result in an increased light gathering potential? I've also tried to look into visible-light interferometry, but there aren't many accessible resources on the subject.

My feeling is that there is a point in equipment in which you are simply better off getting a new rig (to work in paralell) than trying to get slightly bigger aperture (let's face it, 16" vs 14" is not as dramatic in light gathering and image quality as 8" vs 6"), but I'm not sure where that point lies.

<comment><USER2> But you also need another camera and probably another mount too. The scope is actually the cheapest component in a astrophotography setup. Probably the 80% of the cost is the mount+the camera.

<comment><USER4> Absolutely. Then again, there are limits. I remember an old Meade model (no longer available) that was a 20", $36k monster. I was beautiful, and they sold it as an observatory-grade instrument. But the 16" models were priced close to $10k, so it sort of made sense (in that particular case) to duplicate the rig. My "napkin analysis" was:

20" diameter, ~315 squared inches of area[0], $36k

2x 16 inches diameter, ~402 squared inches of area, $20k

This prices did include mounts, but back then (more than 10 years ago) I wasn't very knowledgeable and I honestly don't know if they were good mounts. So there was margin to increase the light gathering and having spare money for the new camera.

Still, the most interesting use for multiple telescopes would be building and interferometer. I'll keep looking into that, with the procesing power available in todays machines it should be doable.

[0] I know the secondary mirror obstructs the light gathering, but I don't have precise figures, so let's go with it the area of the main mirror.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The advice here seems dated, even for 2015. Here's my advice:

1\. Install an astronomy app on your mobile phone. Start with free ones, and see where it leads you. I recommend Skeye. This is good for going out by yourself and looking up things you see in the sky. For a PC, Stellarium is the best I have seen.

2\. Get a camera capable of taking long exposure RAW photos, and get a tripod. There is so much hidden within the range of our FOV, that a telescope or binoculars are overkill. You'll use the camera for other things, so that won't be a special-nights-only investment. A basic DSLR should be fine, though I am curious about how well generic travel-zoom cameras do. If you have such a camera already, and played around with it, let me know.

Telescopes come _after_ this stage.

> What about Astrophotography?

> Don't.

Sorry, this is shitty advice. His friend blew thousands of dollars on the hobby. I didn't.

> and untold thousands of rejected images

In the days of DSLRs? That's like saying I'm no good at computer games because of all the "bullets" that didn't hit my intended target. Lame. To put it bluntly.

> 8) Avoid any thoughts of astrophotography.

Fuck off.

<comment><USER6> Astrophotography without a telescope is indeed a good starting point. Get a bright 50mm lens and just with a simple barndoor tracker you can do amazing things. But as this article is about buying a telescope - and astrophotography through a telescope requires more skill than a complete beginner might imagine.

<comment><USER7> You don't even need a tracker at all. Just take a series of 20-second exposures, align them in hugin, and stack them. I have managed to get some remarkably good results this way, because the fact that the star background moves allows you to cancel out a lot of the noise that the camera and light pollution produces.

<comment><USER8> If the aligning phase can be automated, this looks like a nice plugin for ImageJ/ImageMagick or even an online version in a web page. (You an monetize it with ads about telescopes or something.)

(Bonus points for a deconvolution filter. (Is it useful here?))

<comment><USER9> Two pieces of gratis software (DeepSkyStacker Live) and RegiStax already do something like this, as well as PixInsight and the venerable Maxim DL, among others.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> 1) Spot on. If you won't bother to learn at least a few prominent bits of the sky first then a telescope will be fun about twice and then gather dust.

2) Subscribe? Er, see if you can buy individual copies first. I dropped my subs because, well, the articles all started to become pablum. Probably worth picking up a few issues when you start out.

3) Yes, join a club or tag along. There's no better way to get an idea of what it's about than to meet some enthusiasts and look through their scopes. And a really friendly and helpful crowd, in my experience.

Binocs: I bought 10x50s, and I wish I had bought 7x50s. The higher magnification is nice and all, and I can hold them steady enough...for a little bit. You can use 7x50 without strain for a lot longer. Also, yes, do buy binocs. You'd be amazed what you can see with a pair of 7x50s that you can't see with naked eyes. It's a great, cheap, convenient way to get started.

Telescopes: buy one that you can afford and that you will use. Like my binoc choice above, I bought something actually nice but big enough that it was a pain to haul around and set up. Save that for later. Buy something that you will pull out on a whim and have a nice evening. This is a very individual choice, of course. If you live in a fairly dark place and the farthest you will take your scope is to your back yard, by all means get that light bucket. :)

Overall very solid advice in the article.

</comment><comment><USER11> I get this question all the time - "I am want to get started with Astronomy - which telescope should I buy ?"

Its so important to make people realize , one does not need to have telescope right way. A decent pair of binocular (and probably a book with sky charts) is enough to spot the 1st few objects in the sky. If the hunger for celestial objects then one can go for the telescope else there is high chance the telescope will eat dust at home.

The other problem with hastily buy a telescope is that we end up buying a beginners one with low budget which is is usually no better than good binoculars of same power. (magnification and light gathering). It is netter wait and have a decent budget to buy a good telescope later on.

<comment><USER9> Another thing I commonly get is (after explaining that decent telescopes have the ability to swap eyepieces (If you're lucky it'll take 2" ones without vignetting)) is which eyepieces will "get the most zoom." People seem to be under the impression that because most objects in the sky are far away, they are also really "small." So if misguided they'll go buy 4mm Kellners with huge coma, have a painful time trying to get their scope aligned on any DSO, strain to see anything because everything looks dim in them, and squint because the eye relief is terrible. If somebody still wants a scope with high magnification because they're into planetary observing it's usually best to stick with a scope with a long focal length that brings it to f/12 or higher, then get some wide-FOV EPs for that.

<comment><USER12> In english?

You seem to be giving good advice to newbees, but the language is incomprehensible to that audience.

<comment><USER13> There are two problems in Astronomy:

1\. Objects are distant so you only have so many photons from them that reach your current location. This means they appear "faint". The solution to that is a large aperture scope which collects more light.

2\. Objects still appear relatively small even after collecting more photons. This can be improved somewhat by using an eyepiece to "zoom up" the image.

But just like magnifying a lower resolution image on a computer, the image through your scope gets fuzzy as you blow it up since you are still only collecting so many photons. So a good eyepiece doesn't help as much as beginners think it will.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Bought the recommended Orion XT8 Dobsonian a year ago for my 10 year old daughter (ok, and for myself!). It is super easy to setup (minutes), captures plenty of light and has been a joy to view through. I have observed the moon, Saturn, Jupiter and its moons and several Messier objects - even tracked a few satellites as they transited overhead.

<comment><USER15> Were you able to see the rings of Saturn with this telescope? How about the red spot of Jupiter? Any of its moons? And finally, do you observe these objects in a place with a lot of light pollution?

<comment><USER16> I can see Saturn's rings with my 16x70mm binoculars. Jupiter's Galilean satellites are easy with any decent pair of binoculars. You can track their positions relative to Jupiter from night to night.

Binoculars are definitely the way to go for a beginner. Spend 12 months using the naked eye and binoculars to learn the entire night sky that's visible from your location. With the aid of an astronomy book and star charts, you'll learn all the constellations and the names of the major stars in each, plus other interesting objects in each constellation (Messier objects, variable stars). Binoculars also bring out the different colours of many stars. Supplement this with background reading on the targets of your observations and other nearby objects.

During this time, you'll also be able to learn many of the most prominent features of the moon's surface, as well as easily being able to identify the planets (although Mercury can be a challenge and Neptune requires large binoculars and even then will just be a speck of light), and you'll get a feel for which constellations are visible in which seasons. Learning the sky like this is very satisfying and is a great precursor to buying a telescope. Your binoculars can of course be used for other purposes too.

As casual astronomers are generally most interested in the moon and planets, I'd recommend buying a medium-sized apochromatic refractor as a first scope. A high-quality 4" (100mm) one with a good mount can be had for under $1000, and will give stunning views of Saturn, Jupiter and the Moon, even in the middle of a large city. Other planets and the brighter star clusters and nebulae will also look good.

<comment><USER17> Can you link to a specific pair of binoculars?

<comment><USER18> If you want the best, get Canon's image-stabilized 15x50 binoculars. Image stabilization is a miracle technology.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Great summary article for beginners. Ed's been reviewing scopes for as long as I've been in the hobby. His advice is sound.

The best advice I can give beginners is to get out to a dark sky on a moonless clear night and enjoy the wonders above you. Maybe watch for meteors for awhile. That only costs you time and effort. No equipment needed.

I've got mixed feelings about astro apps and phones/tablets. Sure their handy but I often see people looking at it instead of the night sky. While your looking down or trying to move your device around to orient it a meteor goes overhead. But you missed it jacking with your phone.

Also your night vision is affected by that phone/tablet screen - every time you look at it your pupils constrict letting in less light (unless you put a red filter over the screen). generally it takes 20 minutes for your eyes to become adapted to the dark. And 3 seconds looking at a bright screen wipes out that adaptation.

</comment><comment><USER20> I got An etx125 for a gift a number of years ago. The tripod is a pain to work with, but otherwise I really like this scope.

I just have one low power eye piece, I think the 26mm plossl. Saturn looks pretty much like the simulated 100x photo.

I'd like to get a Barlow and a higher mag eye piece for looking at craters on the moon.

I've messed with photography. It's a lot of trouble. Most of the time the easiest thing is to use my phone to take a picture through the eye piece.

</comment><comment><USER21> Infrared: Most amazing experience I ever had looking at the average clear night sky was wearing a pair of night vision goggles. Seeing all the extra stars (100x more) in the sky as I turned my head around allowed me to see the sky in a way I never would have imagined possible. Highly recommend it.

</comment><comment><USER22> Excellent advice. I just sold off most of my astronomy equipment except for my first telescope - an orion xt8 - and some mid-range plossl eyepieces. If I did it all over again i'd buy everything used off astromart.com (no affiliation - it's just the best place to find good used astononomy gear). Seriously though - join your local astronomy club, try out members' telescopes and use their telescope library if they have one.

</comment><comment><USER23> I've had several small telescopes, but my favorite turned out to be my first: a 4.5 inch newtonian reflector on an (no motors) equitorial mount, with upgraded 35, 25 and 10 mm focal length plossel eyepieces.

A small refractor on a camera tripod is too frustrating, and a small cassegrain on a computerized mount often is too much fuss to align and set up.

<comment><USER23> Explanation: an equitorial mount has an axis that points at the north star (Polaris, or more accurately, the celestial north pole). One you learn to set it up, it's pretty easy to just "eyeball sight" over the shaft-bearing at Polaris and call it good enough. When the planet or other object you are looking at drifts west, you turn a knob a little bit and it is re-centered.

Plossel eyepieces have 4 lenses, vs the 3 in a "Kelner". Minimal "rainbows" (chromatic aberration), and you don't have to smash your eyeball (or worse, glasses) onto the lens to see (eye relief). There are better eyepieces. Be prepared to spend at least 4 times as much, though.

The 35 mm focal length gives you the widest field of view in a standard 1 1/4" wide eyepiece, so you can actually find anything at all (and brightens dimmer objects), then, you can swap other eyepieces in the same series ("parfocal") without refocusing (much) to get higher magnification - 10 mm is the highest in my set.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> One thing he didn't talk about is clock drives. They're essential for photography, but they're also good for keeping the scope on target if you want to let other people look through the scope. Especially at higher magnifications, the thing you're looking at will move out of the field of view in a few seconds without a clock drive. The one disadvantage of Dobsonians is you can't put a clock drive on them (well you can, but it requires two motors instead of one. And high magnification is not really the point of a dobbie anyway).

<comment><USER2> Clock drives?

Today's hobbyist telescope mounts have incredible precise stepper or servo motors, many with optical encoders so precise that they know exactly where they are pointing to. I don't think you can get a clock drive anymore.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> I agree with most of the points here. There should have been an additional section on choosing the right mount. There's the cheap AZ mount which makes it easier to locate an object but is too painful to use while tracking it. The expensive EQ mount takes a little bit of practice and frustration before you can use it well. It makes it difficult to find an object, but tracking an object is a breeze.

Go for a stand AZ/EQ with a motorized GOTO unit if you can afford it. It 'll save you a lot of time looking for objects.

</comment><comment><USER26> Binoculars are handy, but I wouldn't get anything cheaper than the Nikon Aculon series (usually $80-$120; they used to be the Action series). Sharp optics, wide apparent field of view...

</comment><comment><USER27> I have dabbled with simple whole-sky night photography with a DLSR and wanted to do more (yes, going straight against the no astrophotography advice from the article!). But as the article shows, there are simply so many options and permutations of equipment!

I would love a simple (and very approximate) web page with a few sliders and check boxes that said I have budget range X, and want to do Y and Z. It will say: "you need the following ... and these will be nice ... " And you can click "I have these", and it will go "Okay, then go and add this."

This goes for a few other grouped-purchase hobbies/undertakings. I entered similar befuddlement trying to get a reasonably sound field recording setup. There's a lot of opinion in these areas, perhaps a general "recipe" engine would be good to allow people to submit their codified advice.

</comment><comment><USER28> After attending and then volunteering at my local observatory for a few months, I pulled the trigger on a Nexstar Evolution 8. Tons of fun to let people choose what to look at on the iPad and the tracking keeps me from having to make adjustments every minute when we zoom in on Saturn to see Titan.

</comment><comment><USER29> Here is a nice mount for those wanting to do Astrophotography without a telescope. The problem with using long exposures without a tracking mount is that the objects being photographed is always in motion wrt. to where you originally pointed the camera and you end up with star trails. This may not be a problem if you are using wide angle lenses to photograph a large chunk of the night sky.

[http://www.ioptron.com/product-p/3302b.htm](http://www.ioptron.com/product-p/3302b.htm)

One of the most useful things that I did when I started out in this hobby was get a login to 'AstroMart' and bought used equipment. Amateur Astronomy is like buying Gym equipment. Everybody wants to do it and will buy fancy equipment but most will not use much of that (myself included). So you end up with a lot of very good used equipment available for sale. It can also be a very very expensive hobby, hence reselling some of your equipment to feed your habit is a common event. Astromart is a sort of self regulated auction site for used astronomy equipment. I personally bought a 10 year old telescope 12 years ago which I can still resell today at the price I bought it then.

The most useful advice I see on here is to get something that you will actually take out and use. Binoculars (7x50 or 10x50) or a good small apochromatic refractor (80 mm or less) with a decent alt-azimuth mount. Learning the common constellations, locating the north star (if you are in the northern hemisphere) etc.

The following site will give you the list of dark sky locations in California.

[http://www.observingsites.com/ds_ca.htm](http://www.observingsites.com/ds_ca.htm)

For those in the Bay Area, Henry Coe State park near Morgan Hill/Gilroy is an excellent dark sky site. I saw the Milky Way again in all its majestic glory after 30 years here. Camp out there for a night and you can have a great time stargazing. Just try and find a cloudless, moonless night for best experience. Learn to read the Clear Sky chart for each location and plan out your trip.

Its a fun but addictive and expensive hobby. So beware.

</comment><comment><USER9> After being trapped in this hobby for years now, I've finally settled on (for the time being) a nice 10" RC from GSO/Astro-Tech, as well as an ES80ed and SVQ100-3SV and a Losmandy Titan mount. While not specifically a mount for beginners, it is a nice choice considering the RA and DEC axis comes apart to reduce weight and it doesn't use a proprietary mount control protocol like some companies -- _Looks in the general direction of a certain high-end red- colored mount manufacturer_

</comment><comment><USER30> I wanted to combine several interests and acquire something like the Sony QX or Olympus AIR, which have lens mounts, with a computer based program and display (OLED eventually) for capturing night skies (and general exposure exploration). But I found none of the available systems have much versatility. Is there any affordable system useful for this purpose? I know some SLRs and high end 4/3 cameras have APIs, and hacker oriented devices like the PI's camera have potential.

</comment><comment><USER31> I am visiting the USA soon and thought of getting a telescope, but not a 42lb/20kg monster. What's the best I can do for 10 kg/$300 or so?

</comment><comment><USER32> I am a first time buyer and spent months comparing scopes, talking to people who owned my top choices, etc. Finally settled on Celestron Astromaster 140EQ. It is just fantastic to setup and quickly get seeing - an important factor for first-time hobbyists. Also, a must-buy is the Celestron Astromaster lenses kit which just increases the quality and quantity of views immensely!

</comment><comment><USER33> I wish I had come across this article earlier. Recently bought my first telescope: a 6" reflector with EQ mount (Celestron Astromaster 130 EQ). While the images are superb, I find it very hard to find my desired objects in the night sky. The finderscope on the unit is either useless, or I don't know how to use it correctly.

</comment><comment><USER34> I am looking at buying a telescope that I can mount to my son's playhouse, and leave it outside year around. We live in the midwest, so there is weather.

I was thinking of something like the coin operated ones that you see at tourist spots. They are pretty expensive. Anyone have any info or done something like this before?

</comment><comment><USER35> Are there "amateur" remote observatories? I'd be happy to control a telescope on a mountain in Chile or something over the Internet, rather than trying to screw around with a physical telescope in a city.

</comment><comment><USER36> There are no mentions of motors or automated tracking in this article. I've heard from multiple sources that they wished they had a motorized rig, is there a reason this is not recommended for beginners?

</comment><comment><USER37> I was expecting one that you could connect to a computer.

Can someone give me any recommendations?

<comment><USER2> Any Meade, celestron or skywatcher robotic mount can connect to a computer using a serial RS232 interface.

I recommend a Skywatcher mount, because those mounts can be completely controlled by software and there is a very good opensource project for this, called eq-mod.

<comment><USER37> thanx alot!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Why is astrophotography hard?

<comment><USER6> Astrophotography requires more experience with the telescope handling, a more stable platform and usually the best beginners telescope for observing isn't ideal for photography.

For photography you should plan at least $500 for a tracking mount, you might start even with the cameras lenses or a small refractor telescope. "Barndoor" mounts are a good alternative for not too long focal lengths.

Photographic mounts for the recommended 8 inch newtonian would run at $ 1500+ and require precise setup.

The good news is, that modern digital cameras with interchangeable lenses are pretty capable for astrophotography, so if you own one of those, there is no reason not to try it. So the strong warning in the article was to set the proper expectations.

<comment><USER39> Couldn't you use manual tracking at first? The steadiness of the tracking isn't so important if every individual exposure is short, and most cameras have a continuous mode so you can take many thousands of photographs. I've successfully stacked hand-held photos using Hugin:

[http://hugin.sourceforge.net/](http://hugin.sourceforge.net/)

You will probably need a camera with raw support for this to work, because each individual exposure will be extremely noisy, and any in-camera noise reduction will destroy too much detail. You will probably also need at least two bright stars in frame for alignment to work.

And if you have a huge number of images you can also keep only those with low atmospheric distortion:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucky_imaging](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucky_imaging)

The same principle could be used to keep only those images with little tracking-induced motion blur.

<comment><USER6> That could work - and I am a strong believer to try everything, even if the equipment at hand is not "officially capable" of doing the task. If one does that in the proper spirit of experimentation, this is great and you learn a lot and can have tons of fun. People who have no astronomy experience might though think that you can just take photos as you see them in the web or in magazines.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> I used to love to go out at night with my 10" reflector and see a point of light magnified to... a point of light. For variety, I would look at binary stars to see... two points of light. Sometimes, I would search for nebulae and galaxies to see... a fuzzy patch of light. Optical astronomy is such fun.

Now, alas, the light pollution is so severe that all my points of light and fuzzy patches are severely washed out.

So I sold my telescope and took up scuba diving. It was all fish and coral, fish and coral, until a few years ago. Now it's no fish and fuzzy white patches that used to be coral.

The former coral looks like nebulae and galaxies through light pollution in my 10" reflector.

<comment><USER41> Haha... I took up scuba diving after astronomy too. Maybe there's something similar in wanting to see stuff for yourself, rather than television or photos. Coolest thing I saw was a star disappear for a few seconds as it was occulted by an asteroid.</comment></comment>


Decrease email bounces with EmailPie: a simple, open source email validator API - <AUTHOR> http://emailpie.com/

<comment><AUTHOR> I was inspired by the post yesterday. So I made this at <http://hackcomo.com/> and learned me some Flask & gevent.

Happy to answer any questions.</comment>


Bladerunner Rutger Hauser Has Died - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2019/07/rutger-hauer-genre-actor-and-blade-runner-icon-has-died-at-75/ <comment><USER2> I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die.

</comment><comment><USER3> Dupe: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20519122](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20519122)

</comment><comment><USER4> Would it be possible to correct the name in the sub text?</comment>


Tesla introduces fee for lazy owners who leave their cars at charger stations - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2016/12/16/tesla-introduces-fee-for-lazy-owners-who-leave-their-cars-at-supercharger-stations/?ncid=rss <comment><USER2> If only there was some way to have the cars detach from the chargers and drive themselves to a nearby parking spot, where they would be out of the way. Too bad Tesla doesn't have the technology to make self-driving cars that automatically connect to the chargers yet...

* Tesla Autopilot Full Self-Driving (Paint It Black soundtrack) - YouTube || [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GeyH734JQD0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GeyH734JQD0)

* Tesla Charging Snake - YouTube || [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ut3sELMOyTM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ut3sELMOyTM)

<comment><USER3> Does Tesla have the right to move a car that doesn't own? It's private property, I'm sure there would be complaints

<comment><USER4> Put a switch to enable self-parking after charge in the car, increase fees for blocking the supercharger to $very_painful, no moving without permission required.</comment></comment></comment>


"Culture fit" craze is turning tech from innovators to ideological fiefdoms - <AUTHOR> http://imgur.com/a/v4YBd <comment><USER2> At a place I worked not too long ago, they fired a guy after two days because he was clearly an extremely huge asshole and stoner, and the reason they gave was that he wasn't a good culture fit. But it was just a polite way of saying that they didn't want an unkempt, disorderly, drug addict.

Although, I must say, he did seem to be a fairly decent developer, as far as I could tell by talking with him over two days.

<comment><USER3> What happened to those who screened/interviewed/hired this person? Were they spoken to about how this slipped under the radar?

<comment><USER2> We talked about it, and we all agreed that his appearance and demeanor at the interview was much different than his appearance on his first day.

He actually missed his start day, without notice, now that I remember, and started late.

I looked up his music scene and realized he'd been at a rave in another state all weekend, and was clearly hungover and irritable.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Coming from 4 years at a startup as emp#1 and looking again in Austin (engineering), if I hear one more time that "they loved you but didn't think you would be a good fit" instead of a real reason for missing the cut, I am going to go nuts.

<comment><USER5> Not a good fit is PC language. Best way to get along these days apparently. I'll translate.

"They Loved You" (No they were lukewarm at best but they're being polite at this point.)

"Wouldn't be a good fit" (Not their responsibility to point out your flaws, some of which were subtle, some were obvious so keeping it brief and to the point. We know we can find somebody better or already have.)

<comment><USER4> Yeah, I know the foundation for it. It is just an irritating process (I know, stating the obvious) that should be better. Both the company and applicant invested time/money in exploring a relationship, and candidates shouldn't be left with a brutally ambiguous result. Even if it takes 5 more min in a debrief and some possible hurt feelings, the company should respect candidates enough to spend that time and help them understand the specific reason(s) as to why they aren't getting the job. I really want to know, was it my salary reqs, my quietness, my loudness, I looked wrong at the VP of Eng/CEO?

This applies to onsite interviews obviously, not initial phone screens.

<comment><USER6> The company defaults to polite silence to avoid legal liability. They can't risk saying anything which might be construed as discrimination against a protected class.

<comment><USER7> I kind of wonder if "not a culture fit" could be construed that way if you were an underrepresented minority. It's pretty close to existing coded language.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I wrote about why we got rid of cultural fit interview here:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9851060#9853911](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9851060#9853911)

a little over a year ago. The short answer was that we couldn't find a single thing that this interview helped with.

And since then I have yet to hear anyone give a reasonable answer as to what a cultural fit interview provides.

I mean by the time you are ready to hire someone, they've met the team and the team has already approved. We've already given them the hard sell on why they should work for us, infact this is what I spend half our initial phone screen doing, just selling the company.

Almost all cultural fit interviews seem to be a form of asking: "Can we figure out if this person will dedicate all their waking hours to our company", and that's just really sad.

<comment><USER9> The "culture fit" shouldnt be an interview all its own, its should be something that every person they speak to considers.

Speaking only technically will give you that person's tech skills... that person's non-tech skills and nuances will actually have a huge effect on their performance and that of those they work closely with.

Something powerful comes out of that - you learn intuitively what a person's true priorities are, and they do the same. You get a "feeling" about them and how they will incorporate into the team. those are just as important

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I think this can be true in some cases; however, it's also nice to look for things like: * Does this person think they're above grunt work / taking out the trash? * Does this person work better in a position where they take on responsibilities as they see fit or would they rather have work given to them?

Neither one of those are captured in the "data-driven" hiring process; however, they are key in our particular company's culture. And yes... years of experience can be dismissed simply if the candidate thinks they're above everyone else.

<comment><USER11> I think those are more about professionalism and work style than culture.

<comment><USER12> > I think those are more about professionalism and work style than culture.

"professionalism" is one particular set of features of culture (and different people use the term to describe slightly different feature sets, but each definition _is_ a set of culture features), and "work style" is a synonym for workplace culture.

<comment><USER11> > "work style" is a synonym for workplace culture

Only if a workplace chooses to enforce a particular style. Otherwise, it is an individual variation that a good organization tries to work with.

On professionalism, I think it comes down to how you use the word "culture". Yes, professionalism is an aspect of culture in the larger sense, but one which I think should transcend the cultures of individual organizations. Most of the surface variation in professionalism are the little things that vary by geographic location and industry and should not vary by company.

<comment><USER12> > Only if a workplace chooses to enforce a particular style.

No, the actual work style practiced in the workplace is an element of workplace culture whether or not a uniform style is enforced (whether or not a uniform style is enforced is, itself, an element of the workplace culture.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I've studied programming my whole life. But somehow someone I've never met before can decide I don't know how to program after fifteen minutes of questions. Guess I need to go memorize the meaning of 'polymorphism' again.

<comment><USER14> You don't need the Oxford Dictionary definition, but any decent engineer who has touched an object-oriented language should be able to explain what polymorphism is. Come on.

<comment><USER13> Sure, it's just difficult to think all that way back after I've talked about the operating system I designed and implemented. Don't worry, though, now I just get rejected for $12/hr data entry jobs. Come one. I've been suicidal for almost a decade and a half, now. How come nobody has any clue how to get programming jobs? Why doesn't that bother other programmers?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I completely understand what he means, but his disdain would have a better effect if he compared the trendy "we don't take ourselves too seriously--see? Nerf wars and ping pong!" culture to the drab, grey, cubicle-dominated culture of the past.

Companies take note: be a fun place, but protest too much about your culture and risk becoming a weird hive-minded cult.

</comment><comment><USER16> I can't imagine that this issue doesn't manifest even more seriously when it comes to race and gender bias.

<comment><USER17> being a white male (thanks, God!) i can't say for race and gender, yet it is definitely a way to filter out by age (i'm 44)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I've seen very qualified candidates passed over for people with no discernible skill because of "culture fit".

</comment><comment><USER19> A longer-form take on this issue: "Inside the Mirrortocracy" [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7930430](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7930430)

</comment><comment><USER20> Hasn't this always been the case? Companies that carry on the "80s SV hardware startup mantra" (AAPL, along with repeat founders in semi conductor sector) are definitely fiefdoms that reflect the character of the founder.

</comment><comment><USER9> I mean, the creator of these seems like someone I wouldn't want to work with. There is a lot to be said about creating a culture in a company, and grooming said culture, and making sure to preserve aspects of it you see as powerful for your employees...

The "culture" of an open source tech shop is vastly different than a typical .Net tech shop - the clients are different, the dress codes are often more strict in the .net shops, the hierarchy and "feel" is far more corporate... Those are different worlds, and trying to stick someone from one into the other inevitably doesn't work well... at least not optimally..

<comment><USER21> On the other hand, taking someone from a typical .Net tech shop and putting them into an open source tech shop suddenly gives that open source tech shop a whole new way of thinking; here's a person who is going to approach problems differently, and has a different set of experiences. By not hiring someone who thinks the same as everyone already there, the company becomes stronger.

We should hire for culture-UNfit. Do you think differently? Are you going to give me options nobody else here would have thought of? Do you have experience with technologies that nobody else here does? Are you going to be able to fill in some of the blind spots and vulnerabilities that would stay open if I just hired someone identical to everyone else here?

Hiring another person just the same gets me the ability to do a little more of the same. Hiring someone different gets me something new.

<comment><USER22> Ugh, nowadays typical .NET dev is well-aware of what is open source because, FYI .NET is open sourced.

<comment><USER21> Tell you what, replace .NET with anything you like. You've focussed on the one thing I said that's meaningless and utterly superfluous to the point.

<comment><USER22> I just don't like the outdated stereotype, that's all.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Log Optimal Betting – An interactive demo of the Kelly criterion - <AUTHOR> https://kelly-streamlit.herokuapp.com <comment><USER2> That was a indeed a great primer and good example of using streamlit for building apps quickly</comment>


Show HN: Ephemeral Electrum – A quick throwaway text based Bitcoin wallet - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/lukechilds/ephemeral-electrum/blob/master/README.md <comment><AUTHOR>
        $ docker run -it lukechilds/ephemeral-electrum "much bottom such hurt hunt welcome cushion erosion pulse admit name deer"

There are some sats left on that wallet, help yourself.

HD wallets can be loaded as Electrum or BIP39 mnemonic seed phrases as well as extend public and private keys.

Single addresses can be loaded using the Electrum address-type:wif format.

The Docker container automatically creates an Electrum wallet file importing your seed/key, then starts the text based interface for Electrum.

Once you quit the process everything is destroyed. It's all isolated to the container, nothing is persisted to disk.

It's pretty handy for just quickly checking the state of a wallet/address or monitoring test wallets while developing.

Hopefully some people find it useful.</comment>


Vitaly Borker of DecorMyEyes Pleads Guilty - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/13/business/13borker.html?_r=1&partner=rss&emc=rss <comment><AUTHOR> Some background HN discussion links

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1946085>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1977048></comment>


The iPad Air - <AUTHOR> http://daringfireball.net/2013/10/the_ipad_air <comment><USER2> The iPad community is starting to give the amateur cyclist "weight weenies" a run for their money when it comes to inane banter about the weight of an object.

Here's an experiment. Divide 100 people into 4 groups: one group gets to compare the weight of a 1 pound block of lead and a 1.4 pound block of lead, the second gets 1.4 pounds and 1 pound, the third 1 and 1, the fourth 1.4 and 1.4.

See if anyone can actually tell which one weighs more.

<comment><USER3> When you're holding something the way you hold an iPad -- or at least the way I do -- the weight of the device is amplified through leverage.

I tend to grip my iPad the way I do a book; near the bottom. The fulcrum point of support is at my wrist, which is always far from the center of gravity of the iPad. Gripping it from the bottom makes it worse, as the total weight of the iPad is suspended above my wrist. I constantly find myself swapping between gripping where I _want_ to grip (near the bottom) and some other position that requires less effort. Even then, human anatomy dictates that the fulcrum point is always well outside the bounds of the device.

I've owned an iPad 1 (680g) and an iPad 3 (650g). Even the seemingly tiny reduction in weight was noticeable when holding the iPad near the bottom. I've held an iPad Mini, and the difference is night and day.

The iPad Air weighs 181g less than the iPad 3, but only 138g more than the iPad Mini. That means the iPad Air is closer in weight to the Mini than it is the outgoing iPad. If you don't think that's an appreciable weight difference that you'll feel every time you use an iPad, then you've got some serious gorilla-strength arms.

<comment><USER2> I use a Nexus 10 and the weight is fine for a JFK-SFO flight. (It's 1.3 pounds.) Sure, you shift it around a few times, just like you adjust your legs or get up to use the bathroom.

Lighter is better, but I don't think it warrants so much discussion.</comment></comment></comment>


In Pictures: 11 Leaders In Artificial Intelligence - <AUTHOR> http://www.forbes.com/2010/06/25/artificial-intelligence-leaders-entrepreneurs-technology-ai_slide.html

<comment><USER2> Kind of a stupid list - I can't believe Fair Isaac didn't make that list given that it's a public company built entirely on financial applications of machine learning.

I had a chance to intern for Robert Hecht-Nielsen once - they do some amazing stuff.</comment>


Show HN: Kube-router: A distributed load balancer, firewal, router for Kubernetes - murali-reddy https://github.com/cloudnativelabs/kube-router <comment> murali-reddy Kube-router is a distributed load balancer, firewall and router for Kubernetes. Kube-router can be configured to provide on each cluster node:

a IPVS/LVS based service proxy on each node for ClusterIP and NodePort service types, providing service discovery and load balancing

an ingress firewall for the pods running on the node as per the defined Kubernetes network policies using iptables and ipset

a BGP router to advertise and learn the routes to the pod IP's for cross-node pod-to-pod connectivity</comment>


A Hidden Origin Story of the CBD Craze - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/23/sunday-review/coronavirus-cbd-oil.html <comment><USER2> The article doesn't talk about this, but the most mind blowing thing about the "CBD craze" to me is that hemp flower is now legal in all 50 states, and despite what people will tell you ("you can't get high off hemp; it doesn't have THC; it doesn't have enough THC to get you high") it definitely can get you high. It won't get you high in the same way that Modern Engineered Marijuana (TM) will (read: it won't make you go crazy), but marijuana of the 1970's is basically legal everywhere, and you will get stoned if you smoke it.

Flower is typically tested for compliance against the psychoactive delta9-THC in most states (not in all states though), which ignores the THCA content. But THCA is converted to delta9-THC when heated/"decarboxylated", which is a pretty big loophole.

These communities [1][2] are buying ounces of weed through the mail.

A better example is probably this 17 gram edible [3]. At 0.3% d9-THC, that's a ~5mg dose of psychoactive THC per package. You can buy these all over the US in states like Texas, Oklahoma, Alabama, Mississippi, and Kentucky... Places not exactly known to be "weed friendly". See this map [4].

Pot has basically been legalized everywhere and people just don't know about it yet.

[1]: [https://www.reddit.com/r/hempflowers/](https://www.reddit.com/r/hempflowers/)

[2]: [https://www.reddit.com/r/CBDhempBuds/](https://www.reddit.com/r/CBDhempBuds/)

[3]: [https://lunchboxalchemycbd.com/products/full-spectrum- hemp-s...](https://lunchboxalchemycbd.com/products/full-spectrum-hemp- squibs-100mg-each-10-servings?variant=31701050556496)

[4]: [https://lunchboxalchemy.com/cbd-retailers-cbd- squib/](https://lunchboxalchemy.com/cbd-retailers-cbd-squib/)

<comment><USER3> > It won't get you high in the same way that Modern Engineered Marijuana (TM) > will (read: it won't make you go crazy)

Make you go crazy? I've had friends who were all-day stoners for 20+ years. I've never seen anyone "go crazy". Become lazy yes, get couch-locked yes, get really creative yes, have short attention spans yes; crazy, no. Worst I've seen is someone who's never smoked do a dab (inhale highly concentrated THC as a vapor) and have a paranoid panic attack, after which I learned that they were prone to panic attacks. I do agree, however, that the genetically engineered marijuana of today is at least 5% more potent than the stuffs of the 60s-70s.

<comment><USER4> Anecdotal: I know 4 people well enough to know that they had psychotic episodes. _All_ of them were using cannabis at the time of onset.

I don't think it _caused_ those diseases in those people, but I think if you have schizophrenia or bipolar I, or critically if you might have it but are not yet diagnosed, it can mix poorly and you could be in for a bad time with long term consequences, so be careful.

I am in favor of legalization, but people need to get less defensive about this. It's harmless for most people and shouldn't be a crime for law abiding adults. But there's real risks for that small subset of people.

Also anecdotal: There were a few times where I saw mental health professionals ask in my town "how often do you use cannabis?" as one of the first screening questions, one of them said offhand that they see it a lot in their line of work.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> » Unrelated to the brouhaha on the West Coast, tobacco farmers in Kentucky were seeking a new cash crop. In 2011, James Comer won the race for Kentucky state agriculture commissioner by promising to legalize industrial hemp.

"That raised a lot of eyebrows, including in McConnell's office," Eric Steenstra, a hemp lobbyist, told me. "They saw the winds were shifting."

Along with Representative Jared Polis, now the governor of Colorado, Mr. McConnell included a hemp pilot program in the 2014 farm bill — for "research." In the legislation, hemp was defined as cannabis containing less than 0.3 percent THC — an arbitrary threshold, not a scientific distinction: Nothing in the Farm Bill, in case law, or in the Controlled Substances Act seemed to say anything about CBD. So entrepreneurs interpreted this research- oriented pilot program as the de facto legalization of cannabidiol.

The Drug Enforcement Administration disagreed, but couldn't stop the tidal wave of CBD production. In 2018, over 60 percent of the hemp crop in Kentucky was grown for CBD. Then, long after the country was already flooded with CBD products both dubious and legitimate, Mr. McConnell inserted language into the 2018 Farm Bill explicitly making hemp federally legal.«

<comment><USER6> It's actually pretty amazing how quickly this happened. Prior to the new legislation, "cannabis" was illegal, that is, the plant, regardless of THC content. Schedule 1 narcotic according to the DEA.

Then this farm bill passes, without a lot of fanfare (about cannabis) and poof, it's legal across all 50 states (as long as it's less than 0.3% THC).

What's interesting to me is how the DEA is losing influence. They not only tried to stop this legislation, but also kratom (they were making it schedule 1 as well). Due to public outcry, the DEA backed down and we're in this weird limbo where kratom remains legal federally, even though the DEA doesn't want it to be.

I'm guessing over the next 20-30 years, we'll see a lot of changes with regards to the war on drugs. It started with marijuana, but it won't stop there.

<comment><USER7> This is definitely one of the spaces where the internet has made the status quo unacceptable to the majority of at least the US public. It's very hard to fight one of humanity's basic urges with disinformation in a open society with the internet.

<comment><USER8> And yet adult contact is down overall, sex workers cannot communicate online anymore, and covid is seen as a 'nothingburger' by half the people I meet reguardless of political leanings. Never underestimate a good disinfo wave. Hell, even Biden is singing the old 'we don't know if it is safe, better keep it illegal' refrain.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> It's rare that I read an article that has the names of so many people I've worked with over the years. Samantha Miller is one of the pioneering cannabis scientists in Northern California and for a long time was the only resource in the area. I still test with her lab to this day.

Lawrence Ringo introduced me to a lot of my supply chain before his passing. The network of farmers he worked with were largely not able to make the transition to the recreational cannabis industry.

Mel Frank cultivated cannabis in the next room over from my first manufacturing lab. Super nice guy with a real love of the plant.

Reading articles like this make me miss the old days of cannabis when there was more passion for the plant.

<comment><USER10> _The network of farmers he worked with were largely not able to make the transition to the recreational cannabis industry._

Yes, the industry has been taken over by people who don't actually use the stuff. That says something.

<comment><USER11> Its definitely hard to be motivated by money when your using cannabis.

<comment><USER12> or by anything else for that matter

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> There's actually a big "hidden" story in CBD Hemp flower right now that has gotten surprisingly little attention.

The 2018 Farm bill legalized < 0.3% delta-9 THC which basically legalized all hemp flower strains that are currently popular to grow.

However, 2020 USDA regulations and various state regulations are changing that to TOTAL THC which includes THCA, which is typically at 0.4-0.6% for all popular strains.

The market is about to get seriously hurt for 2020 if this comes to fully pass and a lot of farmers are confused about the new regulations.

</comment><comment><USER14> In South Africa we've been treating cancer patients with hemp oil for 2 decades.

<comment><USER15> Interesting ! How well does it work ?

<comment><USER16> As a South African, I recently watched a family friend die after 10 years of breast cancer growth, which could have been quite easily been curbed with modern medicine.

They opted for naturopathic treatment instead, relying on CBD oil, amongst other things.

I'm sure, like all medicines, CBD oil is highly effective, when used for the right ailment. In this case it might even have prolonged a life, and might have been an amazing co-medicine alongside more brutal modern treatments like chemo. But it definitely did not cure or even stop the progress of the cancer.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Mirror: [http://archive.md/ur9wT](http://archive.md/ur9wT)

</comment><comment><USER5> TIL that CBD was kind of "invented" around 2011.

</comment><comment><USER18> Excuse me, I buy Pounds of Federally Legal flower through TheHempSheet's discount coupons.</comment>


What's Your Most Controversial Technical Opinion? - <AUTHOR> http://techblog.trunkclub.com/whats-your-most-controversial-technical-opinion/

<comment><USER2> Not sure if this is considered a technical opinion but I believe Desktop Support/Help Desk positions shouldn't exist.

Computers are basically tools to help you do your job. Computers are ubiquitous enough now that I believe everyone should be ok using them. Hiring people to use your tool for you is wasteful for the company.

If you're having a house built and your carpenter doesn't know how to use his hammer, you don't hire a hammer support person, you get someone that knows how to use the tools of their job. I believe this same thing applies to knowing how to use your computer.

</comment><comment><USER3> Annotations in Java build the same fundamental complexity that preprocessor statements did in C

</comment><comment><USER4> "Idem-potent messaging is the interface of choice for all networked applications"</comment>


AWS OpsWorks - Flexible Application Management in the Cloud Using Chef - <AUTHOR> http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2013/02/aws-opsworks-flexible-application-management-in-the-cloud.html <comment><USER3> Wow, I have that sinking feeling that this OpsWorks stuff may have turned what was a coin flip decision we made between Chef and Puppet (in which we chose Puppet) to a one heavily weighted towards Chef, but hard to say without reading more.

My immediate question is how easy it would be to keep your Chef recipes in source control somewhere and have equally easy one click deployment to both AWS and to a local Vagrant development box. We currently have a similar environment set up with puppet and it makes testing sysadmin stuff pretty awesome.

Edit: already finding holes - can't deploy to cluster compute instances (a deal breaker) and deployment seems rather slow (15 minutes to deploy from scratch versus about 8 with normal puppet) :(

<comment><USER4> Why would OpsWorks' choice of configuration and deployment management software affect your own choice, unless you want some sort of hybrid?

I think this will be a boon to AWS users who are currently deploying manually, but I don't think very many people who already use deployment/config management software will want to switch and rely on AWS.

I don't think it's a puppet/cfengine/ansible/salt killer,

<comment><USER3> I think the big advantage here is really just how much you just get out of the box without sacrificing flexibility -- if you're deploying on AWS in the first place. This seems like it would also save us from writing a bunch of management scripts (around scaling, etc) which would be tied to AWS anyway (read: no inherent disadvantage since any solution in-house or not would require the AWS platform). I'm always looking for ways for us to reduce our code/services footprint and this would seem to do so without a huge amount of vendor lock-in.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is the most interesting news I've heard from AWS in a long time. I don't mean to suggest that they have not produced any exciting news in a while, but that this is service is so exciting because it will fundamentally change how a lot of people use AWS.

Of particular interest to me is how this will affect platforms like Heroku. After the recent routing mesh debacle a number of people contacted me to discuss migrating their application from Heroku to AWS.

My Heroku -> AWS migration procedure is already pretty straightfoward:

\- identify Heroku services

\- write Puppet manifests to manage EC2 instances

\- write CloudFormation stacks to control other aspects of the infrastructure, e.g. autoscaling and S3 buckets

\- write deploy scripts so clients can continue using git-based deploys

OpsWorks is only going to make this migration easier, and will have the additional benefit of letting my clients manage more of their own infrastructure without my help. Training people to change autoscaling group configuration via a web interface is one thing, training them to update CloudFormation stacks is a little less user-friendly.

From the clients I have spoken to, the key benefits of Heroku are a) git-based deploys and b) easy scaling configuration by a web interface. All of these things are possible with AWS, albeit a little more difficult to set up - especially in the case of scaling configuration - and OpsWorks is going to close the gap even further.

If AWS can provide most of these services directly, will people still be willing to pay the Heroku premium?

There is one downside to the OpsWorks announcement, at least from my personal perspective. I'm currently writing a book on AWS System Administration, and I've almost finished the chapter describing various Puppet workflows. Like many other commenters I was undecided whether I should focus on Chef or Puppet, given their relatively similar feature set and popularity. I'm not sure if I've backed the wrong horse here and should rewrite the chapter using Chef, or if having a Puppet-perspective would be useful. Any thoughts?

<comment><USER6> I don't think you should throw out the stuff on Puppet. Perhaps expand and add how to do it with Chef too.

<comment><USER5> Thanks for the responses folks - it seems like a combined approach is preferable.

I'll be doing a ShowHN as soon as it is published :)

If anyone wants to make suggestions about other content you'd like to see in the book, please let me know!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The Amazon blog post is not very clear on this, but Werner Vogels post is:

[http://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2013/02/aws- opsworks.htm...](http://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2013/02/aws- opsworks.html)

This was previously known as "Scalarium", which was a third-party solution developed by Peritor that added several features on top of AWS, including management of instances using chef, infrastructure planning etc.

</comment><comment><USER8> AWS have owned the base cloud market with EC2 and S3. What I find impressive is that they're continuously lowering prices competitively[1] and expanding their services in a way that makes their base offering more attractive.

OpsWorks starts to battle one of the biggest reasons to go with PaaS[2] providers such as Heroku: the difficulty of managing these services yourself.

[1]: This benefits both Amazon and the consumer. Lower prices and continuous reductions improves customer confidence in and use of the AWS platform, whilst consumers are just happy they're paying less. Heroku and Google App Engine (even VPS providers) rarely decrease prices, making AWS something certain to be considered.

[2]: Accidentally wrote IaaS -- thanks Argonaut.

<comment><USER9> Nitpick: Heroku is a PaaS.

EDIT: Second nitpick: AWS OpsWorks is no Heroku. Amazon's already released AWS Elastic Beanstalk, though, is supposed to replicate Heroku's functionality (there's a reason Heroku is still around, though).

<comment><USER10> Yeah, I noticed some of the similarities to Beanstalk myself and am kind of curious where they are going with this concept? It seems to me that instead of building a fully integrated Chef management platform with fancy gui (which was my initial thought), they just recreated Beanstalk with some major bonus features and perhaps a lot more control.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I wonder what is the easiest way to automatically snapshot EBS volumes? I don't want to run a script - scheduling, managing access keys, etc are all too much hassle. Besides runing the script on the machine itself is unreliable - <USER2> want the setup to take one last snapshot after the instance dies.

Ideally I would right-click on an EBS volume, select "backup periodically" -> "every 10 minutes" -> retain each for three days, and then dailies for 30 days" and be done with it.

<comment><USER12> You can do this with ylastic - "scheduled tasks" - it's $25-50/mo (depending on the plan) for managing your whole AWS infrastructure and is basically an alternate WEB UI that autodiscovers your AWS footprint. Has some nice ways to manage autoscaling configurations as well, and also migrating AMIs between regions. I do not work for ylastic or anything but have used it for 2 different clients and used the "scheduled tasks" feature to do periodic backups of EBS volumes just as you've described you'd like to do.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Amazon is still committed to solving the wrong problem, which is "how do I run a lot of virtual machines", when the actual problem is "how do I deploy/scale/maintain complicated applications"

Chef is an excellent fit.

<comment><USER7> Amazon AWS is a low-level platform, not necessarily a full solution. They do solve the "right" problem, but not necessarily yours. Thats where Heroku and (the now obviously aquired) Scalarium come in.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Bad news for heroku...

</comment><comment><USER15> What has always bothered me is AWS comes up with a service which is half cooked and doesnt answer the true requirement of the application. I have used almost all of AWS offering in different contexts and every time, when we really needed the action, it failed miserably.

I believe, AWS should concentrate on its core offering and that of being a awesome IaaS. It needs to fix it severe and long downtimes and many such core issues, unpredictable network performances, etc

</comment><comment><USER16> Word of warning - the step-by-step deployment of a PHP application is _full_ of errors, and the application itself doesn't work as expected from the document.

[http://docs.aws.amazon.com/opsworks/latest/userguide/getting...](http://docs.aws.amazon.com/opsworks/latest/userguide/gettingstarted.walkthrough.phpapp.2.html)

It needs some massaging on the web servers in order to actually respond without a 500 error

<comment><USER17> I'm currently writing a blogpost about how to spawn up a simple Rails stack. I've got a broken instance in a boot-stop-terminate-boot loop. It's very beta.

<comment><USER16> I was hoping to do the same (albeit much easier to follow than their own walkthrough), but I'm going to sit back for a while and see what develops. These could be early teething problems, so I'm not going to judge them so soon.

That said, I'm surprised by what's _not_ included in the main interface (VPC, ELB, to start with).

<comment><USER10> you hit the nail on the head (oppositely, I was surprised to see them deploy out HA Proxy by default). The lack of VPC makes this far less appealing. I've been working on a scaling capable VPC configuration with quite a few moving parts and got so giddy with excitement over the potential of OpsWorks, then I tested it out and realized it's nowhere near ready for prime time and is missing some major players.

Still...Props to them and am excited to see it mature.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> <https://aws.amazon.com/opsworks/faqs/#amis> : "Q: Can I use my own AMIs? No, however you can customize the AMIs OpsWorks supports using Chef scripts to install agents and other software that you require."

This makes OpsWorks useless if you want to autoscale with any reasonable "nimbleness" - meaning the amount of time it will take to wait for a non- custom AMI to be bootstrapped with chef client and then load and run all my standard and customized cookbooks is way too long... I need to be able to specify custom AMIs that are already largely prepared so they can boot fast. Also, the Chef bootstrap process is brittle. twice in as many weeks it has been broken by dependency fails. (First, a net-ssh dependency, then a JSON gem dependency).

</comment><comment><USER18> Looks interesting, but it seems strange to me that it's something of an island.

There's no integration with Elastic Load Balancer, no integration with RDS or in fact any of the other AWS services except for deployment from S3.

<comment><USER19> Yeah, I spotted that too, it's interesting that this service puts the focus on coordination + orchestration with additional app servers versus leveraging existing AWS services.

I believe the general intent of this is to enable users using non-AWS services (yes, I know that's redundant) to more efficiently work with outside apps on Amazon - the example in their Layers guide is specific to Redis for example. ([http://docs.aws.amazon.com/opsworks/latest/userguide/working...](http://docs.aws.amazon.com/opsworks/latest/userguide/workinglayers- custom.html)).

So this service basically says - "Just because we don't have a Redis Amazon Service for you to snap into doesn't mean you should not use AWS or look to other PaaS, instead, easily integrate other apps with OpsWorks."

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Something in my gut tells me this is a game changer, and we may yet to see a great PaaS/IaaS consumer show in the next weeks/months.

Also, feels like a great move with Peritor/Scalarium and Chef.

I'm definitely grabbing the popcorn!

</comment><comment><USER21> I don't see any press release from OpsCode, which makes me think this is not a joint venture with them, which in turn makes me wonder how dangerous is to be part of the AWS ecosystem...

If you prove a market around AWS, what are the odds of getting this market gobbled by AWS themselves? They have a level of access to their own infrastructure that you don't have, let alone the access to their own (huge) customer base, integrated billing and branding.

<comment><USER22> Amazon has been repeatedly accused of exactly what you describe with Amazon Marketplace. This is the first article I was able to find, but I've seen similar articles over the past few years (One of my companies is an ecommerce site that considered selling through Amazon marketplace) [http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405270230444140457748...](http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304441404577482902055882264.html)

So it would not surprise me if they used this same tactic with AWS.

Edit: here's a google news link to the article: [https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&...](https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=newssearch&cd=1&ved=0CC0QFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fonline.wsj.com%2Farticle%2FSB10001424052702304441404577482902055882264.html&ei=kcAjUf2MBObVyAHEzoGgBQ&usg=AFQjCNHh6eNon3AU-e6dKXJWVMv4ieDPEQ&sig2=P2QizYFUsceZCT0BghYQjg)

<comment><USER21> I doubt OpsCode is getting much revenue from OpsWorks, or any, since AWS is giving it out for free. It's hard to compete with free. This tweet from OpsCode reads like they were blindsided and trying to catch up <https://twitter.com/opscode/status/303941706888409089>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> If you want to undo your setup and wait for a while for this system to mature a bit, you need to delete the security groups that are auto-created in your account in this order:

AWS-OpsWorks-Monitoring-Master-Server

AWS-OpsWorks-DB-Master-Server

AWS-OpsWorks-MemcacheD-Server

AWS-OpsWorks-Custom-Server

AWS-OpsWorks-Blank-Server

AWS-OpsWorks-PHP-App-Server

AWS-OpsWorks-Default-Server

AWS-OpsWorks-Rails-App-Server

AWS-OpsWorks-nodejs-App-Server

AWS-OpsWorks-Web-Server

AWS-OpsWorks-LB-Server

 _edit_ 1 or 2 of these were typed from memory - but it should be clear at a glance which one is which in the EC2 console

<comment><USER16> For the record - don't do this. The system doesn't seem to like it at the moment

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> The lack of VPC support and inability to configure custom security groups would prevent me from using it for right now. It seems like a good alternative to PaaS out there though, and I'm sure it will be rounded out with more features in the coming months.

(Note: I wouldn't see us using it in the near future anyway, since we already manage our machines on AWS with Puppet.)

<comment><USER24> Thanks for the feedback on the need for VPC support. We're listening to customer input to prioritize our roadmap. You can add custom security groups to each layer in the layer configuration.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I find it _very_ odd that they've built in the HAProxy load balancer option, but there's no mention of ELB at all

<comment><USER25> I had to look into the docs to find the "ELB is not supported at this time" statement.

<comment><USER16> Not only that, but there's no allowance made for micros either.

Also, SSL on a per-app basis is confusing me - does that mean that each box individually is handling SSL termination, or is it done on the loadbalancer side? I have a lot of reading to do before I can really understand what's happening here I think

<comment><USER17> The lack of micro instance is a real shame. I suspect that's because the time taken to do a full chef install run on a micro might be vast.

<comment><USER26> I've used t1.micros extensively with chef -- it's not as bad as you might think.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> OpsWorks looks quite impressive from my non-devops perspective. And most interesting of all is the fact that it's free! I understand that it's build to encourage more usage of AWS, but there are plenty of 3rd party services out there which to similar things but are not free.

</comment><comment><USER28> Do AWS Elastic Beanstalk and OpsWork integrate in some ways or is OpsWork just more flexible?

<comment><USER24> There is currently no integration between AWS Elastic Beanstalk and AWS OpsWorks. You can see the differences between the services here <https://aws.amazon.com/application-management/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> This still has a long way to go before it is a threat to Scalr / Right Scale, but as it matures, that is definitely going to happen. Where companies like Scalr and Right Scale add value is the ability to deploy your cloud across multiple providers.

</comment><comment><USER30> Confused... is this an alternative for chef server?

<comment><USER31> Sort of, but not exactly. It's not API compatible with Chef server, and I believe you don't get the nice search syntax for grabbing node information across your fleet that match some kind of criteria. But you still do get info on your other machines, and you do get nice orchestration across your fleet.

<comment><USER32> you get a much better orchestration as you could with chef server you also have much faster interactions, better life cycles and to the searching... you get every information of evert machine under your fleet it is much much more better the chef server

<comment><USER30> sorry, do you mean chef server is better, or this looks better?

<comment><USER32> OpsWorks gives you better features, try out to start a small stack and then also have a look at the default cookbooks, there you can see what you can do with OpsWorks: <https://github.com/aws/opsworks-cookbooks>

<comment><USER33> Im not clear on why you get better features.

I have a webapp that I built, that utilizes rackspace's API and chef. I have a chef server that I use for all my configuration management, I have a Rails app that I use to talk to my chef server to manipulate machines, or rackspace's api to spin up machines, and I am building "triggering" into it (low disk space, high CPU do X). I am able to change IP addresses, spin up a machine with a specific stack etc. Granted this isnt the default chef-server, but the ability to do all this stuff, and not be locked into AWS is there.

<comment><USER15> You are right about this, as it is now, it looks more of a vendor lock-in gimmick

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Does anyone know if this will support web sockets? Major issue (for me) in regards to using heroku is the lack of web sockets.

<comment><USER35> Given that this doesn't support ELBs yet and you'll need to roll your own load balancer with HAProxy, there's nothing stopping websockets from working.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> I would be more excited if it supported micro instances, but as it stands, I'm still very tempted.

</comment><comment><USER37> Heroku, GAE and Appharbor, brace yourselves</comment>


Hello, I'm Mr. Null. My Name Makes Me Invisible to Computers - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/2015/11/null/ <comment><USER2> > Responding to a request for comment for this article, a media relations > representative for Bank of America expressed concern and assured me the > appropriate IT employees would be informed of the issue.

That made me chuckle.

</comment><comment><USER3> This being in the US, I wonder why BoA has not been sued yet for harrasment, discrimination and what not.

</comment><comment><USER4> Well I certainly hope someone learned to sanitize their database inputs!

<comment><USER5> Oh, little Bobby Tables... you scamp!</comment></comment>


'I Was a Spy': He Lived a Hidden Life, and Now Fears Deportation - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/07/nyregion/i-was-a-spy-blerim-skoro.html?_r=0 <comment><USER2> I find this story believable. Some years ago my neighbor had a similar problem. He wasn't a spy, but had lawful reasons to live in our country. After months in jail and courts he needed to leave. As far as I concerned he moved to Europe. Anyway, I believe in fair trial and wish a good luck for Mr. Skoro.</comment>


Raspberry Pi touch display - <AUTHOR> https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/the-eagerly-awaited-raspberry-pi-display/ <comment><USER2> 2 years and instead of adapting one of PLENTY DSI screens they opt for convoluted DSI to parallel conversion, with 10 year old resolution to boot, color me not impressed :(

This is just like when they released camera module. Instead of opening MIPI interface to the developers they shipped binary blob locked to one particular camera module from one vendor, because fuck you thats why (well, actually one of rpi/broadcom engineers said something like "people wouldnt be able to figure out how to color correct/debayer because its trade secret of camera module manufacturers, so why bother")

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm dreaming of general availability of touch enabled e-paper/e-ink displays. Not just for the Raspberry Pi, but especially with it I would be one step closer to my always-on home dashboard.

<comment><USER4> I would personally pay a lot for an e-paper based laptop specifically for text editing. For writers, or programmers, I don't think you can beat e-paper. No eye-strain, outstanding battery life, perfect visibility in direct sunlight...

<comment><USER5> Pixel Qi tried and failed, though you can still buy 3Qi panels (IIRC 7" or 10") from tripuso (who bought the rights when Pixel Qi folded) and swap the display of a corresponding-size notebook.

<comment><USER6> Nice! I've never heard of those. Pretty expensive for a 10" monitor though, found them on aliexpress/alibaba for ~100$. Adafruit stocks them too for 180$, but with a driver board included.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Before shooting this down as expensive can we stick to comparing like with like, the device is intended to have a long life span so educators can build quality teaching resources based on the platform.

<comment><USER8> Expensive? $60 seems really cheap.

<comment><USER9> There are a ton of Chinese brands that sell rasperryPi compatible touch screens (of very varying quality) at half the price. That being said if I actually needed a touch screen for a rasperryPi I wouldn't hesitate to spend $60 on an official screen and save myself a lot of potential hassle.

<comment><USER10> The most of cheap "rasperryPi compatible touch screens" use SPI interface (GPIO) which has very limited data rate, only suitable for 320x240 / low FPS graphics without any kind of HW acceleration. HDMI compatible touch screen are typically more expensive than $60.

The official RPi display is great because it uses the onboard display connector (which has been useless this far).

<comment><USER11> _typically more expensive than $60_

No, you can certainly get them for less than that:

[http://www.aliexpress.com/item/Tontec-7-Raspberry-Pi-LCD- Tou...](http://www.aliexpress.com/item/Tontec-7-Raspberry-Pi-LCD-Touch-Screen- Display-TFT-Monitor-AT070TN90-with-Touchscreen-Kit-HDMI-VGA/1692887583.html)

<comment><USER12> The $60 RPi screen is higher resolution, mounts with four screws (vs this one with three separate PCBs plus the LCD), and has an interface designed to be controlled by the RPi GPIO pins. I don't think saving $17 is worth losing all of that.

<comment><USER13> These are 7-inch capacitive touch screens, less than $70 from amazon prime, same resolution (800x480), mount with 4 screws, and use HDMI for video and USB for power/touchscreen. The downside is that the touchscreen drivers are binaries. Somebody online made an open source driver that appears to work perfectly, so if you're not using Raspbian or something else their binaries are made for, you might have some driver hacking to do.

[http://www.amazon.com/Waveshare-Capacitive-Interface- Android...](http://www.amazon.com/Waveshare-Capacitive-Interface- Android4-2-2-Beaglebone/dp/B00XV9QDNK) [http://www.amazon.com/SainSmart-Touch- Screen-Display-Raspber...](http://www.amazon.com/SainSmart-Touch-Screen- Display-Raspberry/dp/B00XXOUIE8)

[http://www.april1985.com/post/2015-06-28-hack-waveshare- touc...](http://www.april1985.com/post/2015-06-28-hack-waveshare-touchscreen/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Even though most people will use RPi as headless server or connect it to TV, it is good to have a decent "default" display option that works out of the box. The display looks very elegant in provided photos. It should be a great choice for hobby projects.

<comment><USER15> I'm not sure "most people will use it with X" makes sense as way of thinking about RPi. It's for tinkering and learning and plugging into your projects. As a starting point, 7" Touchscreen seems like a pretty good way to go for versatility.

I like how this lets people just tape a RPi to a screen to make a tablet. Nice first step for young tinkerers. Step 2, lasers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I use RPis for bespoke installations for clients. One of the problems has been offering an easy way to make adjustments to the apps the RPi is running without a keyboard/mouse/monitor setup or having to SSH in. This is a great way to offer the ability to make changes. Looking forward to trying one out

<comment><USER17> What kinds of installations do you use these in for clients? Automation? Communication? As a small server?

I have a RPi sitting here and I'm not sure what to do with it!

<comment><USER18> I once created password less WiFi hot spot and served weird texts instead of websites. For example if someone went to google.com, a person received "No Google for you today" message instead...

<comment><USER19> Haha, this is great. Do you still have it going? How did you make it work?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> A lot of people are comparing this to just buying an Android tablet and saying it doesn't make sense. You're probably right :)! The Pi has so many more use cases outside of just typical Android use however that this product does make sense for.

My example is that you can rig the Pi to work with your own Receiver as a wifi flac player with this device: [https://www.hifiberry.com/](https://www.hifiberry.com/). You have to control it over wi-fi, but having a console that I can go up to and interact with will be awesome. Also will be great for people like my Father-in-law, I wanted to build him a device that has all 60s/70s/80s rock for christmas, but I didn't want to have to set-up a wifi router and get a device for him just to control it.

</comment><comment><USER21> Could you possibly buy only the connecting PCB module, and use a touch screen from a bricked mobile phone or tablet? Many of those lying around...

<comment><USER22> The trouble with recycling parts like that, is that the more mass-produced something is, the more likely to have idiosyncratic connectors and signal formats that mere mortals can't find out how to hook up and program.

<comment><USER11> Actually, unless you're deliberately looking at the companies who like to invent their own proprietariness, they're more likely to have standard connectors and protocols; consider laptop displays, for example. The ones designing the laptop want to be able to use displays from different manufacturers, and the display manufacturers want their products usable in as many laptops as possible. This leads to standards, both normative and de- facto, and there being only a small number of variations.

I'm not as familiar with mobile device displays but given that standards like MIPI DSI exist, I suspect it's a similar situation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> HN hug => [https://archive.is/GBqGR](https://archive.is/GBqGR)

included video [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6HvWXQsBeHk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6HvWXQsBeHk)

</comment><comment><USER24> this seems expensive, considering you can buy a whole android tablet for this price.

<comment><USER25> "When looking for a device, we needed to look for what are termed 'Industrial' LCD displays. These tend to have better-quality metrics and guaranteed availability"

This explains the $60 price, which I personally find to be great value.

<comment><USER11> Look up the Innolux AT070TN90/92\. It's been in production since 2009 and will be until at least 2023. There are people using it with the RPi, and no, it does not cost anywhere near $60.

[http://www.buydisplay.com/default/7-inch-lcd-screen-tft- disp...](http://www.buydisplay.com/default/7-inch-lcd-screen-tft-display- module-wvga-800x480-at070tn90-at070tn92)

First one to do a teardown can tell us what panel it contains. I'm almost willing to bet it's that one, as the specs are close.

<comment><USER26> Quite cheap but to compare, you also need to add the cost of the touchscreen and the board to drive all this, and your result would probably not pass EMC requirements (for a hobby project, you wouldn't care).

Still cheaper to source these parts yourself, you are right, but the official screen isn't meant to be the cheapest, it's meant to be cheap enough to be affordable, to workout-of-the-box, to be reliable, of good quality and have some guaranteed availability.

You can work with other screens and build and write your own interface if that's part of the pleasure you get from hacking on these devices, but for people who have other goals, being able to get an affordable screen that just works allows them to spend their time on other parts of their project.

It's good to have choice.

<comment><USER27> They provide a model with a touchscreen for an extra $7. However, you can't work with other screens and build and write your own interface because on the Pi, all the display modesetting is handled by the closed-source binary blob running on the undocumented parts of the GPU, and the RPi Foundation won't enable DSI connector support in it for anything other than the official screen they sell. It's a fairly common hobbyist thing to do on more open boards, it's just not possible on the Pi.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Does anyone know why Android devices don't video inputs, or even aftermarket way of getting video in cheaply? They would be super useful as small screens for various applications

<comment><USER29> When I used to work on those devices, the arguments went something like this:

"Adding video input means we need an additional connector on the device, which the Industrial Design guys hate."

"We could multiplex the signal, but then we need some kind of proprietary connector and the additional cost of that circuitry."

"How many customers want to record video from an external source anyway? It's not worth adding $5 to the MSRP for a feature that isn't going to get used."

<comment><USER30> Hopefully we will see less of those arguments as USB-C gets more available.

<comment><USER28> usb-c should do video out, but how about video in?

<comment><USER30> The wires themselves are agnostic, its all a matter of protocol choice.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Doesn't seen to be in stock yet at RS or Farnell in the UK.

<comment><USER32> We have stock and ship from the UK to most worldwide destinations: [https://shop.pimoroni.com/products/raspberry- pi-7-touchscree...](https://shop.pimoroni.com/products/raspberry- pi-7-touchscreen-display-with-frame)

We sell it with our own stand solution (in six colours!) that is manufactured by us in our workshop in Sheffield, UK.

<comment><USER33> Vote of confidence here from a longtime Pimoroni customer. Really great company to do business with. Keep up the good work!

<comment><USER34> Seconded. I've got lots of stuff from them.

They also run the official swag store. You can order the display on there. [http://swag.raspberrypi.org/products/raspberry-pi-7-inch- tou...](http://swag.raspberrypi.org/products/raspberry-pi-7-inch-touchscreen- display)

I ordered a Sense HAT from them recently and it arrived in a couple of days. It's pretty fun BTW, my thoughts are here: [https://unop.uk/dev/raspberry-pi- sense-hat](https://unop.uk/dev/raspberry-pi-sense-hat)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Also [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10184508](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10184508).

</comment><comment><USER36> Anyone use an e-ink display for programming? Not sure how well Visual Studio would perform on one?

</comment><comment><USER37> Wow, I wanted to use that top image on my site and found out it was 1.8MB and more than 4700 pix wide! Nice way to increase the server load ;) ([https://www.raspberrypi.org/wp- content/uploads/2015/09/front...](https://www.raspberrypi.org/wp- content/uploads/2015/09/front-centred.jpg))

</comment><comment><USER38> Was excited until I saw the resolution - 800x600 will struggle to view most websites, given the resolution it seems rather expensive for $60.

<comment><USER39> It will view most websites just fine considering the amount of mobile traffic out there. It won't be super sharp like pixel doubled smartphones, but it will render them just fine.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> How about we use the touch display with the raspberry Pi and a windup mechanism to charge an added battery pack then start a charity to distribute these to developing countries.

</comment><comment><USER41> Looks like there are a few ICs on the adapter board. I wonder if that means other screens could be hacked in and if the DSI connection is going to be a binary blob.

<comment><USER2> binary blob all the way

straight from RPI foundation: "No there is no software support for direct DSI displays."

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Anyone know if the mouse signals from the touch input go over the DSI connection? Or if you need to plug in a USB cable? It's not clear from the post.

<comment><USER32> They go over the DSI connector.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> Is there a high quality, good looking wall mount available? So that I can use something like as the control panel for my home automation setup?

</comment><comment><USER43> One thing I miss in default raspberry pi is battery support. Today I just use the filesystem in RO.

<comment><USER44> > One thing I miss in default raspberry pi is battery support. Today I just > use the filesystem in RO.

It would be easy to put a battery + charging circuit in front. If you still want to power it through USB you could get increased efficiency by bypassing the DC-DC converter (just cut the trace from it and solder the output from your own PSU there).

If the RPi itself had a charging circuit, they would have to decide for the end-users what kind of battery chemistry, charge rate etc. it should support, and they would not be able to please everyone as these things are used for so many different purposes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> down,

version in cache of google:

[http://goo.gl/YILqaS](http://goo.gl/YILqaS)

</comment><comment><USER46> Although the resolution might not be the best, this looks like a nice monitor for a POS system!

</comment><comment><USER47> Seeing that made me feel really nostalgic for gnome 2 and the simple interface it had.

</comment><comment><USER30> Hmm, a back case, a battery, and we have a "vivaldi"...

</comment><comment><USER48> I wish someday they will make their own raspberry terminals.

</comment><comment><USER49> Anyone know about using it with Windows 10 IoT?

<comment><USER34> I've not got the screen (it's only just come out) but I assume it should work. It uses a standard interface.

I tried out Win 10 IoT a bit. You can find my thoughts in this post and the others linked from it. [https://unop.uk/dev/windows-10-iot-core-on-a- raspberry-pi-2](https://unop.uk/dev/windows-10-iot-core-on-a-raspberry-pi-2)

</comment></comment><comment> mike-cardwell I can't see an on/off button

<comment><USER32> Neither does the Raspberry Pi - the user base is pretty used to halting and pulling the power.

The display driver board backpowers the Pi itself so there is no change of process for existing users there.

<comment> mike-cardwell There are a lot of use cases where you want a machine to be running constantly but don't want the screen to be on constantly.

I can't put one of these in my bedroom unless I can easily and instantly switch the monitor on/off.

[edit] I have an existing PiTFT which also doesn't have a power button. I can turn it on/off programatically, but still a power button would be highly useful.

[edit2] Can this screen be turned off programatically without turning the Pi off at the same time, if the screen is powering the Pi?

[edit3] Hang on. Is it even possible to turn the screen on/off programatically from the Pi if the Pi is powered separately?

<comment><USER32> I've just confirmed with the foundation that the display will be controllable from software but the current Raspbian image doesn't have it _yet_ \- this will allow you to turn off the screen and backlight while leaving the Pi running.

So your use case will be possible!

<comment> mike-cardwell That makes the screen a whole lot more useful to me. I will probably buy one when that happens.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Uh, I'd rather see them adding a fast interface to connect SSD drive

<comment><USER50> Your best bet is probably going for a Banana Pi board - they come with SATA to attach SSDs to. It's a close contender to the RaPi, but the software support isn't 100% though.

I've got one myself as an attempted NAS device. It worked 'ok', wouldn't advise it as full-time thing though, these things don't provide the AC nor CPU power to perform such tasks.

<comment><USER18> But does it have a real SATA or is it just SATA over USB?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> This is disappointing. This screen is 7" at 800x480, so its sharpness is about 133 PPI (pixels per inch).

For comparison, my original Android G1 (several years ago) was 180 PPI, and it looked shit.

This is $60 plus taxes and shipping. I just found a 7-inch tablet for £28 ($43.10) on Amazon (plus a camera and RAM and stuff). Including taxes and shipping. Why is this so expensive?

<comment><USER52> >I just found a 7-inch tablet for £28 ($43.10) on Amazon (plus a camera and RAM and stuff). Including taxes and shipping. Why is this so expensive?

Sales volumes determine economies of scale, it is likely the £28 tablet was made in quantities much larger than the pi screen (I'd guess at least 2 orders of magnitude).

Also, not all screens are equal. It's not just resolution: there's colour reproduction, viewing angles, brightness, contrast and response time. On the non-technical side mentioned on the blog, they mentioned they wanted a manufacture who would make the panel for a long time. I would bet a dollar that Pi screen beats the £28-tablet display on all the above parameters

<comment><USER53> > there's colour reproduction, viewing angles, brightness, contrast and > response time.

Which seem to be all crap for this panel anyway – 70° viewing angles implies it's the cheapest TN panel they could find.

For a non-profit(!) like the RPi foundation that can neither guarantee sales nor buy them in advance in massive bulks, availability is the only factor that really matters.

<comment><USER11> Indeed. They mention it's an "industrial" panel, which in my experience seems to mean "low contrast and brightness, narrow viewing angle, but wider temperature range[1]". The Innolux panel I mentioned in another comment here ([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10185433](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10185433) ) is an example of this type.

[1] [http://www.pacificdisplay.com/lcd_temp_range.htm](http://www.pacificdisplay.com/lcd_temp_range.htm)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: LaTeX equations on GitHub Markdown?? - <AUTHOR> <comment><AUTHOR> isn't this an obvious one?

we can insert youtube videos but not LaTeX equations???</comment>